This is why we fight…
I’m afraid that the real response will be to pull back the embeds from the front-lines.
This murdering piece of shit just recruited 10,000 more anti-American guerilla fighters. :mad:
The US media will do what it can to suppress the story or excuse it but Al Jazeera won’t.
How much more of this crap is going on in that city? How many of the victims are civilians?
All those who were there and know exactly what happened, feel free to post. The rest of us should shut the hell up.
It’s on video, dipshit.
It’s a good thing there wasn’t an NBC cameraman there taping every moment of it. If there had been, we might know what happened.
Sure, Abu Ghraib spurred Rumsfeld to ban cameras and camera phones in Iraq. Banning embeds, or embeds with cameras is the logical next step.
I don’t know. Send the Marine to Leavenworth, strip him of rank and retirement, and tell his buddies he did the wrong thing. But beyond that, what the hell do you people want? You want to take him to his hometown, lay him on the floor of his church, and let a captured insurgent take a free shot?
Would that appease your sense of fair play? 'Cause guess what: FUCK fair play.
It’s all well and good to talk about the laws of armed conflict, but the Marines are there to kill Iraqis who want to kill us. They’re good at it, too. As for the helpless unarmed victims, they were not “innocent civilians”. They were unarmed because we shot them and took their guns away, and it was bad form to wait so long after the engagement to kill them (forgiveable, if it had happened right after the firefight). But don’t kid yourself that if we had patched those boys up and sent them home they would have gone on the Baghdad U. lecture circuit saying how sweet we were to them.
I don’t want to give this Marine a pass – he broke the rules, and he got caught, which means he has to be made an example of. His lieutenant did him a disservice by asking him whether he committed a crime while cameras were rolling. So, send the Marine to jail, and teach the others the lesson: when you’re tossed into the wild and start breaking civilized rules so you can win the war and go back home to a civilized place, don’t get caught.
Let us all now wring our hands and bemoan what horrible things war makes people do. And maybe, just maybe, next time we’ll realize that asking eighteen-year-old boys with guns to kill people makes them into killers, and maybe blaming them for it rings a little hollow, and then maybe we’ll come up with a better way to solve our political disagreements and win elections.
Sorry, absolute precision of thought is impossible for us humans.
I don’t think you understand. You are letting your objections to Bush and this war cloud your judgement. As I have observed countless times on Usenet and more recently, this forum, you seem the type that would jump on anything like this in order to support the foundations of your perspective. You’ve already made two incorrect assumptions about me. My only thoughts on this subject are that it is very simple for America to shrug is collective shoulders and continue on exactly as before. Will you be satified when this Marine is behind bars? I suppose you would. If I was you, I’d think of that as a compromise. In the end, you are just another Plebeian with an opinion of zero consequence. I don’t want to Godwinize this thread, so I’ll just ask you this: do you Support the Troops?
The man was a fucking prisoner. You got that?
A god damned prisoner.
He had no weapons. He had no way at all of fighting back.
How can anyone defend what happened?
Now he’s dead.
What if an Iraqi had done it to an American?
Yes I support the troops. But you sure as hell don’t. You support the men and reasons that put our troops in this position.
Fuck you and your ilk asshole.
Have you ever been in combat asshole?
Of course you haven’t.
What the fuck do you know.
Bite my ass.
Fine by me.
Yep.
Really? Well if we hadn’t gone there they wouldn’t want to kill us, would they asshole?
That’s a bullshit excuse for killing a wounded POW, btw.
And once we take their guns away it’s an act of despicible cowardice to murder them.
Yes you do.
Reeder is right. You fuckers will say anything.
I’m with you as far as this goes, but even Marines in combat have a line they can’t cross, and the crime is not just getting caught but the crime itself. It’s fucking WRONG, man, and if we don’t acknowledge that it’s wrong then we’re just another gang of fucking terrorists.
And it was extremely thoughtful of this asswipe to provide a wonderful recruiting new video for al Qaeda, the insurgents, et al.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
“Don’t get caught”? THAT’S the lesson you think should be drawn from this? Not, oh, say, “DON’T SHOOT WOUNDED, UNARMED PRISONERS IN THE HEAD”?
You amoral motherfucker.
Is this how you react to anything who disagrees with your idealized conceptions?
So you support the troops, but not the job that they have to do?
Is it logical to suggest that by “Supporting the Troops” you must also, indirectly, support the civilian authority that gave them their orders?
Reality is a bitch.
You know what? I just read this, and now I do want to give that Marine a pass. Who knows what was going through his mind after that?
I’ll be sure to write his unit commander and chastise them for deciding to vacation in Iraq. It just might be someone else’s job to decide where Marines get sent. More on that in a bit.
It’s the Marine’s job to kill anything that threatens his life. This particular Marine had a pretty fucked-up lapse of judgment, but in the circumstances (see above), I don’t blame him. And I think there are lots more lapses of judgment going on over there that aren’t getting caught on tape, and the Marines who see it every day know what the lesson is. If you think any of them are inclined to learn a lesson that includes the words “don’t shoot” and “insurgents” you’re dreaming.
As for accepting my utterly hypothetical punishment for the Marine, I say – that insurgent has just received that exact brand of eye-for-an-eye “justice” better known as revenge. His comrades booby-trapped a dead body, and now every not-quite-dead insurgent is a “suspected IED” rather than an “unarmed combatant.” Don’t confuse revenge with justice – there won’t be any justice served in this little clusterfuck.
As long as you just drag out the one or two who get caught so you can make examples of them and take the moral high ground, this behavior will continue. War is when you take humans and train them to behave inhumanly. When you turn around and expect humanity of them on command, you’re just a hypocrite. Might as well take a wolf to the Westminster Dog Show while you’re at it.
I suggest that you stop criticizing a killer for killing someone, and instead, criticize the ones who set him loose.
I think some of you are missing the point of the article that the Marine unit had received word that some of the Mosques (including the one in question) had been reoccupied. A different Marine batallion went back to said Mosque, not the one that had fought there and left wounded on the premises the day before. I don’t know exactly what happened there. None of us do! But until I do know more of what happened than we do now I will not pit some 20 year old who has most likely been fighting for 24 to 48+ hours without sleep as many of them had. This attack on Fallyjah was pumped for days as “No one knows what to expect” essentially. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in the midst of that and neither can most of you, my friends.
I hate this war. I think it was a supreme mistake. But I do not confuse my distaste for out President and his sicko way of running our country with the young men and women who are over their with their fucking balls to the wall.
I think I will wait to hear what really happened.
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
Nothing was threatening this cocksuckers life. :dubious:
As to booby traps, no fucking excuse. It sounds like bullshit anyway, but no, just because some other corpse was booby trapped does not mean it is now open season on all wounded prisoners.
Trying this a bit more calmly now…
The pesky thing about the moral high ground is that by definition you’re supposed to be there all the time. What’s “right” isn’t just “right” when it’s convenient.
And yes, that does apply to war too. In the heat of battle, or when following orders, a soldier may end up doing things that would be abhorrent in other circumstances. But to all accounts this soldier wasn’t acting under direct orders, nor was in the heat of battle. He shot an unarmed, wounded prisoner in the head. He may not be punished…I freely admit there may be extenuating circumstances I’m not aware of…but if he is punished I hope to God that it’s because he did something wrong, NOT just because he was caught.
Yes, it is horrible to expect soldiers to behave morally in that kind of environment. The poor bastard who pulled the trigger was in six different kinds of hell before, and he’s in seven kinds now, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. But there is still right, and there is still wrong. And if it’s harder to avoid do abhorrent things in wartime, that’s just one more reason why we should be damned reluctant to send those young men and women into harms way in the first place.
But apparently, expecting people to adhere to a moral code as best they can even when it’s difficult makes me a hypocrite. But throwing any pretense of a moral code out the window when it would be convenient to do so wouldn’t. Riiiight.
I’m not criticizing a killer. I’m criticizing a soldier. I see a distinction. You, apparently, do not.
Perhaps, just perhaps, you’re selling the soldiers short by not expecting better of them.
But what “really” happened
IS ON A FUCKING VIDEO! You can see with your own eyes what really happened. A jarhead went batshit and shot an unarmed prisoner for no better reason than because he thought the guy was playing dead. We can cut him some slack because he has been living on adrenaline for the past few days and not hang him as a war criminal but this is still second-degree murder.
I have not seen the video. I have read this thread. I remember that the single incident that marked the beginning of the end for Somoza in Nicaragua was a piece of video showing a National Guardsman approaching a journalist spread eagled on his belly in the street and shooting him in the back of the head.
If the incident we are talking about here is as bad as even the apologists seem to say then this may mark the beginning of even more trouble for the US occupation. This is serious stuff and like the prisoner abuse and torture is a indicator of a loss of control within military formations. This sort of thing does not happen in well trained and disciplined units. The wanton murder of prisoners and helpless wounded is inexcusable in a properly lead military.
I suspect that this has done irreparable harm to what ever chance there was to avoid all out rebellion in Iraq. Somebody need to repair some fences and do it fast. Short of an out right defeat this is about as bad a thing as could have happened, not excluding the mass defection of the Iraqi police force.
The Marine may well have all sorts of excuses but I expect that Nicaraguan Guardsman did too.