WikiLeaks plans to post video showing US massacre of Afghani civilians | Hacker News Reader

WikiLeaks plans to post video showing US massacre of Afghani civilians

rawstory.com

37 pointsulvund38 comments

The use of the word "massacre" implies something like My Lai or the Katyn Forest, a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants, especially by infantry.

Attacks by aircraft, like those in this video (as indicated in the article) and the previous one, should be described as something else -- although it remains the case that Apaches, F/A-18s, and B-1s (the US counterpart to the Backfire) do not have the large role in COIN that the Pentagon has assigned them, and their employment in Iraq and Afghanistan reveals a poisonously cavalier attitude towards non-American lives.

The right way to fight COIN campaigns is known (see David Galula, _Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice_ (1967)); it is not the same as the Pentagon's -- although in fairness, the US military has been trending in the right direction since the happy day when Rumsfeld was given the boot.

A massacre is the indiscriminate, unnecessary killing of a large number of people. It doesn't matter how you kill them.

like anything would be different if they killed more people.

That My Lai incident you brought up? Where 300-500 civilians were killed? Where the soldiers went out of their way to eliminate every civilian(no fog of war, no "we thought they were terrurists"). Where they killed women, children and infants....only 1 person went to jail for it.

2 days later he was released from jail by the order of a president no less...pending his appeal, and on appeal he was only given 4 months in jail and 3 years under house arrest.

I agree that the US has a long history of double standards (WWII was particularly shameful: the worst criminals in that war were the Communists, who got away scot-free; and the Western Allies' strategic bombings, especially the deliberate targeting of German civilians by the UK and Japanese civilians by the US, were war crimes); but my point was just the connotations of the word "massacre."

And if we want to talk about US-perpetrated crimes with horribly inadequate prosecutions for them, we should talk torture. Death is death, and that's the end of it; but Guantanamo Bay, or the rendition programs, or the US torture which the rendition programs replaced when it was forbidden, or the employment of torture down to the present day to control prisoners? The mind revolts. A country which trusts in God should remember that He is just.

"The worst criminals in that war were the Communists"

Oh, you have a measuring stick, how does that work then? I was pretty certain that everyone that took part in that did some fucked up shit:

* The Holocaust - Germans

* Katyn massacre - Ruskis

* Dresden Bombings - English

* Nagasaki/Hiroshima - Americans

If you'd like to forward your measuring stick to this page:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html

Then I hope you could provide us with some nice totals at the end?

My criterion is pre-1945 body count for the governments in question, including non-military actions (like the Holocaust of the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs; and the Holodomor of the Ukranians) as well as military. It doesn't matter whether or not you count Operation Keelhaul, the campaign against "rootless internationalists," and the like: Stalin worked more people to death in the GULAG network (and starved to death in the special settlements) than Hitler gassed (and worked to death: the Nazi concentration camps were modeled on their Soviet counterparts) in the Holocaust.

The Communists targeted class enemies, while the Nazis targeted racial ones, but this was a less important distinction than you think: if you were a kulak and became poor, you were now a poor kulak, not a proletarian... and in practice, Lenin and especially Stalin managed to off an awfully large number of race enemies anyways.

Edit: For the "worst _criminals_" part, as opposed to "worst faction": look at the crimes that the Nazis committed, that the Japanese committed, and that the Western Allies committed; Stalin committed crimes of the same categories, including crimes which one of these three groups did commit and the other two did not. The Winter War was Stalin's Manchuria; Berlin was his Nanking; his artillery bombardments of cities were his strategic bombing; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was his Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact; his extermination of the Ukranians and the kulaks was his Holocaust (remember: a kulak was a class enemy, but a kulak who became poor was now a poor kulak, not a proletarian); and he committed the Katyn Forest massacre, which was on a larger scale than any comparable massacre done by anyone else.

The worst criminals in that war were the Communists

Stalin's purges predate 1941 when SU entered the war. So they aren't part of the same war, unless you also want to add the extermination of native americans to the list of WW2 crimes.

And what was wrong with the winter war? A plain old war of agression, sure, but I don't think there were any war crimes?

The Winter War, like Manchuria, was a "crime against peace" by the standard of Nuremberg; that establishes that Stalin, like both Hitler and Hirohito, had launched a small aggressive war prior to WWII.

The purges were not part of the war any more than the Holocaust was part of the war (pointed out at Adolf Eichmann's trial: the continued prosecution of the Holocaust actively impeded the Nazi war effort, especially by clogging up the railroad network); but I wanted to make it clear that Stalin as well as Hitler exterminated large numbers of his subjects during his "reign."

Well, "the crime against peace" is a single-serving "let's stick something on them" charge. US engaged in multiple aggressive conquests after WW2 without anyone even mentioning the word "crime" in a serious context. So aggressive conquest is a common practice, whereas civilian massacre is universally frowned upon - a big difference in my mind.

I can see how to tie holocaust to WW2 - the regime which perpetrated the former has then also started the latter. Stalin didn't launch the WW2, but then you can argue he did set it in motion with the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact making both the purges and the WW2 part of his empire-building. Good point, I agree.

The use of the word "massacre" implies ... a deliberate killing of large numbers of noncombatants

I expect that the most famous "massacre" in history, at least to Americans, was the Boston Massacre in 1770. In that incident, 5 people were killed.

Depends where you live, I'd never heard of the Boston Massacre. Katyn and Glencoe being the examples that come to mind - with the details of the former being particularly gruesome.

Just because the Boston "Massacre" is called that doesn't mean that it _was_ a massacre. Revere and Sam Adams picked a fight, and then pretended that the violence they began had been perpetrated by evil, aggressive foreigners against their pure and noble citizens -- the same contemptible monkey-trick that Putin used in Georgia. The South Ossetians began the Russian-Georgian War, by firing artillery at Georgian villages; the Boston rioters began the "Massacre," and the British fired in response to one of their soldiers being knocked down -- not by a thrown rock, but by someone hitting him with a club. That's self-defense, not My Lai or the Katyn Forest; and the verdicts from their trials support that statement.

The US has a nasty history of describing anything it doesn't like as a massacre; this is particularly visible in the Indian Wars, in which every incident in which the US wipes out an American Indian village is a "battle," and every incident in which an Indian tribe wipes out a US village is a "massacre." I'm not saying that the US was always in the wrong or that it was always in the right -- "American Indian tribes" is a pretty broad brush to be painting with, and some tribes (the Cherokee, most prominently) were more civilized than the US while others (the Sioux, for ex.) were honestly pretty barbarous -- but I am saying that traditional US historiography is propagandistic.

However, this is changing (although sometimes only by becoming propagandistic in the other direction); and the connotations of the word "massacre" remain the same regardless of how the word's been abused.

im sure you're smart and well-informed, but even with all those fancy references, none of us have any idea wtf you're talking about.

(I'm going to lose karma for this, but...)

Your "tl;dr" was tl; I dr.

This is a very minor point, but could someone edit the title? "Afghani" means the currency; "Afghan" means the people of Afghanistan (Afghan-i Stan, "Land of the Afghans [originally another name for the Pashtuns]", in Persian).

This is a pretty common mistake, for what it's worth; demonymns in the eastern Middle East are kind of unpredictable.

How should I feel about the possible reaction in Afghanistan given that we still have US citizens in the country? My father is due to make a two week tour of Afghanistan next week and this makes me worry for him.

I realize that exposing the realities of war is the best way to end a war but I can't help but worry for the people on the ground.

At first: I feel very sorry for you and hope that your father will return home without getting into trouble. I do understand your point of view.

I just want to say that this video could make US^H^H citizens worry more for _all_ the people on the ground of Afghanistan or any other war zone. That is a good thing.

nothing should change...the people in Afghanistan already know all about all this stuff.

Wikileaks were exceedingly disingenuous with their presentation of the material in the former video - in which 2 helicopters killed a group carrying loaded RPG and assault rifles that were an imminent threat to a passing ground patrol that was already taking fire.

I hope that they'll let the material stand for itself rather than lying like politicians trying to score points.

The way they handled the last one was like some sort of Microsoft marketing exercise.

Did we watch the same video? The RPG and assault rifles were professional cameras in mine...

I think that this reveals the real villain of the previous video: the people who sent these men up to patrol a city in an Apache in the first place! Apaches are attack helicopters, "flying tanks," built to kill armored columns; they are not known for their stealthy approach (which is necessary to be confident that no one with an RPG will move around behind you and put a rocket up your tailpipe), nor for the high resolution and good zoom features of their gun cameras (since a small-screen, black-and-white camera is generally adequate to distinguish that which _is_ a column of tanks and ZSU-23-4s from that which _is not_. Well, maybe not buffalo herds, but there aren't many of those in central Germany).

Not to mention, should it be assumed that a man with an RPG in a dangerous part of Baghdad is hostile? What if he's Iraqi military and the Apache shoots him, thereby robbing his squad of their light-artillery support and giving away their position?

The right way to patrol is to _patrol_, and that means dismounted infantry operating out of forward bases (which the US is now using) -- not convoys of roadbound IFVs, and certainly not heavy helicopters. Counterinsurgency is not war against poorer enemies, it's police work with heavier weapons; and it's taken five or six years (and a _lot_ of incidents like the previous video), but I think that lesson is slowly sinking in.

Depends, did you watch the full video or the cut one? AFAIK, there are no weapons in the cut one but there were people in the group walking around with weapons before.[1,2]

Wikileaks's goal is not neutral publishing of leaks- it's maximum political impact.[3]

As long as they continue to release the full video, I still think they do far more good than harm. The editorialization forces it into the public eye. Although I do think they were misleading, they're no worse than the MSM, and the full release allows it to be analyzed more objectively later.

"US covers up a video that should've been made public" is not as sexy as "Collateral Damage: US covers up the murder of two reporters." And when you're dealing with a public that seems more interested in Tiger's romantic escapades, perhaps that's what is necessary to seize their attention.

-----

[1] "there do appear to be two other—two people in that crowd having weapons" -Julian Assange[http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/6/massacre_caught_on_tape...]

[2] "The [army's] report claims that at least two members of the group which were first fired on were armed"[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007_Baghdad_airstrike...]

[3] Assange's interview with Colbert. http://gawker.com/5515720/stephen-colbert-grills-wikileaks-f...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0#t=3m40s see the guy at 3:45 swinging around? http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201878.php makes it clearer.

Also the US mil report from the time (not a response to Wikileaks, from 17 July 2007, 5 days after the event) - They did have AKM/AK47 and loaded RPG + extra rounds and were hidden around the corner watching, one of their party took pics, http://www.scribd.com/doc/29487634/Centcom-FOIA?page=41 of an APC whilst their friends were apparently readying an RPG to blow them up with.

And though it's not proof of anything specific in this case the photog in question, who died, was known for getting "victory" shots of insurgents handiwork.

>>> I hope that they'll let the material stand for >>> itself rather than lying like politicians trying >>> to score points.

WTF? This is a video that Reuters has been trying to get released for over 2 years. The only reason that the video can no "speak for itself" as you say, is because wikileaks leaked it.

And good thing that the video can now speak for itself because it shows that the Pentagon lied about what happened to those reporters. I'd rather have the video speak for itself rather than have the pentagon lying to score points.

Erm, there was no RPG and arguably only one assault rifle. Camera equipment was mistaken for an RPG and for one of the assault rifles.

The reason the propaganda was inserted was because the US military explicitly stated that they did not know what happened to the reporters involved and were obviously too embarrassed to admit that they mistook their camera equipment for weapons and proactively engaged them.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1270343

What's wrong with using non-lethal weapons when one side has an overwhelming advantage?

I think it's possible that the widespread use of non-lethal weapons could result in greater attrocities than the use of lethal weapons on the macro-level. It may not always be aparent, but in general, there is human restraint against killing other humans. A group of people would have to do, or at least be pegged with doing, something fairly high on the "bad scale" to justify use of lethal force. I suspect the threshold for beating them into submission with shotgun fired beanbags, high-pressured water, etc. would be much lower. At the level of an individual life, non-lethal would obviously be better. But at the level of one group of people trying to exert their will over another, I think non-lethal weapons would lead to more of that exertion, because it would be less difficult to justify.

Tasers.

When an insurgent points a RPG at my Humvee I should fire [far less lethal] rubber bullets back because I have better air support?

Generally speaking, it is better to disable weapons rather than kill people in war.

If there is a way to disable RPGs from a distance, then it should be used if there is time.

I don't think you can SSH into a soviet era weapon.

This idea that war can be carried out "safely" is detached from reality. We say that our technology gives us a moral advantage in warfare. "We can hit just the right targets, and minimize collateral damage." It will never be.

WikiLeaks presentation of the first video was disingenuous, but I don't care as long as the video enters the public domain. I want to be able to pull up videos that show how worthless human life is on the battlefield. I have friends in the military and they need an emotional shell to do their job. The public, however, needs to start thinking about war not as a pissing match with browner countries, but as a serious issue.

I can't find a reference now, but I've read in the past that the 5.56mm round -- the ammunition used in M-16s, for example -- is designed with a goal of (among other things) seriously wounding the target rather than killing. This isn't for humane purposes, but because putting a soldier into the infirmary with medical staff necessary to support him poses a greater cost to the enemy than simply killing him.

Most "non-lethal" weapons are short ranged. You can't fire a nonlethal bullet from the air.

Put more money into developing such weapons then.

If it's anything like that pathetic excuse for an exclusive video from last week it won't be worth watching.

Report the news . Don't make it, fabricate it or skew it.

The days of yellow journalism are still alive and well.

>>>The days of yellow journalism are still alive and well.

Ahem, Fox?

its slightly ironic that people like you and me are less likely to subject here the HN meme of 'moral obligation to maximize shareholder value'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com