The US military has released some documents from its earlier investigation in response to the video.
Direct link to the PDFs.
I transcribed some relevant text from the PDFs that gives background on the incident:
From the mission order:
A sworn statement from one of the helicopter personnel (I think the gunner), and then a transcription of his questioning by a Lt. Colonel
And a statement from another of the helicopter personnel
I don’t know what the rationale was for attacking the van, as I said in a latter post. I agree, it does not seem like it was necessary to engage the van.
Well, the devil is in the level of exaggeration. What we had was a group of men who, while under observation appeared to have weapons, in an area where attacks had been reported. We didn’t have a 5 year old holding an icecream or a rubber knife here. And we have at least some of the presumably real gun camera footage. So…it’s not just a matter of some trigger happy gun bunnies looking to zap anything that moved.
The military has a process that defines when and how troops can engage the enemy, and under what conditions. Those rules are a bit looser when in a war zone such as Iraq certainly was in 2006.
That’s not how I saw it, watching the video. To me, they were itching to engage because they were certain that these guys were hostile, and armed…and they knew that they had only a very small window in which to do so, before these guys moved into buildings or separated.
True, the guy at the other end only had these guys word for whether or not they were potentially armed hostiles, or a troop of 5 year old’s toting ice cream cones. And you have to trust the guys at the sharp end to be able to distinguish between the two (or between a group of unarmed civilians and a group of armed civilians). But you also have to understand that under conditions like those in this event, mistakes can easily happen.
We have a process for dealing with mistakes in the military, especially egregious or deliberate ones. This even WAS investigated. Perhaps that investigation was whitewashed…but then again, perhaps it wasn’t. Based on the little actual evidence that has been presented in this thread (which boils down to me and everyone else essentially talking out of their ass about a grainy, choppy and confusing video with a bunch of subtext helpfully spliced in by a group that, to be gentle, is probably not unbiased), I don’t see how one can really say one way or the other.
That said, and to be perfectly honest (and after thinking and forcing myself to watch it again several times), I do think that the attack on the van was unnecessary and was probably a mistake. As I said earlier, even if the van was full of insurgents, it was posing no immediate threat, and was clearly engaged simply in removing the wounded from the field.
I never said their judgment wasn’t subject to question, merely that you throw the book at them for being wrong. Not without being able to demonstrate that they were criminally negligent, which, based on the video, I’m not seeing.
Well, feel disgusted all you like. I still don’t see it as reasonable to bring your children into such a situation. If this attitude disgusts you, well…I’ll try and carry on somehow in light of your bad opinion of me.
Sadly, the helicopter crew could not ask him what his feelings were, or check to see that there were children inside the van. As I’ve already conceded that I am puzzled by the attack on the van, I don’t think I really need to go over this again…especially in light of your disgust. I’ll just leave it that I think it was a mistake on the part of the authorizing officer, and that it looks to me (from what little evidence we actually have here) that there was no good reason to engage the van in the manner it was engaged in.
They say that the van is going in to pick up bodies. Then, later, the guy speculates that the van is there to pick up ‘weapons and bodies’…but it’s pretty clear he’s speculating, and that the van hasn’t even stopped yet. Things happen rather fast after that…they continue the dialogue saying that they see the guys getting one of the wounded, and by 9:50 they are given permission to engage.
I don’t see that they tricked the (I presume from the call sign) commanding officer, only that things are happening really fast. There is also some other chatter on the line, so the authorizing officer is probably not just sitting there talking to this crew alone. You are probably right…it most likely DID play a role in his decision to authorize the crew to attack, but that’s the fog of war. I’m sure this disgusts you as well, and, frankly, it doesn’t make me feel all that great either, since I think it was a mistake (and the thought of those kids in there makes me ill every time I look at this thing).
And I don’t see it this way, although I usually play the devils advocate and ‘pro’ military punch bunny on this board, so I’m possibly (probably) biased. I really see this as a fog of war event, with a hugely compressed time table, and a crew that really believed that these guys were armed enemy, and wanting the fat assed officer on the other end of the line to get off his butt and let them engage before the bad guys got away. While this attitude is also ‘disgusting’, it’s also very human. The van incident was, at least from what I’ve seen so far, over the top, and probably was a combination of buck fever and that fog of war with the compressed time frame, plus a lot of confusion and extraneous radio chatter from other sources (if you can stomach it, go back to the part between the the van pulls up and the attack, and you can see some unknown speakers saying stuff like ‘yeah, they are asking for authorization’…obviously neither the crew of the helicopter or the officer on the other end).
Then you change the ROE to be ‘you can engage the enemy only when fired on’, or something like that…and you pay the other side of the consequences (both politically, in morale and militarily) for that decision. There IS no optimal solution to something like this (except to not be there in the first place), not magic solution that will work every time. You put soldiers (kids really) out there in harms way, then you give them guidelines to work under…and then you hope they don’t make too many mistakes, or fuck up to often. Because they ARE going to make mistakes, they ARE going to fuck up. Situations like this ARE going to happen, especially when the people you are fighting look, dress and even act exactly like the population they are moving through.
-XT
Well, thanks to toadspittle, I guess we know why they engaged the van now at least.
-XT
Having viewed the video (and I really don’t care to see that sort of thing again if I don’t have to), I think there are plenty of reasons to think the Apache gunners were entirely too quick on the trigger, and that the military turned a blind eye to the murder of a dozen or so unarmed civilians, but this was clearly not a situation of ‘guys hanging out in front of the drug store’. It seems reasonable to me that the neighborhood was aware that there had been some sort of action in the general area, that American ground troops were a few blocks away and (my opinion) that some of the people of the neighborhood were showing the Reuters reporters the general direction and location of the action they had heard or seen.
The helicopter gunners pretty clearly mistook the Reuters reporters’ cameras for weapons. Everyone else on the radio link apparently assumed this was true, but there is little sign that anyone other than the Apache crews had a direct view of the location, so they controlled the narrative.
One could argue that the first engagement was, if one is being generous, a tragic error of judgement, but the second engagment, where the Apaches shot up the van, can hardly be seen as anything other than gratuitous overkill, and, in my no doubt worthless opinion, should have resulted in prosecution for the parties involved.
In conclusion, I cannot see this incident as anything other than a gross embarrassment to our military. I am fully aware that such tragedies are a dime a dozen in urban conflicts, but we must do better.
Not sure why you think so. The respondent “CW3” says twice he “saw them extract…weapons”. Apparently, this is offered to support the legitimacy of the “engagement”
But then…
I don’t think the answers follow the questions, here. Confronted with the fact that there were no weapons, the respondent starts talking again about a black sedan. I get that he’s suggesting that his actions were taken to protect advancing friendlys. But protect them from what, when there were no weapons? His answer ignores the question. If they “extracted weapons”, then they had weapons, unless they threw them away!
Did anyone see any weapons in these outakes? I sure didn’t.
Because there was obviously some confusion in the mix about this other, alleged car that had been dropping off insurgents throughout the day. Assuming the commander had been receiving such reports, and had it in mind that a black car was doing this in the area, I can see how this could be conflated (in the mind of the commander) to equate to this vehicle, when it showed up. Unconfirmed though reported black car…sighted black van, driving directly into an area where his helicopter just engaged a group of (presumed) armed hostiles, and clearly seen picking up the wounded.
Yeah, he’s pretty obviously realizing that he fucked up, and that he had jumped to conclusions that turned out to not be true. It’s easy to see in hindsight how this thing went so horribly wrong, and I think (based on the reading of the transcript above) that this guy realized this was the case, when he was asked the question after reviewing the video material and the radio transcripts.
No, though in fairness, a lot of the action was happening behind the van, from the perspective of the helicopter crew. The video shows the camera zoomed in on the passenger side, but the wounded guy and the two guys (and driver) were all on the drivers side, except briefly when the driver comes over to the passenger side for some reason. They engaged the van before the camera finished panning to the drivers side, and after that it was too confused with smoke and cannon shells going off to see much of anything.
-XT
The report that the van was picking up the wounded was sent before the van had even stopped moving!
Ah…never mind as well then.
-XT
Fuck this war.
The context here is that while they were prognosticating, they were doing so for a common event. Early in the Iraq adventure, I remember hearing grousing from military types about how restrictive the ROE was. An anecdote from one fellow was that he watched two guys come up, set up a mortar, and start plinking the base he was guarding with mortar fire. Having then obtained permission to do so, he shoots the mortar team. Then before a US team can get out there, three more guys come up and proceed to haul away the mortar, its ammunition, and the wounded/killed mortar team. Since the salvage guys were not making directly hostile actions, they were not valid targets, despite the fact that they were almost certainly enabling the opportunity to come back in the near future and do some more shelling. This happened constantly and thus, as things heated up, the rules of engagement were changed to cover that, under the theory that application of sufficient military force can defeat an insurgency.
A van racing to get to the combat scene before the US troops can does look like a salvage operation. I’ve commented on how strange I find it that the van didn’t need to actually perform any equipment gathering. To play devil’s advocate, I suppose the idea is that if the request to engage waited until they were scooping up the “weapons”, they could’ve driven off before clearance came back, but that still isn’t kosher.
A lot of this thread seems to hinge on whether the victims actually were holding AK47s or not. Why is holding an AK47 a priori justification to engage? From what I’ve read, foreign nationals who go to work in Iraq immediately buy long arms to protect themselves from prospective kidnappings, etc. I can see many civilians also wanting to arm themselves, too, in the near-anarchy of Iraq.
(Of course, the real outrage here isn’t just the killing itself, but the stonewalling after the fact. Swearing blind that the victims were killed in a battle and denying FOIA requests is pretty sickening. If WikiLeaks hadn’t decrypted the video, nobody would have known better).
Let’s see a cite for this. A credible one.
Any other response is an admission that you made it up.
Regards,
Shodan
The answer is “all of them”.
Wait, the small arms were only possible, the RPG was only possible, but there definitely were rooftop weapons teams? I didn’t hear that mentioned at all.
Overlooking the ground unit where? They were all standing in a group looking at each other. Where was this ground unit located during the encounter? And when did he see someone with an RPG try to take a shot? I never even saw the RPG, much less someone lining up a shot with one.
Either there is footage or other points of view we’re not seeing, or this guy is just trying to cover his ass.
By ‘hanging out in front of the drug store’ I mean ‘going about normal business, and not being hostile insurgents’. They weren’t doing anything to warrant being gunned down.
That part I agree with.
Even in the this low-res version of the video it is clear, as the LTC says in his questioning, that there were no weapons visible and certainly NOT five or fucking six AK’s and an RPG. It’s also clear nobody was taking fire from that group. The gunner was lying to get permission to engage. It’s that simple. And he should be prosecuted for it.
It seems absolutely clear to me now that 1) the helicopter pilots were under a certain amount of pressure to clear the street for oncoming American forces, 2) they exaggerated the threat based on unclear information, 3) they gave erroneous info in order to receive clearance to fire, and 4) at least one of them told bald-faced lies during his sworn testimony. There were no units overlooking the ground. There was no confirmed sighting of an RPG.
How is any of this crap acceptable?
I’m not sure how the Army works exactly, but I think the “permission to fire” thing has much less to do with the ROE than people think. It’s more about battlefield awareness and command and control. Permission to engage can be denied for several reasons.
Perhaps these aren’t really bad guys, but rather friendly forces, possibly even undercover friendly forces. Perhaps there are friendlies nearby that might take collateral damage. Perhaps C&C has intel that a camera crew is in the area and it believes the gunship might be mistaken. Perhaps HQ has decided to let the enemy go in order to track them to their safe houses. Perhaps there’s available intelligence that says this group of hostiles is holding hostages and shouldn’t be engaged.
The gunship crew doesn’t have a good picture of either the overall mission objectives or the battlefield at large, which is why they get permission before engaging. It’s less of “Do you believe my story about these guys being bad guys” and much more about “Do you perhaps know something that I don’t know about this situation that would preclude me from engaging this target.” The only advantage to exaggerating the threat is perhaps to get an answer faster, but I seriously doubt that the guy granting approval would ever say something like, “Only 2 AKs? They don’t sound that dangerous. Maybe they’re not really a threat.”
Exactly. Credibility is a soldier’s most important quality. And these were officers! If the U.S. military can’t trust its own officers to provide accurate information, its problems run very, very deep.
Hey man, it’s just SOP in war, you know.
Sure, ensuring that our targets aren’t harmless civilians might save hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent people, but it could also slightly increase the risk to our trained volunteer soldiers. I think we should maintain our policy of ‘when in doubt, shoot’ because after all, can you really put a value on [del]a life[/del] an american life?