You’re right. I take that back.
Highlighting French hypocrisy for their sins doesn’t mean I’m excusing the Fallujah marine for his.
If it really happened, this is (as I said) an atrocity or a war crime or something on that level. That makes small potatoes of hypocrisy. Although I’m not sure if you can blame the French government for it. Anyway, not the point. I don’t think it sounded like you were excusing the guy in Fallujah. I do think it sounded like you were using the incident as an excuse to dump on the French instead of reacting to something really terrible. If it happened. The way you’ve emphasized the hypocrisy part of the deal, in addition to the other stuff I mentioned, drives it home. It makes you sound happy that the French have proven they’re on our level.
The thing is that even if France nuked the whole continent it still wouldn’t make them wrong about Iraq. They turned out to be right about the lack of urgency when it came to WMD. One of the things that really pisses me off over the last few years is how Bush has made me actually agree with Chirac on something :mad:
If this incident turns out to be as bad as it’s talked about by some in this thread then I’d hope that France and the soldiers involved would be condemned and prosecuted to the highest level. To the ICC if necessary which could be a possibility as France has signed up but it would involve France not carrying out their own prosecution for it to go that far.
Exactly the same as I would if it was Irish, British, American or any other country’s troops involved. Troops do not get a carte blanche just because they are deployed. They have to follow the rules of law and engagement. End of story.
Keep bleating, fucktard. Youre obviously looking for some sort of moral eqivalence between the French actions in the Ivory Coast – a UN sanctioned operation, least you forget – and your own murderous Iraq invasion. Guess what, dickweed? You’ve got precious little for the time being – other than a dubious unsourced video that looks suspect at best and conflicts with most news reports from the area. However, should these, or any other war crimes, be proven to have been commited by the French, I’ll stand right there, front and center condemning them as well. Difference being, that unlike you, I won’t be shooting my wad on some highly inconclusive video put together by such a credible source as Who The Fuck Knows.
As for my using Dahr Jamail as a source, why not? Until someone proves otherwise, he is a legitimate indepependent reporter whose articles are widely distributed. He also does some radio reporting for the very BBC.
Don’t like the fact that he is not in bed with the US forces or their puppet Gov? Tough titty. In fact, that only raises his credibility in my own eyes. Like I said, prove him wrong.
Meanwhile, **the French were, and are, still right about Iraq**.
Froth on, cowpoke.
I searched around a little. It’s pretty clear that french soldiers opened fire on a crowd. But the details aren’t clear at all. I couldn’t tell :
-What were the circumstances (how hostile was the crowd, who opened fire first…)
-How many people were killed. I found mentions of 4 people, of 7 people, of 30 people, of “much more than 30”
-Whether or not they were killed by the fire, or for the most part trampled when the crowd dispersed after a warning fire.
- What weapons were used. I found mentions of “heavy weapons” and of “a 20 mm gun”.
Here’s a sum up of the take of the paper “Le Monde” on the issue :
“seven killed in Abidjan. French military fired warning shots, resulting in a stampede, leaving at least seven persons dead and several wounded. The “young patriots”, supporters of president Gbagbo had gathered moments before, close to the Hotel Ivoire occupied by the french military”.
I didn’t download the video. I saw however a footage with a couple people lying dead on the pavement, but I couldn’t tell what killed them.
I’m reserving judgement here, and in this I’m in agreement, apparantly, with you, clairobscur.
I find it funny, though, that you haven’t shown similar restraint in the past, with another country’s soldiers.
Why so? The french soldiers haven’t been involved in heavy fightings, nor for months in a row, and there are much less of them. The situtation isn’t at all similar.
If it’s what you think, I’ve no doubt french soldiers would shot people in the head, or torture them, etc… if they were in the same situation. Why would you assume I believe french soldiers are saintly men, etc, etc…? It’s not like there’s no precedent.
This thread was about a particular incident, I searched for infos about this incident and reported what I found, that’s all. If you read the thread you linked to, you’ll note that I didn’t state that the involved soldier was a cold-blooded murderer. I’m just convinced that similar incidents happened a lot, and that cold-blood murder happened too. Believing that torture only happens when some soldier take pictures to boast about it, or shooting dead wounded prisonners only when there’s a TV camera around, and acting all surprised when the pictures/ footage are aired is just naive.
This particular footage in Falujah is only relevant because there are still a number of people believing that american soldiers are angels, and it shows them that they’re mistaken. Arguing about how guilty the soldier was is still only relevant for people who would still believe it’s an isolated incident, hence would think that if they can justify it, there’s nothing else to bother about. In the grand picture, the civilians killed in bombings is a much more serious issue. I mean, you blow up residential buildings in order to take out an insurgent leader, bomb the hell out of a large city, and you’re highly bothered by a soldier shooting dead a prisonner? Of course, he should be tried and all, but it’s not like there’s nothing else very wrong going on.
Something about that first video has been bugging me all day and I just figured it out. It came from seeing a lot of people asking if the crowd was rowdy.
If you watch the first video again, you can see the only barricade was a simple light-weight rope cordoning them off. With none of them crossing that boundary. I’m 50/50 on what really happened. (Real or staged)
What were all those Irish folks doing there?
An update:
From:
From: Little Green Footballs
referring to a story on a Swiss News Channel (go to the page for a link to video)
The NYT doesn’t mention this in their article entitled “France is cast as the villain in Ivory Coast” :
This is just insane.
I could eventually watch the videos of the incident, thanks to a link provided by one of the poster on this page. I still can’t watch these “real xobix” videos, though, like the interview of the witnesses or of the french officer.
I would tend to assume the videos are genuine, since they seem to match the testimonies. The incident has been mentionned in the medias, both on TV and in papers, but only briefly and without much precisions, giving the impression that some sort of clash happened resulting in some deaths. There has been an overwhelmingly more important coverage of the attacks against the french military position, against the french expatriates and of the rampages and destruction of franch-owned buildings like schools. Unfortunately, during the last two weeks, I didn’t listen to “Radio France International” that covers quite extensively African news, something that I usually do every day. They would probably have given more detailled accounts.
I checked the site of the french ministery of defense, but theres’s only one document refering to this incident, the transcript of the interview of a representant of the army aired on a french radio. And he’s using what we call the “langue de bois” (wooden tongue), IOW, he does speak, but he says nothing.
The most relevant bit is the following :
It’s really not worth translating. For people who don’t speak french, roughly, he says there has been serious incidents, there was a crowd, there were french soldiers, there was Ivorian security forces between them, a panic was caused by something, the situation was very difficult, and the french troops displayed a lot of restraint. There’s no information whatsoever about what happened. There’s not even a mention of any shooting.
My position would be quite accurately summed up by a post on the page you linked to :
I ran both videos repeatedly, and I have the following thoughts:
One: The injuries shown on tape were real - The huge level of advance preparation necessary to fake that many wounds, that realistically (most especially the victim with the crushed head), would have been obvious in the free-ranging video shots. Some people very close to camera were filmed before and after the shooting, showing head wounds afterwards. That would’ve required makeup magic that even Hollywood would be hard-pressed to match, and certainly not in that short of a time-frame.
Two: The crowd shown lying down were not all shot - Most were lying down to avoid getting shot. Once the fire slacked off, they got up and moved away.
Three: The crowd’s behavior was consistant with other crowd behaviors I’ve seen filmed under similar circumstances, especially in countries where violence and death are more common than they are in the West.
Four: The breast shots were part of the scene, and not prurient in nature - many of the injured were shown either with their shirts raised or off, or in the process of being removed. It appears that the crowd was trying to treat (ineffectively) for shock.
Five: The crowd did not appear to actually threaten the soldiers at any point. Nor did I see any signs of weapons. They were, however, loud, insulting, and generally (if passively) hostile.
Six: Based upon the volume of fire, the troops must have either been remarkably bad shots, or they really were using “less-lethal” ammunition. The wounds seen in the crowd were, for the most part, consistant with relatively low-energy projectiles. e.g. Head wounds that indicated projectiles had ricoched, torso wounds that produced only mildly disabling wounds, and so on. Full-power ammunition fired at that volume at a crowd that dense would have produced far more than just a relative handful of fatalities, given the number of wounds.
Seven: This is fairly typical of what happens everywhere with depressing regularity when you put combat troops in police roles. That is especially true when you issue “less lethal” ammunition to those troops without giving them proper training on the doctrine of use for that ammunition. The average combat trooper doesn’t have as good as good a grasp on rules of engagement as police forces (MPs) would, and believes it when he reads ‘low lethality’ on the ammo crate - They often don’t realize that ‘less lethal’ != ‘non-lethal.’
Eight: The burning UN vehicle wasn’t very far involved - I’d guess that it was set afire either right before, or right after, the shooting. It might have been, with equal plausibility, the trigger for the shooting, or in response to the shooting.
Conclusion: This was a predictable fuck-up, and France does itself no damn good by trying to deny it or sweep it under the rug. They’d do far better to acknowledge it and tell what steps they’re taking to prevent a recurrence.
Or they were mainly shooting over there heads, which is kind of how it looked to me. The soldiers were on a raised position, didn’t appear to be pointing down. As well, the protesters seem to jump up a little before the firing had stopped.
Also I’m not sure it’s fair to say they were put in a “police role”. There’s been plenty of violence already and the soldiers are protecting a hub for extraditing foreign nationals.
I am hard pressed to notice any provocation by the crowd in the video. On another note I got the impression that faces were purposely blurred at the 3:00 mark 1st video. Comments?
Far too many wounds in the crowd for the soldiers to have been firing over heads. To have it otherwise would imply that the troops were such bad shots that they couldn’t hit the sky - Not plausible. Also, it seems to me that there was a pretty close match of wounds-to-shots, based solely upon my perceptions from the videos.
Crowd-control and security, against an unarmed and unthreatening demonstration? That’s a police role, not a proper job for line troops. Much more appropriate to have used Military Police for such work, if any were available. MPs are specifically trainied in how to handle such situations, while line trops only get cursory training at that kind of work, at best.
Sadly, the line troops appear to have been the only force available.
I’m not sure there was one, but from the limited perspective of the cameras, I’m not at all convinced there wasn’t one, either. Hard to say, though I suspect that it was a case of troops out of their depth (called to do something for which they had little training) getting nervous and acting what training they did have. i.e. when you feel threatened, shoot.
That said, I’d have to say that the discipline of the French troops is pretty good - they stopped shooting fairly quickly, and didn’t start up again. Nor did the firing errupt into a general slaughter. Once a trigger is pulled, it’s sometimes quite hard to stop the shooting again, depending on the discipline of the troops involved.
I haven’t seen the video, what were they doing?
In the first video, I’m wondering if the wounds weren’t caused by bullets dropping from the sky. I too saw that lots of people appeared to be overcome by heat rather than wounded by bullets. As for the second, the crowd appeared to close on the soldiers and the soldiers opened fire before they got overwhelmed and then withdrew. Considering that the soldiers had tanks there, which did not fire, and the limited number of casualties - there could have been hundreds. I’d suggest that the French showed restraint in the circumstances but I’ll let those with actual military experience make proper judgements.
Very unlikely - the placement, depth, and distribution of the wounds would have been quite different if it were from projectiles falling from the sky, especially if they were using ‘low lethality’ bullets.
Restraint is a relative term, and the main reason you’d not use tanks to fire on the crowd is that tanks are grossly coarse tools for crowd control - You either waste a very expensive round killing a very few people, or, if you have the ability to fire cannister (most tanks do not have cannister ammunition for their main guns), you wind up killing everyone in front of you. Two very poor choices. So, the lack of tank main-gun fire isn’t really an issue of restraint in either direction. They’re just the wrong weapon for the task.
My opinion of the French troops is posted above.
Well, if you say you are an emergency/combat triage medic, coroner or something I’ll take you at your word.
However, from this layman’s eyes the clear round leg wound and what seemed to me shrapnel being taken out (both in first video) makes me think regular rounds. The wounds in the second video don’t make be think rubber bullets either: mostly heat stroke and deep gashes. The amputated foot and head could be caused by a direct hit from a gas canister, but there’s no other evidence of gas use. My first guess would be being hit by a heavy vehicle.
That’s my take anyway. Not that it changes moral culpability much, just how to prevent it in the future.
Not a combat medic, though I was part of the local volunteer ambulance corp when I was younger. What I have, instead, is a long familliarity with firearms, military experience, and a fair fascination with the work of wound ballistics research. In short, while I don’t treat such wounds myself, I’ve seen scores of them.
I’ll agree that I heard nothing that would acount for the foot injury or the crushed head, and both resemble the kind of damage that a vehicle would cause.
The kinds of less-lethal bullets that could be fired from the battle rifles the troops were using would quite handily cause neat round holes from a close-range direct shot, but would be highy unlikely to cause any serious wound if falling straight down - The sectional density of less-lethal bullets is sufficiently low that terminal velocity would too low to cause worse than minor bruising and pressure cuts. In order to cause serious injury with less-lethal bullets, they have to strike their victim fairly close to the muzzle. Within a few tens of meters, typically.
Placement: Far too many leg and torso hits for falling bullets, and far too many clean entries (as you correctly mention) for spent bullets.
Lastly, distribution of the wounded: Most were close to the front of the crowd. Falling bullets would be scattered over an area far, far more broad than the relatively localized crowd. The bullets would have been falling all over the city, not in the plaza. It takes serious care and near-perfect conditions to cause a bullet fired in the air to return to the ground with the kind of precision neccessary to produce the results video taped. It’s simply not credible that a number of soldiers could fire into the air and have that many bullets drop to the ground directly into the crowd in front of their position. Nor is it credible that randomly falling bullets would create shuch a high proportion of wounds per the number of bullets fired. The fussilade was short, and no more than two or hree hundred bullets were fired, in total. Probably far less than that, actually. Reports were of 200 injuries. Even counting that 3/4 of the injuries were inflicted in the panic afterwards, that still means that as many as one in four, or at worst, one in six, bullets caused an injury. That rate of injury from falling bullets is simply not credible. Not even remotely. No, the distribution of wounded clearly indicates a direct line from the firing soldiers to the victims.
In short, based upon my knowledge and experience, it is not credible that these troops were firing into the air.