There’s many valid reasons the military has for keeping things secret from the public or deceiving the public. This popular idea that all deception is unacceptable has no grounding in reality. Deception is often extremely important.
Morale is an important factor and the military has historically and rightfully suppressed information that may hurt the morale of the men in the field.
There is civilian oversight, there are oversight committees in both houses of congress and the military is controlled by a civilian elected to the position of President who delegates his authority to another civilian appointed as SecDef. There is a difference between “civil” oversight and “public” oversight or complete openness with the public at large.
Martin, I can’t find the video, but I can vouch that it was once available online. It was a nighttime helicopter attack, if memory serves. And yes, there were people laughing over the kills (not on the video, though).
Yeah, there was a ‘debate’ on it a year or so ago IIRC…one of the US bashers calling it war crimes or some such. I don’t remember who (Pjen?) started the thread, but the video clip was in there. It certainly wasn’t funny…nor was it a war crime.
I didn’t say there aren’t people who would laugh over things they shouldn’t, I simply made the statement that people dying violent deaths is not a laughing matter.
I was responding to this quote from Apos:
The only helicopter attack video I am aware of from Iraq is one taken from an Apache helicopter, the camera view is one of a thermal camera and thus specific details are not available, and visual details that the helicopter pilot would have seen would also not be available.
In the video I have seen, the pilot is communicating over radio with someone else and there is never any laughing at all, it is concise and orderly military communication, no pleasure taken in the act and certainly no laughing. The recording I’ve seen records the pilot identifying one of the persons as placing down an object in a field which appears on screen as a long, thing object. The pilot identifies it as a weapon, he is asked if he is sure it is a weapon and he replies that he is “positive.” I find it very unlikely he would say positive if he was not in fact positive, if he was unsure he would have said that, that is the way things are done.
He fires on the enemy when he sees them approach the weapon again. From just the video that we have the impression I get is the pilot killed three persons who were enemy combatants. That is an unfortunate and brutal thing, but it’s a legitimate part of warfare. There has been a lot of mislabeling or “reinterpretation” of this particular video but as far as I know no one has any official information or knowledge about what happened and criticisms of the action are mostly based on wild speculation and on a video which by its very nature cannot give the viewer any specific knowledge as to whether in fact the object in question was a weapon and to whether or not the persons involved were unarmed or armed, insurgents or friendlies and etc.
If we’re talking about another video, I will have to see it, as I’ve only seen the one.
Yes, this is the video I was talking about. It has been called a “war crime” by many. One site has even explained how it really just shows an Apache helicopter massacring three farmers, and identifies the “weapon” as a farming tool. The basis for these analysis is entirely the video in question, a video which gives a thermal view thus making it impossible for any person who only has that video to make any determination about what the object in question was and what was the nature of the three men who were killed. The radio communication that is part of the video suggests the pilot was highly confident he was killing three of the enemy and he made a positive ID on a weapon they had.
One doesn’t make the comment that one is “positive” something is a weapon to a commanding officer if you aren’t positive, there’s no room for not being totally genuine about the circumstances. That’s not how professional military pilots behave.
The attack in question did not happen during the night but during the day, and the pilot had a clear, visual view of the place, he was not looking through the muddled thermal view that is known to the rest of the world.