You are being unreasonable. Of COURSE there is a requirement that they surrender if the building was back in insurgent hands and had to be re-assaulted to take it back…hell, the requirement of common sense if nothing else.
Read the parts I bolded…its pretty clear that the insurgents retook the building and were fighting again…here is the quote again in case you missed it: " But Saturday, another squad of Marines found that the mosque had been **reoccupied by insurgents ** and attacked it again, only to find the same wounded men inside."
Now, I suppose one way to look at this is that the same insurgents were merely still sitting about inside…thats reasonable I suppose (as we don’t know all the facts yet). However, another way to look at it is that a NEW insurgent group was inside and were chased off by the marines…who found the place empty except for the dead or wounded from the previous day. Again, my point is we simply don’t know enough to be making the categoric statements YOU are making about all this…there simply isn’t enough data. Unless you have another source you are going by of course that has more info…and if so, please share it.
You also say this as though the Marines are on a walk in the park and stumble past these injured guys and leave them there. They are in a war zone which apparently this mosque is in the middle of becuase it has changed hands several times. I admit I am not an expert on the GC but I doubt that there is a requirement to treat wounded enemies at the risk of bodily harm to your own soldiers. Feel free to cite the relevent part of the GC if my understanding is incorrect.
You are also continuing to say that these men were in U.S. custody which is unclear. All we know at this point is that they were in U.S. custody at one point and then they were “rescued” by insurgents i.e. not in U.S. custody any more. Thats all we know. Period. Nothing more everything else is assumption on your part. We don’t know if this marine had just stormed the room when he shot him or whether the mosque had been recaptured 3 hours ago.
In a land of blood vengeance and death feuds, we (as white Christians) have killed so many innocents (brown Muslims) that hearts and minds will never be won there. It’s an impossible task.
There is no evidence that they ever returned to the other side. The cameraman said it was claer that the guy was not a threat and that he had no weapons.
The ironic thing about this is that a month ago, conservative message boards were abuzz with arguments that John Kerry was guilty of “murder” for pursuing and killing a fleeing, wounded VC armed with a rocket launcher. The enemy that Kerry killed was a far more demonstrable threat than some guy dying in a pool of blood with no weapon at all.
In your view, a bank guard hired to protect the money, is just as bad as the one who would steal the money. Technically, this is true I suppose. They would both kill to accomplish their job. So, what we are left with is…original intent.
If neither side holds any moral ground, then all that is left is…the guy with the most bullets wins. Always have.
I’m making several contentions I suppose. One, that irregular and un-uniformed insurgents aren’t as fully provided for under the GC as regular army forces as far as treatment goes. In addition, that there is leeway in the GC as far as WHEN wounded enemy forces are treated in a combat situation…i.e. no one is expected to drop everything and tend to enemy wounded as a first priority while the battle rages. Thus my own assertion that this situation falls into a grey area…as opposed to your contention that its a slam dunk.
This is all from memory, as its been several months since I dug through the GC, but I seem to recall that both of my contentions have at least a little bit of merit. As its YOUR contention that the US violated the GC by not treating these wounded combatants (I’m unsure myself as I think this situation falls into a grey area), its on you to prove your case…thus my request for a cite. I was actually trying to help you avoid embarrassment and to broaden your search of the GC to factor in my own contentions…however, do as you will.
He was in a building with a bunch of insurgents fighting American troops. Thats enough evidence for me that he had returned to the other side until he surrenders again I consider him hostile.
The cameraman is not quoted as saying that in the CNN article linked unless you have another cite should we chalk this one up to your imagination too?
No the ironic thing is that you were strenously arguing in the West Memphis that there was absolutely no evidence to convict them when there clearly was some evidence and in this thread you are strenously arguing that this Marine is guiltly with only a little evidence.
Under the 4th Geneva Convention Even those defined as “unlawful Combatants” are entitled to treated with “humanity.” They do not have to be accorded POW status but they are protected:
Does that about cover it? That doesn’t even account for the UCMJ.
Right…as I said, its a grey area. Or, if this helps more, its ‘open to interpretation’, unlike the provisions for actual uniformed soldiers. Exactly what does ‘treated with humanity’ mean in specific terms, and in terms of THIS incident as far as the treatment of wounded combatants in Fallujah goes? I’m unsure (as I already said)…and this doesn’t clear things up as a lot of this falls through the cracks.
As to the wounded issue, I’m fairly certain there is some weasle language in there for receiving wounded in a combat situation, or for the ‘timely’ assisting of wounded combatants, but I don’t have time right now to sift through it again. I conceed that I might be thinking of an earlier version of the GC here though.
Well, we weren’t talking about the UCMJ though…I already said that its pretty clear that it was violated both in the treatment of the wounded (though there might be some weasle language in there as well as far as ‘timely’ treating of prisoners…I’m not sure) as well as the shooting of an unarmed wounded prisoner. It was YOU that brought up the GC DtC and said we were clearly in violation…not me.
I came over here rather than to the parallel Pit thread in the expectation that the discussion here might be a little bit more rational. It is, but only marginally. None the less:
Horrible things happen in combat. Even in the best regulated army combat is an obscenity. We have seen it again and again. Sometimes the horror and indiscipline rises to the level of the MyLai Massacre or to the almost undercover doings of Operation Phoenix. Sometimes it is little personal outrages like this incident. Given the levels of exhaustion, fear and anger involved in combat that these things happen ought to be no surprise. They ought not to happen. When they do they represent the beginnings of what every commander, from the general of the whole army to the low grade acting NCO in charge of a section of three of four soldiers fear above all things. What they all fear is the moment that an armed and disciplined military orginization turns into a mob of murderous free lances. This is a lesson every soldier, every Marine, learns very quickly – discipline above all things. This is why soldiers and Marines are instructed again and again on the rules and customs of land warfare. This is why we have rules of engagement. The attempt to curtail the beast and the acceptance of the self discipline that involves is why a life at arms is an honorable calling. That is why this country tries to ameliorate the cruelty of war. If we did not we would be no better than the barbarians we oppose and our cause would suffer accordingly. We would become no better than the forces of disorder and tribalism we oppose.
That said, that this sort of thing is bound to happen in the face of the best honest efforts to prevent it, we must deal with the fact that things like this and the abuse of prisoners and the indiscriminate shelling and bombing of towns (which is what it is no matter how anybody tries to spin it as “collateral damage”) and the hundreds of other abuses and indiciplines that have most certainly happened are just fuel for the fire of the Iraqi insurgency. You throw enough fuel on that fire and you are going to have a conflagration, if not a holocaust, that is going to be beyond any power to control.
We see the inklings of that in things like Iraqi policemen defecting to the insurgency and taking their body armor and weapons with them. We see the fire spreading in the out break of other uprising in Mosul while our attention is focused on Fllujah. We can be pretty sure that it will pop up somewhere else when the hot spot of the moment is cooled down. In the mean even time more resentment toward the occupation and the provisional government will be engendered and more other wise complacent Iraqis will be willing to take up arms against the occupation and the provisional government.
I’m not sure what can be done about this now short of posting a US trooper at the door of every building in the country. I know what could have been done about it though. We could have observer General Powell’s doctrine. We could have been patient. We could have gone in with realistic force with French armored formations on one flank and Saudi infantry on the other as we did the first time. We could have co-opted the Baathist government and Iraqi army rather than dispersing it. We could have guarded weapons dumps to keep the stuff stored there out of the hands of people who wish us ill. None of those decisions were made by some sleep deprived, fearful, angry, over stressed 19 year Jar Head or Grunt. Those decisions pretty much guaranteed that things like the insurrection and things like this horror were going to happen.
The murder of the wounded, disarmed and helpless former combatants who are prisoners in our hands is just one drop in a bucket. There are plenty of other things going on that indicate that this foreign adventure is going South and going South fast. It seems to me that, if the present trends continue, we will shortly be faced with a regional conflict that is beyond our power, sole surviving super-power or not, to control or direct.
Saw the full video this morning on CNN, stopping just short of the actual shooting (though audio continued). The soldiers in question (group A) approached the site, met up with more Marines there (group B), and told them they’d nearly been blown up by a tank. Group B says that can’t be right, the tankers had told them to go to the building in the first place. The two groups then talk about the captured Iraqis inside. Group B confirms to group A that they are inside and wounded. The two groups then agree that these were the insurgents involved in a previous attack on them.
It is after this point that the soldier goes in, walks up to an unarmed man lying immobile, calmly declares that he’s faking being dead, and kills him. This is immediately met with cheers of “He’s dead now!”
To me, it’s the before and after that make the difference. I could buy a lot of things from the fog of war. Maybe he wasn’t sure of the situation, maybe he snapped, maybe a lot of things. But the fact that he was aware of the situation before he walked in, and more importantly the fact that the rest of the unit didn’t respond with a collective “What the fuck was that?!?!” when someone started shooting, mean that this was not the fog of war. The soldier himself and the units involved were aware of what was happening. It was cold-blooded, deliberate murder. THe murder of a scumbag, but murder nonetheless.
I watched the video Foxnews and MSNBC has up on their website but haven’t been able to find a full unedited version. Where are you guys accessing an unedited version?
The only editing on the CNN version this morning was that the video stopped just before the gunfire, with the Marine standing over a guy pointing his rifle at him. I haven’t seen the full version this afternoon. I imagine you could find it on Al Jazeera’s site, or by googling around enough, but then you have the issue of source credibility.
I saw a longer version of the video on Hardball today. It started as the unit approached the building and included a lot of dialogue between those soldiers and the ones already there. It sure doesn’t look good for the soldier in question, but I’ll still reserve judgement until we hear the full story.
That’s not what he was talking about. He was talking about the incident in which a VC jumped up with a rocket launcher. Kerry’s gunner shot him in the legs. The guy started limping away, and Kerry jumped off the boat, chased him down, and killed him. This is not in dispute - all parties agree that this is what happened. The swiftvets have also said that they had no problem with this, and believe that Kerry was justified. It was not part of their criticism of him.
There is also a difference in that the enemy in Kerry’s case clearly had not surrendered, was trying to escape, and was still carrying his rocket launcher. Still, no one on the left seems to have had a problem with his actions, or questioned why he felt he had to kill him, etc.
liagle said:
This is the most disingenuous description of what happened I’ve seen. I’ve seen the same video. No one was standing around calmly chatting. They had JUST entered the building, and the conversation was rapid-fire - the kind of quick debriefing you would expect. As for the soldier “calmly declaring that he was faking”… BULLSHIT. He was screaming it. He was yelling, “He’s faking! He’s faking!” The guy was clearly wired and almost frantic. For you to state that he was behaving coldly and calmly is simply untruthful. As is your claim that there were ‘cheers’ of “he’s dead now”. ONE voice said it, and he said it matter-of-factly.
I can’t believe you actually perceived the episode the way you described it. The only other explanation is that you are being intentionally misleading in order to support your case.
And in general, I’d just like to say that the left can talk as much as it wants about how it ‘supports the soldiers, but opposes the war’, but it will NEVER be trusted by the military as long as it engages in the type knee-jerk anti-US soldier behaviour being expressed in this thread.