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

439 points by dsplittgerber 17y ago

dsplittgerber 17y 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.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.ht... and supposedly shows a military helicopter shooting a van rescuing two Reuters journalists.
- ugh 17y 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.
  - yesimahuman 17y 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.
  - dsplittgerber 17y 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.
    - iaskwhy 17y ago
      At 3:45 and until 4:25 everything is kinda suspect. It really looks like at least one guy is carrying a big weapon (could be an AK like they say or even some launcher) and by 4:09 one of them kneels at the end of the building with something in his hands then he quickly gets up, turns arounds and it seems like he's shooting something (I'd say he was trying to take a picture but that's not clear at all). I believe the war was wrong, etc, but I can understand why the army was so alerted by this. I'm not shocked by it (until the van arrives, what happens next is not easy to explain, maybe that move happens a lot?) and while I'm completely against it, I also understand that this can happen sometimes. To call this a murder is a much simpler version of what happened there.
      - deleted 17y ago
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        scott_s 17y ago
        Please read the forum guidelines on civility: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html This discussion will be killed if it devolves into name calling.
      - Zak 17y ago
        I think it's fair to call firing on the van murder. The people in the van were pretty obviously trying to remove the dead and help the wounded. They did not appear to be armed, though it's certainly possible to conceal weapons in a van. They were clearly not taking any aggressive action.
  - mquander 17y 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.
  - eagleal 17y 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).
clammer 17y 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 17y ago
  I agree, however it could be easily claimed that this is negligent homicide.
- madars 17y 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 http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/5dwlens.jpg.html [2] - http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/terrorist_pg7c.jpg.html http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/terrorist_pg7c.jpg.h...
  - scott_s 17y 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."
    - elblanco 17y ago
      The sad things was that in July of 2007 all of Baghdad was an active combat zone.
  - bcl 17y 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.
coderdude 17y 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.
dsplittgerber 17y ago
It's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=youtu.be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0&feature=youtu...
spoiledtechie 17y 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.
- EliRivers 17y 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.
- deleted 17y ago
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- EliRivers 17y 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 17y 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 http://www.killology.com/bio.htm
- dsplittgerber 17y 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.
deleted 17y ago
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oscardelben 17y ago
youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik
coderdude 17y 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.
- ugh 17y 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 17y ago
  They probably have a higher quality recording than the one posted to youtube.
- yurifury 17y ago
  They may have been able to tell due to the position of the bodies after the attack.
jcromartie 17y 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?
- deleted 17y ago
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- yesimahuman 17y 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.
  - deleted 17y ago
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  - elblanco 17y 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.
    - rosser 17y ago
      There's a lag of 2-3 seconds between the sounds of gunfire on the video and the rounds striking their targets. The AH-64's chain gun has a muzzle velocity of around 2600 ft/s, so the choppers are at least a mile away.
jackfoxy 17y 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...
- EliRivers 17y ago
  Isn't that true of everything ever recorded? What point are you making?
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dellort 17y ago
    Well that's not true unless you publish the recording in some way so that everyone has a chance to watch it.
  - etherael 17y 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.
    - EliRivers 17y ago
      It is easy for us, yes, but the topic at hand isn't how easy it is for us to watch footage. How easy it is for us to dissect it has no bearing whatsoever on the events themselves. Put another way, how difficult does it have to be for us to see what happened before it's acceptable for us to disagree with the actions taken? Edit: This is a fantastically unpopular comment! Is it my lack of respect for the "Thou shalt not Monday-morning quarterback, no matter how badly the quarterback screwed it up" commandment? :)
  - sliverstorm 17y ago
etherael 17y 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 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.
- Skeuomorph 17y 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 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.
- jacquesm 17y 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?
  - etherael 17y 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.
pg 17y 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.
- elblanco 17y 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.
- krschultz 17y 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.torrent http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torren...
  - bcl 17y 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.
- ugh 17y ago
  Here’s the uncut footage on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik 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.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  This is the unedited video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik 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 :()
mindcreek 17y 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.
- cookiecaper 17y 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.
  - sophacles 17y 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.
    - cookiecaper 17y ago
      I agree. My post explicitly says that.
      - sophacles 17y ago
        Yeah, it does, I either misread or missed it.
  - youngian 17y 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.
Subgun 17y 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.
- jcromartie 17y 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?
- GiraffeNecktie 17y 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.
youngian 17y ago
In case anyone hasn't heard, Wikileaks is badly in need of donations. http://collateralmurder.com/en/support.html 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).
- jacquesm 17y 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.
  - krschultz 17y 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.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      Funny you should say that, I was halfway implementing that when wikileaks re-opened. Wikileaks is a public service, not a business and they shouldn't try to run it as one. The bittorrent channel was exactly what I was going for, with automatic conversion and a 'triage' stage, bogus, maybe true, verified true.
    - youngian 17y ago
      My impression is that this is a publicity move on their part to get people interested and get donations. The presentation seems part of that. They're pitching "hey, look at how useful we are." Before the shutdown, Wikileaks did present most of their content without editing or editorializing. Content would generally be accompanied by a short couple of paragraphs discussing the context, veracity, and format. If memory serves, they did write some opinion/publicity pieces, but labeled them as such and published them separately from the content itself. I guess what I'm saying is this: I think the extra stuff is there because they need money badly and are basically marketing themselves with this. I don't think they intend to make a habit of straying from their original focus on content. I don't have any proof of this, but that's because they're still short on money. So if you would donate to the former, donate. Hopefully they'll be back to their old selves soon.
sliderr 17y 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.
rbanffy 17y 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 17y 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.
- NathanKP 17y 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 17y 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?
- Skeuomorph 17y 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.
drinian 17y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre
- jacquesm 17y 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 17y 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?
deleted 17y ago
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Qz 17y 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.
sliverstorm 17y 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 17y ago
  Except that it's not war. It's a unilateral occupation.
  - sliverstorm 17y 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.
  - krschultz 17y 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.
    - 17y ago
qeorge 17y ago
Not in our name.
drinian 17y 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/2008/10/10/AR2008101002934.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10...
- elblanco 17y 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 17y ago
I'm disappointed that this was killed.
- philwelch 17y ago
  Why was this killed? Were commenters being assholes?
ErrantX 17y 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.
krschultz 17y 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 17y ago
The two men shown around 3:39 (not the journalists) do appear to be carrying weapons.
krschultz 17y 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?
- jacquesm 17y ago
  It's all over the web: http://www.nu.nl/buitenland/2219553/amerikanen-vermoordden-irakezen-en-journalisten.html http://www.nu.nl/buitenland/2219553/amerikanen-vermoordden-i... http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/04/05/4117730-wikileaks-posts-combat-video-from-iraq-showing-civilian-casualties http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/04/05/4117730-wik... http://www.mediaite.com/online/wikileaks-publishes-video-of-us-military-killing-reuters-photographer/ 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%.
mambodog 17y ago
Torrent of the video available here: http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torrent http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torren... (for anyone interested being part of the crowd-archive)
ivankirigin 17y 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.
- jacquesm 17y 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203545 belongs here a lot less than this article.
  - ivankirigin 17y 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.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      > You obviously didn't read that lady gaga article. I did, or at least as far as I got in to it (the 'eye in the sky'), it has nothing to do with hacking or computers as far as I could tell, correct me if I'm wrong. > It is actually really interesting. I think you meant to say "I find it actually really interesting". It is not a finding of fact, but an opinion. What some people find interesting is not what others will find interesting and vice versa. > If this story were about wikileaks, and not about the iraq war video, I'd think it was appropriate. It is about both I think, though clearly the contents of the video are what attracts the most attention at the moment. We already know what wikileaks is, but there is definitely a lot of stuff about wikileaks in there as well. (And not all of it good for wikileaks).
      - ivankirigin 17y ago
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Maro 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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 http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
failquicker 17y 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.
gort 17y 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 17y 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).
- pg 17y 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.
  - dkarl 17y 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=/opinion/greenwald/2010/04/05/afghanistan 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/article7060395.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/arti...
- Quarrelsome 17y ago
  BBC has had it for a few hours. Not top billing though... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8603938.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8603938.stm
hoop 17y ago
While I agree that the release of this video is important, I disagree with it being posted on HackerNews. We are not Reddit.
lionhearted 17y 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 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.
kyro 17y ago
The first thing that came to my mind was Sivers' blog post the other day about others being a lot like us.
patrickk 17y 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
- epochwolf 17y 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 17y 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.
GiraffeNecktie 17y 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 17y 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/wikileaks_gun_camera_footage http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/04/05/wikil...) http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%2025210/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fsites%2ffoia%2frr%2fCENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%2025210%2fDeath%20of%20Reuters%20Journalists&FolderCTID=&View=%7b41BA1AAF%2d785A%2d481A%2dA630%2d12470AFCD6FD%7d 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 17y 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 17y ago
I hope those guys never come to save my country
johnnyg 17y 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.
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439 points by dsplittgerber 17y 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.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.ht... and supposedly shows a military helicopter shooting a van rescuing two Reuters journalists.

ugh 17y 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.
- yesimahuman 17y 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.
- dsplittgerber 17y 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.
  - iaskwhy 17y ago
    At 3:45 and until 4:25 everything is kinda suspect. It really looks like at least one guy is carrying a big weapon (could be an AK like they say or even some launcher) and by 4:09 one of them kneels at the end of the building with something in his hands then he quickly gets up, turns arounds and it seems like he's shooting something (I'd say he was trying to take a picture but that's not clear at all). I believe the war was wrong, etc, but I can understand why the army was so alerted by this. I'm not shocked by it (until the van arrives, what happens next is not easy to explain, maybe that move happens a lot?) and while I'm completely against it, I also understand that this can happen sometimes. To call this a murder is a much simpler version of what happened there.
    - deleted 17y ago
      [deleted]
      - scott_s 17y ago
        Please read the forum guidelines on civility: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html This discussion will be killed if it devolves into name calling.
    - Zak 17y ago
      I think it's fair to call firing on the van murder. The people in the van were pretty obviously trying to remove the dead and help the wounded. They did not appear to be armed, though it's certainly possible to conceal weapons in a van. They were clearly not taking any aggressive action.
- mquander 17y 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.
- eagleal 17y 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).

clammer 17y 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 17y ago
I agree, however it could be easily claimed that this is negligent homicide.
madars 17y 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 http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/5dwlens.jpg.html [2] - http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/terrorist_pg7c.jpg.html http://collateralmurder.com/file/photos/terrorist_pg7c.jpg.h...
- scott_s 17y 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."
  - elblanco 17y ago
    The sad things was that in July of 2007 all of Baghdad was an active combat zone.
- bcl 17y 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.

coderdude 17y 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.

dsplittgerber 17y ago

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

spoiledtechie 17y 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.

EliRivers 17y 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.
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EliRivers 17y 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 17y 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 http://www.killology.com/bio.htm
dsplittgerber 17y 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.

deleted 17y ago

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oscardelben 17y ago

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

coderdude 17y 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.

ugh 17y 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 17y ago
They probably have a higher quality recording than the one posted to youtube.
yurifury 17y ago
They may have been able to tell due to the position of the bodies after the attack.

jcromartie 17y 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?

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yesimahuman 17y 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.
- deleted 17y ago
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- elblanco 17y 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.
  - rosser 17y ago
    There's a lag of 2-3 seconds between the sounds of gunfire on the video and the rounds striking their targets. The AH-64's chain gun has a muzzle velocity of around 2600 ft/s, so the choppers are at least a mile away.

jackfoxy 17y 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...

EliRivers 17y ago
Isn't that true of everything ever recorded? What point are you making?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Dellort 17y ago
  Well that's not true unless you publish the recording in some way so that everyone has a chance to watch it.
- etherael 17y 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.
  - EliRivers 17y ago
    It is easy for us, yes, but the topic at hand isn't how easy it is for us to watch footage. How easy it is for us to dissect it has no bearing whatsoever on the events themselves. Put another way, how difficult does it have to be for us to see what happened before it's acceptable for us to disagree with the actions taken? Edit: This is a fantastically unpopular comment! Is it my lack of respect for the "Thou shalt not Monday-morning quarterback, no matter how badly the quarterback screwed it up" commandment? :)
- sliverstorm 17y ago

etherael 17y 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 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.

Skeuomorph 17y 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 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.
jacquesm 17y 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?
- etherael 17y 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.

pg 17y 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.

elblanco 17y 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.
krschultz 17y 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.torrent http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torren...
- bcl 17y 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.
ugh 17y ago
Here’s the uncut footage on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik 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.
ErrantX 17y ago
This is the unedited video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=is9sxRfU-ik 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 :()

mindcreek 17y 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.

cookiecaper 17y 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.
- sophacles 17y 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.
  - cookiecaper 17y ago
    I agree. My post explicitly says that.
    - sophacles 17y ago
      Yeah, it does, I either misread or missed it.
- youngian 17y 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.

Subgun 17y 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.

jcromartie 17y 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?
GiraffeNecktie 17y 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.

youngian 17y ago

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

jacquesm 17y 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.
- krschultz 17y 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.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Funny you should say that, I was halfway implementing that when wikileaks re-opened. Wikileaks is a public service, not a business and they shouldn't try to run it as one. The bittorrent channel was exactly what I was going for, with automatic conversion and a 'triage' stage, bogus, maybe true, verified true.
  - youngian 17y ago
    My impression is that this is a publicity move on their part to get people interested and get donations. The presentation seems part of that. They're pitching "hey, look at how useful we are." Before the shutdown, Wikileaks did present most of their content without editing or editorializing. Content would generally be accompanied by a short couple of paragraphs discussing the context, veracity, and format. If memory serves, they did write some opinion/publicity pieces, but labeled them as such and published them separately from the content itself. I guess what I'm saying is this: I think the extra stuff is there because they need money badly and are basically marketing themselves with this. I don't think they intend to make a habit of straying from their original focus on content. I don't have any proof of this, but that's because they're still short on money. So if you would donate to the former, donate. Hopefully they'll be back to their old selves soon.

sliderr 17y 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.

rbanffy 17y 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 17y 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.

NathanKP 17y 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 17y 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?
Skeuomorph 17y 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.

drinian 17y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre

jacquesm 17y 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 17y 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?

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Qz 17y 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.

sliverstorm 17y 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 17y ago
Except that it's not war. It's a unilateral occupation.
- sliverstorm 17y 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.
- krschultz 17y 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.
  - 17y ago

qeorge 17y ago

Not in our name.

drinian 17y 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/2008/10/10/AR2008101002934.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10...

elblanco 17y 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 17y ago

I'm disappointed that this was killed.

philwelch 17y ago
Why was this killed? Were commenters being assholes?

ErrantX 17y 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.

krschultz 17y 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 17y ago

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

krschultz 17y 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?

jacquesm 17y ago
It's all over the web: http://www.nu.nl/buitenland/2219553/amerikanen-vermoordden-irakezen-en-journalisten.html http://www.nu.nl/buitenland/2219553/amerikanen-vermoordden-i... http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/04/05/4117730-wikileaks-posts-combat-video-from-iraq-showing-civilian-casualties http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/04/05/4117730-wik... http://www.mediaite.com/online/wikileaks-publishes-video-of-us-military-killing-reuters-photographer/ 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%.

mambodog 17y ago

Torrent of the video available here: http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torrent http://collateralmurder.com/file/CollateralMurder.mp4.torren... (for anyone interested being part of the crowd-archive)

ivankirigin 17y 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.

jacquesm 17y 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203545 belongs here a lot less than this article.
- ivankirigin 17y 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.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    > You obviously didn't read that lady gaga article. I did, or at least as far as I got in to it (the 'eye in the sky'), it has nothing to do with hacking or computers as far as I could tell, correct me if I'm wrong. > It is actually really interesting. I think you meant to say "I find it actually really interesting". It is not a finding of fact, but an opinion. What some people find interesting is not what others will find interesting and vice versa. > If this story were about wikileaks, and not about the iraq war video, I'd think it was appropriate. It is about both I think, though clearly the contents of the video are what attracts the most attention at the moment. We already know what wikileaks is, but there is definitely a lot of stuff about wikileaks in there as well. (And not all of it good for wikileaks).
    - ivankirigin 17y ago

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Maro 17y 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 17y 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 17y 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 http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

failquicker 17y 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.

gort 17y 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 17y 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).

pg 17y 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.
- dkarl 17y 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=/opinion/greenwald/2010/04/05/afghanistan 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/article7060395.ece http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/arti...
Quarrelsome 17y ago
BBC has had it for a few hours. Not top billing though... http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8603938.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8603938.stm

hoop 17y ago

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

lionhearted 17y 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 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.

kyro 17y ago

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

patrickk 17y 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

epochwolf 17y 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 17y 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.

GiraffeNecktie 17y 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 17y 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/wikileaks_gun_camera_footage http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/04/05/wikil...) http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%2025210/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fsites%2ffoia%2frr%2fCENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%2025210%2fDeath%20of%20Reuters%20Journalists&FolderCTID=&View=%7b41BA1AAF%2d785A%2d481A%2dA630%2d12470AFCD6FD%7d 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 17y 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 17y ago

I hope those guys never come to save my country

johnnyg 17y 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.

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