Actually, I suspect the Geneva convention probably doesn’t apply, since the insurgents probably aren’t all wearing distinctive signs nor belonging to a clearly organized command structure.
It’s probably debatable from a legal point of view. Anyway, since apparently they’re called “ennemy combattant” by the US military authorities, I assume it means htey’ve already made their mind on this issue and decided they aren’t protected by the Geneva Convention.
Excuse me, I did not hear you,
Could you speak louder please?
I did watch the video. I also put my judgement in check and fucking listened to Kevin Sikes reporting. The soldiers had been warned of the new method of enemy booby trapping of bodies, the unit took fire apparently from the Mosque as they approached it, the man the Marine shot was at first thought to be dead and then they discovered he was not which could lead them to think they were walking into a booby trap. Another unit, at the same time and just down the street, took one casualty and 5 wounded from a booby trapped body. What I am trying to say is that I cannot imagine what it would be like to be in that Mosque. The report goes on to say, I think quite eloquently, that in this battle our soldiers are being forced to shoot faster than one can think, Again, i cannot imagine that horror.
The Marine has been removed from duty and is being investigated. This is the correct action. I won’t be party to trying him and finding him guilty on a message board. He deserves better than that. Actually, IMHO, he deserved to have been relieved from duty the day before the fight in the Mosque. Remember that day? The day he got shot in the face.
We can sit here clean and tidy and think we know what it is like to be there. But we are not there, are we? And tomorrow we won’t be making decisions in a split second about whether or not we need to shoot or get killed, will we?
Indeed. He might have been bleeding in a threatening manner.
The point, and try to grasp this for a moment, is not whether a defense for the Marine’s murder of an unarmed and wounded non-combatant can be concocted from some set of speculative facts. The point is that this does tremendous, maybe fatal harm, to the government’s efforts to impose civil order on Iraq. This is magnitudes worse than the abuse of prisoners. It is the single incident that may shoot US attempts to forestall civil war and the emergence of an anti-US regime in Iraq right in the head. We have serious trouble here and it doesn’t have a god damned thing to do with whether some stressed out Jar Head had an excuse. This is nothing less than a huge set back for US hopes of establishing a friendly government in Iraq. The resistance to the US occupation and its provisional Iraqi government of limited sovereignly is clearly increasing. Iraq is clearly descending even more precipitously into chaos and disorder. Fighting the resistance is turning into an immense game of wack-a-mole. This just makes it worse. This makes it less likely that the game of wack-a-mole can be won.
You appear to have a flawed understanding of how “Whack-A-Mole” is played. There is no “winning,” in the sense that the mole heads stop popping up. The whole point is to get the slot under the token slike to spit out as manyu tickets as you can manage, so you can take them to the counter and exchange them for Halliburton stock optio – err, prizes.
Your points are well taken. I understand this to be a possible unraveling of any tenuous chance we had to have any order in Iraq. The sad fact is that we never had a real honest chance at that from the beginning. And now we seem to be eager to rush to judgement that this is the deciding factor. Maybe it is easier to blame some nameless “Jar Head” (what an awful name, but then I have very little testosterone, so what do I know?) than it is to point the finger at what put him is such a horrible position.
This war was poorly thought out and poorly planned. But then, I suppose that war, by definition may always be just that. I see with horror and it makes me want to cry that we are heading for the same quagmire we had in VN and the ones to really get the short end of the stick will be the young men and women we sent over there to do the impossible. Will we spit on them when they come home too? I want to smack someone but since he is safe and secure in the White House, I guess all I can do is sit here and cry for the ones trying to do the un-doable.
It’s all just so fucked up. At least you didn’t resort to infantile yelling at me. :rolleyes:
The scary thing is, he’s probably one of those “moral values” voters for Bush the pundits keep talking about.
It’s a war. A war I oppose, but for the purposes of this thread that’s neither here nor there. The Marine was in combat, and saw someone he supposed to be dead to be moving - fighting an enemy that you know to use suicide tactics, do you endanger your life and the lives of your fellow soldiers by standing around to ponder whether or not he may be booby-trapped, or debating the ethics of the matter? You kill him before he has a chance to kill you: he reacted by shooting him and removing any chance of a threat. It’s violent. It’s horrible. But unfortunately, that’s the nature of any war - it isn’t a movie, and it isn’t a game. I think he did the right thing, and I suspect most posters, given military training and being put in the same situation, would have acted similarly.
I’ve seen most of the video, but CNN blacks it out just before the shot is fired.
What did the soldier do after that? If he suspected that the wounded man was a threat, or that his body was booby-trapped, did he approach cautiously after shooting? Did he warn the other marines to be careful? Is there anything in his actions that indicates he thought he was facing a threat?
From what I saw, it looked like murder. He should be investigated and face a court martial.
The video (you don’t see any killing) can be seen here .
What, exactly, is threatening about faking being dead?
Video can be a very manipulative media, precisely because it seems so real. But it only shows the tiny bit of reality the media allows and the cameraman wants to be revealed. The video shows nothing of what went on in the rest of the room. The time up to the vide clip. The time following the video clip. What they were feeling or thinking. etc. The iconic footage of the captured Vietcong shot or executed by a police officer in Vietnam, didn’t show how he had just killed a number of civilians (…or perhaps he hadn’t, the stories vary. Fact is we don’t know). This video from Falluja didn’t show that there had just been another incident of a booby-trapped corpse. That the insurgents are notoriously unconcerned about their own survival, using suicide bombs etc. to kill enemies. Perhaps there have been incidents of fake surrender. Perhaps the man wasn’t actually pretending to be dead, but really dead. Also isn’t it doubtful whether an enemy that pretends to be something he’s not, can be classified as having surrendered. The video didn’t show many things. Likely the soldier is guilty of using excessive or unnecessary violence, but you cannot condemn him on some edited video footage. I sure as hell ain’t gonna damn anybody sitting here thousands of miles away in security. War is hell. These things go on all the time in Iraq. Everybody knows that – or ought to know it. It seems a bit strange to get especially outraged over this particular incident just because it’s on video. But people demand blood, and probably the marine will get crucified.
Too bad the Marine didn’t first kidnap the guy, then record him pleading for his life, then had Sikes videotape the decapitation. That may have garnered him more sympathy.
BTW, if he was a prisoner that the Marines knew was unarmed and not a threat, why was it a surprise that he was still alive?
Funny how “it’s a war” works to justify anything we do but not what they do. They’re cutting our heads off? Hey, IT’S A WAR!
Let’s not forget that whatever we excuse by our own troops we are also excusing for them. If we don’t make this Marine face justice, we are saying, “hey bad guys, please kill any unarmed wounded Americans that you want. We don’t care about that rule anymore.”
THE GC is in place to protect OUR troops. Don’t forget that.
Let’s also not forget that the military exists to kill people and break stuff. It’s not a jobs program, nor a way to have your college education paid for. Those are benefits you get for putting your life on the line.
I know that sounds cold, but this is a volunteer army and every enlistee knows the deal going in.
They entered an office and signed papers to join. They knew there was a chance they’d be shot at, no matter if they agreed with the reasons. Heroes, every one of them. Keep in mind, the Marine in question was shot in the face the day before and lost a friend during the taking of the mosque.
This guy is welcome in my home anyday.
I, like the rest, was shocked and distressed at Abu Ghraib. There is no question that the guards there deserved to be punished for what they did not only to the prisoners, but also to the US.
On the other hand, I have a hard time mustering too much sympathy here, nor ire at the shooting of the prisoner:
There are anecdotes that in WWII prisoners were sometimes shot dead because the US troops needed to keep moving and had no other way of handling them.
As mentioned before, the insurgents had booby-trapped bodies. If these particular marines did not know that the other troop of marines had mended up these guys (I cannot imagine that kind of communication to be traveling through the ranks as they are scattered about the city), then it could well look like a booby trap to someone walking in and seeing someone behave in such a way. We already know that there have been no shortage of suicide bombers, how might this be any different?
While reclaiming the city and telling families that it is okay to try and put the pieces of their lives back together, two marines were shot by insurgents using the families as cover. Just because the city is ‘cleared’, it is clear that these guys cannot let their guard down, and even if the soldier’s actions were incorrect, again, I would be hard pressed to find fault with him under the circumstances.
There is no question that Al-Jazeera is going to milk this for all that they can, and that will ultimately hurt us, but I have a tough time blaming a soldier for panicking in a situation to which he is not accustomed (how often in training does the idea of ‘humans as explosives’ come up?) and taking this course of action.
What saddens me is the unrestrained glee felt by opponents of the military, the Republicans, and the United States because they finally got a video out from the front lines of a battle showing a questionable killing.
The “conservative controlled” media sure was reluctant to broadcast this on every single network. REAL worried that it would inflame islamo-fascist terrorists to saw off more heads and bomb more police stations. They were CERTAINLY careful to include a cautionary note that this situation is not representative of the battle there.
Fuckers. You lose the election, then you lose the battle in Falujah with low casualties on the American side. “Oh, but we still have the MORAL superiority! See, see, homophobia is why people voted Republican! This tape shows that American soldiers are bloodthirsty killers!”
What’s this going to do, geniuses? Make troops be more politically correct when dealing with these psychos? I don’t think so. These embedded reporters are GONE. We don’t need soldiers getting killed to appease the Bolsheviks here in America.
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These “lapses in judgement” (nice term for shooting someone in the head in cold blood) are going to result in more Marine causulties, don’t you fucking understand that? That bonehead just put an even bigger target on all our troops, and recruited more terrorists. Don’t do boneheaded shit like that, and we’ll at least minimize the excuses for hatred towards us. I’m not talking about the insurgents either, they’ll hate us no matter what, but imagine what the rest of the world thinks when they see this shit? We need to maintain the moral highground, the insurgents don’t. It’s a fucked up equation, but we should have known that going in.
So, I’m in touch with my inner child. I thought that was supposed to be a GOOD thing. 
Sorry for the yelling.
If the word ‘probably’ is appropriate, then the Geneva Convention applies. It applies to all combatants whose status is not clear, until their status is decided by a fair process. The soldier on the ground doesn’t have the right to decide who it applies to.