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Wikileaks has really misled the public

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Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#91

Post by jpwagner »

analyst74 wrote: post #83
alexgartrell wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killing ten Iraqis to save an American soldier is not justifiable, any which way you look at it. As messed up as it may sound to you, I'd rather my friends make it home. As far as I'm concerned, the blood is on the hands of the people who started and continued the war; not the ones who have to actually fight it.

If my friend went to Iraq, I'd rather him coming back in one piece too. Good thing that none of my friends went, your friends do not have to go either.

your friends do not have to go either

wow...if you delete your post, i promise i'll delete my quoting you to remove the evidence of your ignorance.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#92

Post by Uchikoma »

Maktab wrote: post #88
Uchikoma wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to drive 8 minutes to get to the scene, when they are "near"? Even when halving the time for mounting and going by 20kmh they were 1km around 1.5km away. Near? What does "in the area mean"? Bagdad?

Merely halving the time for mounting and assuming a 20km/h travel speed without any stops (bearing in mind this is a combat zone) seems a bit arbitrary. In any case, the radio calls seem to affirm that the ground element was in visual range of the people before the gunships even opened fire and Namir's photo, if it was indeed taken at the scene as we assume, shows the ground force as being pretty close, perhaps no mo…

If they were 100m away, why did it take them several minutes to arrive while the helos circled? Even when crouching (from my exp in the the army), looking for ambushes during house fighting you're faster going down a street than this.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#93

Post by analyst74 »

cia_plant wrote: post #55

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.…

Please don't protect my country, we'll do what you say!

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#94

Post by gruseom »

foldr wrote: post #89
gruseom wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this outrage prissy. I don't know anything about war, but even I know that it's utterly naive to expect that soldiers wouldn't get off on killing people. It is completely to be expected. The fantasy that war would somehow be more acceptable or even possible without it is not serious; it's a head-in-the-sand refusal to consider the ugliness of the thing. Next up: they aren't faithful to their wives while on tou…

> I don't know anything about war, but even I know that it's utterly naive to expect that soldiers wouldn't get off on killing people. It is completely to be expected. How far are you willing to take this argument? Statistically speaking, it's to be expected that invading armies will rape a substantial portion of the female population. Would it therefore be "prissy" to be outraged if this happens? >This is part of th…

The difference is that we ask soldiers to kill people, we don't ask them to rape them. To ask, pay, and celebrate them for doing the former and then fastidiously insist that they only do it in a way that conforms to our hero fantasies is incongruent.

That being said, it is naive to unleash violence and not expect it to spill over. So I guess in the case of war rape I would say that while it's not prissy to be outraged by it, it is to be surprised.

As a side note, I've never been comfortable with these kinds of arguments that go too far beyond the immediate context. A context grounds a problem; it gives you a real situation to refer back to and prevent going off the rails. The more purely abstract these things become, the more arbitrary they get. I don't trust disembodied reason. But that is a complete tangent; sorry!

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#95

Post by chrischen »

jeswin wrote: post #54

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…

> 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?

Because you're making a generalization and treating "America" as a single entity. It's not. It's government allows its individual citizens to pick and choose what they support.

It's very likely the "human rights" people also oppose the war in Iraq.

As far as the government goes, it then amplifies the voices of its individual citizens so that it may seem like "America" is contradicting itself, but it's not.

It's ideas you should be targeting, not the concept of "America" or "westerners."

So what you should ask is "What gives human rights activist warhawks the moral right to talk about human rights when the Iraqi death toll exceeds well over one hundred thousand?" When you find such a person, you should ask him/her.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#96

Post by analyst74 »

fbuilesv wrote: post #19

The author like many other posters is making the mistake of thinking that some of us put fault on the individual soldiers. In their own shoes I would've done the same thing, with the things hanging on the shoulders I couldn't tell if it was an AK-47 or a camera so I would've opened fire. What most people is complaining about is the military secrecy and handling of this business, not the "mass murder of civilians" (li…

That's probably the same reason why the commanders want to keep it secret. Because most people will just have a jerk reaction and blame the soldiers, which in turn put pressure on the soldiers in the field.

While I think the higher ups are to be blamed for even going to war, it's the people who elected them. So I don't really know who to blame.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#97

Post by jrockway »

zaphar wrote: post #15
jrockway wrote: post #11

Blame the victim. They shouldn't have been in Iraq. They shouldn't have been near someone bad. They should have marked the van. You shouldn't have murdered them. Killing should be the last resort, even in the heat of battle.

ummmm no. The whole point of the heat of battle is death. What you mean I think is that getting into the heat of battle should be the last resort.

We have non-lethal ways of taking down an opponent. We should be doing that instead, even if it's more costly.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#98

Post by KirinDave »

otto wrote: post #28
metamemetics wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But, the vehicle was already transporting suspects. That's like using a medical vehicle to transport combatants and then come back and pick up the wounded from the same vehicle.

You need to watch the video again. This time, turn off the sound and ignore the captions.

A man covered in blood is crawling along the side of the road as you drive by. You say, "My god! This man is injured! We need to help him!" You and your friend jump out to help an injured man, not really sure what's going on, and tell your children to wait in the car. Suddenly you're dead, because a helicopter flying high overhead killed you instantly because you were moving an injured man.

That isn't a hypothetical, that's what happend. And if you ignore the chatter of a few pilots eager to score more kills, it's very clear that these people had no connection to any activity on the scene. The Van is nowhere in sight until the very end of the engagement.

What's more, it's clear the pilot is eager to kill. He reports it in the most biased of terms: mentioning they were "possibly recovering weapons" despite seeing NO such action. How do we know he knew such a thing, you might ask? Because just moments before he was literally begging them to pick up a gun so he could kill them, and in the end he got a fire order anyways because of a biased report.

The actions of the pilots in that video were reprehensible and it is unfortunate that they will most likely be shielded from prosecution. On that day they ceased to be revered servicemen for the united states and became a representation of every flaw in our military system that Americans revile. They teetered on the edge of becoming war criminals. At the very least they should be dishonorably discharged.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#99

Post by Maktab »

Uchikoma wrote: post #92
Maktab wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Merely halving the time for mounting and assuming a 20km/h travel speed without any stops (bearing in mind this is a combat zone) seems a bit arbitrary. In any case, the radio calls seem to affirm that the ground element was in visual range of the people before the gunships even opened fire and Namir's photo, if it was indeed taken at the scene as we assume, shows the ground force as being pretty close, perhaps no mo…

If they were 100m away, why did it take them several minutes to arrive while the helos circled? Even when crouching (from my exp in the the army), looking for ambushes during house fighting you're faster going down a street than this.

Maybe they had soldiers spread out and it took a while to call them back and mount up? Maybe one of the vehicles had mechanical problems? Maybe they even decided to hold for a few minutes to wait and see if any more surprises would show up? We can't know.

Regardless, this discussion is now irrelevant, as it has been confirmed elsewhere that the photo I posted above was taken at this scene, presumably while Namir was peeking around the corner. That photo shows US troops no further than 200 m away, if I recall that lens's capabilities correctly.

Re: Wikileaks has really misled the public

#100

Post by jpwagner »

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…

actually you've mentioned the state of HN more than most:

  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1223767
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171670
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1148739
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086310
First of all, the flagging handles things, so why complain?

And for what it's worth, the discussions on here involve many intelligent, well-informed people whose opinions are worth high value. Certainly there are technical things discussed, but I think most people here are interested in all sorts of other "hacks," including sociology hacks, a category, I would argue, to which this article relates.

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