Wikileaks video is just cover for troops haters
I read comments by Josh Stieber and his friend and I commend them for defending the soldiers (although it’s half-hearted) however that’s not what folks are thinking. Some anti-war types are using it as an excuse to condemn the troops. For example, someone sent me some screen shots of Dede Miller’s Facebook Wall. For those of you who may not know, Dede Miller is Cindy Sheehan’s sister.
It was almost funny to watch through several conversations she was having, Dede tried to garnish sympathy for herself using Casey Sheehan’s death, all the while she was tearing the troops still serving to shreds;
I have mountains of screen shots in which Miller, that paragon of moral authority hiding behind Casey Sheehan’s body, refers to the troops as “heartless killing machines”.
So this is not a dialogue about the war and it’s conduct like the peawits at Wikileak claim, it’s providing cover for the anti-war doofuses to tear our military apart. Anti-war doofuses who don’t live the real world – they live in a world insulated from reality by the very people they attack.
Oh, and, Dede, in the event that you come here and read this, because most of you meglomaniacs do come here to This Ain’t Hell eventually, it was one of your friends who sent me these screen shots. They agree with you to your face, or say nothing, and then send me proof that you’re nothing but a brainless bimbo for the anti-war crowd. Better check your six.
Category: Antiwar crowd, Usual Suspects
whoa. Sent by a friend?? interesting.
At what point can we muster the troops for a few days of Dungaree Liberty?
Hey Dede
I guess the apple doesn’t fallfar from the sister tree, hmm? You are nothing more than the Wizard of Oz characters thrown together in a shell of body.
You have no brain, or you would understand that a soldier’s job protects your freedoms whether you ask for it or not, and you clearly have no heart or you would not denigrate your nephew’s sacrifice. You lack the courage to simply say you are sorry your nephew gave his life voluntarily and instead shit all over his comrades in arms when you shoud be honoring what he chose to do.
It would suck to be you and the Sheehag. You are nothing more than users of the worst kind.
Leftist anitwar types are leftists first and just use the wra as excuse to bash our country and military.
Ms. Miller, I’m sorry you lost your nephew. I never knew him, but from what I’ve read he turned out to be an honorable man, despite the influences of the maternal side of his family.
i don’t want to condemn American soldiers, pilots, gunners — let alone America in general. i have a lot of respect for your military, as it happens (and being British, more than a little gratitude for my freedom from nazism!). but seriously, i watched the unedited (40 min) video, and the only reason i heard the gunner give for wanting authorization to open fire on the van was that it was picking up the wounded (a couple of unarmed men were trying to help a severely wounded unarmed man into a little van, apparently to get him some medical attention). good enough reason to open fire on and kill them all? no.
Not a troops Hater- Did you watch the preliminary stuff where that same black van dropped off insurgents at the firefight 800 meters away?
I would have agreed with you until I saw that portion of it. If you hane’t seen that section, the best place to go is the Jawa Report that also has still shots of it.
@TSO yes i had seen it, it is at the beginning of the 40 minute version, though to be fair i hadn’t really noticed the truck. sure, watching it again has made me think about the possibility that some of those in the truck that was shot up may have been insurgents, but that thought doesn’t change my feeling that it was wrong to open fire on it.
for a start it is not clear that the first van was dropping off insurgents. could it not have been a taxi dropping off people who lived there, unaware that there were armed insurgents nearby? since we know that the driver of the second van was (at least outwardly) a local taxi driver, we would have an explanation for the second van being seen earlier dropping people off a few blocks away.
but it is not even clear that the first and the second van are the same van. they do look similar in shape, but you really can’t tell if they are the same colour. both look black on the video, but still shots reveal that the second van was actually relatively light in colour (http://collateralmurder.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/aliabbas_van.jpg), meaning you cannot reasonably use the description ‘that same black van’.
most importantly, there is nothing to suggest that the pilot, gunner, or ground control identified the second van with the first van. at no point does the gunner mention that the van he is looking at picking up the wounded man is one that he saw earlier, dropping people off a few blocks away. the decision to open fire seems based entirely on the fact that the passerby and the people in the van are helping a man the pilot and gunner know to be severely wounded and unarmed man whom they had identified as an insurgent. that just seems wrong.
OK, even if I give you all that, which I don’t concede, but picking up wounded on the battlefield is not what you do without identifying marks that you are a non-combatant. It’s fairly clear that you have to have a red crescent, red cross, or some other identifying mark that you are a non-combatant and coming to provide aid.
I believe the pilots mentioned something about loose weapons laying around in the street that the “rescuers” were picking up.
well so maybe the taxi driver was a bit overcome with empathy for the gravely wounded man he saw crawling on a kerb a few metres away from a pile of corpses. he must have been really, considering his kids were in the van too. despite this, surely he didn’t deserve to die.
@ Jonn Lilyea. yes, that’s what one of the helicopter crew says just as the van is pulling up. but he can’t possibly know exactly what it is there to do until it has stopped. after it has stopped, he reports only that it is picking up the wounded, and it seems to me that it is on the basis of that report alone that he seeks and is given permission to fire
Didn’t deserve to die?
Who the **** deserves to die? Trying to look at a video of an event without understanding the content before during and after is called 20/20 hindsight. You have no idea what is going on during the time in question, but you want to make dumbass comments from the safety of your mother’s basement on the conduct of men.
Go play the leftist harpstrings for the enemy somewhere else.
Guess what? These people use women and children as human shields and human bombs, and have NO issues with it. If that isn’t cause celebre to whack them, WTH is?????
Lucky, apparently the helicopter should have landed and the crew interrogated the folks picking up wounded and various weapons before taking off and getting permission to engage. Perhaps nota should address the idea of taking your kids to work when your work is being an insurgent or sympathizer.
@ upnorth: at no point in the video does anyone from the van attempt to pick up any weapons from the road, nor are they carrying any of their own. all they do is try to help the unarmed wounded man crawling on the ground. and the unarmed wounded man crawling on the ground apparently turned out to be Saeed Chmagh the reuters driver, not an insurgent.
The following was extracted verbatum from the findings of the investigating officer, the original report of which is online (I provided the link in a previous thread here at TAH somewhere, I don’t remember where):
The recommendation that:
-(10a) Members of the press be encouraged or required to wear identifying vests or distinctive body armor within the MND-B AOR is passed to PAO for coordination through CPIC
-(10c) Condolence payments be made to families of the two children wounded in this engagement is approved.
To give condolence payments to families in a culture in which use of human shields and children as suicide bombers is considered to be an acceptable practice, I think that’s remarkable. Just my opinion.
More to come…
nath,
Something that these pilots have that you don’t is experience. Just because it isn’t specifically said in the video does not mean that the van wasn’t hostile. Without knowing specifics of the case there are too many variables to account for. For instance, that truck could be on a bolo list. It doesn’t matter at that point because they are aiding the enemy. When the infantry guys got on the scene the wounded would have been taken care of. It looks suspicious and the apache acted acordingly.
Oh…to clarify, the paragraph beginning, “To give condolence payments…” was NOT part of the official report of investigation (the lines preceding that was). That paragraph was my words.
jpj ‘the enemy’ that they attempted to aid was an unarmed, severely wounded man crawling helplessly on the dirt. he turned out to have been a civilian, a driver for reuters
in what other way could the van possibly have been ‘hostile’ or ‘suspicious’, such that the pilot and gunner would not have mentioned it and yet seen it as sufficient grounds to request permission to engage? and the ground control who gave them permission to engage, did he also know but not mention this unknown variable making it reasonable to fire on unarmed men attempting to provide first aid to the unarmed wounded?
Re: not a troops hater,
Jesus H Christ……this is War. It’s not a Hollywood movie with multiple endings where you can pick the best one and be done with it.
Dutch, Lucky, and UpNorth made some very valid points and you just buzzed right on by them and kept assuming……these pilots are on OUR side and did what they had to do….nuff said.
please, which valid points did i miss? did they HAVE to shoot up the van? NO
Not A: Let me tell you, asa Veteran of two Theaters of this conflict, and an NCO, neither you, nor any of us were on the ground or in the air over the firefight when it was occuring, I myself was in a College classroom. Due to that, we did not see what they saw, and therefore have no real right to armchair quarterback the event. The Soldiers knew the ROE and must have seen something to engage first. Only when you have been in a Theater of War are you fully qualified to comment on it.
nath,
I don’t think you are ever going to get it. It is war not a game, decisions are made and people die. I could go into in ad nauseum, but I am not going to waste my time.
Maybe all reporters should be required to wear red shirts so they don’t get shot at by us or the bad guys…
Not a Troops Hater (#22), I think what you’ve missed is the fact that soldiers on the ground were under smalls arms and RPG fire prior to this operation from the air taking place. The helicopter came in as support. The reason they fired on the black van is because it was believed to be the vehicle that had been dropping off insurgents in the area (i.e., that were shooting at our soldiers), not to mention that from the air, they believed they were picking up weapons along with the bodies. Again, none of these people had any identifying markings – the reporters could not possibly be identified as reporters; they were embedded with insurgents. The black van was believed to be dropping off insurgents in the area who were shooting at US soldiers; it was not marked with a red cross or crescent, and it was not a war crime for them to fire on the van under these circumstances. In my observation, I have seen even the most antiwar military veterans intuitively grasp this situation, understand it, and not condemn the soldiers involved in this operation while those who never served in war or in the military continue to call our soldiers murderers without having even so much as researched this matter to find out what the circumstances were surrounding this incident, or even so much as find out what the pilot and wingmen had to say about the matter. If you would like to read the Sworn Statements of the pilot and wingman, you can easily read them here: http://tinyurl.com/y6aq3hg I have to do research again to find out where I got that from – it is definitely online from an official website, publicly released, and I downloaded all the documents to my computer but forgot to keep track of where I got them. It’s here on TAH somewhere. But for now you can read the statements there and I will look that up later when I’m feeling better. (I’m currently nursing a terrible cold and under the influence of hot toddies…) Also I put the link… Read more »
Debra – first off, i wish you a speedy recovery! now, in the statements you attach (thanks, hadn’t seen them before), the debriefing officer actually asks “As you saw on the tape, they didn’t have any weapons. So, what drove you then? What threat made you want to engage the van?”. The reply is “Well the friendlies were 300 metres away and from the initial report that a black car, sedan had been coming in and dropping off insurgents, taking them out, moving them to different locations. That was my whole thought process”. IF that was, in fact, his ‘whole thought process’, why does NONE of the voices on the unedited video at any point say anything like ‘we suspect that this is the same van that was seen earlier dropping off insurgents’. At no point in the voice record once the second van has arrived is the earlier van referred to at all. One voice says ‘We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons’, but this is before the van has even stopped moving and anyone has got out. there is a separate pedestrian who walks up to the wounded man, but he is unarmed and seems only interested in the wounded man, not in any weapons lying around. When the van does stop moving, all we see and all that is reported is unarmed men picking up a severely wounded unarmed man — i.e. not picking up any weapons, not carrying any weapons of their own — so what threat could they have been said to pose to the friendly forces 300 metres away? What evidence is there that the main reason why the Apache crews opened up on the van was that they believed it to be a van they saw earlier dropping off and picking up insurgents and that would have gone straight on to attack friendly forces, rather than take the wounded man to hospital? Only what they say after the fact. sorry, but it is a well-proven universal of human psychology that when we don’t really know… Read more »
NATH…sorry I didn’t think I had to point out that the red shirt thing was sarcasm.
Josh Stieber says a lot of wise things here, including ‘the shooting of the van is far less militarily justifiable than the initial killings’:
http://countusout.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/collateral-murder-wikileaks-josh-stieber-soldiers-speak/
NATH,
Were you there?
Debra: no, i wasn’t there. but Ethan McCord was apparently there on the ground, carrying one of the wounded children. i reckon he and josh stieber know what they’re talking about better than anybody posting here:
http://www.steinershow.org/radio/the-marc-steiner-show/april-13-2010-segment-2
Nope. No agenda there, no siree.
and what agenda would that be?
NATH,
Listening to this interview did not change my opinion about anything, but reinforced it. I think American soldiers have often shown themselves to be the most compassionate in the world; our enemies seldom, if ever, express the compassion, and sensitivity that American soldiers have historically been known to do. The insurgents and terrorists find it acceptable to use their own children as bombs in some cases.
This interview shows that Ethan McCord is a decent human being, as the majority of our soldiers are, and he felt paternal compassion for those children as he does his own. I didn’t hear anything in their message that I disagree with.
I support our troops in doing whatever they have to do and defending themselves and each other in the combat situations they are thrust in. They do not deserve to be treated as though they are war criminals and I detest the behavior of those who have so much compassion for the insurgents and terrorists who kill them, but not enough for our own troops, who are not just the troops, but are our own children, and brothers and sisters.
Debra what i am having real difficulty with is that you people will not even pause to register the FACT that the unarmed man crawling along the ground WAS NOT A TERRORIST OR AN INSURGENT, HE WAS AN UNARMED CIVILAN REUTERS DRIVER. The unarmed man driving his two children to a class in his van who stopped to help the injured reuters driver WAS NOT A TERRORIST OR AN INSURGENT using his kids as human shields, HE WAS A LOCAL TAXI DRIVER taking his kids to class. in fact none of the people killed in the attack on the van had a weapon, and there is no evidence to think that any of them was a terrorist or an insurgent. It seems that the lead apache crew perceived a threat from the van. none of you has so far admitted the obvious fact that it was mistaken in perceiving this threat, nor that it is not even clear what threat it could have perceived, nor have any of you expressed any condolences let alone respect for the innocent people killed or the traumatized children whose father was blown to pieces as he sat next to them. as it turned out, none of the people in or near the van when it was attacked was a threat to your troops or anyone else; there was no reason to kill them. all of these people were precisely the Iraqi civilians that your troops are supposed to be there to HELP. but like josh and ethan i do not condemn any individuals; the co-pilot gunners, the pilots, or the various ground control. i have simply said that the attack on the van was WRONG, that it should be APOLOGIZED for and COMPENSATED for, and that steps should be taken to avoid the same sort of thing happening again. and i want this not only in the interests of justice and compassion for the families of the innocent dead, i want it for the safety of both your and OUR troops, as well as your and our safety from terrorism at home. incidents like… Read more »
Mistakes happen.
yes, and then you apologize for them, and you try to work out how to avoid the same sorts of mistakes in the future.
NATH,
An investigation of this incident was conducted in 2007 after it occurred. As a result of the investigation, two recommendations were made. One recommendation was that members of the press be encouraged or required to wear identifying vests or distinctive body armour within the area of operations. The other recommendation was that condolence payments be made to the families of the two children. This was approved by Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks, signed 21 Jul 2007.
Documents pertaining to the original investigation have been released to the public and are available at:
http://tinyurl.com/yjuro99
If you find yourself with a chilly reception here at TAH, it’s because we know that the purpose of the release of this video is political. The left-wing laps it up and uses it to advance its own agenda, spewing forth its crap and nonsense at the expense of our soldiers and to demoralize the troops by making the American people believe that our soldiers are monsters.
I hope you will take another look at all this and reevaluate.
debra, i am really not sure what i need to reevaluate: the unarmed wounded reuters driver and the two unarmed pedestrians who tried to help him and the unarmed driver of the van and his children should never have been fired upon. nothing will change my view on that. if you watch the video closely, you will see that the Apache gunner only didn’t fire a further salvo into the side of the van because he got an azimuth limit error. if he hadn’t had this, the kids would almost certainly be dead too.
it is a shame if the video has also been used as ‘cover for troops haters’ but it is absurd to pretend that that is all it is, that it is pure propaganda. the unedited video that i have been watching is just that: an unedited video, exactly the same as the video that the gunner saw. it really does show some things that are wrong, the most obvious of which is killing someone for no more reason than that they are trying to help someone who is himself unarmed and incapacitated. even if the unarmed wounded man had been an insurgent it would have been wrong to shoot him or unarmed people helping him — and he wasn’t an insurgent, he worked for reuters.
thanks for the link to the documents. as you say, condolence payments were apparently approved for the family of the driver. good. were they actually PAID? doesn’t seem so in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BflAj2txMVQ&feature=player_embedded. and is there any mention in the documents you attach of any public apology in iraq? no. is there any mention of any condolence payments to anybody else? the families of the reuters employees? the other unarmed men who tried to help saed into the van? no. is there any mention of steps to be taken to avoid such a mistake in the future? there hasn’t been any in public, and if anything is recommended in either of the investigation reports, it seems to have been redacted
For “no more reason than that they are trying to help someone who is himself unarmed and incapacitated”? That statement is blatantly false.
NATH, you are twisting things around and making things up simply to fit the story that you want to believe and tell. You have an ax to grind and you’re not being objective.
fine, “it really does show some things that are wrong, the most obvious of which is killing someone for no more reason than that they are trying to help someone who is himself unarmed and incapacitated although mistakenly believed to be an insurgent”. even if someone is a gravely wounded, unarmed, incapacitated insurgent, you don’t fire on him or those attempting to give him first aid. blatantly obvious rule of war right there. do as thy would have done unto thy own soldiers
i see from your blog that you probably think they opened fire because they saw the van earlier dropping off insurgents. even if they had, even if the same van had been used by the same driver earlier to ferry insurgents (highly debatable given that it looks black on the video but is in fact blue and cream coloured, and the fact that the driver who was killed made part of his family’s living by hiring his van out), the fact is that none of the aircrew mentioned this at the time of engaging the van. surely if THAT was the reason to open fire on the van, the fact that it was picking up the wounded would have been irrelevant. if anything it would have been more of a threat without a gravely wounded passenger. no, the gunner seeks permission to fire when he sees that they are trying to take the wounded man away in the van. the inescapable conclusion was that they opened fire so as to prevent some unarmed people from helping someone who was himself unarmed and incapacitated.
“the inescapable conclusion was that they opened fire so as to prevent some unarmed people from helping someone who was himself unarmed and incapacitated”
Again, simply false. I’m tired of arguing. Read the results of the investigation again.
nota, maybe if the insurgents hadn’t had a take a journo to work day, the two “journalists” would still be alive? Maybe if some of the stringers who work for various media in Iraq didn’t actually help the insurgents, they wouldn’t have been there, trying to get video of the “brave resistance fighters” trying to kill American troops? You hang with shitbirds, don’t be surprised when you get treated like a shitbird.
Here’s a better idea, NOTA–quit bringing kids to a firefight! Ever fucking think of that one, Einstein?
NOTA
Let me break things down for you. The press in Iraq has largely behaved like a bunch of shitbirds with a political agenda that looks like an anti troop agenda to me.
First they treated us to Abu Ghraib every 10 minutes for months on end. Lame, but at least Abu Ghraib actually happened.
Next, the press parrots Muj propaganda during the first battle of Fallujah, thus creating political pressure which ended up handing the Muj victory on a silver platter and costing the lives of more US servicemen.
Then came Haditha, an incident that was extremely questionable. But according to the media, it was a wanton slaughter of poor innocent civilians, despite evidence to the contrary that the media couldn’t even be bothered to report on. In fact, McGirk was too much of a pussy to even show up at the court martial hearing.
Next comes this incident, an incident where it is apparently obvious that the pilots acted appropriately despite attempts from wiki leaks to show us all edited footage. I am also wondering why the sudden hoopla about something that happened 3 FUCKING YEARS AGO!!
Bottom line here is that certain segments of the press do have an anti-troop agenda, which is downright pathetic if you ask me.
Not to mention that being a reporter in a war zone is known to be a pretty dangerous job. Wow, who would have ever thought.
As one blogger explained it (http://freedomguerrilla.com/?p=1419#comments):
“According to one stat I read, 139 journalists have been killed in this war which seems like a fairly unsafe profession. I would think that a journalist understands the risk/reward aspect of this assignment and decides accordingly just as a soldier does (there is no draft after all). Knowing that there is a significant probability of being murdered, what is motivating all these people?”
The only thing I disagree with in this blogger’s post is my dispute with his use of the word “murder,” which is a legal term that requires meeting elements of proof.
Like I said earlier lets make journalists wear red jackets, so that we know who to shoot and who not to. It would make this war thing so much easier and mistakes like this will never happen again. Better yet lets just make everyone use nerf guns so nobody gets hurt.
Nath, drop it you aren’t going to convince any of us and we aren’t going to convince you. You will never understand the decision untill you have to make it.
Like I said earlier lets make journalists wear red jackets, so that we know who to shoot and who not to
Bad idea. Islamonazis have this annoying tendency to masquerade as innocent “civilians” while they’re plotting and scheming. A van full of red-shirted “journalists” on a roadside photoshoot turns out to be an IED planting party…yeah…not a good thing.
Best response I’ve seen on the Wikileaks video:
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/shame-on-wikileaks-framing-lawful-engagement-as-anti-american-propaganda-part-two/
look, i am not trying to argue the rights or wrongs of the entire incident with you guys. i accept that under the circumstances, the initial killings were accidental, perhaps mainly the result of a naive decision apparently made by the reuters cameraman.
as i have said from the off, my real problem is with the second killings, the killings of the people in and around the van. let’s forget, shall we, that the gravely wounded unarmed man crawling on the ground was a reuters employee. let’s say he was in fact a gravely wounded unarmed insurgent, since that is what the Apache crew clearly thought he was. even then WHEN YOU SEE UNARMED PEOPLE TRYING TO HELP A MAN YOU KNOW TO BE SERIOUSLY WOUNDED AND UNARMED, YOU DO NOT SHOOT. WHEN THE UNARMED PEOPLE TRY TO TAKE THE SERIOUSLY WOUNDED UNARMED MAN AWAY IN A VAN, YOU LET IT GO, YOU DO NOT TRY TO KILL THEM ALL.
and yet that is EXACTLY what happened. some unarmed people tried to take a seriously wounded unarmed man away in a van AND THEY WERE KILLED FOR IT. this stuff about the pilots thinking that the van was the same van as one they had seen earlier and that it therefore posed some as-yet-unexplained additional threat was MADE UP AFTER THE INCIDENT. NO mention is made of the van’s supposed resemblance to a suspect van during the video. the ONLY thought process we see and hear evidence of goes straight from ‘they’re picking up the wounded, they’re taking him’ to ‘permission to fire?’. and that is WRONG
Tell ya what, NOTH–let’s drop you into Fallujah, Kandahar, or any of a hundred other shitholes in the world with bullets and RPG rounds buzzing around, and see how well YOU do, m’kay? BTW–you’re showing time and again you haven’t the first fucking clue of how the ROE works, nor do you have an understanding of even the most basic international agreements regarding conducting warfare. Wikileaks is hunting for dollars, not justice.
sparky: i don’t care if the attack on the unarmed men attempting to render assistance to the unarmed wounded WAS justified according to the rules of engagement in effect at the time, let alone these vague ‘most basic international agreements’ of which you speak. it was OBVIOUSLY still morally and tactically WRONG. i have never suggested that all of the blame for the killing of the people in and around the van should be laid entirely at the feet of the Apache crew, and so the fact that i don’t know (exactly) what it is like to be them is of little relevance. i feel that the much greater part of the responsibility for the tactically and morally unjustified killings of those in and around the van almost certainly lies with a flaw in the rules of engagement, the mission, the training, and the selection of and equipment given to your forces in this situation. Josh and Ethan (who were actually THERE) say much the same thing i don’t know about wikileaks’ motivation. but what some of us in the U.K. are hunting for is an explanation of what we are still doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, why we are both (U.S. and U.K.) still losing our brave and precious servicemen and women and seeing so many more come home so physically and psychologically damaged, why the vast majority of locals do not seem to welcome us as liberators, why there is no end in sight. in this video we have clear evidence of a large part of the explanation: we are carelessly killing and maiming A LOT of innocent locals, and by and large when presented with incontrovertible evidence of what we have done, we have not faced up to it and properly tried to explain ourselves or apologize — let alone to put in place measures to avoid such tragedies in the future — but have rather tried to sweep it under the carpet or to portray it as leftist antiwar propaganda. as a result the friends and loved ones of those innocent civilians we have carelessly killed… Read more »