I’ve gathered that it is standard practice for us. I recall reading about how in our attack on Fallujah, we made a point of occupying the hospitals and of shooting anyone trying to rescue the wounded. Or flee, for that matter.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the choppers generally stay far away. There are videos of other Apaches, where the view looks the same until the gunner zooms out and then it looks like they’re a mile away. You can see a whole section of a city and you can’t even pick out where they had been zoomed in. They have really good optics that make it look like they’re closer than they are. (This is also why the guns don’t look all that accurate when they shoot in the zoomed-in views.)
The results of this incident are very sad. However, I think many of you are missing the forest for the trees.
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If we’re going to unleash our armed forces on someone, innocent civilians will be killed. It’s inevitable. So rather than criticizing these soldiers or the rules of engagement, we should be bemoaning the fact that we’re in Iraq in the first place. It’s naive to think we can operate with surgical precision. If we send our military to fight, we have to accept that this kind of thing will happen.
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More troubling is the attempted cover-up and the worthlessness of our media, who largely parrots whatever the Pentagon tells them. I can accept that doing good reporting is tough to accomplish in a combat zone, but there’s no excuse for blindly accepting and disseminating the “official” explanation. And this type of cover-up isn’t an isolated thing. Note this story, where the Pentagon had to retract their original claim that 5 Afghan civilians who had been killed were insurgents and that 2 women found dead had been victims of an honor killing by their supposed captors, none of which was true.
Because the helicopter is so far away that it’s practically imperceptible. Even if the man in the video had an RPG and not a camera, there’s no way in hell they could’ve possibly hit the helicopter from that distance, too.
No, let’s not. Was there smoke on the battlefield at some point? Yes. Was there smoke on the battlefield when the minivan pulled up? No. No contradiction. Perhaps this is another term you don’t fully understand. You can look it up at many dictionary sites.
Nope. I saw only 1 person left alive after the initial engagement. Where did you see more than the one survivor that the minivan was trying to help?
So you’re now saying it’s a reasonable belief that IF the “insurgents” had called someone, help would arrive in less than 2 minutes? That “insurgents” have men standing by at every corner, waiting to aid in a firefight? Dude, our guys had a whole squad on the way, with people in the air giving them directions, but you think it’s reasonable to “believe” that these insurgents, in a minivan, could get there before our ground troops?
The shooting is all over by 6:09 of the video. 3 minutes later, at 9:03, the chopper crew relays that they see a van approaching “and picking up bodies”. This cannot be the case, since the van has not stopped moving yet. Or do you think it’s “reasonable” to “believe” that the van was scooping the bodies up with some sort of street-sweeping device? In 3 minutes, traveling at just 20mph, you would cover over a third of a mile. So this van could have been far enough away to not have seen or heard anything from the initial engagement.
It’s over a minute later that the chopper recieves permission to engage again, and opens fire on unarmed civilians.
And it’s not “pretty obviously a war zone”; it’s the suburb of New Baghdad. A city where civilians live, and drive around, and run errands, and since it’s not just our troops who are human, but also the people of Iraq, it seems likely to me that these people would seek to help alleviate suffering when they see it, just like people in our country would.
It shows that I have some judgement. I’m not just blindly accepting that “everything our side does is ok”.
You do keep going on about the weapons that the first group might have had, when all I’m asking you about is the 2nd engagement, the one with the minivan. And here’s another indication that you don’t understand what a contradiction is. It’s not impossible to tell. The answer, as you finally assert, is no, there were no weapons seen after the initial engagement. If it’s impossible to tell, then why do you finally admit that no, you don’t see any weapons?
The film is not ambiguous. Please describe, from 9:03 to 10:09 what you see that might possibly be a weapon. There is nothing there to indicate that these men were insurgents. Nothing.
I admit that I don’t know that either. But again, this wasn’t a battlefield. This was a suburban city street.
False equivalence. Not knowing = might not need to be destroyed.
I agree.
No, what I did was attempt to understand your position on this. So far, it seems that it amounts to “it’s ok because it was our guys doing it”.
No, it’s not okay. I did write it, and you can ignore it all you want, but I’ll just view that as evidence that you cannot answer my question truthfully or honestly without yourself falling into a pit of contradictions and moral sludge. You want it to be okay for our military, our country to act on “beliefs”, but deny the validity of anyone else acting on their “beliefs”, IMO. If that isn’t the case, please explain.
My name is Bo. Capital “B”.
And no, you shouldn’t suspect anything about my position re: the US military in general. I don’t believe I’ve mention Bush at all in this thread. In fact, nothing I’ve said here indicates either support for the US military or non-support. I’ve only talked about this incident, and the video. And what you can glean is that I don’t have knee-jerk support for anything; I am a skeptic, and prefer to convinced by evidence. And the evidence in this video, at best, shows an initial justified engagement and then a simple case of opening fire on unarmed civilians.
It also shows, IMO, that the flight crew said the things they needed to say to be able to open fire.
For instance: At the start of the video, we hear (2:48) “one of them has a weapon”. At 3:20 we hear “that’s a weapon”. At 3:36 this changes to “have individuals with weapons”, somehow. At 3:44 this changes to “have 5 to 6 individuals with AK-47s”, even tho at best we can see 2 men with what may be weapons. At 4:22 they claim “we had a guy shooting”, even tho it’s clear from the video that no shots have been fired.
But it got them what they wanted, which was permission to open fire on a group of men standing in the street, doing nothing at all.
Well, at least we can agree on this.
If I’m remembering the symbology right, as the video starts, the system is estimating the range at 1.7 kilometers. Not exactly breathing down their necks.
I’m grasping that they thought a couple people in the group were armed. The majority was not, and that is fairly easy to spot in the video. This is a city street in a residential area and you have a group of people standing around. Even the ‘armed’ ones are just sort of standing around. They aren’t firing at anything, they aren’t doing anything threatening.
The helicopter crew had no way of knowing if these were all insurgents, a few insurgents and some civilians, or, as things turned out, a camera crew. The didn’t know, so they thought the best course of action was to unload into everybody there.
The van comes in. The helicopter has no way of knowing if the driver is an insurgent or if he’s just some dude taking his kids to school that stopped to help a bleeding man on the street. As you so kindly informed me, they don’t have x-ray vision. In the face of an unanswered question, they choose to unload into everybody there.
They think there are people in a building. They have no way of knowing who else is in the building. Again, no x-ray vision. A man, clearly unarmed, is walking on the sidewalk right in front of the building. Again they unload.
No, I don’t expect them to land the damn helicopter and ask for ID. I don’t expect them to have super powers. I do expect them to err on the side of caution when they are fighting in the living heart of a city full of people going to work and taking their kids to school and just trying to live their lives as best they can.
Is it not the responsibility of the man with the machine cannon, who knows the great majority of people below him are innocent civilians, to confirm his target is a military one?
The Apache crews have a positive respsonsibility to take reasonable care that they’re firing at legitimate targets, not just anyone who has a van or a camera. That’s a tough job but it’s the one they signed up for. Don’t want to be held to those standards, don’t join the Army.
Hey, Crimea River!
Regards,
“Lucy”
It’s on one of the links on the cite from the OP. From memory, there was an engagement earlier, and several groups were taking small arms fire from insurgent groups in the area. The helicopter was looking for the group or groups that were firing.
That is the armament of this type of helicopter. I don’t believe that in 2006, civilians were permitted to carry weapons in this particular part of Iraq, but I honestly don’t know. Considering what was happening in Iraq at that time, I’d say that anyone not in uniform carrying weapons out on the street would be taking their lives in their own hands, though.
To me it sounds like they wanted to make sure that these guys didn’t get away. It’s a pretty natural reaction. Consider…if they let these guys go, and later they blew away some of their buddies, how do you suppose that would make them feel? I remember watching a documentary on the Military Channel about a sniper in Iraq. He saw a pretty distinctive insurgent (he had a really large black beard and a pretty big bear gut) and he called in to receive permission to engage the guy (as per his ROE). By the time he received permission, however, the guy had moved off. Later, this same guy blew away a Humvee with an RPG, killing several of the troops inside. The sniper was both bitter and he blamed himself for not taking the shot (despite the fact that he couldn’t, per his ROE orders).
Try and put yourself in these guys place, and in the context of how things were in 2006.
It’s important because in war, shit happens…and with modern weapons, when shit happens, people die. If you follow your companies rules and do your job, but things go tits up anyway, most likely you aren’t going to be blamed/fired/imprisoned. Of course, if you fuck up, people won’t die, even if it’s not your fault. However, we are talking a war zone here…when people fuck up, then other people die. And, frankly, there was fuckup-age on all sides. Why were these guys moping around with any guns at all in what was clearly a war zone (look at the buildings…a lot of them had combat damage, the streets had rubble in them, etc). Why in the name of the 7 gods would anyone in their right mind drive a van (with their kids) onto a battlefield that is pretty clearly still going on?
Intent is the key in such a situation, IMHO (and I believe the military agrees). It’s like a bomber pilot. If his intent was to shoot at target A, but instead (and through no fault of his own) he hits school house B, you don’t court martial the guy and throw him in prison. Or, if he bombs target A but finds out that there were civilians there instead of the insurgents that he was told were there. Or if a tank is trying to engage an enemy vehicle but hits a store instead. Or engages and enemy vehicle, only to find out that it wasn’t an enemy vehicle at all, but an ally…or a civilian. How do you hold the people who pulled the trigger responsible for any of this? And if you do, how are you going to get anyone to do anything except CYA in the future?
These guys believed that the people they were attacking were armed hostiles (and, frankly, I’ve still seen no evidence that they weren’t…just because reporters were with the group, doesn’t really mean anything. I know that there are embedded reporters in Afghanistan that are with insurgent groups from time to time, because I’ve seen reports from said reporters, and interviews with Afghan warlords or Taliban groups). They had seconds to assess, report and engage. Watch the video…or go to the link in the original cite and look at the time line. The entire engagement lasted maybe 5 minutes. Think about that.
So…do I believe this excuses them? Yeah…I do. Just like I believe that a pilot trying to hit target A that hits the school instead is not to blame for carrying out his orders to the best of his ability. You can’t run a military in any other way, frankly. People are only human, and they can only do the best they can do. Put them in pressure situations with the fog of war, time constraints, stress, and ambiguity that is rife in something like Iraq, and mistakes are going to get made. If the soldiers think that they will be punished even when they are following their orders and doing what they are told to the best of their abilities, in the end none of them will do anything. That might sound good, but it would totally paralyze the military.
The real folks to blame are the ones who sent those boys and girls over there. Bush. The Congress. Ultimately the American people, who voted those folks into office. THEY/We are to blame…not the crew of this helicopter who were just doing their best in a fucked up situation. THEY followed the rules and did what they were supposed to do.
-XT
Certainly…but as far as I can tell, they did that, to the best of their ability. It’s easy to second guess these guys, especially since we can go back and watch the film over and over again. But perhaps the film we are watching isn’t telling the whole story here, since the crew seemed (both the pilot and the gunner) seemed pretty confident these guys were armed and that they weren’t innocent civilians. I suppose they could have been wrong, that they could have jumped to conclusions, or based their analysis on faulty data…but I’ve seen no evidence that this was the case. We are merely seeing a video along with subtitles and text by a group who doesn’t seem completely unbiased about this case. Perhaps they are…but then, if this video is the extent of their evidence of wrong doing, then I’d have to say, again, that the evidence is completely ambiguous.
Do you have any evidence though that they didn’t follow their ROE on this mission (i.e. that they weren’t up to the standards that the Army expects of them)?
I confess that this also puzzles me. Even assuming (and I think this would be a fair assumption) that the van was an insurgent vehicle coming in to pick up the wounded, it’s hard to imagine the ROE that would allow these guys to engage it in the manner they engaged it here. I’d like to see what rules they were operating under on this day, but I’d have to say that the officer who authorized the attack probably fucked up. The only mitigating circumstance is probably the time constraint. From the time the van is reported to the helicopter crew to when they looked like they were going to be able to pull away was less than a minute. So, the officer on the other end of the horn had to digest the reported sighting, the report from the helicopter, and then make a split second decision whether to let the thing go or to engage. I’d say that it was a bad decision, unless they could clearly see whether the van was full of armed hostiles or weapons or whatever.
For that matter, it puzzles me that they didn’t move in a ground team to the area quicker, though without knowing the full situation (according to the cite in the OP there were multiple battles in the area that day, and they had received fire from that block…which was why the helicopter was in the area), it’s hard to second guess what was going on. I presume that the military investigation would have determined if there was wrong doing…but I concede that these things can be whitewashed, so that could go either way as well. We simply don’t know enough, based just on this film and on the text on this web site.
-XT
Its been well established that people see things when expecting to see things. I forget the name of the concept, but it certainly happens in wartime. A camera stand looks to them exactly like a rifle and the boom mic an RPG. This is an unfortunate thing, but pretty predictable. Non-uniformed asymmetrical warfare is an ugly thing. I just wished all the people who were cheerleading for war in 2003 cared to understand this, instead of demanding Saddam’s head and the innocents who have to die to get it.
I see, this explains a lot and also why someone in a van with their children would stop to try to help a guy bleeding on the street. They probably didn’t even realize it was helicopters that had fired on them because of how far away the helicopters were. How sneaky.
I still can’t see this. Assume they didn’t know there was a helicopter. Ok…then what DID happen? Something obviously did…and whatever had happened had JUST happened, since there were still bleeding and wounded people on the field, right? Whether it was from a helicopter, a jet fighter or a battle between <fill in the blank…this was 2006, so it could have been any number of groups>, I just can’t see how it would be wise to drive onto such a battlefield…and especially not with my kids in the car!
Even now, it seems fishy to me, though presumably someone has checked out this part of the story and confirmed it.
-XT
Freaky creepy. You see the images, here the gun go off, and nothing happens, maybe he missed, and then suddenly the people are lying around all tore up.
“Do you have a picture of the pain?”
- Richard Farina
What makes you think it was all that unusual to run into wounded people there? What makes you think there was anywhere he could drive that wasn’t dangerous?
His mistake was in being a better human being than the thugs in the helicopter and not just letting innocent people die.
If the helicopter is a mile away and for intents and purposes out of sight(makes you wonder what kind of weapon the guy could have picked up to make a difference?) it would make sense that a van could have very well have turned a corner on this road and seen the guy on the road and with no hostile people anywhere near would think that there was no danger, unfortunately for them they were wrong…as they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
Considering where they were, I suppose that’s a good point. I still can’t see taking my kids onto such a battlefield…though I have to admit, I don’t live in the middle of such a fucked up situation, so maybe that wasn’t all that unusual.
No real point responding to this part…
-XT
It’s a suburban neighorhood not a battlefield, this is the point that I think you are missing.