I'm curious to find out whose alias that was.

But the stellar work of WikiLeaks is misleading and incomplete. I also seems to me that they could have at least gotten a Phony Soldier to accurately transcribe the dialog as there are numerous errors. That aside, why don't they replay in slow motion and highlight the weapons in the group? Why do they also not put the event in context with the events leading up to the incident? Why is there no mention of the weapons found at the scene by the ground troops? For those criticizing the opticals the aviators are using have you considered just how loud an Apache is and the fact that they fly in the open air? The crowd was completely unaware of their presence which, to me, means we are viewing pretty remarkable video from an extreme distance where the camera men mingled with the insurgents were relatively indistinguishable when put in that context.



I don't really think gun camera footage should be considered freely distributable government information. It is good, though, that insurgent view it occasionally to reiterate that they are not safe.

A **** up was made. Reuters shouldn't hire photographers that pal around with insurgents.



Doesn't appear to be any issues with ROE. A group of insurgents were engaged in the open on abandoned streets. The vehicle rushing in to help their pals was also engaged. Unfortunately, the bad guys brought their kids to work. I hate it when they put children in harms way. I can't tell you the number of soldiers that have had the displeasure of shooting woman and children that just happen to be in the vehicle with some idiot trying to ram through a traffic control point (TCP).

Must be a cover-up on Massassi. Contact WikiLeaks.

Oh damn, we'll have to file for freedom of information

Hey, remember how our soldiers went into Europe and kicked ass in WWII? Remember how the media was heavily censored? Remember how the war didn't last ten years?

Maybe we had some good ideas back then.

Not really. It was Europe and had civil, humane values in general. Basically, we kicked the bad guy's asses and reinstated rational humans. In these current theaters we kicked their asses but now we have to educate them to be rational humans. I would think this might take at least two generations to accomplish.

Counterpoint: Japan.

Translated:

Somewhat valid, but not. While they may have had some arcane philosophy going back even a couple hundred years would still put them ahead of present day middle east. Except for Israel, of course.

I feel like I've heard this somewhere before like in the mid 1800s or something

manifest destiny and related philosophies

I find it hilarious that Wookie06 is such a sheep after serving in the military, when I figure that most enlisted men would know that this whole war is a crock after their first tour. Atleast my friends who've served aren't so ready to except rhetoric from the upper echelons.

Funny, I didn't realize we were discussing the validity of the entire war. I thought we were discussing the incident in which two Reuter's photographers were killed.

accept.

and he's not accepting rhetoric. He's explaining the situation as quite possibly the only person on this board who has been there and can make judgment calls on this sort of thing.

Also, from what I know of the US Military from serving in the Navy, if the powers that be had any reason to believe that these guys didn't go by the book, they wouldn't try to cover it up. They'd destroy their lives. I've been in the Navy for just under 2 years, and I've seen a lot of people get very hefty penalties (reduction in rank, restriction, extra duties, fines, and other than honorable discharges, (and note this is not a "take your pick" list. usually these things will be stacked on one another)) for not following the exact letter of the rules. And I'm talking about minor things like whether or not a person did maintenance on equipment properly, or getting caught sleeping with an officer or something. I couldn't imagine that when lives are involved, the military wouldn't do what it always does and destroy these guys if there was even a hint of a suggestion they didn't follow the ROE.

That's because the proscription list is only updated when the guy who dealt the ban can be bothered.

edit: wow I was on the previous page...this was a reply to one of Mort's messages.

Their "arcane philosophy" goes back a bit further than a couple hundred years, but they did manage to build a functioning industrial world power of a nation and were more diplomatically capable than preaching the death of the great American/Jewish Satan so that puts them ahead of most of the mideast. A better critique of your original post would, I guess, be that most of WW2 was the Allies liberating various nations occupied against their will by Germany/Japan/Italy as opposed to the Allies occupying, even then there were German resistance groups, though I don't think they did much.

I meant that going back a couple of hundred years still puts them at a greater societal level than much of the present day middle east.



In a sense Iraq and Afghanistan were occupied against their will. The Shiite majority of Iraq hated their Sunni minority regime and Afghans suffered tremendously under Taliban rule. That would explain why local sentiment was remarkably positive in both campaigns in the beginning. Sentiment mostly changed due to the influx of chaos after the relative stability of the dictatorial regimes had ended.

I apoligize to Wookie06 for my last post, I was drunk as hell last night.

Mah bad man :/

Alcoholism goes well w/ threads like this.

The Japanese are pretty far from anything I'd call rational.

How dare you.

That was a drunk post? Don't worry about it, man. I've gotten far worse from others here whom I presume to be sober.

I hope you're not talking about me, because I'm rarely ever sober.

Well, that's obvious.

haha

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that military helicopters flying in that airspace is commonplace and the noise isn't anything unusual...

I'd also like a source about what weapons the U.S. ground forces found. I could only see one rifle, and something I couldn't tell was a rifle or a camera tripod. Armed men in Iraq is commonplace, just because they're brown and one or two have AK's doesn't mean they're insurgents.

For those of you confused about the "guy shooting," the gunner is assuming the man kneeling around the corner is getting ready to fire an RPG, he doesn't mean the men on the ground have fired shots, just that he was sure the man leaning around the corner was attempting to sight in on them.

It couldn't possibly be that. A group of armed men on abandoned streets that were in engaged in hostilities with US forces aware of Apaches flying overhead would have scattered.



You're not going to see an actual source because none of this information has been released by the military. Some scrub illegally gave the video to wikileaks. I'm surprised that kind of stuff isn't more common place because it's not too hard to burn the file to a disc or, back then, transfer to a thumb drive. It seems to me that wikileaks didn't care enough to identify the actual obvious weapon in the video just what, in hindsight, you can assume to be cameras. Even then insurgents routinely film their escapades so cameras wouldn't necessarily be a red flag. Anyways, reports of military response to this leak can be found on Foxnews.com, not sure about other sites. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/07/military-raises-questions-credibility-leaked-iraq-shooting-video/



Not necessarily sight in on them, especially since they were unaware of their presence.

As I alluded to earlier, I don't really like these type of engagements. Even when you know for a fact that the dude is a bad guy, seeing them engaged with weapons designed to destroy armored vehicles is unsettling. However, keeping in mind that this is often the only way the insurgent can be engaged before disappearing to be a certain yet unpredictable future threat it is probably the right choice. Of course it seems cold to hear the sort of discussions soldiers have with regards to killing but, remember, your military is paid to kill, break, and blow **** up. Sure, they also occassionally pass out some beannie babies but their primary mission is not a pretty one.

A whole lot of you should just shut the **** up.

If wikileaks is going to claim to be a free media source, they should do better releasing media without their opinions and biases attached. I think the way the information was presented immediately puts blame on the government. I think the major oversight was firing on the wounded man and the van. The "eagerness" of the gunner adds to the videos incriminating nature.

The real problem here is that the incident was covered up, which means some sort of protocol was broken that would've prevented this incident. I think our military needs to be better at admitting its ****-ups.

Again no. All it means is that the government didn't want this story getting out because of the potential backlash. It's PR. And it has nothing to do with whether or not they did anything against the "rules". If they *had* broken the rules, we WOULD have heard about it, cause there'd have been a military trial, and they'd have gone down.

Agree with most here but something I addressed earlier in the thread is the presumed "eagerness" you refer to is a result of the frustration these guys experience when they routinely have bad guys in their sights and are unable to engage because the clod on the other end of the radio is too scared to give them permission. But, there is a problem with this in general. The simple fact that they need to ask permission. It should tell you something that these pilots feel the need to ask permission from someone who can't even see what the aviators are witnessing. Troops are so fearful of the repercussions of making a mistake that they ask permission to shoot from people that, often, aren't even on the battlefield. I've got a somewhat humorous, in a very stupid way, story to relate to you guys on just this sort of BS if enough people are interested.



I don't even see where there was any cover-up. Seems to me that no explanation really is warranted. They engaged a group of perceived hostiles. Anyone can Monday morning quarterback it.



Man, you gotta remember, many of them don't have the ability to relate to the situation. It is pretty unsettling to the average person to see footage like that. I'm trying to help some of them understand that things like this aren't necessarily as black and white as the footage they're reacting to.

Wiki-leaks people were threatened when they were going to release this information. News briefs about the reporters deaths were skewed and people were threatened not to release the names of the soldiers and staff involved (specifically the people who were asked permission to fire in the first place.)

And I don't think claiming there was no protocol breach means there wasn't. This is a city full of people for christ's sake. This isn't exclusively a war zone. A van pulls up and someone gets out to help a man crawling on the street like any other place on the planet. Anyone who thought for two seconds would have said "No no, don't fire on that van there could be civilians." If a bunch of people jumped out with guns to cover the van, you'd start to have a reason to shoot. "They might take guns!" is stupid and conclusion-prone. Look those guys over there might be drinking from a water fountain of explosives, blow it up.

The problem is we're fighting street gangs with Apache helicopters and half of our people think the whole country is against them.

Yeah, I'm not so worked up about that as I am the fact that people are supporting and condemning these guys with such an imperfect picture. Most of you don't even know how much there is to not know.

How many BOLOs were out for vans and military aged males of a particular descripton that day? How were the pilots briefed?
How many of those vans were involved in shootings earlier that day? That week?
What exactly were theater ROEs? How long had they been enforced? Were there troops on the deck? It seems so, but how close? Was the van driving towards them?

Its going to take an extensive investigation to even begin to recreate what the cumulative situational awareness of those involved was, but people are saying it should be dismissed, or that they should get locked up.

You don't know. I don't know. We can't. So grow up, shut up, and discuss what is relevant. That this was terrible, and it may have been handled incorrectly. The fact that anyone here thinks they can pass any judgement on this is hilarious to me.

I would like everyones input on whether or not I am a coward for not shooting the terrorists I saw in Iraq. Oh, thats all the info you get. Have at me.

coward

At least that was to the point.

I feel much like Kirbs on this one.

Here I would expect that people would praise you for shooting Americans.

I a friend of mine in the Army shot an American on American soil in Louisiana during the floods. They were out looking for looters, survivors, etc and a group of guys pretty much unloaded on them for no reason.

He was pretty broken up about it. He shot the guy in the neck by accident, because he took two to the chest right before he fired.

Rob, sell your bull somewhere else. Nobody here is going to believe you have a friend.

Maybe the clod is afraid that some ****ing innocent civilians might die?