Wikileaks gun camera video of civilians shot in Baghdad 07/12/07

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik

by dsplittgerber • 16 years ago

439 277 16 years ago

Video will be posted at 16h UTC latest, according to Wikileaks press conference. It shows this incident http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.ht... and supposedly shows a military helicopter shooting a van rescuing two Reuters journalists.

ugh3• 16 years ago

Murder? What can that video possibly show that would justify calling this incident “murder”? And what’s the motive? Killing journalists can only be a bad move for the US military, so why would they do it on purpose? We already know that those journalists were killed by US military, so that alone wouldn’t be news.

I’m curious.

– edit: I have now seen the video, looks like major incompetency combined with what looks like the wrong training for those situations. Also a possible coverup of this incompetence on part of the investigators. No murder. Bad enough. I would probably argue that this is negligent homicide. Has definitely a different effect than just reading the New York Times article.

yesimahuman3• 16 years ago

Many people are against our operations in the area. To them, any incident involving innocent people is "murder" and the USA must be held accountable. You don't protest by calling this an accident.

dsplittgerber4• 16 years ago

Had you seen the video at that point? No.

Look at 04:50 onwards. It was obvious there was no RPG, the group of men started dispersing, yet they started shooting and kept shooting.

Edit: Look at 10:15. They just killed people who were trying to rescue one wounded guy. No weapons to be seen anywhere.

mquander2• 16 years ago

Well, a lot of people would happily tell you that war in general is murder, but killing people who aren't obviously and convincingly an immediate threat to you is certainly "more murderous" than killing enemy soldiers.

If the guys in the helicopter weren't soldiers, or if they were somewhere else and not Iraq, then it would legally be murder, so personally I have a hard time understanding why this is morally different. It's true that they're under a ton of pressure, and certainly they aren't totally to blame for murdering people, but it doesn't make their morally addled actions any more right. It's a shame that there is nobody who will ever answer for most such tragedies.

eagleal4• 16 years ago

They should have requested intel (more accurate images) for that zone. I think the Apache was clearing for enemies, because the ground troupes were near.

It was a warzone (?) and at the start of the video you can see it, because the journalists were sneaking at the corner (they were trying to photograph something).

clammer9• 16 years ago

As a tax payer, I'm not too happy about paying for these peacekeeping/war adventures in the M/E. I'm not convinced that I'm more secure because of them.

That said, in the style of warfare that exists in these areas, it's probable that innocent people will be killed. In a war, intent determines if innocent people are being killed or murdered. Can this video prove intent?

invisible• 16 years ago

I agree, however it could be easily claimed that this is negligent homicide.

madars• 16 years ago

The video can prove grave incompetency. If you can't distinguish between standard photo lens [1] and a full-blown rocket-propelled grenade [2] you shouldn't be engaging in combat.

[1] http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/5dwlens.jpg.html [2] - http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/terrorist_pg7c.jpg.h...

scott_s• 16 years ago

That's not necessarily true. It depends on what expectations the soldier has for that area. If it's an active combat zone, then a solider has less than a second to make a shoot/no-shoot decision. Someone raising something long to their eyes will resemble raising a weapon.

With that said, I haven't watched the video, and I don't know if that was an active combat zone, or if it was considered "safe."

bcl3• 16 years ago

On of the men clearly did have an RPG. The cameras were mistaken for AK-47's. One the left as they point out the 2nd cameraman note the long tube that one of the 'innocent civilians' is carrying and leaning on the ground. It also looks to me like this is the same guy peeking out from behind the wall, the tube is too long to be a camera.

I expect that the source video for this is much cleaner than a youtube conversion, and seeing it in real life, by an experienced pilot and gunner, would make it clearer that these were not simply locals gathering to talk to a reporter.

clammer9• 16 years ago

Remember though, you're watching after knowing that innocent people were killed. In fact, I watched it in 480res, full screen, on a 23" monitor and I too thought it was an RPG. What do you suppose the heli gunner was watching on?

Skeuomorph3• 16 years ago

Right, because photo stills from "collateralmurder.com" are intended to convey the ease of identification from a moving helicopter during a live situation? There are other form factors for RPGs:

http://world.guns.ru/grenade/rpg22-2.jpg

http://world.guns.ru/grenade/rpg26-1.jpg

http://world.guns.ru/grenade/rshg2-1.jpg

I wouldn't want to be wrong on the fly about whether it was an RPG or a black telephoto barrel that's sticking around the corner aiming at my crew. Presumably I'd use other cues to help decide.

The site leaves out stills showing the key decision-triggering factor - surreptitious behavioral cues. Here is one they left out:

http://imgur.com/PjolB.jpg

The site talks about the cameraman shooting a picture of "whatever is occurring further down the street" but the video, even in slow replay (that the airmen didn't have in the moment), suggests the man is taking cover then popping out to aim at the helicopter. The man appears to "engage" the helicopter. Thinking in context of 2007, that was incredibly dumb:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0#t=4m14s

Want a picture of an American chopper while you're walking in a hostile zone with militia carrying what even "collateralmurder.com" admits "might be a weapon" and "appears to be a weapon" -- ok, stand in the middle of the street with your camera, wave your obvious press card while wearing your obvious press jacket, and take your picture. Don't duck around corners then share the intel with your gun carrying group.

Troops made a call about the RPG vs camera (though certainly doesn't look like a white Canon lens as shown in the website, looks black, and that tube and the way he aims it sure looks like bazooka or anti-tank RPG considering troops can't see around the corner). After that judgment call was based on behavior more than identifying the weapon, what happened after that could have been interpreted as combatants feigning nonchalance until their next chance to ambush from behind cover.

Even assuming it's an unmarked photographer, presence of a war correspondent in a hostile zone does not mean the armed men with him are not combatants, that they should be immune from attack, or that they should be free to wander around armed studying long distance photo intel of their enemy to better plan an ambush.

tfh• 16 years ago

> I'm not convinced that I'm more secure because of them.

I'm convinced you're _less_ secure because of them.

clammer9• 16 years ago

Sorry, that was tongue-in-cheek. Yes, I believe in for some more blowback.

NathanKP7• 16 years ago

I'm not convinced that I'm more secure because of them.

The argument could be made that in some respects you are in more danger. Not only do incidents such as these promote hate of the US by other countries and terrorism, but many of these soldiers end up badly mentally damaged because of the post traumatic stress disorder from the things they took part in over there. There have been multiple incidents where former soldiers snap and go on killing rampages.

War just trades one kind of danger for another. At best it just keeps the majority of the danger in another country.

sigstoat• 16 years ago

multiple incidents? i don't recall hearing of even one in US soldiers returning from the gulf. perhaps the media didn't cover them.

regardless, the question that follows is whether or not that rate is higher than the rate of postal workers doing similar things.

jacquesm16• 16 years ago

> I'm not convinced that I'm more secure because of them.

Does that mean that you are convinced that you are equally secure ?

I would wager you are less secure because of them. For every civilian killed you get a whole family that hates you in return.

Note the recent Russian bombings and the fact that at least one of them was carried out by a woman that lost a loved one.

Multiply by a few thousand and you get why there is no shortage of people willing to take up arms against what they rightly see as an occupation.

patrickk9• 16 years ago

I'm not convinced that I'm more secure because of them.

You are less secure simply because of the pointless decision to go to war in the first place. It was based on utter lies (WMDs, the "link" between 9/11 and Saddam, and "freeing" the Iraqi people nonsense). Anyone can see that. GWB referring to the invasion of Iraq as a "crusade" doesn't help matters either.

coderdude2• 16 years ago

View the page source. There are quotes from people like George Orwell and Dwight D. Eisenhower. I'm glad their display is none, because it's going to look really cheesy.

Edit: The full page went up and the quotes are no longer in the source.

dsplittgerber4• 16 years ago

It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=youtu...

spoiledtechie• 16 years ago

Iraq is a war zone. Thats the first thing people need to understand. Everyone is a civilian, but they could be the enemy. They don't wear formal uniforms. If you were in a War zone and your life was threatened, would you pull the trigger or would you wait to see if someone else is gonna pull the trigger first. War Zones are very worrisome places. You need your BASIC instincts to survive there. Most of those soldiers are using just that. The instinct to survive.

EliRivers4• 16 years ago

I feel it should be pointed out that whilst what you say is probably an accurate depiction, it of course does not make it alright to murder non-combatants.

That's not to say that this alleged video will show such things, of course.

EliRivers4• 16 years ago

Just as a point of discussion, history indicates that within a war zone, professionally trained soldiers tend to do better than those relying on BASIC instinct.

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

And one of those elements of training is conditioning to overcome the basic instinct that prevents people killing others even when their own life is threatened, according to West Point psychologist Lt. Col. Dave Grossman:

http://www.killology.com/bio.htm

dsplittgerber4• 16 years ago

At 04:36 in the video: "Just fuckin', once you get on 'em just open 'em up."

They did not have a proper visual and just randomly started shooting at a guy with what looked like an RPG but was a camera. Now this is a war zone, agreed. But these guys were not under fire in their helicopter, they just started shooting at hard-to-make-out images.

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

What's random about it?

From the chatter, there's a ground force element moving in that direction. The pilots see a group of men gathered in the street, some of them undeniably carrying weapons. They see a man with a long tube crouching around a corner and pointing it down the street. There's a line "Yeah we had a guy shooting", indicating that fire had already come from this group, or at least the pilots thought it had.

There's nothing random about it. They may have been wrong, but it wasn't random targeting of people walking around town.

The van portion of the incident is more questionable. It sounds like they followed the rules they had, but those rules may not have been proper for this situation.

mrtron3• 16 years ago

War by definition:

1 a (1) : a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations

Who is this war between?

It quite simply is no longer a war. It is an attempt of forcing the western preference of 'stability' into a country that was intentionally destabilized by the US upon false pretenses of WMDs.

edit: what are you in disagreement with?

GiraffeNecktie4• 16 years ago

A couple of points. First, Iraq is NOT a war zone. Just because you have lots of soldiers running around and a few random terrorist bombings it does not constitute a "war". The war ended in 2003. Secondly, even if it was a war soldiers are expected to follow basic rules like "don't kill people for no reason". Third, there's no indication that anyone's life was being threatened. The only people who's survival was being threatened were one the ground. Certainly there was no threat to the crew of the helicopters who were standing well away from the ground.

oscardelben• 16 years ago

youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik

coderdude2• 16 years ago

How the heck are they able to tell which guy is which? At 5:12 you see a guy running and they pinpoint who it is, even though there's been all this smoke and you surely could not keep track of people between the moving of the camera and with all the sand and dirt in the air.

ugh3• 16 years ago

I ignored those labels, I tried to not let myself distract by anything that added by the editors. I pretty much only trusted the labels at the very beginning when all the people were pretty clearly recognizable. Doesn’t change much, though.

meroliph• 16 years ago

They probably have a higher quality recording than the one posted to youtube.

yurifury• 16 years ago

They may have been able to tell due to the position of the bodies after the attack.

jcromartie2• 16 years ago

I feel like we have a bunch of trigger-happy teenagers viewing the world through a video-game-like HUD with a joystick, just itching to light something up.

Nobody should support this.

Also, imagine being a child with an Apache circling your town waiting to dispense this sort of justice. You'd probably become a terrorist, wouldn't you?

yesimahuman3• 16 years ago

That video was incredibly eye-opening. Everyone needs to see it just to know what war is like in the 21st century. You can't just ignore this shit.

As for the itching part, I felt at first he was threatened, and I could sense a bit of fear in his voice that the RPG was going to be aimed at him (not sure what the chances are of that hitting the copter though), and I felt like I could understand that reaction were I in a similar position...but then it was pretty clear he just wanted to light it up.

I guess my take on all of this is that these kids are over there in a war zone. Their friends die. The enemy is real and they have been ordered to kill him. You can't blame the kids, but it's so hard to hear their voices knowing they were once living a life like you are, away from danger and war. To most of us, this is just a capture of a video game. It's crazy shit.

elblanco7• 16 years ago

If you notice, at no time does anybody look at the helicopter. That's how far away they were from the action, the people on the ground weren't even aware of the presence of the aircraft.

sunchild• 16 years ago

A sidenote to yours: War prior to the 21st century was equally horrible, if not more so, in terms of scale.

NathanKP7• 16 years ago

I am going to play devil's advocate for a moment. I obviously don't condone the killing in this movie, but just for a moment think about the young kids who were in that helicopter, doing the shooting and all the shit they have to face now. Think about all the haters that are going to be calling down evil on them over the internet and news. Think about how bad they must feel knowing that they killed innocent people when they thought they were killing the enemy.

From their point of view they are in a helicopter, scared, and afraid that someone is going to shoot a RPG at them. You can't seriously expect them to notice the kids or the difference between a camera and a weapon.

Sure they jumped the gun, they killed innocent civilians, but it was a product of the environment and training they received. It happened because America made those kids soldiers and put them in that situation, with a deadly weapon to control. Don't blame them personally.

What does need to be blamed, on the other hand, is the fact that this video was kept secret and that the world was lied to.

That is disgusting.

aerique• 16 years ago

That's not playing the devil's advocate. It's bringing a sensible post to a forum filled with emo reactions.

mrtron3• 16 years ago

I don't know that anyone is blaming the individuals here. The individual on the gun repeatedly got approval to engage and wikileaks posted the rules of engagement as well as the video.

I agree about the system put them into the situation and hid this video being disgusting.

jimmybot• 16 years ago

If they can't actually identify a gun as a gun, why are they engaging?

thirdusername• 16 years ago

I'm not sure where you deriving that fear from especially after the initial fire from the helicopter. All I was hearing was the gunner being excited he got to shoot something.

I realize Americans grow up late but there's also a big difference between being in your (mid?) twenties and being a kid, let alone a young one. How old do you need to be before you are responsible for your own actions and mistakes? I would hope it's before they put you in a helicopter armed to the teeth.

Theres plenty of blame to go around but some of it surely lies on the people lighting up a van recovering wounded people which was of no apparent treat. You can even hear him get stressed as the body they are carrying is getting closer to being loaded into the van, because hes about to miss his opportunity to shoot.

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

> Think about how bad they must feel knowing that they killed innocent people when they thought they were killing the enemy

They felt like this for quite some time now.

You always have the choice to disobey illegal and or immoral orders. It may limit your career options, but, then, who would really like a career that involves covering up what could be, at the very best, considered manslaughter.

> You can't seriously expect them to notice the kids or the difference between a camera and a weapon

I always was under the impression military pilot training went beyond manoeuvring your chopper or firing its gun.

While all of them have the excuse of being in the middle of a war and having received orders they are trained to obey, there are lines you don't cross.

samuel• 16 years ago

You can't be serious.

That guy is a sadic. It's OK to be scared. It's OK to confuse a camera with a gun, and shoot before discovering that it really was a weapon the hard way. That shit happens at war.

But aiming a severely wounded guy, begging him to take a weapon so he can shoot without permission it's sadistic. That guy is a sadic. Now we can discuss if he was born sadic or just the result of careful training, but it's hard to deny, watching the video and hearing the conversations that he wanted to shoot, and was having fun, the kind of fun a hunter feels.

Of course the US Goverment, the Army, whoever, is to blame because covering the thing up. But that soldier is a murderer, no question about that.

ck2• 16 years ago

Think about how bad they must feel knowing that they killed innocent people

Er, they could have joined the Peace Corp, Red Cross, etc. They didn't accidentally wake up one day and kill someone, they made a series of choices and put themselves into a series of events where they got to use powerful weapons against people.

Think about how bad the friends and relatives of the innocent people they killed feel.

jacquesm16• 16 years ago

Those kids shouldn't have been in control of those weapons anyway, they should have been half the world away going out that evening. The US is in Iraq for all the wrong reasons and the amount of collateral damage (and the amount of cover ups) is simply disgraceful.

Once you create a situation like this you own the pieces that you break.

Covering this up shows how high up this goes.

The US should be grateful to whoever leaked this, hopefully they'll tread more careful now. As long as the mental value of a civilian is deemed smaller than that of an American soldier this will continue.

Not that long ago there was a statistic posted here with how the number of US combat deaths was dropping steadily, but nobody thought of mentioning the number of civilians that get killed by soldiers in situations like these.

patrickk9• 16 years ago

Congratulations on a fairly even-handed post.

However, two points I disagree entirely with:

"From their point of view they are in a helicopter, scared, and afraid that someone is going to shoot a RPG at them."

Guys in chopper: Wrapped in bulletproof glass and several inches of heavy armour, with enough firepower under their thumb to reduce a battalion of tanks to scrap metal (remember attack gunships like the Apache were designed to repel Soviet tank formations from coming over the Rhine during the cold war).

Iraqi guys on street: wrapped in cheap cotton shirt, with a 70 year old assault rifle under his arm. Completely oblivious to the angel of death hovering above (the chopper was circling for quite some time at the very start of the video; no-one, least of all the RPG gunner, seemed to notice).

"Think about how bad they must feel knowing that they killed innocent people when they thought they were killing the enemy."

Think about how bad the poor Iraqi mothers must've felt during the closed-casket funeral. Or how they feel now, seeing their husbands/sons/brothers being gunned down all over YouTube. I hope none of them have internet connections for their sake.

mrtron3• 16 years ago

Yes, I would become a 'terrorist' if that means fighting with any means necessary. In Iraq that means IED's.

A childhood friend of mine just returned from Afghanistan missing an arm and leg from an IED. He understands why they use those tactics given the firepower mismatch.

I would also like to add to your point that there is no duality between supporting the troops and being against events like this. You can do both.

tsally4• 16 years ago

I feel like we have a bunch of trigger-happy teenagers viewing the world through a video-game-like HUD with a joystick, just itching to light something up.

Your analysis strikes me as a bit glib.

There are two critical pieces to this issue and I think it is important we distinguish between the two. The first part (which is what you are trying to get at) is that the prospect of warfare being conducted through a video-game like interface is scary and feels wrong. I agree and I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach just thinking about it. Imagine soldiers driving to work in the morning from their homes in the suburbs, putting in a 9-5 day piloting a drone killing insurgents, and then going home to their families in time for dinner. Very scary.

However, the second part is what you miss. These military personnel are kids. Kids that we ask to conduct a large scale invasion and then engage in the near-impossible task of nation building. As Thomas Barnett says, the same 19 year old just can't do it all. These kids should have been out of Iraq after we captured Saddam. They aren't psychologically equipped to deal with a country post-invasion. This video is a perfect example of that. Notice how the kid mistakes a camera for a weapon and is extremely jumpy when he is trying to figure out whether he is being shot at. He's never been trained to deal with this kind of situation (urban warfare, enemies without uniforms, civilians intermixed with soldiers) and it's criminal we force teenagers make these kinds of decisions every day.

All of that said, clearly bad decisions were made in this video. I'm not disputing that. But there are two crimes in this video.

waterlesscloud3• 16 years ago

Why is everyone calling these soldiers kids?

There's a good chance the pilots at least are older than most of the people reading this forum.

Qz3• 16 years ago

I wonder how likely you would be to think that if it the video games that simulate this exact kind of thing didn't exist -- do we think they're playing a video game because of the video games they've played, or do we think they're playing video games because of the video games we've played?

papachito2• 16 years ago

He's talking like a gamer in that video.

jackfoxy2• 16 years ago

Whoever was shooting lived through this once in real-time. Everyone else gets to view it again and again, stop the action, if they please, back up...

EliRivers4• 16 years ago

Isn't that true of everything ever recorded? What point are you making?

Dellort• 16 years ago

Well that's not true unless you publish the recording in some way so that everyone has a chance to watch it.

etherael4• 16 years ago

I think the point he's probably making is it's a lot easier for us sitting here in front of our computers with no risk to our person watching a video edited and subtitled with helpful descriptions of exactly what's happening after the fact than it is for a pair of soldiers strapped into a piece of military hardware hovering over an active warzone with immediate risk to their lives in the event that they're engaged by enemy forces armed with RPG's.

sliverstorm14• 16 years ago

he means it's easy to analyze and criticisze from our safe little chairs.

colinplamondon• 16 years ago

Watching this in a YouTube video is gut-wrenching after the introduction, knowing what's going on ahead of time - I still feel sick five minutes later. But at the time? There was the man crouching against the corner of the house, looking like he could possibly have an RPG to blow the shooter out of the sky.

The guy doing the shooting was trigger happy, but murder is probably too strong for this. Clearly this is a fucked up example of what happens in the midst of urban warfare, but more than that is going beyond the context of the video.

After the shooting, a black van runs up to collect bodies and help the wounded, in a very organized fashion--- it doesn't seem unreasonable that they thought that they were dealing with a team radio'd by insurgents.

I think the bigger problem here is that you have a godlike helicopter raining death on people below, with no on the ground intelligence.

Why doesn't the helicopter have the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds in this kind of situation? Why can't they communicate with the man crawling after the shooting? If we can fly UAVs from Vegas, why can't we fucking drop a remote ground vehicle to deal with grey area situations without killing eight people?

This seems like a disgusting failure of capabilities more than malicious murder.

sliverstorm14• 16 years ago

> Why doesn't the helicopter have the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds in this kind of situation?

Even if it did, I'm pretty sure the lethal kind are called for when you see an RPG pointed at you. We know it wasn't one now, but if it had been me in that helicopter? I doubt I would have chosen non-lethal.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

I agree with a lot of your points - except there is no such thing as a non-lethal round fired from a helicopter. Any material you shoot at people at that velocity will kill them, and the velocity you need to make it non-lethal would be too low for any accuracy from that height. I did some work on non-lethal rounds and they need to be fired from an underpowered shotgun or grenade launcher to be slow enough not to kill people.

What really would help is better cameras. If the gunner had better resolution and zoom, he would have clearly seen it wasn't an RPG. If we give these guys the power to be judge, jury, and executioner, we also need to give them the senses to make an informed decision. That technology is possible and just like uparmored HUMVEES for whatever reason it is not available to these guys and innocent people died because of it.

But hey, lets go back to the broader generalizing on the state of US society and the blood-thirstyness of its troops because after all, it is the internet.

lolcraft• 16 years ago

There was the man crouching against the corner of the house, looking like he could possibly have an RPG to blow the shooter out of the sky.

The helicopter was at very long range; no one of the guys on the ground looked at it. The "RPG" was pointed to the ground. You can see that it was a camera before he starts to fire. Further, an RPG takes two seconds or so to draw, time which the gunner could've used for confirmation. It didn't look as a threat to the helicopter, once seen; still the gunner freaked out and shot them.

Very organized team? They were two guys in a dirty van.

Yes, it wasn't, strictly speaking, murder. Still, it was unjustified, criminal use of force.

etherael4• 16 years ago

I can't help but think this isn't a bad argument for a heavier investment in removing the risk to allied lives element from decisions like this, it's one thing to mistake a telephoto lens on a camera for an RPG as illustrated here http://collateralmurder.com/en/resources.html.

You might be more prepared to risk being wrong if, were you not wrong, you weren't potentially betting your life on the fact. The pilot sounded genuinely scared when he misidentified that RPG, one would not expect the same if it was a UAV feed.

Skeuomorph3• 16 years ago

I agree with you.

In the video I didn't see a medium white Canon lens as illustrated there. I'm not sure guessing at what a man in a hostile zone is brandishing from behind a corner is going to help:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51uImrxH1yL.jpg

Whatever it is, don't duck in and out behind corners pointing your black tube at military gunships or approaching convoys. Don't bet your life on whether the guy behind the turret paid to keep the zone clear can sort that out while you pop in and out of view.

jacquesm16• 16 years ago

Au contraire, the fact that a soldier is far enough away to be able to murder indiscriminately when not at risk is what caused this. If he had been standing more vulnerable but right by that road side this would not have happened.

The further you take the person pulling the trigger away from the person they murder the easier it gets.

Do you really believe the guys that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been able to do it given an infinite supply of ammo and a machine gun that never jams pointed at fields full of tens of thousands of unarmed civilians?

etherael4• 16 years ago

You make an interesting point but the alternative is to purposely hamstring your combat abilities in order to make a commitment to using them less appealing. That doesn't sound like a sound survival strategy.

I am by nature a pacifist and would prefer not to engage in war or violence at all. However, once the bonds are slipped and the blood starts flowing, I don't think there should be any punches pulled and the more options on the table the better. I still maintain that if the pilot in this particular instance had less reason to fear for his own safety he would have been more careful with his judgement call on the combatant status of the target group.

This is actually one of the common arguments for increasing the role of remote robotic agents on the battlefield, less necessary to be overly aggressive in defense in edge cases. I think the commonly cited example is not calling artillery on apartment buildings to flush out a sniper.

mindcreek2• 16 years ago

Whatever happens in the first five minutes of the video, killing unarmed people helping wounded is murder, it is out of moral and military code of any legal combat group.

The sad and disgusting part is this video was in the hands of the us military all along and they knew, what happened and how it happened, and they also tried to stop the video from leaking out actively to cover their malformed policy.

This video is proof of murder, disresctpectful combat, imcompetent ranking officers and blind trigger happy pilots.

Calling this video anything other than above is political bullshit.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

Who ever thinks that these atrocities won't occur in war? The mindsets of the people who commit these actions are not a far leap from the mindset that a soldier has to maintain in order to kill enemy combatants day in and day out.

Every war there's big civilian massacres and other major moral abridgments no matter what the combatants' PR department spews out. We should be realistic about that.

It's not an excuse for those that committed or knew about this, but it shouldn't be unexpected.

sophacles2• 16 years ago

Whether or not it is expected is irrelevant to the discussion of hiding the fact it happens. It also is irrelevant to the reprimand/punishment of those who do cross the line.

youngian7• 16 years ago

I think that's part of the reason it's so important that things like this become public. I think every American of voting age should have to watch this video, because this is the reality of war and we need to come to terms with what we're inflicting. People need to realize that there are real people dying horrific, needless deaths, because war is always horrific and no amount of euphemisms changes that fact. If we are going to support a war, we should be forced to reckon with the real face of it, and accept that some of the blood is on our hands. It's easy to pretend otherwise when you've always lived with an ocean between you and the conflicts.

oconnore4• 16 years ago

You suggest that there exists some "moral code" which justifies killing each other in certain circumstances. Combat is never respectful, nor is it ever moral. To make honorable rules of engagement is to obscure the horrific violation of humanity that war is.

In my opinion, we should only ever declare total war, and we should not allow ourselves the opinion that some wars are less gruesome than others. If we aren't willing to carpet bomb a school, we should not be willing to destroy the family that depends on it.

And yes, the video is horrific.

sliverstorm14• 16 years ago

idk, I've always felt killing someone in self-defense is moral. Not that it's right and good, but wholly fair and justifiable and moral. minor nitpick with your overall salient point.

I really agree with you here. In my opinion, total war is how war should be waged. If we're in, we're in for the long haul and we take it serious. Plus, it forces our citizens to constantly acknowledge and renew their commitment every day, which means no shaky 'oh I'm not sure' wars.

cynicalkane2• 16 years ago

To make honorable rules of engagement is to obscure the horrific violation of humanity that war is.

This is the whole point of rules of engagement. Making war a lesser--or "more obscure", if that is your semantic preference--violation of humanity is the goal, the whole idea, the very point of these rules. We live in a time where we can easily afford not to have total war--not that it was ever a good idea in the first place.

You think as long as we're killing people, it's OK to carpet bomb schools? As long as you're doing bad, might as well not be selective about it? Might as well go for the big enchilada? Maximize body count, like a video game? You're an idiot of the first class. Not just because of the foolishness of the idea, nor because of the lazy faux-intellectual rationalization therefor, but because of how easily you justify the obliteration of lives and nations when such a thing is not even close to necessary. Thank God that America abandoned your mindset after Vietnam; too bad they didn't abandon it earlier.

run4yourlives4• 16 years ago

Same assessment here as a former soldier. The first piece is debatable. I clearly saw an RPG and a personal weapon, and to be honest, unless the cameraman was ID'd, I would be 50/50 on that.

I don't know the tactical situation, but it looks like they were providing aerial cover for a convoy of some sort, since that's who they keep chatting with. This was quite possibly an ambush in it's very early stages. While disturbing (welcome to war) I don't think that the actions of the crew where unbecoming at that point.

I did however have an issue with the destruction of the van. There were no weapons visible, it was clear that they were collecting bodies for transport/medical attention. Any perceived or real threat to the convoy was at that time neutralized, and there was no need to fire.

Doing so clearly violated the Geneva conventions and the US Army's ROE. Both apache crews should be charged with murder, and the authorizing officer should be charged with some lesser charge for not confirming the intended target.

Alex39172• 16 years ago

At 4:20 one of them says, "We had a guy shooting" even though clearly no one is shooting at the time. What's up with that?

elblanco7• 16 years ago

Don't forget too that this was right around the high point of violence in Iraq not long after the surge started. It's likely the Apaches and the Bradleys were part of a coordinated clearance operation not a convoy.

I definitely saw cameras with telephoto lenses in the video, but I also saw a weapon as well.

I'm glad the video was released, but it should have been released raw and without all of the markup and commentary.

subpixel• 16 years ago

run4yourlives sums up by feelings about this particular incident very well.

However, I'm uncomfortable with the way Wikileaks has couched the release of this video (the editing, the title, and the url used to promote it). It's agitprop, and in the long term I think it undermines the ability of leaked documents like this to enter the public discourse and (possibly) effect change.

My advice to Wikileaks if they want my continued support is to stick to what you're good at: enabling whistleblowers to anonymously release documents that may serve the public interest. But let Michael Moore handle the filmmaking.

dkarl4• 16 years ago

Why were they so agitated about getting permission to shoot the men who came to pick up the wounded guy? Did they just really, really, really want to make sure that guy died?

And who gave them permission? (Really ignorant here, sorry....) Did the person who granted them permission to fire have another source of information about the situation, or was the decision based entirely on the crew's description of the situation? Did it have something to do with them saying the van was "picking up weapons?"

clammer9• 16 years ago

>killing unarmed people helping wounded is murder, it is out of moral and military code of any legal combat group

I'm not so sure that's true. According to the Hague and Geneva Conventions medical personal are off limits, but are supposed to be identified as such. If the people who jumped out of the van had medical personnel markings, they wouldn't have been attacked.

Instead they were presumed to be members of the same un-uniformed militia which is common in Iraq (as I understand it).

That's not political BS, that's just how war works. War is terrible and should be reserved for the defense of our nation, not these pseudo war escapades across the world that we have now.

mindcreek2• 16 years ago

So killing unarmed people helping wounded is perfectly fine huh? This is not an active war zone this area is a Country which us claims to be helping to rebuild order and infrastructure, after us destroyed both.

War is an active engagement between military forces, not randomly killing civillians in a country you are trying to help.

Zak2• 16 years ago

Based on their behavior, it seems reasonable to presume that they are medical personnel. That may not satisfy the legal requirements, but there's a reason we have people deciding whether to pull a trigger rather than computers. It may have been legal to fire on the van, but anyone in a position to make that call should have the sense not to.

papachito2• 16 years ago

Many hospitals in Iraq don't have money for equipment, let alone uniforms for their staff.

Jeema30002• 16 years ago

According to the Geneva Conventions, you are not allowed to shoot wounded combatants who are out of the battle... period. End of story.

It also specifically provides protections for civilians who are trying to assist wounded soldiers, so it's immaterial whether or not they were official responders or not.

Either way this is a war crime and needs to be prosecuted as such. Those who conspired to suppress it should also be charged as co-conspirators.

eagleal4• 16 years ago

So what are Americans doing from stopping their Army? (I'm not saying it's Americans fault, just govt administration, as everywhere)

For me this video it's just a tool for journalists to play with, and the media to make some money with. Nothing more.

Has the army retired from war? No. The administration could be punished only once it finishes its goal.

dkarl4• 16 years ago

So what are Americans doing from stopping their Army?

Choosing between the candidate who supported the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the candidate who only supported the invasion of Afghanistan.

lionhearted2• 16 years ago

> This video is proof of murder, disresctpectful combat, imcompetent ranking officers and blind trigger happy pilots. Calling this video anything other than above is political bullshit.

Proof of murder, huh? I'd point out some things worth thinking about, but it sounds like you've completely made your mind up already. Would it be worth spending a few minutes trying to look at why it happened, and all the elements of the situation, and the thinking patterns of people involved - or would that just be "political bullshit"?

It's easy to apply black and white thinking to a battlefield after the fact, but it seems to miss a lot of the nuance of the situation - the helicopter had been radioed in by ground troops who were under small arms fire. The fight might or might not have still been going. It's not clear where the van came from, and what the positions of the engaged ground forces were relative to the van. Who knows if that style of van had been used recently for combat purposes by the insurgency. This was at the height of the surge - was there a curfew or some ban on vehicles in the area?

I don't know. I'd ask and think about things like that, but is that just "political bullshit"? Battlefields seem to rarely give way to black and white morality. It seems like after something like this comes out, you could get more answers by thinking and asking smart questions than you would by rushing to moral judgment.

xilun666• 16 years ago

yeah, war is a mess, context exists on a battlefield, let's destroy more medevacs, YEAH

fire in the hole.

GiraffeNecktie4• 16 years ago

There was a bunch of guys casually wandering around the middle of street. They weren't running, hiding or shooting and they were obviously not participating in this supposed firefight.

Subgun• 16 years ago

If you are in a war zone near people with weapons you have no right to complain if you get shot at.

You can Monday morning quarterback the scenario all day long. The fact is the pilots saw firearms and RPG's with a group of people and knew US soldiers would be the target. It's tragic but what armed conflict isn't.

jcromartie2• 16 years ago

When you live in a war zone, you don't really have a lot of say in wether or not you will be near people with guns. Also, are you saying that the children in the van have no right to complain?

GiraffeNecktie4• 16 years ago

Iraq is not a "war zone" (the war ended in 2003). As in the United States, many law-abiding citizens in Iraq carry weapons for self defense. Sometimes local militias have heavy weapons for self defense because their neighborhood is threatened by rival militias.

youngian7• 16 years ago

In case anyone hasn't heard, Wikileaks is badly in need of donations. http://collateralmurder.com/en/support.html.

This video is a damn good argument for why what they do is important. Go give them a few dollars. I can't think of a cause I see as more important in the world right now (with the one possible exception of free software).

jacquesm16• 16 years ago

The video is important, but the way it's been released is exactly the opposite of a 'worthy cause', they could have done that a lot better.

Wikileaks is starting down the 'greenpeace' road, great initial intentions eventually becoming a self-perpetuating PR machine.

They should cut down on the hyperbole and the editing, simply release that information that they consider to be legitimate once verified.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

And their expenses wouldn't be so high. Forget the editing, forget the hosting, forget the editorializing. Post the video and the transcript on a bittorent channel and let it move on to better funded news agencies. Is their job to protect the sources that release information, or be an advocacy group based around information leaked from sources? Because I would donate to the former but not the latter.

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

WL supporter and small donor here. I agree 100%, the integrity of Wikileaks depends strongly on its willingness to abstain from activities beyond verification and dissemination.

sliderr• 16 years ago

I wonder what mindset one in the military must have to shoot on unarmed carrying away wounded. I always thought that at least those people a bit higher up in the ranks had at least some moral values or ethical responsibility. I mean Joe Redneck doesn't get to fly a 20 Mio. $ Helicopter just getting out of basic training.

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

A small nitpick. It's "gunsight", "gun sight" or something like it.

I sincerely hope the whole chain of command goes to jail.

sheldonwt• 16 years ago

If you had any doubts as to the important of Wikileaks, give this video ten minutes. This is cold blooded murder. Those people were clearly unarmed, and the conversation that occurs over the radio is disgusting. It was like they were begging to just pull the trigger, no matter what they were aiming at.

NathanKP7• 16 years ago

Don't forget that that is what soldiers are trained to do. They are trained to feel scared of the enemy and shoot to solve problems. It is not surprising that incidents like this occur, or that some soldiers go crazy and go on shooting rampages later when they come back home.

War is a sign of a world culture that is mentally ill, and being a soldier that is willing and eager to kill is a form of mental illness.

cellis• 16 years ago

Mental illness? I'm surprised, but I suppose an idealist would think that. I'm pretty sure the fight or flight syndrome has been well documented as being in every human, not just soldiers. So, are we all mentally ill?

Skeuomorph3• 16 years ago

> clearly unarmed

Even "collateralmurder.com" says the men are carrying "something that might be a weapon" and "what appears to be a weapon" and that site is hardly unbiased.

drinian2• 16 years ago

While this isn't on the same scale, we spent several weeks in high school studying My Lai[1] as a lesson in personal responsibility and morality. It seems we've learned nothing, not even to be honest when these things happen, but, then again, perhaps the lesson is that war changes people in horrible ways?

Wikileaks' continued existence is essential to our democracy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

jacquesm16• 16 years ago

I always found it depressing that Colin Powell got a red card for his UN speech but that My-Lai cover up was never even mentioned.

teilo• 16 years ago

It is quite obvious from watching this video that the boys pulling the trigger have no idea what they just did. So, calling it "murder" is a bit misleading. We got to see the photos of the reporters with their cameras before watching the video. So we obviously know, going in to it, that those are not AK-47's and RPGs. But that fact that they have no idea what they just did, is damning in itself.

One could easily presume from watching this video, that we have inculcated a sense of utter callousness for the taking of life, and an inability to distinguish peaceful from threatening activities. The judgement is made in an instant that there are guys with guns, despite the fact that there is no suspicious activity going on. It looks like a lawful public assembly. The presumption is: Iraqi men, milling about an area, some with something slung over their shoulders. Must be insurgents. Kill em. Good job, soldier.

Is anyone in doubt that the guys who drove up in the van were unarmed? Did they LOOK like they were trying to shoot back at the helicopter. No. They kept looking at it, wondering if they were next. They were risking their lives trying to save an innocent. And they were killed for it.

The most chilling line, after announcing that two children were wounded: "It serves them right for bringing kids into a battle." Serves them right? Setting aside the fact that nobody who got shot on that day knew that they were in a battle until the bullets starting raining down, do they truly deserve to have their children shot because they bring them into a battle?

I have no doubt that these boys will be haunted by what they did the rest of their lives. I utterly abhor what happened and I was literally shaking watching this video. At the same time, I cannot help but sympathize with the young men that we have placed into a situation that, quite literally, cuts off their common and moral sense and requires them to be trigger-happy in order to gain the accolades of their commanders. My God, what are we doing?

Qz3• 16 years ago

Watching the video, it's fairly obvious to me that the people holding supposed rocket launchers were in fact holding cameras with telephoto lenses. However, this is obvious to me after having read comments about the video, as well as with all the captions in the video explaining what it is we're seeing. This is a lot information gathered after the incident, when the people on the ground actually got to go in and see that there were no RPG launchers and so on. So even though I clearly see a telephoto lens, I can't say that the guys in the helicopters could see that. I have a hard time saying that this is clearly murder.

The whole situation seems like a no-win to me. If they (US Military) don't release the video, they cover their ass in the short run, but when the video gets leaked it makes them look more guilty than perhaps they really were. But if they had released the video then, you'd still get tons of people proclaiming how horrible this is.

Don't get me wrong, this is horrible, but it doesn't seem more horrible than a lot of the stuff that happens over there. It's horrible that we're even in this situation.

sliverstorm14• 16 years ago

reading the comments in this thread is a little depressing, and reminds me why the army has their own justice system. we as safe citizens, protected by these very soldiers, want to scrutinize and analyze and put every move under a microscope to ensure it meets our concept of right and wrong and decency.

Guess what. Mistakes will happen. War is war, and it is inherently already not particularly moral. We reap the benefits in security, and wish to tear people down when mistakes are inevitably made... If soldiers were tried by civil courts I can see things getting just as bad as the private sector, where liability laws and their effects are suffocating and nobody can move for fear of a civil suit.

Put another way, we send these boys- kids my age, people much like myself- into a pressure cooker with their lives at risk. We ask them to sweat and fight and sufferand die all on our behalf, and they do so. Then we want to punish the ones who aren't perfect and make a mistake. That's right, go on and punish a man sent there for you and by you who did his best for all of you. Then come back and tell me how you can sleep at night.

Frazzydee• 16 years ago

Except that it's not war. It's a unilateral occupation.

sliverstorm14• 16 years ago

I would argue that 'unilateral occupation' is what is going on as part of an attempt to wage war, but I see your point.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

If it wasn't a war, US troops wouldn't have been killed long after the Iraqi army was dissolved and they would have left by now. If anything the worst part of the war was the part where the US was fighting non-Iraqis who came to fight them in Iraq. Then the Iraqi people were losing from both sides. Nobody can really believe the US wants to CONQUER Iraq in the sense that they want to stay there indefinitely for control. If the insurgents hadn't fought the US would have left a hell of a long time ago.

mquander2• 16 years ago

Look, what are you talking about? Sent there for me and by me and for all of us? That's bullshit. Statistically speaking, most of us writing here think that the whole war is a pointless hole that we're shoveling money and lives into. We didn't ask for it, we don't like it, and it's our impression that it's hurting us, not helping us. They were sent there against our loud protests by politicians and policymakers we largely despise. What the fuck are we supposed to be appreciating?

If you think the war is a just or sensible war, that's your perogative, and perhaps then you feel a great deal of remorse and compassion for soldiers fighting it. But if you think the war is insane, then it's equally insane to feel like the soldiers fighting it are doing a great good and should therefore deserve some huge benefit of the doubt on events like this.

sliverstorm14• 16 years ago

Obviously there are dissenters, I'm speaking of the nation on the whole. We elected our President(s) and as such he (they) should be considered to speak for us on the whole. If he doesn't, that's our fault- on the whole. And, like it or not even the dissenters benefit from the operations over there. Certainly not what we like to talk about, but they are maintaining the American sphere of power which keeps America on top of the heap and keeps your gas cheap (for starters). Right or wrong, want it or not, you are benefiting from it, and it feels horrid in my mind to rabidly attack people who are helping me through their own sweat and blood- even if I don't want their help.

So yes- they do it for all of us, even you. They are sent there for you along with everyone else in this nation. We, the nation (not you the individual) sent them, and you are a part of the nation. Stand behind them, whether you support the cause or not.

I don't think the war is just or sensible. I don't feel the soldiers are doing a great good, but I do feel it's ridiculous to tear them down. They are on our side, they are our men and our citizens. You can hate the war, but don't blame our soldiers; they are still our brothers and sisters.

qeorge• 16 years ago

Not in our name.

drinian2• 16 years ago

Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work. That seems like an enormous number given that about 4,800 US soldiers died in the same time period. At about 250,000 US troops in Iraq, that would imply about 7,200 journalists total in-country, assuming an equal proportion of journalists killed.

In fact, there were about 220 "embedded" journalists in 2007 [1]. Certainly, there were a lot of journalists not associated with the US Army, but, still, the conclusion seems to be that being a journalist in Iraq is far more dangerous than being an American soldier in Iraq.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10...

elblanco7• 16 years ago

Not only that, but journalists are often more exposed than soldiers. They tend to shack up out in the city, drive around in unarmored vehicles with local translators, and aren't tapped into the information network about where bad things are happening right now.

pw• 16 years ago

I'm disappointed that this was killed.

philwelch4• 16 years ago

Why was this killed? Were commenters being assholes?

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

I agree that the shooting of the van was unequivocally wrong and, possibly, murder.

People commenting, though, need to remember a couple of points; they are sat at home viewing this on big monitors under no pressure. In reality that was viewed on a small screen under the pressure of war fuelled on adrenaline.

I can see how the first attack could be considered simply a tragic mistake. Also there is probably little chance they would have spotted the kids in the van. Regardless the attack on the van was utterly unprovoked - I wouldn't call it totally malicious but a mistaken, adrenaline driven, undisciplined and rushed attack. He wanted to shoot it and didn't take the necessary pains to decide if it was a threat or not (clearly, it was not).

Someone should be held very responsible for this.

However I also feel Wikileaks have milked some aspects of the video. I would much prefer to have seen the shortened version without the "heart strings" introduction etc. I believe doing that actually takes away from the impact of the video - show us what happened first, then do the dedications.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

Do they have a non-YouTube link with the original video they have to see its quality? I'd be interested to see if the Apache gunner has that quality of video when making decisions or if it was clearer for them. It would seem that a better video camera that showed the gunner more clearly what they were holding could have avoided this whole incident, but the fuzziness may be an artifact of YouTube itself.

nfriedly• 16 years ago

The two men shown around 3:39 (not the journalists) do appear to be carrying weapons.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

So if Reuters was trying to get this video via a FOIA request, and wikileaks now has it, will Reuters be writing about it? If this pops up onto the "real" mainstream it will (probably) be a big story a la Abu Ghraib, but if it remains on the internet the overall impact will be smaller. Have previous wikileaks documents made their way up the news chain?

jacquesm16• 16 years ago

It's all over the web:

http://www.nu.nl/buitenland/2219553/amerikanen-vermoordden-i...

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/04/05/4117730-wik...

http://www.mediaite.com/online/wikileaks-publishes-video-of-...

And since one of the people murdered was a Reuters employee I'd wager the chances they will write about it are about 100%.

mambodog2• 16 years ago

Torrent of the video available here: http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torren...

(for anyone interested being part of the crowd-archive)

ivankirigin4• 16 years ago

This story toggles between dead and alive. Clearly some moderators disagree.

Most people that say this site is degrading have been here for only a short time. I just passed my 1000th day on the site. In my opinion, shit like this does not belong on this site.

jacquesm16• 16 years ago

'shit like this' is a fantastic display of the power of the internet at work as a force of democracy, it is one of the worst ways of presentation that I've ever seen but it concerns all of us here in ways that we probably don't even realize yet.

Arguably this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203545 belongs here a lot less than this article.

ivankirigin4• 16 years ago

You obviously didn't read that lady gaga article. It is actually really interesting.

If this story were about wikileaks, and not about the iraq war video, I'd think it was appropriate.

kyro2• 16 years ago

I just passed my 1100th day on this site, and I feel this should belong here.

ivankirigin4• 16 years ago

I only mentioned my duration because the common response to "news.yc is getting worse" is "ohh, you're new. People say that a lot"

I'm not new.

pg2• 16 years ago

I've been of two minds about this post. On one hand, it does seem important. But Wikileaks presents it with a lot of propaganda mixed in. They are going far beyond their original role of merely leaking information. So if anyone knows of (or wants to make) a version that's just the original footage, please supply a url and I'll switch the link to that.

Edit: Switched link. Thanks. Please note that many of the comments on this thread refer to the original page.

elblanco7• 16 years ago

The amount of "hey look at that! isn't that bad?" in the video makes it very hard to look at it as a piece of "leaked" forensic evidence.

--edit-- I see an unedited copy has been released as well.

krschultz8• 16 years ago

Agreed. Add in what YouTube does to video and a lot of people are drawing conclusions off a 3rd hand source right now.

The original torrent which I have not yet downloaded but may be better http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torren...

bcl3• 16 years ago

I'd like to see the raw video before they edited it and added sub-titles. Thanks for the link -- this one is slightly clearer than the youtube 480p version.

ugh3• 16 years ago

Here’s the uncut footage on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik

There is only a reference to the website and to Wikileaks at the beginning, no other editorial content (there are subtitles). Might be a bit too little context, would work great in combination with the old New York Times article, though.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

This is the unedited video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik

However it still has the title "collateral murder".

(and I wholly agree; Wikileaks have crossed the line with their presentation here for me. In my opinion it actually harms the impact of the video and is not in keeping with their purported vision as whistle-blowers :()

prole• 16 years ago

In addition to providing the original footage, WikiLeaks appears eager to directly combat the misinformation sown by the U.S. government since the incident took place. My guess is that they wanted to refute the official reports step-by-step to maximize the impact of their leak, and so that there would be little chance of it being swept under the rug by yet another official denial.

Yes, it may come off as propaganda, but why would WikiLeaks want to do all of the hard work acquiring the video, decrypting it, and bearing legal repercussions from releasing it only to have the other major news organizations do the analysis and reap the rewards? WikiLeaks is in need of cash, so there's an incentive for them to provide the full report; and additionally, they do seem to be motivated by a sense of justice, so why entrust the same old news media who might not give it the attention it deserves?

mambodog2• 16 years ago

Also, this video of related material for news services just appeared on the channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BflAj2txMVQ

drunkpotato2• 16 years ago

I agree that I wish they had released the video with only subtitles and left out the narration. It's powerful enough on its own, the rest only weakens the impact and introduces wiggle room for authoritarians to squeal about the horror of liberal propaganda.

noodle2• 16 years ago

i agree that they're presenting it beyond their original intent, but i'd also point out that they've been striving for a business model as a pure information source, just to keep the lights on, and it hasn't been working out. this might be their attempt at finding a way to monetize some of their information.

uriel• 16 years ago

Financial difficulties (which to be honest, I have trouble understanding), does not justify over-hyping and over-editorializing content, it only hurts their image and reputation and means less people will appreciate their work.

Also, if they allow their funding issues to compromise their principles it would be a much bigger issue than if they allow their principles to affect too strongly the way they editorialize.

So if your theory is correct that would be more disturbing, not less.

Maro• 16 years ago

The basic premise here is that the guys on the helicopter claim they see weapons (AKs and RPGs). So they shoot shit up, and then the soldiers get there. What I don't get is that nobody seems to be following up on the basic premise: there is no audio communication where the helicopter guys are asking about weapons, or the guys on the ground saying that they do or don't see any weapons (or that they instead see a camera with a bigass tele lens).

This implies that the soldiers don't care whether their kill was justified. Setting aside conscience, this is bad because there's no feedback - next time they'll just mistake the tele lens for an RPG again.

cj• 16 years ago

"Look at those dead bastards"

"Nice, nice. Good shoot'n"

They bask in the moment, somehow deriving pleasure from the murder of 12 people. This is what disgusts me.

It's dangerous how far from reality some people can drift in certain situations.

Sethnektochy• 16 years ago

Straight from the posting guidelines.....

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

This is in no way an interesting new phenomenon. People have been dieing in wars because of stupid mistakes since the beginning of civilization. How shocking can it be that an individual died who was hanging around people who remotely looked as if they were militants?

Source: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

failquicker• 16 years ago

Let me first say that killing unarmed ANYONE is wrong. And that I did get queezie watching this video. We are suppose to be better than this. That being said, war is not clean. It is not merely a set of commands and rules that are followed where everything turns out ok. It is horrible.

I have been in the smoke of war. Crazy things happen out there. Sometimes, there are children with guns and bombs too. And those bullets kill just as well. It is easy to make mistakes when you're in an area where there are very real threats to your life and the lives of your friends all around. Even so, they are MISTAKES. I don't believe these pilots felt as though they were murdering these people. I'm sure at the time they felt they were dealing with a real threat. But they made egregious errors in judgement and caused a terrible tragedy because of those mistakes.

But there is another tragedy in this case. In the military there is a process called an "After Action Review" that is suppose to be done after EVERY mission. It is a time to look back on what happened, talk openly, and analyse how things could have been handled better. The military could have used this horrid event as a way to change training and tactics to prevent things like this from happening in the future. In just a few hours of being released on the net, there are already scores of dissection and analysis about how things could have been done differently. Imagine if tactical analysts had reviewed this and in theater pilot briefings were changed to reflect the results of that review. Imagine if the military had actually acted in good faith on this event instead of trying to cover it up. This is 2010. The event happened in 2007. And still they did not release the video. It had to be leaked.

In cases like this where mistakes were made, the government loses any credibility to "mitigating circumstances" when they try to cover it up.

I hope one day the military can be more transparent with this sort of action.

I hope one day that we don't need an organization like wikileaks, but I am so glad we have them right now.

And most of all, I hope we aren't going to be watching a similar video in 2013 of a similar event that happened this week.

gort2• 16 years ago

Significant events (note that this refers to the link as modified by pg, not the link as originally posted):

1:11 - We hear there's a guy with a weapon.

1:38 - We see the weapon.

2:05 - Identification of a second weapon. One of the pilots requests permission to engage. This is given; however the helicopter does not have a clear shot and waits.

2:33 - Identification of apparent RPG (is that the camera?)

2:45 - "We got a guy shooting", not sure what this refers to.

3:15 - One helicopter opens fire. The other joins in a bit later.

4:40 - Apparent gap in the tape?

6:15 - We see a survivor crawling slowly, obviously injured.

7:29 - First mention of a van approaching "and picking up the bodies".

7:40 - We see this van and some apparently unarmed men.

7:48 - One of the pilots says "let me engage". They ask permission to engage several times but get no response until...

8:19 - They finally get a reply, and ask for permission to fire on the van.

8:32 - They get permission and open fire with several bursts.

9:28 - Shooting ceases.

(I didn't go much beyond this.)

vaksel• 16 years ago

I like how it's been how many hours since this story leaked...and not a single major U.S. news organization covered it yet(as far as I can tell).

pg2• 16 years ago

Even more interesting perhaps is that I didn't know that, because I don't depend on news organizations for news anymore. Aggregators have been my default source of news for years. News organizations now have the role that weekly publications used to: they're a place you sometimes find interesting articles about things you already knew about.

dkarl4• 16 years ago

Here's something published just today that shows both the value of well-funded commercial journalism and the folly of trusting major news organizations to bother with real journalism:

http://www.salon.com/news/afghanistan/index.html?story=/opin...

In this case, most of the major news sources simply parroted the Pentagon, but some bothered to investigate. Eventually the Pentagon was forced to change its story, at which point CNN and the NYT were able to report that U.S. and Afghan government forces accidentally raided a peaceful party and blamed the deaths of three women they killed on honor killings.

Gotta love this quote from some American Rear Admiral acting as Nato's "director of communications" in Kabul: "You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back." He's either from the "What Would George Bush Say?" school of communication, or he's incompetent, or, if he was choosing his words as carefully as you would expect in such a delicate situation, he decided to send a damned chilling message, not something I want a representative of my government saying to people we're supposed to be educating about freedom and liberal government.

Source for the quote: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/arti...

Quarrelsome• 16 years ago

BBC has had it for a few hours. Not top billing though...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8603938.stm

youngian7• 16 years ago

Yeah, I just noticed that as well. CNN's World page has "He married a video game character," but not a mention of this. Things like this make it hard to feel bad about the looming death of Old Media.

koepked• 16 years ago

CNN has it on the front page now

hoop• 16 years ago

While I agree that the release of this video is important, I disagree with it being posted on HackerNews. We are not Reddit.

lionhearted2• 16 years ago

People are missing that the helicopter was called in by ground forces who were getting fired upon. This is from the unedited video at 15:23:

"Bushmaster to all elements: Which element called in Crazyhorse to engage the eight man team on top of the route?"

"Bushmaster six, this is hotel-two-six, I believe that was me. They had AK-47s and were to our east, where we were taking small arms fire. Over."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik

Looks like the helicopter wasn't flying around and saw a group randomly - it was called into a combat region to support ground troops under fire. Still a bad situation, but a bit different than it's being made out.

kyro2• 16 years ago

The first thing that came to my mind was Sivers' blog post the other day about others being a lot like us.

patrickk9• 16 years ago

I thought one particularly sickening part was around 18:50 when a Humvee drove over a body, or at least the driver thought he did. And then the other guy on the line jokes "well, he's dead". Talk about disrespecting the dead.

When an American soldier dies, his mates will risk their own lives to recover the body and a book and testerone-fuelled movie get made about it (Black Hawk Down). But when an Iraqi gets shot to shreds by a chain gun and run over by a Humvee, its some sick joke. We live in a twisted, unequal world in many ways.

ps. How amusing that this comment is getting down voted. The truth is unpleasant, but still the truth

epochwolf4• 16 years ago

Soldiers joke about their job. It's a way of coping with the stress. Firefighters and police officers will make jokes about things most of us wouldn't dare.

lotharbot• 16 years ago

A partial video is currently on the frontpage of CNN.com. They don't show the part where the helicopter crew actually opens fire, but they do show the guys on the ground and the helicopter crew saying "we've got guys with weapons... that guy's got an RPG" and such.

GiraffeNecktie4• 16 years ago

So, let me get this straight. In Iraq, anyone seen carrying something that resembles a gun or who happens to be in the general vicinity of someone carrying something that resembles a gun is subject to immediate summary execution without stopping to make sure its a gun or sorting out who the people might be or why they might be carrying something that looks like a weapon? And then helping an injured person get to the hospital is also grounds for summary execution? And all this is according to the rules of war and the rules of engagement? And here I thought the Nazis were hard core.

aheilbut• 16 years ago

The US Army released some lightly redacted versions of the reports on its investigations (linked by Salon: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/04/05/wikil...)

http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%2...

In hindsight there were clearly mistakes made, but it looks like the Army took the incident pretty seriously, and there was no big cover-up. One also gets a bit of a sense from those reports of the broader context in which the events were happening, which the video on its own does not show.

I'm not so sure that the histrionics from Wikileaks does anyone much good.

delackner• 16 years ago

Reading the investigation you linked to (the one labelled "1st" I was surprised to see that they describe as perfectly correct the shooting of the van, despite also describing the van as clearly just picking up wounded.

War is very ugly, always, and this is just one of the many aspects of its reality.

Some comments have said this sort of stuff wouldn't happen if the crews involved had high quality optics. The van scene clearly would still happen.

Also very late in the video, when preparing to fire a missile straight into a building, there is very obviously an unarmed man walking along the sidewalk in front of the building, totally relaxed. The excited gunner is so impatient to blow up the building that he simply fires with his crosshairs practically on top of this person.

Again, something that would happen regardless of optics improvements, and a sad message about the level of desensitization soldiers are forced to.

johnbrit• 16 years ago

I hope those guys never come to save my country

johnnyg• 16 years ago

Without the labels and WikiLeaks cuts, could you have looked at these pictures and determined what the guys on the ground were holding? Honest to god, I could not.

Rules of engagement are good. They should be followed. Unfortunately, the government sets them, and I think even a YCombinator startup would get its butt kicked coming up with better rules.

Example: the Van, that is very gray. Is it a weapons collection unit or a medical assistance device? Its both. Its war. Its moving...

As I read through these comments, some gave a back story that the Apaches were called in by ground troops that had taken fire earlier in the day. If that's the case and you are on that trigger, in that moment, I doubt many of us would be as judicious in our decision making.

Wikileaks gun camera video of civilians shot in Baghdad 07/12/07

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