Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Cycloneman »

SancheztheWhaler wrote:Hey twister... did you even watch the video? The gunner and pilot identified the guys in the video as carrying weapons. Now unless you're trying to argue that they were lying and knew that these guys were unarmed civilians carrying cameras, enough whining about the Geneva Convention.
Cool, way to be completely brain dead or some shit. I'm talking about the guy who stopped his van for the wounded guy on the side of the road. There was a guy crawling along the floor who the shooter was desperately hoping would pull out his camera so he could blast him to hell, and then there was a guy who stopped to help him. The guy who stopped to help him was killed without any, even flimsy, justification. He didn't have "a camera that looked like an RPG" or anything.
Mr. Coffee wrote:I don't fucking have to. I'm not the one making the claims that they committed premeditated murder and intentionally committed warcrimes, you are. So prove it, motherfucker.
Well, since you're apparently arguing with someone other than me, maybe this conversation should be discontinued. Are you hoping that I'll become confused and think that I made the argument that it was premeditated murder? Feel free to point out where I said that.
Mr. Coffee wrote:Better yet, why don't you just go back to lurking. It's what you're good at.
Nice post count burn. :roll:
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Flagg »

Jesus Christ, some of you people are myopic cunts. The atrocity isn't so much that some psychopath in an Apache brutally murdered a dozen civvies, it's the fact that the military then covered it up and called most of the innocent dead insurgents.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Mr. Coffee »

Cycloneman wrote:
Mr. Coffee wrote:I don't fucking have to. I'm not the one making the claims that they committed premeditated murder and intentionally committed warcrimes, you are. So prove it, motherfucker.
Well, since you're apparently arguing with someone other than me, maybe this conversation should be discontinued. Are you hoping that I'll become confused and think that I made the argument that it was premeditated murder? Feel free to point out where I said that.
You've been pretty much saying exactly that since your first post in the thread, and everytime I ask you to explain how or why it is you think that the pilots intentionally engaged a bunch of unarmed civilians, knowing full well they'd be violating the articles of the Geneva convention you claim they violated. I mean, did you even watch the video? Are you saying that they knowingly lied about weapons being present, and intended to commit multiple murders and war crimes?

If your not saying that, then by al means tell me, but first answer why the fuck are you still trying argue we me about this?

Cycloneman wrote:
Mr. Coffee wrote:Better yet, why don't you just go back to lurking. It's what you're good at.
Nice post count burn. :roll:
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Plekhanov »

Simon_Jester wrote:
Plekhanov wrote:Do guerilla fighters habitually stroll about in open squares whilst there are enemy helicopters overhead?

Ok so the guys had a few items that with enough confirmation bias you could see as weapons but were they were just milling about in the open without the slightest concern about being seen from the air. Do guerillas who've just been involved in attacking occupying forces act like that?
No, they do not. On the other hand, I'd think it would be really dangerous to fall into a pattern of thinking "No, that cannot be the enemy, because the enemy would never be that stupid!" At that point you're vulnerable to the kind of tactics that belong in bad movies.
How were the guys circling in an Apache vulnerable to a bunch of guys who might have AK47s hanging around in a square? The transcript from the unedited video is as follows:

00:03 Okay I got it.
00:05 Last conversation Hotel Two-Six.
00:09 Roger Hotel Two-Six [Apache helicopter 1], uh, [this is] Victor Charlie Alpha. Look, do you want your Hotel Two-Two two el-
00:14 I got a black vehicle under target. It's arriving right to the north of the mosque.
00:17 Yeah, I would like that. Over.
00:21 Moving south by the mosque dome. Down that road.
00:27 Okay we got a target fifteen coming at you. It's a guy with a weapon.
00:32 Roger [acknowledged].
00:39 There's a...
00:42 There's about, ah, four or five...
00:44 Bushmaster Six [ground control] copy One-Six.
00:48 ...this location and there's more that keep walking by and one of them has a weapon.
00:52 Roger received target fifteen.
00:55 K.
00:57 See all those people standing down there.
01:06 Stay firm. And open the courtyard.
01:09 Yeah roger. I just estimate there's probably about twenty of them.
01:13 There's one, yeah.
01:15 Oh yeah.
01:18 I don't know if that's a...
01:19 Hey Bushmaster element [ground forces control], copy on the one-six.
01:21 Thats a weapon.
01:22 Yeah.
01:23 Hotel Two-Six; Crazy Horse One-Eight [second Apache helicopter].
01:29 Copy on the one-six, Bushmaster Six-Romeo. Roger.
01:32 Fucking prick.
01:33 Hotel Two-Six this is Crazy Horse One-Eight [communication between chopper 1 and chopper 2]. Have individuals with weapons.
01:41 Yup. He's got a weapon too.
01:43 Hotel Two-Six; Crazy Horse One-Eight. Have five to six individuals with AK47s [automatic rifles]. Request permission to engage [shoot].
01:51 Roger that. Uh, we have no personnel east of our position. So, uh, you are free to engage. Over.
02:00 All right, we'll be engaging.
02:02 Roger, go ahead.
02:03 I'm gonna... I cant get 'em now because they're behind that building.


So they see people standing round in a square with what could be weapons (which of course could be almost anything) but whom don't seem to be doing anything else the least bit suspect and within 90 seconds ask for and are given permission to open fire, which they then proceed to do at the 1st opportunity.

These aren't some ultra vulnerable infantry guys within easy range of small arms but circling above in armoured gunships, they could have looked a little harder and longer without being "vulnerable to the kind of tactics that belong in bad movies".

I can appreciate how for soldiers on the ground at risk of IEDs, sniping and so forth are incredibly jumpy and open up on civilians but the guys in the apaches weren't at risk from some guys hanging around in a square who may have small arms nor is there any indication that they thought anyone else was close to being at risk. Despite not being at risk they did however seem very quick to interpret anything with a strap as an AK47, anybody holding anything with a strap as an insurgent regardless of what they were doing and confident they'd get permission to kill them on those grounds alone, which of course they did.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Plekhanov »

SancheztheWhaler wrote:Hey twister... did you even watch the video? The gunner and pilot identified the guys in the video as carrying weapons.
And what a rigorous "identification" that was :roll:
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Mr. Coffee »

Flagg wrote:Jesus Christ, some of you people are myopic cunts. The atrocity isn't so much that some psychopath in an Apache brutally murdered a dozen civvies, it's the fact that the military then covered it up and called most of the innocent dead insurgents.
Thjat';s just it, Flagg, you're claiming that it was murder, i.e. that the pilots just decided to make up everything they said about observing weapons, did so intentionally, and then opened fire for the express purpose of killing a bunch of unarmed civilians. I'm asking what the fuck are you basing that on? Now, you can follow along in Dominus and Cyclones footsteps of feigned indignation over "atrocities", but I'm going to keep asking what the fuck you're basic your claim that this was an intentional homicide and warcrime, i.e. the pilots did it on purpose, and I'm going to keep asking that until you or one of those two shitheads fucking explains why your making the claim and provide some fucking evidence to back it the fuck up.

Fuck, the government covering anything up is a completely separate issue. Christ only knows what the fuck they were thinking on that count.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by CJvR »

Well I have to say I probably also would have ID them as hostile, although surprisingly nonchalant ones.

Having seen the sequencs only once there were three things that in the video just before the copter moved out of sight that made my mind up.
1: there were two guys hanging slightly back that sure looked like they were carrying AKs.
2: one guy at the corner sure looked to be carrying a RPG (tripod?).
3: the fellow looking around the corner sure seemed to be acting like he had an eye on the gunship.

Then again I havn't had the training in target identification and shooting autocannons in a crowded urban enviroment that one assume these guys have had...
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Cycloneman »

Mr. Coffee wrote:You've been pretty much saying exactly that since your first post in the thread,
Nope. The only time the words "premeditated murder" appear in my posts is when I'm quoting you.
Mr. Coffee wrote:and everytime I ask you to explain how or why it is you think that the pilots intentionally engaged a bunch of unarmed civilians, knowing full well they'd be violating the articles of the Geneva convention you claim they violated.
I don't think that, so I've avoided answering. I think that they did not use proper discretion and fired when there was no reason to. That doesn't mean I thought that there was some sort of insidious circle-jerk conspiracy to assassinate random civilians.
Mr. Coffee wrote: I mean, did you even watch the video? Are you saying that they knowingly lied about weapons being present, and intended to commit multiple murders and war crimes?
I can understand why they thought weapons were present when they opened fire on the eight-ish guys (it actually does look like two of them had weapons, four if you count cameras). But what I don't know is why they thought weapons were present when the guy stopped his van. Were they just high off adrenaline or something?
Mr. Coffee wrote:If your not saying that, then by al means tell me, but first answer why the fuck are you still trying argue we me about this?
Because you think that only premeditated murder is murder or some shit.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by The Duchess of Zeon »

CJvR wrote:Well I have to say I probably also would have ID them as hostile, although surprisingly nonchalant ones.

Having seen the sequencs only once there were three things that in the video just before the copter moved out of sight that made my mind up.
1: there were two guys hanging slightly back that sure looked like they were carrying AKs.
2: one guy at the corner sure looked to be carrying a RPG (tripod?).
3: the fellow looking around the corner sure seemed to be acting like he had an eye on the gunship.

Then again I havn't had the training in target identification and shooting autocannons in a crowded urban enviroment that one assume these guys have had...
And let's not forget that target identification from aircraft by visual tools is hilariously bad. In WW2 the kill claims could easily by inflated by 200 - 300% in air to air combat, or 500% against ships all the damn time, the same thing for tank busting and destroying vehicles. Basically it is really, really hard to positively ID anything you see from an aircraft, so that trucks become tanks, one tank becomes two and a destroyer becomes a battleship. A camera becomes an RPG is just another aspect of that. Any engagement started by aerial visual identification of the target is virtually guaranteed to result in the target that is attacked not actually being what it is identified as, to this day, since there's no way to improve the human eyeball against sitting in a vibrating contraption at altitude and angle to what you're going after. The misidentification in short is the perfectly understandable part of this event and basically an inevitable fact of combat air support.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Mr. Coffee »

Cycloneman wrote:Because you think that only premeditated murder is murder or some shit.
Premeditated or not, what makes more sense...

1. The pilots made a horrible fucking mistake, thinking camera equipment were weapons, and then acted based on that.

or

2. The pilots decided to lie about the camera gear, instead calling them weapons, and then proceeded to commit war crimes, all the while muttering about there being weapons present in case anyone were to watch the video.

The first I can buy, the video is grainy, and some of that shit if you're not paying attention could possibly look like a fucking weapon. I don't know, I wasn't there (neither were you or anyone else in this thread). People make mistakes like that all the time, misidentifying something, it's common as all hell. Admittedly a dozen or so people usually don't die as a result of such a common mistake, but still shit happens.

The second I can't buy because in order for it to be true the pilots would have had to planned this in advance. That's where I'm getting the premeditation from. If you believe the second scenario is true, you're saying the pilots did this on purpose knowing full well what they were doing, and the only way they could have laid down the verbage on the audio is if they'd planned it in advance.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Cycloneman »

Mr. Coffee wrote:
Cycloneman wrote:Because you think that only premeditated murder is murder or some shit.
Premeditated or not, what makes more sense...

1. The pilots made a horrible fucking mistake, thinking camera equipment were weapons, and then acted based on that.

or

2. The pilots decided to lie about the camera gear, instead calling them weapons, and then proceeded to commit war crimes, all the while muttering about there being weapons present in case anyone were to watch the video.

The first I can buy, the video is grainy, and some of that shit if you're not paying attention could possibly look like a fucking weapon. I don't know, I wasn't there (neither were you or anyone else in this thread). People make mistakes like that all the time, misidentifying something, it's common as all hell. Admittedly a dozen or so people usually don't die as a result of such a common mistake, but still shit happens.

The second I can't buy because in order for it to be true the pilots would have had to planned this in advance. That's where I'm getting the premeditation from. If you believe the second scenario is true, you're saying the pilots did this on purpose knowing full well what they were doing, and the only way they could have laid down the verbage on the audio is if they'd planned it in advance.
Let me put this in the simplest way possible:

HOW IS THE FIRST SCENARIO NOT MURDER YOU FUCKHEAD?
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

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The Duchess of Zeon wrote:
And let's not forget that target identification from aircraft by visual tools is hilariously bad. In WW2 the kill claims could easily by inflated by 200 - 300% in air to air combat, or 500% against ships all the damn time, the same thing for tank busting and destroying vehicles. Basically it is really, really hard to positively ID anything you see from an aircraft, so that trucks become tanks, one tank becomes two and a destroyer becomes a battleship. A camera becomes an RPG is just another aspect of that. Any engagement started by aerial visual identification of the target is virtually guaranteed to result in the target that is attacked not actually being what it is identified as, to this day, since there's no way to improve the human eyeball against sitting in a vibrating contraption at altitude and angle to what you're going after. The misidentification in short is the perfectly understandable part of this event and basically an inevitable fact of combat air support.
You forget Marina, on this forum A-10s can strafe MBTs with clearly marked reflector panels and it's an "oops", but when some dudes walking around with what look like weapons in an area where there were gunshots heard get shot up it's an "atrocity". Double plus so if people are shot after trying to rescue their presumed comrades who (as far as the Helo gunner is concerned) were the armed gunmen they were looking for.


Look, this was a huge screwup, and I would love to see the investigative play-by-play. There are probably heads that need to roll for this, and agree that the DoD likes to do a "blue line take care of our own" think that police departments do. What this is NOT is an atrocity.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Flagg »

Mr. Coffee wrote:
Flagg wrote:Jesus Christ, some of you people are myopic cunts. The atrocity isn't so much that some psychopath in an Apache brutally murdered a dozen civvies, it's the fact that the military then covered it up and called most of the innocent dead insurgents.
Thjat';s just it, Flagg, you're claiming that it was murder, i.e. that the pilots just decided to make up everything they said about observing weapons, did so intentionally, and then opened fire for the express purpose of killing a bunch of unarmed civilians. I'm asking what the fuck are you basing that on? Now, you can follow along in Dominus and Cyclones footsteps of feigned indignation over "atrocities", but I'm going to keep asking what the fuck you're basic your claim that this was an intentional homicide and warcrime, i.e. the pilots did it on purpose, and I'm going to keep asking that until you or one of those two shitheads fucking explains why your making the claim and provide some fucking evidence to back it the fuck up.

Fuck, the government covering anything up is a completely separate issue. Christ only knows what the fuck they were thinking on that count.
Dude, it was murder. It's murder in the same way that if a trigger happy cop shot a guy with a camera phone because he thought it was a gun is murder. Only in this case it's worse because the trigger happy cunt who blew away a van full of kids was in no immediate danger even if the camera had been a gun. If they had come clean about the incident and used it as an opportunity to train gunners how to more easily tell the difference between a camera and an AK-47 then that would have at least mitigated this colossal fuckup. But instead they did what they always do: They covered it up and lied about the innocent victims.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Mr. Coffee »

Cycloneman wrote:HOW IS THE FIRST SCENARIO NOT MURDER YOU FUCKHEAD?
Because it would be manslaughter, i.e. not fucking murder because of the lack of intent, you fucking retard.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

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Cycloneman wrote:HOW IS THE FIRST SCENARIO NOT MURDER YOU FUCKHEAD?
Its called "Manslaughter," and it is indeed not murder. Murder doesn't have to be premeditated, but it does require intent. If you kill someone by accident rather than design, you haven't committed murder even though the act may still be criminal. Its the same reason a drunk driver who kills someone in an accident isn't considered a murderer, even though they're still going to jail.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Mr. Coffee »

Flagg wrote:Dude, it was murder. It's murder in the same way that if a trigger happy cop shot a guy with a camera phone because he thought it was a gun is murder. Only in this case it's worse because the trigger happy cunt who blew away a van full of kids was in no immediate danger even if the camera had been a gun. If they had come clean about the incident and used it as an opportunity to train gunners how to more easily tell the difference between a camera and an AK-47 then that would have at least mitigated this colossal fuckup. But instead they did what they always do: They covered it up and lied about the innocent victims.
And you base this on your years of experience as a gunship pilot? Oh, wait, you don't have any of that experience and you're just making another knee-jerk reactionary claim. Which part of "murder means intent" isn't getting through to you people?
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Lonestar »

Flagg wrote:
Dude, it was murder. It's murder in the same way that if a trigger happy cop shot a guy with a camera phone because he thought it was a gun is murder.
I guess I'll point out the obvious, that camera phones don't look like guns in the way that cameras do through grainy video half a kilometer out.
Only in this case it's worse because the trigger happy cunt who blew away a van full of kids was in no immediate danger even if the camera had been a gun. If they had come clean about the incident and used it as an opportunity to train gunners how to more easily tell the difference between a camera and an AK-47 then that would have at least mitigated this colossal fuckup. But instead they did what they always do: They covered it up and lied about the innocent victims.
The Helicopter pilot wasn't shooting up those guys because it was in immediate danger, it was there at the behest of someone on the ground who was worried about gunshots in the area. Hence the term "air support".
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by CJvR »

Flagg wrote:Only in this case it's worse because the trigger happy cunt who blew away a van full of kids was in no immediate danger even if the camera had been a gun.
Except this wasn't a civilian police operation but a military combat situation. For the Police the authority to use deadly force would have ended once there no longer was any immediate danger. For the Military the rules are very different, it is their job to defeat the enemy and letting that enemy evacuate troops and equipment from the battlefield is not going to get the job done.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Cycloneman »

Mr. Coffee wrote:
Cycloneman wrote:HOW IS THE FIRST SCENARIO NOT MURDER YOU FUCKHEAD?
Because it would be manslaughter, i.e. not fucking murder because of the lack of intent, you fucking retard.
Oh, so you're saying he opened fire on a collection of people with a gun, but he didn't mean to kill anybody? Why don't you try thinking this through a little?

Oh, but I know what you'll say. "Oh, but Cycloneman, you big beautiful amazing person, he didn't mean to shoot up civilians! He meant to shoot up the evil terrorists!" To that I respond, so fucking what? They didn't try to charge Bernhard Goetz with attempted manslaughter.

The question is not, did the pilot think that opening fire was appropriate? The question is, would a reasonable person in his situation open fire on a clearly unarmed man exiting his van to help a wounded person on the side of the road? No, no they would not.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Plekhanov »

CJvR wrote:Well I have to say I probably also would have ID them as hostile, although surprisingly nonchalant ones.

Having seen the sequencs only once there were three things that in the video just before the copter moved out of sight that made my mind up.
1: there were two guys hanging slightly back that sure looked like they were carrying AKs.
2: one guy at the corner sure looked to be carrying a RPG (tripod?).
3: the fellow looking around the corner sure seemed to be acting like he had an eye on the gunship.

Then again I havn't had the training in target identification and shooting autocannons in a crowded urban enviroment that one assume these guys have had...
Check the timeline. They asked for, received permission to open fire and were attempting to do so before they saw the guy on the corner. All they saw up to that point were men mulling about with straps over their shoulders.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Chris OFarrell »

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!
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Siege »

The Duchess of Zeon wrote:Any engagement started by aerial visual identification of the target is virtually guaranteed to result in the target that is attacked not actually being what it is identified as, to this day, since there's no way to improve the human eyeball against sitting in a vibrating contraption at altitude and angle to what you're going after. The misidentification in short is the perfectly understandable part of this event and basically an inevitable fact of combat air support.
Oh, really. Let's summarize: we have an armoured gunship manned by a trained, professional crew hovering over what is presumably a densely populated area wherein the distinction between hostiles and innocent civilians is obviously fuzzy. We also have a chain of command which is presumably fully aware of the problems associated with visual identification by a loitering aerial platform, a chain of command I might add which answers to a political body which drones on and on and on about winning the "hearts and minds" of the local populace. We have precisely zero extenuating circumstances: no troops are under fire from these 'insurgents', there isn't a giant battle raging, the gunship isn't being shot at with MANPADs or anything more hostile than a mild glare. And yet in no more than two minutes flat the clowns in charge of this lethal weapons platform decide that yeah, they're justified in blowing the shit out of this group of random people milling about some square without any obvious hostile intentions, permission for which is promptly given by a command element entirely at the word of some orbiting prick at the wheel of an AH-64. There's no double-checking, no 'let's vector in some guys to make sure we're not blowing away another group of random nobodies', just "uh, you are free to engage". And you would call this "perfectly understandable"? Are you kidding me? I would much sooner say, what the fuck are you people smoking if your ROE condone this sort of atrocious cowboy behaviour in the middle of a city of 6,5 million?
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Mr. Coffee »

Cycloneman wrote:Oh, so you're saying he opened fire on a collection of people with a gun, but he didn't mean to kill anybody? Why don't you try thinking this through a little?
No, you dishonest sack of shit. I'm saying that there was no intent to commit murder. Kill != Murder, unless you're a retard and think anytime someone kills another person that it's "murder". So once again, why would the pilots intentionally murder civilians?

Cycloneman wrote:The question is not, did the pilot think that opening fire was appropriate? The question is, would a reasonable person in his situation open fire on a clearly unarmed man exiting his van to help a wounded person on the side of the road? No, no they would not.
In order for it to have been murder then the pilots 1. knew that they were firing on unarmed civilians and opened fire anyway intending to kill unarmed civilians.

As far as that specific situation, someone else already brought up that the pilots, again operating under the mistaken belief that they were engaging armed combatants, were denying the enemy access to personnel and equipment.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Cycloneman »

Mr. Coffee wrote:
Cycloneman wrote:Oh, so you're saying he opened fire on a collection of people with a gun, but he didn't mean to kill anybody? Why don't you try thinking this through a little?
No, you dishonest sack of shit. I'm saying that there was no intent to commit murder. Kill != Murder, unless you're a retard and think anytime someone kills another person that it's "murder". So once again, why would the pilots intentionally murder civilians?
This is fucking retarded. Malice aforethought requires intent to kill, not intent to murder. Jesus.
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Re: Wikileaks about to drop "the bombshell"

Post by Mr. Coffee »

Cycloneman wrote:
Mr. Coffee wrote:
Cycloneman wrote:Oh, so you're saying he opened fire on a collection of people with a gun, but he didn't mean to kill anybody? Why don't you try thinking this through a little?
No, you dishonest sack of shit. I'm saying that there was no intent to commit murder. Kill != Murder, unless you're a retard and think anytime someone kills another person that it's "murder". So once again, why would the pilots intentionally murder civilians?
This is fucking retarded. Malice aforethought requires intent to kill, not intent to murder. Jesus.
For fuck's sake... He's the problem we're having. You (and that fucking idiot DA), are insisting that they murdered civilians and that there is no way at all they could have misidentified who it was they were firing on. You're both saying that they intended to go kill civilians, and that no other possibility exists, because it's not like the US Military has ever done anything remotely like fuckign up target identification before. No, it HAD to be intentional murder of civilians, nothing else.

That's the problem we're having here and the reason why I keep asking for you to prove the intent on the part of the pilots to go kill civilians.

Was any of that at all unclear to you? Are you still going to claim that the pilots knew those were civilians, that there was no way at all they could have made a mistake, and they flew in, saw all those people, and decided "I'm gonna murder me some civilians"? If you are then I want some fucking evidence to back that claim up.
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