What is the video in question? There's a video on the front page of wikileaks, but it's not a "39 minute video".
Wikileaks has really misled the public
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Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#42After viewing the video, it clearly is an unprovoked massacre. LINK: This is clear considering they approached the hot zone at the beginning of the video with intel, either from ground troops, or from the another Apache, that there were armed combatants in the area. The video indicates there was ONE combatant, and that the group of people was NOT him. @2:49: air: “we had a guy shooting, now he’s behind the building”…
if you examine the frame between 2:40 and 2:41 I don't think people do that in combat. If you're ever in combat, or in a situation with armed people who think you may want to kill them, I highly recommend that you make it very obvious you're not armed. If they look at the footage of how you died and say "Oh! If we examine the frame , it looks like he wasn't going to kill us, after all!" I guess you'll be vindicated.
Uh, wtf. The helo is just circling about casually and they're taking their time fixing the targets before firing. How is that combat and an adrenaline rush moment? And that RPG...clearly a telephoto lens. Those supposed AKs look nothing like actual AKs.
I expect a well-trained pilot or soldier to be able to take a second to make sure they're firing on an actual target. If you look at the length of the damned video, you see that the helo pilots had enough time to examine the targets carefully (meaning at least a 10sec glance).
Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reality is that there were kids in the van and they were trying to help a wounded journalist.
The reality be damned. Hindsight is 20/20. Imagine you're there, in the arena, adrenaline practically oozing out of your pores. You're 500 feet above the one of the most dangerous cities in the world [1], a warzone that's claimed the lives of thousands of young men, just like you, and you've just taken out the armed enemy. That was the enemy. And that guy laying there still is the enemy. And so is anyone helping him.…
"So you do as anyone in that situation would do, with limited information and a hell of a lot of empirical data. You neutralize the threat. You destroy them and live to see another day."
What exactly was the "threat" here? The helicopter was a mile away and in no danger of not "live to see another day" ?
(err why the downvotes? That was a straightforward question. The parent seemed to imply that the shooters were doing it in order to "live to see another day". Was anyone threatening the helicopter in any credible fashion?)
Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reality is that there were kids in the van and they were trying to help a wounded journalist.
The reality be damned. Hindsight is 20/20. Imagine you're there, in the arena, adrenaline practically oozing out of your pores. You're 500 feet above the one of the most dangerous cities in the world [1], a warzone that's claimed the lives of thousands of young men, just like you, and you've just taken out the armed enemy. That was the enemy. And that guy laying there still is the enemy. And so is anyone helping him.…
Not knowing who someone is is not an excuse to shoot them.
It is NOT true that 'anyone helping him' is also an enemy. That is just a recipe for war crimes.
Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#45I watched this video from end to end. It is entirely possible that this was a team setting up an ambush and filming it. The fact that a Reuters photojourno was involved only fortifies the plausibility of this theory, since wire photojournos are well-known for "embedding" with insurgents. I'm not saying one way or the other (unlike many others). I'm proposing an alternative theory that I believe is just as likely as t…
It's a good theory. Unfortunately no other weapons (apart from a single AK-47 - which was commonly carried in 2007 Baghdad) or bombs were found, so I can just as easily say that they might have been aliens from Xenu.
I do think that there are more extenuating circumstances than some may think (it was 2007 in Baghdad - people forget how bad things were there). But claims that those people were anything other than a random group of people will require some evidence.
Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#46Wow, the apologists are springing into action. Watch the video again. At the exact moment the correspondent is in the crosshairs of the camera and you see that he is carrying a small black bag you hear the crew saying "Yeah that's a weapon." and "Fucking prick". For God's sake, it's a guy sauntering down the middle of the road carrying a little bag and the crew is making out that they're tracking a dangerous insurgen…
Do you think the gunner had a chance to "watch it again" when he was making his decision?
Hacker News is becoming reddit, except reddit has a hide button.
Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#47After viewing the video, it clearly is an unprovoked massacre. LINK: This is clear considering they approached the hot zone at the beginning of the video with intel, either from ground troops, or from the another Apache, that there were armed combatants in the area. The video indicates there was ONE combatant, and that the group of people was NOT him. @2:49: air: “we had a guy shooting, now he’s behind the building”…
if you examine the frame between 2:40 and 2:41 I don't think people do that in combat. If you're ever in combat, or in a situation with armed people who think you may want to kill them, I highly recommend that you make it very obvious you're not armed. If they look at the footage of how you died and say "Oh! If we examine the frame , it looks like he wasn't going to kill us, after all!" I guess you'll be vindicated.
In the military investigation, it is revealed that the man crouching around the corner with the camera was taking a picture of US troops 100 meters away. The timestamped photo was found on the camera later.
So he's in an area where combat has occurred, crouching around a corner, pointing a long tube at US troops. No press is suspected to be in the area. Other men in his group are undeniably armed with weapons. He's a threat by any reasonable standard.
Two RPGs are, in fact, found at the site by ground forces, as is an automatic rifle. There were combatants in this group.
Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#48Wow, the apologists are springing into action. Watch the video again. At the exact moment the correspondent is in the crosshairs of the camera and you see that he is carrying a small black bag you hear the crew saying "Yeah that's a weapon." and "Fucking prick". For God's sake, it's a guy sauntering down the middle of the road carrying a little bag and the crew is making out that they're tracking a dangerous insurgen…
There are weapons visible at various points in the video and an RPG was found at the scene, these people were not all unarmed. That the journalists were killed is tragic and may very well be due to mistakes or incompetence or even malice, but none of that is clear from this video.
What is clear is that the journalist and his driver were in the presence of armed Iraqis carrying AK-47s and RPGs at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It was common practice for Iraqi stringers for news agencies like Reuters to embed themselves with insurgents in the hope of being extremely close to the story and getting pictures they would not otherwise have been able to obtain, but it was a very risky thing to do. If soldiers have already seen the people around you carrying guns and RPGs, they're a whole lot more likely to misinterpret your camera lens as an RPG when it peeks around a corner.
There were also two Apaches at the scene, but it's not entirely clear which crew is making each comment on the radio and what they can see as we only have one viewport into this event, which comes from the gunner's sight of only one of the Apaches. It is entirely plausible that the other Apache crew did clearly see weapons and that, outside the field of view of the camera we're looking at, they saw the black van picking up weapons. Further, each helicopter also has a separate sight for the pilot which can be slewed on its own axis and which we cannot see.
In short, the video lacks context and it's difficult to make a conclusive judgement without that context. We are given only one limited viewport into this event and expected to pronounce judgement on four guys who at once had a much broader and more detailed view of the situation but who also, unlike us, had to process that information in real-time, not from a video which could be rewound and played back. Whatever happened here, I'm not as ready to call it murder as WikiLeaks and some of the commenters here have been.
Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#49"Regardless, no one is allowed to be armed except for Iraqi police and Coalition forces. There is no such thing as an armed Iraqi escort for journalists" Err.. no. Under Iraqi law, everyone was allowed to keep one gun at home. These guns were mostly AK-47s (because that was what was issued to the army). See http://johnrlott.tripod.com/armediraqis.html for example discussion of this. I believe there was an attempt to…
But as I understand it, by 2007 they were not permitted to take those guns out from their houses. This is why the US's rules of engagement pretty much stated that anybody in the street with a weapon who was not part of the Iraqi security services was fair game.
So the quoted comment may not have been entirely accurate with regards to Iraqis as a whole, but it was in fact accurate with regards to Iraqis carrying weapons in the street and the fact that there was no such thing as an armed Iraqi escort for journalists.
Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public
#50The following comment was posted by Deviltry on Reddit. "That's the problem with the war in Iraq... It's insurgency based. They use vans to come up and pick up the bodies, but truth be told they don't care about the bodies, they come to get the weapons/rpg's. I know it's popular to hate America and our military action on reddit, but this particular engagement is necessary. Anyone who's ever spent time on the ground i…
I watched both the short and long versions a couple of times, and there I see no justification for the claim that the truck or those in it were doing anything but trying to move the wounded man to safety. Considering (1) there were children in the front seat visible about as clearly as the weapons the men were supposedly carrying and (2) the dialogue on the radio, it seems clear that the gunman was a little too eager to engage without really considering the lethal gravity of his actions.
While on one hand, it may very well be that troops are more effective (by some simple measure) when they fire first and ask questions later, on the other, if those apache gunmen were in the shoes of the marines on the ground who have to carry wounded kids out of the rubble, or worry about those same orphans throwing grenades into their humvee windows a week later, maybe they'd be as careful looking for children as they are for RPG's.