Fuck that, the U.S. has a huge dominant army with superior technology and well trained personnel. They bombard a village because it's easy and effective.
Someone made a decision that the lives of American soldiers were worth more than an entire Afghan village. That's a war crime, and someone should pay for that. And that person should not be Bradley Manning..
Nobody made this decision. American soldiers were already engaged in the fight with large Taliban force and suffering casualties when the strike was called in. They most probably had no idea where civilians are, since it wasn't exactly home terrain for them (they were called in from Farah when Afghans came under attack) and finding out where civilians are in the conditions of active urban warfare is next to impossible. They only target that makes sense to call air strike on is where the shooting at you originates. Turned out, it was also where the civilians were hiding (read: Taliban was probably firing either from the same or from the nearby places). Common tactics, Hamas is Gaza places rocket launchers near mosques, on the roofs of hospitals and in the school yards for exactly the same reason. If the army new that, they could probably do something else - retreat, regroup and try to resolve it in some other way, but I don't see where could they know it from.
Military operations are not law enforcement. They aren't required to prevent all deaths other than combatants. I don't know where you draw the line on collateral damage, but to say that you can't kill any "innocents" is not practical.
Yes, by all means, let us not burden our efficiency at slaughtering our fellow man with morality!
Certainly that's an easy choice for you to make; you're not the one bearing the brunt of that decision.
Second, it was not 5 soldier lives versus 1 civilian, more likely it was 5 soldier lives versus 140 civilian lives.
Third, yes I myself would probably also make the same decision, favouring the lives of my friends over a bunch of foreigners who are probably on the enemies side.
That doesn't make it less wrong, if I was in that position, and I made that decision, I would still have to be tried for committing a war crime, because that's what it is.
More importantly, the issue at hand is that we don't know whether that decision was as clean-cut as you suggest, precisely because of the lack of transparency of our .gov and .mil.
Now, there are very sound opsec reasons for not making that information public, but when we are the foreign aggressor I believe that it is not an unreasonable burden to place on ourselves; indeed, it may help encourage caution when considering military adventures abroad.
A side that operates like this doesn't get to call itself the "Good Guys" or call its opponents "Terrorists".
Is that true? I mean, it could be, but I'm wondering if anyone determined this to be the case, or is this just speculation based on descriptions of the video of the attack.