Bay 12 Games Forum

If I'm in the middle of a crowded mall and someone comes at me with a knife, if I pull out a gun and start shooting at him wildly, and hit basically everyone else in the mall except the guy with the knife, even though I was acting in self defense, I SHOULD STILL BE HELD PERSONALLY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DEATHS MY SHOOTING CAUSED.

A mall is not a combat zone. Awesome false equivalency, though.

I'm glad we can actually look at the topic as what it is, and not by using a facile analogy.

Did you see the kids before it zoomed in and pointed them out?  I certainly didn't, and I doubt the people in the helicopter did.  You just got done shooting what you thought were insurgents, and this unmarked van pulls in and starts picking them up.  That would seem pretty suspicious.

Precisely correct. Once more for emphasis: the only entities legally protected when picking up combatants in a combat zone are ones bearing international ambulance marks. This is not a marked ambulance. It's coming into a combat zone to pick up hostiles. That's no different than somebody coming back to pick up their buddy and getting shot in the back. They're not medics--they're not protected.

(Also notable: this could have been trivially avoided by the Reuters guys phoning up the area command and saying "hey, we're media, here are our credentials, we're going to be going to X, Y, and Z with a small private protection team of N people armed with W." If they're known to the command in the area, a do-not-fire order is more likely to be issued to err on the side of caution. But, y'know. That'd be too smart.)

"That's a weapon" my ass. This is such utter... ugh.

Monday-morning quarterbacks are cool.

I was trying to be nice about it earlier, but let's break this down a little more for y'all, because your knee-jerk reactions are awesome.

First point: the video's been begun in a really strange place. There's no reason that Wikileaks would be given a video that starts halfway through a sentence spoken by what seems to be the currrently operating C.O. While this is in no way an indictment of the video's veracity, this is kind of suspicious. What are they cutting out?


I don't know about you, but I can pretty clearly see a number of men in the group with assault rifles and one seems to have a tube-style RPG on him. There are three groups in the middle of a combat zone that carry assault rifles: friendly military units (local and American/Allied), contractors (and let's not start the HURR BLACKWATER argument, please), and the enemy. There's one group that regularly carries RPGs, and it's the last of those three.

At the kind of range and reaction times these guys are used to dealing with, you don't have a whole hell of a lot of time to make a decision. Specifically I'm looking at that shot of the guy crouching and aiming the long-angle lens toward the helicopters--at a glance that does look pretty well like a weapon, and you don't get more than a glance. Remember: you are being told that he is a journalist with a camera. They are not being told this. They are coming to a conclusion based on the evidence at hand, not what some anonymous commentator knows and tells them. It's a lot easier to see "a journalist with a camera" when they tell you that he's there. This is not the U.S., where you have a right to a fair trial--this is a war zone, and looking suspicious and potentially threatening is your own damn fault. You can criticize them all you like, but you're doing so after-the-fact, and it's pretty shitty and pretty disingenuous.


Claims that there wasn't combat in the vicinity are silly. Look closely at the video. Notice how you don't really see anyone else in the vicinity? That's a pretty good tip-off that there's armed conflict going on in the local vicinity. At the time of this video, this area of Baghdad (what is known as "Sadr City") was an incredibly dangerous place.  The locals have gone to ground so they don't get their asses shot off by one side of the conflict or another.

If you actually paid attention to this topic aside from when somebody shoves a video under your nose and tells you what you should be thinking and feeling, you'd know that Wikileaks actually published the U.S. military's rules of engagement (ROE) in 2007. You can read it on their site. And guess what? This is a really good textbook case of how it works. They're working to positively identify their targets, they're given weapons-free orders, and they terminate the target. Nobody went spree-shooting. The black van that approaches afterwards is not a Protected Collateral Object and it is not a marked ambulance (protected under international law), which means that there is absolutely no way for them to reliably determine friend-or-foe status of the van and its occupants. If there were kids inside (unsubstantiated)--that's absolutely terrible, and I feel bad for them. But they are coming to the aid and rescue of what appear to be hostiles and, as importantly, what the higher-ups have told them to target as hostiles. You can't credibly fault the air crew for treating them as reinforcements. It's their job. You can call them callous or BAWWW about "oh they treat it as a video game"--disassociation is a good thing from a military perspective, because it makes soldiers more effective. It's not their job to question policy, it's not their job to care about other people. It's their job to go where they are told to go and kill hostiles until the hostiles don't want to keep fighting. Complaining that they treat it as a game entirely misses the point that this is what they do.

That you think, after the fact, that they were "lying" or some shit is great, and rah rah rah for you, but to be entirely blunt--what the hell do you know? You don't have the domain-specific knowledge to come to an intelligent, educated conclusion based on this video.



The squelching of the video can be explained pretty simply. The military has a PR department. They have to deal with people like y'all, who are the most sanctimonious and whiny of sanctimonious whiny screamers. People who don't really care about sense, just barreling in with a preconceived notion and, by god, finding something that fits with it. And there's no "coverup"; this press release from July 2007 puts the lie to the claim:

Soldiers of 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, both operating in eastern Baghdad under the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, along with their Iraqi counterparts from the 1st Battalion, 4th Brigade, 1st Division National Police, were conducting a coordinated raid as part of a planned operation when they were attacked by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Coalition Forces returned fire and called in attack aviation reinforcement.

Allied forces were under fire. Allied forces called in air backup, in the middle of a combat zone, and told them to do their thing. Proper ROE was followed for target acquisition, and the targets were smeared. Did they get the wrong guys? Absolutely. Is it shitty that it happened? Sure. Is it entirely expected in war? Yes. This stuff happens. It's not that big a deal, except to people who already want to find reasons to crucify the Americans.


You lot fell for some biased "reporting" from a bunch of anonymous agenda-driven folks with an axe to grind against the target of your freshly unearthed righteous butthurt. How's it feel to be manipulated?

This is nothing new or particularly surprising. If significant disciplinary action hadn't already happened, it certainly will now.

One of the biggest paradoxes of China is that for all that it's a "totalitarian" government, it's actually incredibly difficult for Beijing to make sure its will is carried out.

Not very paradoxical. Most autocratic systems of governance share that failing.

Representational governments, for all their occasional faults, have this nice habit of attaining the kind of buy-in that makes institutional corruption more difficult to sustain (though by no means immune to it).

Quote from: Scruga on April 05, 2010, 07:41:44 am

Thank you, I have trouble getting to old pages :/

You see that purple box at the top of every page? The last line is "Other Versions of this Article:  v0.28.181.40d · (v0.23.130.23a)" The links point to the old versions of the articles.

Worst. User interface decision. Ever. We've gone Microsoft Bob here.



I do dig the cheaper furniture now, though. I'm not sure it's a good thing, what with the metric asston of metal lying around, but it is pretty nice until that gets boring.

That's why Guardians exist. They out-range missile turrets.