Not letting the facts get in the way of the meme
My editor, Robert Johnson at Business Insider put up this bit of war pr0n that was at LiveLeak and posted at the UK’s Daily Mail. It shows an Apache crew blasting at some Afghans;
The Mail describes the targets from the caption at LiveLeak;
According to the caption the victims were ‘innocent farms planting poppy seeds in the middle of the road,’ although that has not been verified.
As Robert says;
Planting poppies in road is an unlikely horticultural practice, and could instead be insurgents planting a bomb in the road.
Yeah, since it’s at night and there’s a crowd of the little bastards, and since tires tend to kill young plants, I think planting poppies in the road is the very last thing any Afghans would be doing late at night.
The Mail also complains that the pilot sings “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie” while the missile flies to it’s target, but if you listen closely, the voice doesn’t sound like the pilot’s voice which occurs before the launch, yeah, it might be the gunner, but it sounds dubbed to me.
Of course, the Mail says this was released by Wikileaks and compares it to the urination videos;
The footage is the latest clip to emerge on LiveLeak which will prove embarrassing to top brass.
In January footage emerged on the website which showed four American soldiers urinating on dead bodies in what appeared to be Afghanistan.
The Marine Corps began an official investigation over the clip in which one of the men can be heard saying: ‘Have a great day, buddy’ to laughter from his colleagues.
Another of them joked, ‘Golden like a shower’ and said ‘Yeahhhh!’ as they groaned with relief whilst urinating.
The reputation of America’s military has also still not fully recovered from the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal in Baghdad.
Reporting on the same video, the Guardian makes the same comparison;
The footage comes in the wake of a string of damaging videos and pictures showing US forces in Afghanistan urinating on the bodies of dead insurgents, and posing with the remains of suicide bombers and civilians killed for sport by a group of rogue soldiers.
If it is proved to be authentic, it could further undermine the image of foreign forces in a country where there is already deep resentment owing to civilian deaths and a perception among many Afghans that US troops lack respect for Afghan culture and people.
And Russia TV piles on;
This is only the latest in a series of revelations which has forced the US armed services to launch damage control investigations into the conduct of its soldiers.
And UK’s Sun;
The footage is the latest clip to emerge on LiveLeak which could embarrass the US Army.
In January footage was posted which appeared to show four American soldiers urinating on bodies.
Personally, I think they’re all full of shit. First of all, they ain’t plantin’ poppies in the middle of the street and even if it is the pilot and his weapons officer on the tape, what’s the big damn deal? Do they expect soldiers in war killing people intent on killing their friends and comrades to bow their heads and say a silent prayer for their enemies? Or yell out the window “Lookout!”
FFS, these prissy-assed journalists are really stretching the meme of heartless American killers gone on a rampage a little too far.
And the American press, except Business Insider, are absolutely silent on this so far probably because they don’t have the guts to stand up for the soldiers in this instance. The implication that this is a an outrage is ridiculous.
Category: Terror War
In Iraq, the ROE in certain AOs was that anyone out after curfew with shovels on or near a road were legitimate targets due to the obvious hostile intent. The locals all knew this. Bottom line is that the night farming on the road excuse didn’t fly then, and it shouldn’t fly now either.
and all them other fellas are recycling bomb casings for the metal…. yep, rightee-oh, I’m sure. Personally, I’m thinking that’s a highly sensitive song – coulda been Big Head Todd covering John Lee Hooker- “Bang Bang Boom Boom!”
I trust no man will confuse “WIKI”-Leaks,
with WIKI-Pedia .
(Leaks bad; Pedia good)
Lets assume that these guys were midnight farmers planting poppy seeds (as unlikely as that is). Aren’t poppy seeds a used to manufacture opium? And isn’t Afghanistan kinda big on the whole opiate trafficking business?
ENGLISH Newspaper:
“. . . there is already deep resentment owing to . . .” —
OWING TO !@#$%^ media LIES, INSULT BY IMPLICATION, ENEMY-LOVING “JOURNALISTS” !!
(rational emotion is permitted)
the SO-CALLED “American” press .
What I’ve seen in the MSM is a lean toward tabloid reporting — and I do mean tabloid. As in “Lady Pregnant with Bigfoot’s Baby Seen Holding Hands With Elvis!” kind of reporting.
No one except the most weakminded people out there believes this nonsense anymore.
And oh, by the way — if singing helps our pilots hit their targets then I say let them sing!
Dude, they even go out of their way not to level the house the dude ran into on the off chance that it had non-combatants. That seems to prove to me just how slective we are, not the opposite.
Asked 3 times if any friendlies and confirmation. The miss American pie piece sounds added in. I think that it could be re edited heavily.
Not trying to defend the Afghans, but to enlighten some people. In my district and villages the power MAYBE came on at night, so farmers would do all their farming at nighttime. we warned them many times not to farm at night and that we would be extra careful, and sometimes they would even come to our base and say ‘were farming at night over here so dont shoot’.
i think this video was heavily edited to put the blame on us.
I always like reading this BS and then listen to turds trying to explain how the MSM is not biased, what kind of 4sshole thinks farmers plant anything in a road?
Before they write this stuff down perhaps they should take a moment to question how many farmers put seed in hard pack soil? Poppies, like just about every farm crop known to man, like to be planted in tilled soil…foot deep till is really nice…roads that are tilled and soft to a depth of one foot aren’t much of a road….I’m with Pinto on this only weak minded fools (and there are far too many in America these days) can believe any of this material.
@10, I want to confirm that too, the farmers do go out at night (it’s a lot cooler) but they don’t plant in teh middle of a street.
Haters gonna hate.
Bummer… can’t see the video from here at work, so I’ll have to wait til I get home tonight.
I hope the American Pie lyrics being sung were
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick,
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
‘Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.
That verse would seem appropriate to the occasion.
The video shown was from the aircraft that wasn’t even doing the shooting. It sounded as though someone on the team freq transmitted the “American Pie” thing on the team internal.
I don’t know how anyone who actually listened to the transmissions could come to the conclusion that they were somehow some kind of blood thirsty killers. Anyone who thinks that thought that going in. F’ng idiots.
I’m hideously embarrassed and ashamed myself. One, that Hellfire works good for tanks, dismounts not so much. How embarrassing that the forkers apparently lived. Note to CSA: get fragmentation warheads for those Hellfires, that shaped charge sucks. Two, note to Apache unit S-3: get more 30mm live fire training. I’m ashamed that that 30mm didn’t turn those meatsacks into stinking piles of hamburger.
On another note, the clock in the display was showing 1830 hours. Anybody (Apache drivers) if that is 1830 local, GMT or what?
Now I’m no farmer, but I don’t think people usually plant their crops in the middle of the road.
Any experts want to weigh in on it?
Hmmm…we have a major cash crop in high demand across the world. Hey Ahmed, do you think we should plant it in the middle of rural route 61?
@17; I grew up on a farm and I don’t recall anyone I know planting crops in the middle of a road.
Anyone with 3 working braincells knows that the media hyenas are full of shit.
Time is probably GMT (Zulu), Al T. Afghan local is GMT + 4.5 hrs.
Afghans are stupid. They would tell us they were farming at night and exactly where. Then we would proceed to watch them on the cameras for a bit just in case. I agree you dont farm inthe middle of the road, but those dumb afghans dont surprise me one bit.
@16 You might hear the gunner say they are firing a K2A missile, it has a blast frag sleeve. I agree with your comment about using a hellfire though, I have yet to see a hellfire used on troops in the open that didn’t require clean up with the gun. A lot of people press for aviators to use the missile however for its ability to stand-off and because it’s a “precision” weapon. During my deployments my unit tended to use the gun more than a lot of other units do.
Since we don’t see the firing aircraft’s video it is difficult to say but range and angle have something to do with dispersion the of 30mm rounds. Before I would critique anyone’s shooting skills I would need to see the tape of the shooter.
The pilot can select Z or L time, so it could be either. If you look at the end of the time stamp though there is a “Z” there. Personally I always selected L.
It’s Zulu.
Amazing how every Afghan that gets shot, blown up or otherwise taken deep is “innocent”. People are fucking stupid.
Come on, y’all.. don’t you know the difference between an “armed combatant” and an “innocent civilian” over there is whether or not he’s still holding onto his weapon when he’s killed?
I see this as a quick mission to discourage the enemy from planting IED’s. The explosion itself killed the two in the middle of the street from the concussion alone, but also the blast radius would of blown them into little bitty pieces. The others that show up right after the explosion are, IMO, others who were standing around as lookouts for the two in the street.
As far as the media’s response, anyone with a shred of common sense knows it’s liberal, anti-American bullshit.
I guess they wouldn’t like George C. Scott:
“We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”
26, George C. Scott or General George S. Patton?
I believe that whover posted the remark about poopy seed planting, I think that person was being facetious. People need to update their Sarcasm Recognition Software. As for the soundtrack, I think Scandal’s Goodby To You or Boom Boom Boom Out Go The Lights (Sammy Hagar?)
Hey — George C. Scott *IS* GEN George Smith Patton !!
(smile)
Zulu – got it. So, it was 0100 local. As for the K2A, I think it still needs work. 🙂 Thanks Hondo, Outlaw13 and SFC Holland.
Tom B., you think so? Hard to tell on my monitor. I have seen a Hellfire hit close to a group of folks (video) and they were all able to run away.
Oh, I FORGOT to applaud the Great Quotation Of History, presented by No. 26 — a top favorite of mine .