Collateral Damage
This video of a helicopter attack on a group of men in Iraq has been obtained by wikileaks. Two reporters for Reuters were killed in the attack, and two children were wounded. The video explains much of what happened. The U.S. helicopter thought that this was a group of insurgents, and mistook the camera equipment of the two journalists for AK-47s. There are actually two different shooting incidents, a few minutes after the initial shootings a van stops to pick up a wounded man. The helicopter then opens fire on the good samaritans, and this is when the children were wounded. According to the military, everything was done according to the rules of engagement.
The most disturbing part of the video is how eager the U.S. troops appear to engage the insurgents. At one point, a Bradley runs over a body and the soldiers laugh about it. They also say that it’s the parent’s fault for bringing children to a firefight.
Here is the New York Times on the video:
“There had been reports of clashes between U.S. forces and insurgents in the area but there was no fighting on the streets in which Namir was moving about with a group of men,” Reuters wrote in 2008. “It is believed two or three of these men may have been carrying weapons, although witnesses said none were assuming a hostile posture at the time.”
The American military in Baghdad investigated the episode and concluded that the forces involved had no reason to know that there were Reuters employees in the group. No disciplinary action was taken.
Late Monday, the United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released the redacted report on the case, which provided some more detail.
The report showed pictures of what it said were machine guns and grenades found near the bodies of those killed. It also stated that the Reuters employees “made no effort to visibly display their status as press or media representatives and their familiar behavior with, and close proximity to, the armed insurgents and their furtive attempts to photograph the coalition ground forces made them appear as hostile combatants to the Apaches that engaged them.”
Another opinion, A.J. Martinez:
…but Sadam had imaginary WMD.
I think the most damning thing about this incident is the attempted cover-up by the Pentagon.
Cover story from the NY Times, July 13, 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?_r=1):
“The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack … See Morehelicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.”
“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad. “
Agreed, it is very disturbing, but not surprising. War is ugly, this is how they are trained. To seek and destroy anyone they think may be a threat. I am not defending one iota of how this went down, just saying t does not surprise me at all. My guess is there are dozens and dozens of these incidents, some with innocents no where near a person with a gun..
So sad.
This is a disturbing video. It is the kind of shitty stuff that happens in an urban war. To tell the truth, I am not disturbed by the shooters. This is their job. We pay them and trust them to shoot bad guys in war zones. The guys have to justify their actions to each other “It’s their fault for bringing their kids to a battle” because they just hurt the kids in the course of their jobs.
My bottom line… This is why you don’t bring your military to a place where diplomacy can do the job.
War is ugly, this is how they are trained.
I hate this rationalization. Officers in fact are trained in avoiding civilian casualties; that is the job of the command and control structure. We do this not only because of our sense of decency, but because every time we blow away a wedding party or a minivan full of kids, we put our troops at greater risk and drag our nation further into the mud.
I think we need to make sure our troops have better training so they can tell the difference between a camera and a weapon and also so they can recognize a civilian van with children from something else.
To me the first part of the attack really hits in a gray area. There had been a recent battle and some of the men were armed. If you read the link in the first comment, at least one may have been aiming at the helicopter. Although the men did not look hostile, they looked relaxed.
I don’t know how the 2nd part – shooting the van could be justified. They called to the base that the van was taking weapons. They weren’t. They were picking up the wounded cameraman.
lg is correct though that this is the reason why war should be the last resort.
War is ugly
War is ugly, but the inverse is not true – all ugliness is not war. It is far too easy to just say when something ugly happens, it must be due to “war.” Sometimes ugliness happens because you have done something ugly.
This rationalization was invented when “war” meant a pitched battle, with clear lines, between two national armies, in uniform, who were for the moment at least relatively equal on the battlefield.
But Iraq is not a war; it is an occupation. We are the protagonists. The ugliness we see is sometimes a mirror held up to ourselves.
The justification of shooting the van is that these are bad guys. If you get a live bad guy, as the troops had assumed the cameraman was, you can ask him questions that could spare other lives. If that “bad guy” gets into a van and drives off, so does a potential source of intel.
I suspect that every guy in the helicopter had a friend that has had their helicopter knocked out of the sky by the insurgents. They must, from a standpoint of self-preservation, stop any and all insurgents, lest the insurgent kills them.
It was never clear to me that the thing hanging from the shoulder was a camera. I watched for it. It would have been damning if it was ever clear that that is what they were carrying, but I never saw it.
It is a sad affair all around. But I’m with Rob, the cover-up and post-event false-rationalization is the crime here. If we are going to wage war, we had better not lie to ourselves about it.
This stuff will stop once the US realizes the US has no business deciding who is an insurgent outside US borders.
The justification of shooting the van is that these are bad guys. If you get a live bad guy, as the troops had assumed the cameraman was, you can ask him questions that could spare other lives. If that “bad guy” gets into a van and drives off, so does a potential source of intel.
Totally disagree with this. The justification for shooting the van was that the van was picking up weapons. They weren’t. All they picked up was the wounded man.
As far as intelligence goes, you get a lot more by letting the wounded man live and interrogating him. It’s clear on the video that the helicopter pilot wanted to kill the wounded journalist. You’d get a lot more intel if you followed the van to the hideout instead of just killing everyone.
We shall disagree. Neither you nor I know how easy or hard it is to follow a van through the streets of Baghdad via helicopter. In Scooby-Doo you follow a van to a hideout, in Baghdad you likely have to deal with a lot of subterfuge in that transport.
Perhaps they could have waited for the van to actually pick up a weapon before opening fire (which I agree, would never have happened) but those guys in the helicopter do not have the time to be circumspect like you and I do. For all they know, the van was packed full of insurgents and or weapons.
In the heat of battle (and not all heat requires return fire) these guys did what they are trained to do. I give them credit for requesting permission to open fire. The request was granted by someone, and it could have been denied by that same someone who most certainly was a superior officer that should have been thinking clearly and analytically. He obviously dropped the ball in several ways.
The purpose of requesting and granting “permission” is to diffuse the blame should anything incriminating surface, thereby avoiding any accountabilty for what is essentially an atrocity.
This is a video of cold-blooded murder. Nobody was carrying AK47s even though the killers in the chopper said that there were multiple people carrying them. The children in the van were plainly visible before they opened fire.
But Obomba says that we shouldn’t be looking backwards, so carry-on. Nothing to see here.