WikiLeaks has been making a noise about releasing a video showing the murder of 12 civilians in Iraq by American forces.
Long story short: two Reuters journalists were on assignment in a suburb of Iraq when the group they were standing in were engaged by 30mm cannon from an Apache gunship. The military claimed they were killed as part of a battle with hostile forces. Reuters requested a video of the incident through the Freedom of Information Act, which was turned down. Eventually, the video gets leaked by whistle blowers onto the WikiLeaks site.
The video can be found here (warning, it’s pretty graphic).
Question for debate (I’m not sure whether this has a straightforward answer):
Was the engagement of the van picking up bodies a war crime? Do “ambulances” have to be explicitly marked, or is the fact that a van is picking up injured men and clearly not armed, or posing a threat in any way, enough of a cover under international law?
I don’t know the rules of engagement, but to me (as a non-armed-forces-guy) this looks a bit excessive. I didn’t make out any guns in the whole video (might have missed them, though, don’t know if the quality was better for the pilot/gunner), and I didn’t see anything with the van that looked like a threat.
And holy crap are the guys you can hear over the radio cold bastards. Like they are playing a video game.
It is extremely difficult to take a human life, so combat soldiers/pilots generally use terms like “Targets”, and make jokes about enemies rather than humanizing them. It doesn’t make them cold bastards, it just makes it so they don’t blow their heads off when they think about how they accidentally shot a little girl.
In the chatter the American pilot/co-pilot says something like “Yeah, that’s a gun.” as they observe some of the men walking down the street. If you watch it again you can see at least one guy with a rifle.
War is ugly, what do you expect the soldiers to say or do when they kill the enemy? These are men and women we train to break thing and kill people making them unlikely to wax poetically about the nature of man’s mortality or man’s inhumanity to man in the heat of battle. Elation in the immediate aftermath of killing the enemy is not an uncommon emotion.
I’m going to vote no on the van attack being a war crime. It was not clearly marked as an ambulance.
I believe an ambulance has to be explicitly marked, either with a red cross or (perhaps in this case) a red crescent.
This is all I can come with for a cite, but I doubt the rules have changed.
I couldn’t tell (based on the quality of the video and my failing sight) if the people fired upon had the AK-47s the soldiers mentioned. Noe the camera the video producers mentioned either, for that matter.
ISTM that the requirements for marking ambulances is meant to prevent exactly this kind of thing.
Yeah, I guess. As I said, the quality isn’t too great. I couldn’t positively identify a gun there, but couldn’t rule it out either.
That commentary is just a little too much Dirty Harry for me. I’d expect some more … I don’t know, professional distance. Talking about “Targets” and all that is fine, but laughing at the flying bodies and joking about tanks driving over corpses? Imagine what image this Video will give US forces in Iraq, alone.
Oh, it wasn’t, and I’m not sure on that issue. If there were weapons I have to wonder what the Journalists thought would happen. “Ugly” describes the whole thing pretty well.
As it turns out, the van contained a father taking his two children to school. A good samaritan stopping to help an injured and unarmed man, and the crew of the helicopter are begging for any reason to shoot them. Despicable behaviour.
Because they should have been watching the same film you are? Plus, the damned pilots should have done a Google search on the event and looked up what was happening…I mean, you were able to do that, so they should have too, right?
The van driver was literally a guy taking his kids to school who saw somebody bleeding in the street and stopped to help. Marked or not there was no reason whatsoever to fire on that van, the driver was obviously just trying to help an injured person and was in no way doing anything threatening. This is disgusting and fuck the people responsible for this, from the soldiers in the helicopter all the way up the chain to the people that put us over there in the first place.
No but they were seeing the exact same images we see on the video. Perhaps you could explain what you see in the video that makes firing on the man and his children and his vehicle such a necessary action?
sigh And you know that the pilot of the helicopter knew this? Do you have a cite that they knew that the van was just some guy taking his kid to school? That it was completely harmless? And that they fired on it knowing this?
Or are you merely looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, and assuming that the crew should have just magically known what you know?
Way back when Clinton was still in office a U.S. fighter shot down a helicopter in the no-fly zone. Oops, turns out the helicopter was a friendly. One of the more shocking things that made it to the media was a recording of the radio chatter that went on which included someone saying “Stick a fork in him, he’s done” in reference to the downed helicopter. While it’s certainly shocking to most of us, I believe such language is a form of psychological self-defense (as Spit mentioned earlier). I think the only “professional distance” we can expect of soldiers is for them to follow the rules of engagement.
What was going to happen, was the driver going to hurl the injured man’s body at the helicopter? Treating everything that moves as an enemy is unacceptable when you’re performing combat operations in a residential area.
The gunner ( or pilot I guess) is willing the injured guy to pick up a weapon so that he can be finished off. He quite fucking obviously doesn’t pick up a weapon but gets blown away anyway.
It looks like the initial killing was just a fuckup where they thought the cameras were weapons. The firing on the van was wrong. When the van pulls up the pilots say that they’re coming to take bodies and weapons. Then they start evacuating a wounded man, and the pilots say AGAIN that they’re taking bodies which is not true, and they get permission to shoot.
I’m watching the video for the first time. I knew they were going to kill 2 journalists but I didn’t know about the van, so I don’t have “hindsight”. It’s clear on first viewing that the van is evacuating wounded.
Could someone point out all these weapons the pilots claim to be seeing? I paused the movie whenever I heard someone say they saw an AK-47 or a RPG, and I couldn’t see anything that looked that. Both of those weapons have fairly unique profiles, I should have been able to see something.
From what I heard, the guy talking says he sees one, then two people with weapons, then when he asks permission to engage suddenly it’s ‘5 or 6’. Did I miss something else?
The LOAC briefing that I’ve gotten maybe half a dozen times says that medical personnel and vehicles need to be clearly marked. This is a powerpoint summary of what I’m guessing is a lengthy DoD instruction, but there you have it. The fact that they were helping an injured man doesn’t make them medics in terms of military law.
That doesn’t necessarily mean their actions are legitimate. They need to meet three criteria – military necessity, distinction, and proportionality. Military necessity just means, “Is this a valid military target.” If the gunship crew had reason to believe that they were insurgents who had been called in, then I suppose they were as much of a valid target as the group of people standing around not bothering anyone a few minutes earlier.
Distinction means that it’s determined the target isn’t civilian, POWs, wounded combatants who have been removed from combat, etc. The military would argue that the wounded guy wasn’t the target, but the “van full of insurgents” was (if you accept the argument for military necessity).
Proportionality means not blowing up several city blocks to take out this one group. Since, nearest I can tell, they didn’t kill anyone they didn’t intend to kill, the response passes the proportionality test pretty easily.
Bottom line is that you’d have to convince a tribunal that the gunship crew knew they were targeting civilians both times they opened fire. Since the audio of the tape convincingly suggests that the gunship crew thought they were firing on insurgents, both the initial crowd and the van, I don’t see this going anywhere. Alternately, I suppose you could argue that they SHOULD have known, but were incompetent. I don’t see the military conceding this point, though.
For the record, this video made me sick to my stomach.
Clearly they thought they were trying to get away with who they thought were insurgents. Treating everything that moves as a potential threat is probably what has kept the crew alive to this point. To me, watching the video, it looks suspicious that someone driving a van would pull up as it did…and it seems suspicious to me NOW, in fact. I’ll tell you…if I had my kids in the car, the last thing I’d be doing is driving up to what was clearly a battle zone that had clearly happened mere minutes before. Think about that for a minute…there was still dust smoke and wounded there, for the gods sake…and you are going to just drive up (with your KIDS in the van??) and start picking the wounded up?? I don’t care who you thought these folks were, or who you thought attacked them, you’d have to at least think that whoever did it might, you know, still be around.
I watched the whole video. Point out to me where there were children visible. You guys do realize that those helpful little markets pointing out the names of the reporters weren’t actually visible to the crew right? Sort of like the lines they put on your screen showing where the first down is in football aren’t visible to the players, ehe?
I watched the whole sad thing through twice. If you watch from about 3 minutes in to about the 4 minute mark (before the helicopter engages the first time), you can clearly see that the group is armed. Around 3:50 you can see that at least one of these guys has what looks like an RPG. As for the reporters, the one they helpfully point out (and why couldn’t the helicopter pilot see that helpful tag, ehe?) has something slung over his shoulder (which we now know was a camera bag, but looking at the video it’s nearly impossible to tell what it is, exactly…could be a weapon but you can’t tell).
I don’t think there is really much I can say here that is going to damp down the RO from folks on this one. Iraq is a touchy subject anyway, and having the brutality (and futility) of war brought home so graphically (especially since, in hindsight, we know more of the details and can Monday morning quarterback the whole thing SO much better than the guys who had a couple of minutes to decide what to do, and who have had to fight in that war zone for months or years). As I said, I watched the whole thing (twice), and, while saddened by what happened, I really don’t see how this is a war crime, or that the crew was at fault (I can hear the heads exploding and screams of ‘Apologist!’ ringing out as I type this).
Hindsight? Seriously, I don’t even get this. You have a helicopter that shoots up a camera crew, methodically ensuring that they kill every single unarmed one of them. When an unarmed man tries to help a bleeding man on the street they shoot him and his presumably unarmed kid too. Then they fire some hellfire missiles into a building, completely disregarding the pedestrian that was calmly walking in front of it at the time. And your response boils down to “Welp, hindsight is 20/20!”
sigh I guess what I’m wondering is just how many unarmed people does a gunship have to blow away before you decide that somebody fucked up and should be held accountable for their actions?