Gee I didnt know it was an AC-130 Gunship… I thought it was some kind of bomber… come to think about it, they did linger a long time over that target. Geez that video showed them targeting individual human targets. That was freaky. They leveled a building just a few yards away from a mosque and didnt even touch the mosque. accuracy wasnt super spectacular tho. Id say they were hitting things about 5 to 6 meters from bullseye, but you have to consider that they were moving and so were the targets. I did have this strong urge to grab the joystick from the targeteer and aim myself…
sorry guys, i could give you a link but its smack in the middle of a porn site. I dont think the mod is gonna appreciate it.
Yeah, I know this is a week dead, but I just saw it.
From what I could piece together, there were 2 gunships, and this was the recording from 1 of them. You see the building being taken out even though the sights weren’t on it. Plus you hear a bunch of ‘stepping’ (two or more people talking at once). Also you hear one of the guys asking which building is the mosque, with 2 people responding- so I assume the confused one was in the air looking.
As for the BAM! Bang! or whatever, I think it was the modern equivalent of ‘bombs away’. Just letting everyone know that they had just dropped something. My brother thinks it might have been lingo for which weapon they were using- there seemed to be large and small explosions, so they might have been differentiating between the two.
I also think that what we see is not as clear as what the soldiers were watching. You hear them talk about a guy crawling on the ground before they get him…No way I could tell from that resolution that anyone was crawling. It would not surprise me in the least if we got the low-bandwidth video while our boys have the high-res-what-type-of-shoes-is-he-wearing to look at.
The interesting thing I noticed was that they were purposely avoiding the mosque. “Do not fire on the mosque” was heard a few times. That is a favor that I don’t think terrorists would return. I think that our religious buildings would be the first thing they would target. Funny that.
I was not offended by the level of death in this video, killing people during wartime does not offend me.
What did offend me is that on one occasion in this video, the weapons operators fired on a building before given clearance to do so by the Fire Control Officer. This seems like shoddy performance.
They did a good job on avoiding the mosque. That is the right thing to do, but now terrorist are going to “hole-up” in mosques more.
Huh? I just watched it again…What building? There are two, and you can hear the permission given to level the square one (the mosque being the rectangle). The third square is a ‘holding pond or something’ as heard at the very beginning. They fired according to plan as far as I can tell.
At first they were ordered not to destroy the mosque and given clearance to destroy the vehicles, and people outside the buildings, but no clearance to destroy any buildings was given.
They blew up the vehicles, and killed several people, and chased one lucky bastard around with artillery. Then they panned back to the compound and the square building (not the mosque) blew-up, then clearance was given to blow up the square building.
To be sure its a minor violation, but I think it still constitutes a breach in the chain of command and should be worked on.
To add a little bit to this, they showed this video on an episode of Nova a couple weeks ago. It was about unmanned surveillance planes and this was given by the military as a demonstration of the utility of the Predator UAVs in Afghanistan. It wasn’t clear whether the video was from the Predator though. If you search the transcript for “mosque” you can find the relevant bit.
