Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

[Mr. Coffee]

Now, we can argue that the Iraqi guerillas aren't covered by the Geneva conventions (mostly on account of not carrying insignia recognizable from a distance). So it is possible to interpret this as a non-violation. That it's perfectly all right to shoot someone who runs to the aid of someone who you've decided is an Iraqi guerilla after they are wounded. And to shoot the van they rode in on.

With out knowing the specifics we really can't call it either way. All we have is grainy gun footage and audio.

But that's lawyering the passage pretty damn far, I'd say. Especially when your identification of the first guy as an actual guerilla is kind of questionable because you did it from a helicopter a long way away.

Which is why I could see charging them with gross negligence, or even manslaughter, but not murder. Baring something going incredibly fucking wrong in both the pilot and the gunner's heads, I really doubt that theses guys arrived on scene and said "Right, let's murder the fuck out of some civilians! 'MERICA FUCK YEAH!".

Why is it worth the effort to do that much lawyering in this case?

Because I find it fucking annoying and pretty goddamned silly when people jump on bandwagons like this, despite not knowing what the particulars of the situation are. Shit, all we have is gun camera footage taken from half a kilometer or more off and what sounds like the two most trigger happy individuals in the entire US Military on audio. Not exactly much to go on for declaring it to be murder and murder only.

Over dramatise much how were the helicopter crew in personal danger from a bunch of guys mooching around in the open a substantial distance off with what may have been AKs?

I kind of doubt the pilots were worried about themselves so much as they were worrying about the guys on the ground that called them over.

[CarsonPalmer]

It uses the term "especially" for a reason. Murder is unlawful killing which is performed with the intent to kill. Ignorance of the law is no excuse.

But ignorance of the facts, or misapprehension of the facts is generally accepted as a mitigating factor. That appears to be the case here. Of course, that doesn't get anybody off scot-free, but it changes the situation a bit. There is a difference between the deliberate murder of civilians and the death of civilians due to carelessness. Nobody here is arguing that the soldiers are innocent, but they are guilty of a crime that is lesser than the one that you want to charge them with.

And then there is the cover-up, which is a separate issue from the actions of the guys in the helicopter.

[open_sketchbook]

The guys that approved and oversaw the coverup seriously need to be strung up over this, metaphorically or literately. The gunner might have fucked up, but those officials are just fucked-up, not to mention dumb as bricks. Admit you accendently fired on and killed a bunch of reporters, and then burn the gunner alive as a scapegoat? The right way to do it. Try to hide the circumstances surrounding the deaths of reporters in the information age? Bad move.

[Plekhanov]

"steel coffin" Over dramatise much how were the helicopter crew in personal danger from a bunch of guys mooching around in the open a substantial distance off with what may have been AKs?

Also are you seriously saying that the guys hanging round in the square look in the least bit like a group which 28 minutes ago attacked occupying troops? Do insurgents trying to get away after attacking US ground forces in Baghdad 2007 just stroll about in the open like that whilst helicopters circle overhead?

You can try to make this sound like some kind of every second counts situation with dangerously stressed helicopter crew but that's a hard sell when the video tells an utterly different story.

Frankly, they did look pretty suspicious. I can understand how the mistake was made. There are a lot of factors that probably went into this. Confirmation bias: once you're "sure" of something, your perceptions of it will tend to conform to your initial impression; also the fact that these guys were walking around in a big group carrying things that cuold easily be mistaken for weapons near a recent shooting in a war zone.

What's "suspicious" about guys strolling about carrying things in the open without making the slightest effort not to be seen from the air? As for "a big group" it's a freakin city you tend to get groups of people in those.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

What's "suspicious" about guys strolling about carrying things in the open without making the slightest effort not to be seen from the air? As for "a big group" it's a freakin city you tend to get groups of people in those.

I would be very surprised if Iraq wasn't still operating under martial law measures in 2007 which would have made the public gathering of more than three people in one place highly illegal. Such measures are extremely common in countries with even far less violent insurgencies for precisely this reason, it automatically lets you know that a group of people is hostile.

[Master of Ossus]

What's "suspicious" about guys strolling about carrying things in the open without making the slightest effort not to be seen from the air? As for "a big group" it's a freakin city you tend to get groups of people in those.

If you hadn't noticed, the streets around them were deserted, probably because there had just been shooting in that area (I can't remember what the curfew rules were in Baghdad in 2007--that might explain it, too). It doesn't seem suspicious, to you, to see a large group of people carrying what could be weapons on an emtpy street, apparently walking towards a group of soldiers?

[CJvR]

Well I would think a unit involved in combat to behave a bit sharper, but then crappy quality of enemy troops is hardly something to complain about. As for the van, merciful civilians or the combat squad's evacuation backup? Things like this will happen when the enemy insists on spitting on the rules of warfare.

[Lord of the Abyss]

What's "suspicious" about guys strolling about carrying things in the open without making the slightest effort not to be seen from the air? As for "a big group" it's a freakin city you tend to get groups of people in those.

I would be very surprised if Iraq wasn't still operating under martial law measures in 2007 which would have made the public gathering of more than three people in one place highly illegal. Such measures are extremely common in countries with even far less violent insurgencies for precisely this reason, it automatically lets you know that a group of people is hostile.

No, it lets you define them as hostile whether they are or not. And like Plekhanov says, this is a city; people are going to end up in groups of three people or more whether they want to or not just because of the population density. Defining any group of three as illegal and automatically hostile is just a way of putting a legal gloss on the more or less random killing of civilians. The same way our soldiers were defining stepping out of a door or getting out of a car as hostile and killing people for it.

[Coyote]

The thing about "fly overhead and get a better look at them" is Hollywood tactics, too. Pilots wouldn't do this because then the insurgents would scatter and melt into the population, to kill another day.

As for kids? Yes, kids are sometimes present on the battlefield, in fact one of the prisoners we took in (whom I guarded briefly) was caught training his 14 year old son to fire an RPG.

[Lord of the Abyss]

The thing about "fly overhead and get a better look at them" is Hollywood tactics, too. Pilots wouldn't do this because then the insurgents would scatter and melt into the population, to kill another day.

If they can't tell what they are shooting at, then they shouldn't fire. Especially in a city, where it is not only reasonable but to be expected that there will be innocent civilians all over. Killing innocent civilians and labeling them "insurgents" is not only completely wrong, but doesn't even make them safer. It's just random killing.

As for kids? Yes, kids are sometimes present on the battlefield, in fact one of the prisoners we took in (whom I guarded briefly) was caught training his 14 year old son to fire an RPG.

They are also even more common in cities than on battlefields.

[MKSheppard]

I pointed this out earlier, but killing civilians in an area you occupy is a violation of Articles 27 and 32 of Convention IV. Try reading the thread next time.

How sad that the US never signed or ratified the later Conventions (which are really terrorist-protection conventions); but the immediate post-WWII Convention, which is a lot different.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Okay, hypothetical: I have a gun, and somebody is around who I believe is a threat to my person, and I act in self defense and shoot them dead. However, it turns out they were unarmed. A reasonable person in my situation would not have come to the same conclusions I did. Is that murder?

The situation is not the same. The best analogy would be if you shot someone believing they were the person who was threatening you, a real person. In that instance if it was reasonable that you perceived your life to be in danger, you would not be charged with murder but manslaughter.

I get that you hate the idea of wrongful death, I do too. The problem is what happened here IS NOT MURDER.

[Lord of the Abyss]

I pointed this out earlier, but killing civilians in an area you occupy is a violation of Articles 27 and 32 of Convention IV. Try reading the thread next time.

How sad that the US never signed or ratified the later Conventions (which are really terrorist-protection conventions); but the immediate post-WWII Convention, which is a lot different.

Yet we condemn groups for violating such conventions who never signed any such things at all.

And "living in a place Americans want to occupy" does not automatically qualify someone as a terrorist.

Okay, hypothetical: I have a gun, and somebody is around who I believe is a threat to my person, and I act in self defense and shoot them dead. However, it turns out they were unarmed. A reasonable person in my situation would not have come to the same conclusions I did. Is that murder?

The situation is not the same. The best analogy would be if you shot someone believing they were the person who was threatening you, a real person. In that instance if it was reasonable that you perceived your life to be in danger, you would not be charged with murder but manslaughter.

Except that is wasn't "reasonable" for them to think that their life was in danger. This is more like shooting at a shadow seen through a curtain because they theoretically might turn out to be a threat. This incident is just another example of how we defined "potential enemy that can be fired upon" so broadly that it pretty much translated to "anything that moves". People stepping out of doors, getting out of cars; and in this case people trying to save the wounded and their kids.

I get that you hate the idea of wrongful death, I do too. The problem is what happened here IS NOT MURDER.

Legally? Probably not, since we write such laws tailored to justify such killings. Morally, yes it was. And in the eyes of our victims. Especially since our being there at all is unjustified.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Don't get me wrong, by the way, steps need to be taken to prevent this sort of thing from happening again, if any can be taken at all. It is a tragedy.

How about no foriegn troops killing anyone in Iraq? Hmm? How about we submit our occupation to an immediate withdrawal democratic referendum, eh?

[Master of Ossus]

The thing about "fly overhead and get a better look at them" is Hollywood tactics, too. Pilots wouldn't do this because then the insurgents would scatter and melt into the population, to kill another day.

If they can't tell what they are shooting at, then they shouldn't fire. Especially in a city, where it is not only reasonable but to be expected that there will be innocent civilians all over. Killing innocent civilians and labeling them "insurgents" is not only completely wrong, but doesn't even make them safer. It's just random killing.

So what do you do when someone can tell, but they're mistaken? Your tautologies just ignore the difficult questions, as in this case.

[Plekhanov]

What's "suspicious" about guys strolling about carrying things in the open without making the slightest effort not to be seen from the air? As for "a big group" it's a freakin city you tend to get groups of people in those.

I would be very surprised if Iraq wasn't still operating under martial law measures in 2007 which would have made the public gathering of more than three people in one place highly illegal. Such measures are extremely common in countries with even far less violent insurgencies for precisely this reason, it automatically lets you know that a group of people is hostile.

If that really was the case then I guess these guys taking a look at the van

and attending the burial of some of those slain

were lucky they weren't arrested/mown down by an apache then. Seeing as how any group of 4 or more people is apparently hostile.

What's "suspicious" about guys strolling about carrying things in the open without making the slightest effort not to be seen from the air? As for "a big group" it's a freakin city you tend to get groups of people in those.

If you hadn't noticed, the streets around them were deserted, probably because there had just been shooting in that area (I can't remember what the curfew rules were in Baghdad in 2007--that might explain it, too). It doesn't seem suspicious, to you, to see a large group of people carrying what could be weapons on an emtpy street, apparently walking towards a group of soldiers?

Right so apart from all the people that were on it, who weren't in a single group nor all moving in the same direction, it was "an empty street

Do you really think you can declare that the surrounding streets are deserted from the brief sweeps of the camera before it focuses in upon the square?

[Lord of the Abyss]

The thing about "fly overhead and get a better look at them" is Hollywood tactics, too. Pilots wouldn't do this because then the insurgents would scatter and melt into the population, to kill another day.

If they can't tell what they are shooting at, then they shouldn't fire. Especially in a city, where it is not only reasonable but to be expected that there will be innocent civilians all over. Killing innocent civilians and labeling them "insurgents" is not only completely wrong, but doesn't even make them safer. It's just random killing.

So what do you do when someone can tell, but they're mistaken? Your tautologies just ignore the difficult questions, as in this case.

Pretty clearly they couldn't tell. It's you who are ignoring the difficult question; what do you do when you can't properly identify the target from far away enough that they can't shoot back?

[Master of Ossus]

Pretty clearly they couldn't tell. It's you who are ignoring the difficult question; what do you do when you can't properly identify the target from far away enough that they can't shoot back?

Epic dodge. You've never felt sure of something but later turned out to be mistaken? That seems to be the issue, here, if we're approaching this from the perspective of formulating ROE's. The problem, here, was not that the "target" was indistinct, nor were the people so far away that they couldn't shoot back--the helicopter was close enough to them that they were concerned about taking fire from one of the people while he was leaning around a corner. The problem was a misidentification--the crew of the Apache was sure that they were confronted with hostiles, but were obviously mistaken.

[Coyote]

Killing a civilian is illegal and wrong-- but what about when the people fighting you are... civilians? They're not really organized; they don't have common uniforms or insignia (except in a few cases, the Badr Militia had all black with green armbands, IIRC). If it is illegal to kill civilians, then there is, by definition, nothing whatsoever that you are allowed to do in the face of terrorism which is largely carried out by civilians.

[Plekhanov]

Hokay, just to add my ten cents here.

Firstly, this should never have happened. Period.

They have no ID on weapons, even sitting on a bloody computer here and taking the time, *I* can't make out what they are carrying. They make an assumption that they are carrying weapons and don't have any assets to confirm or deny. Their entire decision to engage is predicated on the fact that they see a bunch of guys standing in the open holding what they think are weapons. They clearly don't have any downlink to intel or ground officers to double check their footage and get clearence to engage, or if they did, they sure as hell didn't get a second opinion. They did check for friendlies in the area, but 10-1 that its only looking for US troops.

Seriously, how many terrorist cells are going to be just standing out in the open in broad daylight instead of indoors? And how many people in Iraq have AK's? What if they had been Iraqi police or interior troops in the area or something, I very much doubt the US ground controllers would have been informed of every single movement of them. Or some militia the US was paying off?

The entire breakdown here, starts with their IDing of these guys as guys with AK's when you just can't tell ANYTHING, and so it becomes a self fufilling prohpecy, they must be AKs, they MUST be bad guys, every one of them, so lets kill them all. Its a classic example of using oldschool assets like attack choppers in COIN operations, their people are simply trained to look out for enemy infintry on the 'Big Battlefield' and take them out, not to try and squint down a gunsight and tell the sheeps from the goats.

I mean I can see bringing in a chopper to fly top cover for a quick reaction force, providing heavy fire support if needed, interdiction if they try to get away or whatever, but its probably one of the worst platforms for telling the sheeps from the goats in this context. Seriously, the time it took to go from 'hey twenty people down here' to 'twenty people with AK's' to 'twenty hostiles, kill them all' to 'he has an RPG, he's coming right for us!' is just shocking. I don't know what the ROEs were, but they sould like they are ROEs from 2003 in Iraq, not 2007! The pilots really sound like they made up their mind what they saw, and while I won't say they didn't care, I think its clear they were going to see anything from early on as a sheep, not a goat. And we know there WERE friendlies close by, you can hear the pilot calling out when they see the RPG 'Uh negative, he was in front of the Brad', and then they start talking about 4 Hummers. But they still didn't get any other involvement. The group around the RPG hardly look like a fire team setting up, its like 8 guys packed together walking around!

Their continung to engage the wounded is also sickening, but again, it comes down to the fact that the pilots were utterly zeroed in on these guys as enemies, their training had kicked in, and all friend/foe questions simply went out the window. Its horrible, but it all comes back to their initial mistakes.

The HUGE problem with this is the cover up. This was clearly an utter balls up that needed at the LEAST, a real full scale investigation, in the public eye, instead by covering it up and trying to claim it was clearly 'an armed group'. By doing that, they have made this far far FAR worse then it should have been. War is a messy, bloody, horrible thing, and while its trite to say that these things happen, they just do. But WHEN they do, you fucking deal with them then and there, you don't deny it and you don't come out and LIE about it as openly as they did!

Great post and one which is being sadly overlooked. The speed at which they went from the alarmingly casual determination that a bunch of guys strolling languidly about carrying objects with straps on their shoulders are enemy fighters and requesting and getting permission to open fire was amazing.

[Illuminatus Primus]

I wish I could imagine all the apologists in this thread scanning all the coverage of Soviet firefights in Afghanistan in the 1980s and justifying their every choice and death.

[Plekhanov]

The thing about "fly overhead and get a better look at them" is Hollywood tactics, too. Pilots wouldn't do this because then the insurgents would scatter and melt into the population, to kill another day.

Who said "fly overhead and get a better look at them"? Chris OFarrel myself and others were simply saying that the determination that the guys they shot were both armed and hostile was pretty much instantaneous and anything but rigorous. They could have spent a little longer trying to determine whether they were armed and what they were up to without 'flying overhead'.

[Lord of the Abyss]

Pretty clearly they couldn't tell. It's you who are ignoring the difficult question; what do you do when you can't properly identify the target from far away enough that they can't shoot back?

Epic dodge. You've never felt sure of something but later turned out to be mistaken? That seems to be the issue, here, if we're approaching this from the perspective of formulating ROE's. The problem, here, was not that the "target" was indistinct, nor were the people so far away that they couldn't shoot back--the helicopter was close enough to them that they were concerned about taking fire from one of the people while he was leaning around a corner.

Oh, please; these "Oh, just pick up a weapon so I can shoot you" guys weren't that close and they were in no danger. They weren't afraid; they were just looking for an excuse. Something they could label a possible weapon so they could open fire.

The problem was a misidentification--the crew of the Apache was sure that they were confronted with hostiles, but were obviously mistaken.

Because they were just looking for an excuse to label anything they saw an enemy and open fire. Naturally they "misidentified" their targets. That's pretty much been standard behavior for us in Iraq. Someone getting out of a car? That might be a car bomb! Open fire!

[thejester]

Hang on - is this the incident that was described in the book The Good Soldiers?

[Simon_Jester]

With out knowing the specifics we really can't call it either way. All we have is grainy gun footage and audio.

Well, the question of whether they did or didn't violate the convention can be called. They did or they didn't.

The question of whether they knew they were violating it, if they were doing so, can be called. They didn't know.

The question of whether they should have known they were violating the Convention? That can be called too, but that job belongs to a court of inquiry... which the Army decided not to hold, as far as I know.

Which is why I could see charging them with gross negligence, or even manslaughter, but not murder. Baring something going incredibly fucking wrong in both the pilot and the gunner's heads, I really doubt that theses guys arrived on scene and said "Right, let's murder the fuck out of some civilians! 'MERICA FUCK YEAH!".

True. On the other hand, they really, really should have been more careful OR the rules of engagement should have made them be more careful OR we shouldn't be there in the first place. Because if soldiers behave like this (and if the ROE allow it they will, with very natural reasons), we cannot win the war we're trying to fight over there. Not without losing more public relations cred than we can possibly hope to gain from getting it right.

Because I find it fucking annoying and pretty goddamned silly when people jump on bandwagons like this, despite not knowing what the particulars of the situation are. Shit, all we have is gun camera footage taken from half a kilometer or more off and what sounds like the two most trigger happy individuals in the entire US Military on audio. Not exactly much to go on for declaring it to be murder and murder only.

I wouldn't call it murder in cold blood, but I just might call it second degree murder.

Like, if some guy whose mom you just fucked gets mad and pulls out a .44 and blows you away, it's murder. Because he definitely wanted to kill you. It wasn't premeditated, because he didn't think it over, he was just mad at you. Still murder, though.

So I can see calling this murder, even though there was obviously no premeditated intent to kill civilians.

I pointed this out earlier, but killing civilians in an area you occupy is a violation of Articles 27 and 32 of Convention IV. Try reading the thread next time.

How sad that the US never signed or ratified the later Conventions (which are really terrorist-protection conventions); but the immediate post-WWII Convention, which is a lot different.

Ah... the immediate post-WWII convention is Convention IV. It goes like:

Convention I: 1864
Convention II: 1906
Convention III: 1929
Convention IV: 1949

So I'm afraid you're talking out your ass on this one.