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You can't be serious.

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

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

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

Keep in mind that by assuming that the gunner is a sadist you are making the same mistake that the gunner did. The gunner assumed that the wounded man was a terrorist based on what he saw, or rather, thought he saw. You are assuming that the gunner was a sadist based on what you saw in the video. I don't think either assumption is a good one.

What I hear in that movie is not the sound of someone having fun. I hear false bravado in response to the sickening situation. You can interpret the soldier's comments in different ways, but there isn't enough detail to say the soldier is a sadist, just as there wasn't enough detail to say the camera was an AK-47.

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

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

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

Surprisingly in America they give you a gun and the permission to use it at war before they trust you enough to let you drink a beer at a bar.

I'd rather people have training in weapons and discipline before drinking, actually. So that's not so surprising to me.

What's outrageous is the progressive infantilization of teenagers. 13 year olds can make moral decisions and take responsibility for their actions. They are not as fully developed in all cognitive areas as adults (including judgment), but they are starting on that road. That (actually, much earlier) is the time to make sure their development includes things like personal responsibility, ability to safely handle weapons, an approach to drugs and alcohol that includes moderation and adult supervision, and even the discipline imposed in working (part-time, of course, nobody wants the return of child labor sweatshops).

If someone's first experience with combining discipline, responsibility, and the freedom to act is when they join the military at 18, is it any wonder that judgment is impaired, excitement and fear dominates reason, and life begins to look like a trigger-happy first person shooter? Note that I'm saying video games aren't the problem here, infantilizing our youth is the problem.

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

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

Covering this up shows how high up this goes.

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

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

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

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

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

If I walk down the road right now, I will not see billboards encouraging me to join the Red Cross.

Are you saying you're not responsible for the lives you take if the organization that trained you had better advertisement funding?

No, I'm saying that the choice between joining an organisation that gives you aid packages to distribute and one that gives you a rifle isn't as clear-cut as you implied. Not for the majority of people who end up joining the forces, anyway, though my view may well be coloured from having grown up in the self-styled "Home of the British Army".

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

-- Good point. I'd add that in addition to the US soldiers who made a choice to serve their country, and who must take responsibility for those actions, I'd add that the terrorists/insurgents made similar choices. They chose to dick around with AK-47's in a war zone. They made a choice to allow kids to be around them, knowing they would become targets.

Similarly, the cameramen made a choice to hang around insurgents who were dicking around with AK-47's. And the people in the van chose to drive up into the middle of a battle, without red cross markings, to pick up wounded terrorists who were dicking around with AK-47's and RPGs.

So yes my friend, we all make choices. Sometimes they turn out to be dumb ones, or will at least seem like dumb ones when someone like you is watching them on video, and doesn't understand their context, 4 years after they are made.

Cheers.

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

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

They felt like this for quite some time now.

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

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

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

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

What you see relates to what you think you are looking at. Most people who see a dark stick on the ground you will probably indentify it as a stick.

However, if you are looking for your escaped pet black snake you are more likely to assume it's a snake. If you are a zoo keeper who was just told a black mamba you are going to assume it's a snake and try to kill it / run really quickly.

Now let's say you received a lot of military training and are in the middle of a war zone and you see someone holding a dark blob at their midsection. How likely are you to think camera vs. AK-47 relative to someone sitting at home that knows innocent people are about to be shot?

Like I said, they have the excuse of being in a war. It's, however, unacceptable that their training resulted in such a lapse of judgement and less acceptable that the officers in charge opted to cover up the problem.

Even if they are not charged with "reckless shooting of civilians", the civilians killed in this incident deserve an inquiry and changes in the procedures and rules that allowed it to happen so that it doesn't happen again.

Because if it does, and, I would risk it did happen many times - they just did not kill Reuters employees, those civilians died in vain.

And, of all regrettable incidents that day, this would be the least acceptable of them all.

Congratulations on a fairly even-handed post.

However, two points I disagree entirely with:

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

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

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

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

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

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

An RPG can take out an Apache. If you hit the main and tail rotors you have a good chance of causing the helo to crash.

Fair point, but you still have to spot the chopper first! Plus the chances of an RPG actually hitting a circling chopper at a good distance are pretty slim, as RPGs are notoriously inaccurate. The gunner would probably nail the RPG guy before he got his shot off.

EDIT: If you continue reading below, some guys worked out that the chopper was about a mile away from the targets, based on muzzle velocity of the Apache's chaingun and the delay of the bullets reaching the target. Some chance of an RPG hitting that.

Yay, I just read that comment about the distance. I didn't think about that.

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

If you have read "Blink" by Malcolm Gladwell there is a detailed analysis of an incident in which police officers on the ground, less then twenty feet from a man, fired on him and killed him because they thought the wallet he was holding was a gun.

When you have a deadly weapon in your hand, and you are scared and trained to see weapons, not cameras, then what you see is an enemy target with a weapon.

Every year there are countless hunting accidents where hunters will swear they've seen a deer only to find out they've shot a dog or a fellow hunter.

Similar mechanism at work.

I've read that in the structure of the human brain the Amygdala has the ability to detect sensory inputs similar to threatening memories and can the override our normal action formation. This is that sudden sharp panic you get when walking through a house at night and some combination of shadows looks like a figure or animal. It's very easy for our brains to trick us... and if your finger happens to be on a trigger when this happens...

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

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

I don't know that anyone is blaming the individuals here.

Yes fortunately there isn't too much of that in this particular thread. But if you look at other online discussions going on right now, you'll see plenty of hateful comments of all sorts.