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> no, the soldiers in the helicopter should not be tried

Oh, I'm sure they won't be. No doubt whatever actions they took are entirely justifiable under whatever legal framework has been whipped up to cover it. Not like there's going to be Nuremberg trials for Iraq.

But at the end of the day, the video shows american soldiers in billion-dollar helicopters calmly killing innocent people in a foreign country they have no real reason to be in. That upsets people. And you can quote as many legal justifications as you want but none of that changes the profound injustice, and rock bottom morality, of what happened that day.

TL;DR: if the outcome of your legal process is profound injustice and innocent people killed without reason or consequence, your legal process sucks.

None of these are legal justifications. The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war. The video shows soldiers in helicopters shooting at a group of people, some of whom are armed with AK47s and RPGs, in the midst of a firefight in which their comrade's are getting shot at nearby. In the process they mistakenly hit two reporters who are carrying equipment that reasonably could be mistaken for weapons from hundreds of meters away. You don't need legal justifications for that. Ordinary morality suffices.

None of the people in that video were armed with AK47s or RPGs.

Also, way to completely ignore the van they shot up with two children inside. Which they knew were inside.

The Army found two RPG launchers, an AK47 and an RPG round under one of the bodies among the first group. Assange later acknowledged as much. "Based upon visual evidence I suspect there probably were AKs and an RPG, but I'm not sure that means anything..."

As for the kids, look at this picture and tell me how you think they knew children were inside: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/Col....

AKs were commonly carried for security reasons at the time, but the RPG was damning as insurgents. (I had a 9mm and an AK most of the time, and a bunch of suspiciously mortar tube like satellite dish stands in the back yard, which always scared me whenever helicopters flew over...)

> None of these are legal justifications. The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war

You keep on repeating "theater of war! theater of war!" like it's some get out of jail free card giving you carte blanche to do whatever you want, for whatever reasons, without consequence. And I suppose, if you're America, it is.

But this is not some WWI battlefield. It's a city filled with millions of ordinary people living ordinary lives, with every right to live those lives in peace. "Theater of war" or not, if you're going to go and shoot up foreign cities filled with innocent people then maybe the burden of proof should be on you a bit that you kill the "right" people.

Everything you say is founded on a presumption in favour of the military. Their comrades were shot at before! Erring on the side of caution (caution for us, of course)! Hey, that could have been a gun! We didn't know there were kids!

Love to hear what all the bloodthirsty war fans would think if those were innocent americans being calmly cut to pieces by some unfeeling foreign gunner. "What's that you say? It's a theater of war? Oh well that's perfectly all right then! Fire away!"

> The law isn't even relevant here, since the conduct happened in a theater of war.

If the law wasn't relevant in theaters of war, we wouldn't have phrases like "war crime".

Yes, especially when they saw the rescuers come and try to save the injured, they just had to kill those as well. How dare rescuers try to save lives! This is war, which clearly means shooting anything that moves is the best policy. </sarcasm>

It's not just "war" in the abstract. The context of the video is that there is literally a firefight going on nearby in which U.S. soldiers are under attack. The helicopters shot at what appeared to be a group of armed men ("appeared" because some of the men actually were armed) and then shot at a van that appeared to be trying to pick up "bodies and weapons" (according to the soldier who radioed in for permission to engage the van). In the context of a firefight, that means the van is a potential threat--those wounded and the weapons could go back to fighting U.S soldiers.

This is not a "shoot anything that moves situation." It's a "if you're called in to the middle of a firefight you resolve doubts in favor of whatever protects other U.S. soldiers."

""" Gabriel Schoenfeld, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute said of the airstrike:.

It is precisely the presence of weapons, including RPGs, that goes a long distance toward explaining why cameramen for Reuters—pointing television cameras around corners in a battle zone—were readily mistaken by our gunships for insurgents. The video makes plain that in this incident, as in almost all military encounters in both Iraq and Afghanistan, our soldiers are up against forces that do not wear uniforms—a violation of international law precisely because it places innocent civilians in jeopardy. """

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's never appropriate to second-guess a soldier's conduct in war. But "war crimes" are purposefully malicious actions in the absence of a threat. Not bad judgment calls in response to what you can make out from hundreds of meters away in the middle of a firefight.

This is a war crime: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_Massacre.

Thank you for linking up these dots. I hadn't seen this side of the story, but I still think there have been too many deaths of civilians [1].

And you might want to read up exact transcript of the conversation in the chopper [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_War_...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251512

You need to check your facts and your baises. There were never any weapons being picked up by the van nor did they ever "appear" to do so. The talk of weapons where wishful thinking because they were so set on engaging:

    06:33 Come on, buddy.
    06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.
    06:44 Crazyhorse this is Bushmaster Five, Bushmaster Four break. We are right below you right time now can you walk us onto that location over.
    06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage.
    07:07 Yeah Bushmaster, we have a van that's approaching and picking up the bodies.
    07:14 Where's that van at?
    07:15 Right down there by the bodies.
    07:16 Okay, yeah.
    07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like *possibly* uh picking up bodies and weapons.
    07:25 Let me engage.
    07:28 Can I shoot?
    07:31 Roger. Break. Uh Crazyhorse One-Eight request permission to uh engage.
    07:36 Picking up the wounded?
    07:38 Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage.
    07:41 Come on, let us shoot!
    07:44 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
    07:49 They're taking him.
    07:51 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse One-Eight.
    07:56 This is Bushmaster Seven, go ahead.
    07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.
    08:02 Fuck.
    08:06 This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. This is Bushmaster Seven, roger. Engage.

The official report also comes to the conclusion that they were engaging the van because it was picking up wounded insurgents. Of course the wounded man wasn't an insurgent but one of the journalists.

http://www.collateralmurder.com/en/transcript.html https://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%...

You need to not judge the actions in the video based on soldiers talking like soldiers do. He clearly says on 07:18 that he thinks that the van is picking up weapons. An army report found, and Assange conceded that in the first group: "Based upon visual evidence I suspect there probably were AKs and an RPG."

Sure, the guy is eager to engage, but remember the whole context of this is that the Apaches were called in to protect American soldiers under fire in that area.

That decision was made when the rules of engagement were drawn up, by higher-ranking people and long before this incident. In fact I believe at the time, they were supposed to shoot anyone who picked up the weapon of an injured combatant, even if they weren't threatening anyone with it. Not sure what the logic was on that one, but it wasn't like the gunner was just making up rules as he went along.

I've seen you apologize for the NSA spying on everyone, for Google giving all of our data to the NSA while putting on their best "don't be evil" face and now you apologize for scum shooting innocent people from helicopters (AND ENJOYING IT!).

You're a terrible person, how do you live with yourself?

Well, reading this comment, I find you to be more scum than the helicopter pilot. He was eager to engage to protect the soldiers on the ground and thought he found the ones who were trying to kill them. Probably too eager, because war is hell, and despite all the best efforts of people to minimize civilian casualties, they can't. This is the actual reason I am an anti-war veteran.

You are just a coward behind a keyboard hurling insults from throwaway accounts, imagining yourself to be the better person.

Ugh, too much internet for one day.

Huh? BS. I come here to HN to grok the truth, to see other side, not to nod head in agreement. I learn so much from rayiner's view point. I don't agree with him on all points, but I'm definitely a better informed person because of his reasoning.