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Wikileaks has really misled the public

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Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#51

Post by tsally »

metamemetics wrote: post #22
lionhearted wrote: post #6

After I saw the first video, I did some googling around and reading about the rules of engagement during an insurgency. Under the Geneva Convention, clearly identified medical personnel treating combatants removed from combat are protected. However, if an armed combatant is attempting to help another combatant get to cover, they're both fair game. There's a grey area when it's not clear if a person helping a combatan…

Everyone picking up the bodies and from the van was clearly UNARMED. Unarmed non-combatants were picking up the body of an unarmed non-combatant who never held a weapon.

If I was running an insurgency in Iraq, I would keep a guy in the back of an unmarked van with an RPG and I would drive around pretending to pick up bodies. I think I'd probably get a lot of kills that way. I don't think it's fair to say the van was clearly unarmed, especially when you consider the fact that the van could have been called in to make a pickup by a group of people confirmed to have at least one RPG and at least one AK-47.

In the moment of the firefight it was unclear whether the van was armed or not. Was was clear to the soldiers was that the van responded very quickly to a group of wounded people who had several confirmed weapons among them. Also, as others have mentioned, the soldiers knew the insurgency has used similar tactics in the past to salvage weapons and ammo.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#54

Post by jeswin »

I am not American; though I usually side with democratic countries as much as I can.

However, if you made a really big mistake and went to war with a country which posed no credible threat to you (at least in hindsight when this shooting took place) I'd imagine people would err on the side of caution when shooting somebody's family and loved ones.

At least in this part of the world, what is coming across is that your army does not care much about killing people - if they are not American or Western.

And to add some rhetoric, what gives America the moral right to talk about human rights when the Iraqi death toll exceeds well over one hundred thousand? -- What happened in Tiananmen is a mere _hundredth_ of what is happening in Iraq.

Killing ten Iraqis to save an American soldier is not justifiable, any which way you look at it.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#55

Post by cia_plant »

I can't even begin to follow some of the moral reasoning on this page.

The soldiers have to be there to keep the peace, as part of their humanitarian mission towards the Iraqi people. Because the soldiers are there, they have to protect themselves against the violent insurgents among the Iraqi people, by killing anyone who presents any kind of threat. Don't you see, they had to kill the Iraqis in order to save them.

If we didn't massacre Iraqis, we wouldn't be able to safely patrol their cities, and then where would that leave the Iraqis? Completely unprotected.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#56

Post by plinkplonk »

aheilbut wrote: post #27
SamAtt wrote: post #8

There's clearly something fishy about the video if only because we're obviously coming in half way through whatever happened. But the real problem isn't the behavior of the soldiers as much as it's the military not making it's case before this video broke. The author here is raising some valid points but they're all speculation because the military hasn't released anything officially. Military tribunals should be pub…

The military has now released the records on their investigations: http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%2... I suppose that this information wouldn't have been released, at least for a long time, without their hand being forced by wikileaks. However it is also not reasonable to expect everything to be immediately public; there is going to be a ton of sensitive information, and it's not practical…

"he military has now released the records on their investigations: [url]

The site seems to be down.

"Unknown Error

Troubleshoot issues with Windows SharePoint Services. "

SharePoint? :-P

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#57

Post by Alex3917 »

Maktab wrote: post #48
GiraffeNecktie wrote: post #21

Wow, 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…

"There are weapons visible at various points in the video and an RPG was found at the scene, these people were not all unarmed."

The official military statement about the incident was as follows:

"The Apache crew fired because militants 'were endangering the stability of Iraq' and because they had positive identification that the militants 'had weapons and were using them against coalition and Iraqi security forces.'"

There aren't any coalition or Iraqi security forces in the area, and none are ever mentioned in the video. So while it's possible that an RPG was found at the scene, it's just as possible that the military was lying about both.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#58

Post by greendestiny »

steve19 wrote: post #23

The 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…

Insurgents might do all those things, but the people in van made no moves to go for any weapons. Considering they are happy to watch the injured guy to see if he goes for a weapon, there is no reason they couldn't have waited to see if the van people went for weapons. They misreported the situation on the radio, making it seem like the people in van were picking up bodies and weapons - but they are just surmising that's what the people in van's intentions were. I think that ought to incur some kind of disciplinary response.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#59

Post by noodle »

daleharvey wrote: post #12

I am usually the last to complain about "the state of hacker news" and such, but the fact that this article has managed to amass such a large number of points so quickly does indicate that there is a need for moderation. this has nothing to do with hacker news, it is replying to conjecture with conjecture, even though the wikileaks story had a very relevant back story (power of the internet, freedom of press, etc) th…

if you don't like an article, flag it. if enough people flag it, it'll go away.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#60

Post by steve19 »

andreyf wrote: post #50
steve19 wrote: post #23

The 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…

I would guess that what made the van suspect was that it drove into the middle of a battle. Everyone within a couple of miles must have heard the 30mm High Explosive shells detonating.
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