out of interest why does this cause more of an outcry than airstrikes ?

I think because with airstrikes, we don't see the actual moment when people are being killed. With this video, we see the moment Human Life is extinguished, which is somewhat more emotive, in a strange way.

It's horrible, The fact that it's fuzzy footage, and you can't see the people's faces clearly, somehow sanitises it, distances the viewer further from the actual act of killing, but it is still absolutely sickening.

And here we are, arguing about the 'legitimacy' of such slaughter. 😥

maybe. i was in a situation once where we were taking a lot of fire from a built up area and my gaffer called in an airstrike as we were up shit creak. the u.s flew in and cleared the area for us. it was mad they were releasing before they had even passed us (we thought they were gonna take us out) and it was amazing to be there. lots of civvys no doubt got killed but i didnt at the time really think about it i was just glad it was them and not us . and tbh i still am.

so do you not worry that all the civvies you had killed all have family members who are probably that much more ready to kill the next lot of british troops sent out there?

and the point is the apaches werent taking fire from anyone

Roper, I understand what you're saying. We agree that if the military f*** up, they deserve to be punished.
What we don't agree on is

in this case, Reuters seem to have seen the situation clearer than the soldiers.

this I disagree with, and you cannot in clear conscience say that those guys were not armed.
Kimbers what should firestarter have done, died?

kimbers eer no, no i dont 😉

i know they werent taking fire at the time. i was just wondering about the differences between this and airstrikes

i have no answer for that one backhander am not a soldier, other than not taken a job that involves blowing up civilians

and im aware there will always be a need for soldiers, i just fail to see the point in a continually self perpetuating circle of violence like afgahnistan or the mass grave that iraq has turned into

other than not taken a job that involves blowing up civilians

Ahh, I understand. You dislike soldiers. I dislike politicians myself.

i just fail to see the point in a continually self perpetuating circle of violence like afgahnistan or the mass grave that iraq has turned into

Quite agree with you there though. I'd be more comfortable with it if there were sufficient troops there so that we could see an end. I don't think it'll get resolved otherwise.

i dislike the soldiers in the video, yes

laughing and joking as you run over a dead reporters body in your bradley doesnt endear them to me, let alone turning your gunship on a minibus with 2 kids in thats trying to evacuate the other guys you just murdered

backhander,
No that's not what I've been saying and I suspect you are deliberately not listening or misunderstanding for arguments sake, so won't carry on talking to you about it.

Blacklug – Member

Anti-American propaganda

The guys had rpg and ak47s … they werent out to do a bit of fishing were they? the reporters knew the risks when they hooked up with them.

Well from what I saw they might as well have been on a fishing trip

It's hard to imagine a more relaxed bunch of guys – chatting, milling around, etc, without apparently, a care in the world.

Now assuming that the helicopter wasn't "invisible", nor that it was completely silent, I reckon that it's pretty fair to conclude that the last thing they, including the Reuters reporters, were expecting, was to be attacked.

Which is not exactly the attitude you expect from an enemy.

There is very little doubt in my mind that the whole incident was simply a case of cold blooded murder. But there is nothing surprising in that – there was a war going on after all.

And the US government's furious reaction to the video going public, betrays the fact that they don't see it as a unique and unrepresentative incident which needs to be thoroughly investigated without any cover-ups. So presumably they consider it to be fairly routine and representative.

What I do find peculiar however, is how so many people appear to be strangely shocked and surprised by the event – nothing I saw, did either of those things to me. War isn't some sort of boisterous 'gentleman's parlour game'.

What is also surprising, is that there would appear to be people who are very well placed within the US military that are prepared to leak such material in direct defiance of the US government.

The two blokes in centre screen at 3:40 to 3:50 in the video are clearly carrying weapons, or something looking very, very like them – AK and RPG.

Given that – the point where the bloke looks round the corner with the camera can then easily be conceived as a "plausible" threat

Engaging the van was clearly cold blooded. murder though.

What is also surprising, is that there would appear to be people who are very well placed within the US military that are prepared to leak such material in direct defiance of the US government.

Really, you're suprised that elements in the US military would seek to embarass a Democrat Govt ?

There is very little doubt in my mind that the whole incident was simply a case of cold blooded murder

Come on ernie, you don't really think that do you?
You really think they thought "oh I know, lets kill those innocent civvies down there, c'mon it'll be a right laugh"?

apparently wikileaks has similar footage from afgahnistan to release as well

right now im sure this is being forwarded around the arab world
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/04/201045123449200569.html

all these 2 wars have done for us is increase the production of heroin, send the price of petrol through the roof and convince 4 lads from the midlands/yorks to blow themselves up on the tube

as backhander said i blame the politicians, i dont think sending more troops out is the answer
especially when the wahabbi? brand of islam seems to be the main problem and thats based in our oil buddy saudi arabia

Oooh I like wahabbi especially on peanuts. Hot.

Im crying watching that…I don't know why I watched it as I know that these sort of things upset me.

As a younger man ( I now refer to it as being my other life)I have witnessed military attrocities…I am not proud of this – it has had a profound effect on my life. My path is now one that heals and helps rather than maims or kills.

What's done is now done ….lets just hope that the children are safe, and that the pilots come to terms with what they have done.

Jeez.

Didn't the Yanks kill more British troops than the Iraqis did in the first Gulf War?

Come on ernie, you don't really think that do you?

What ? You expect me to think that war is some sort of gentlemen's game instead ? I expect the Geneva Convention to go out of the window. I expect prisoners to be shot, etc etc. I haven't been taken in by Hollywood and the likes of Tony Blair since I was a kid. There is no 'law and order' in war. And people die who shouldn't die. I'm not necessarily condemning those who carried out the apparent cold-blooded killings…….it's all part of a bigger picture. The only people who are really useful in a war, are the psychopaths (10% of the population iirc?) Normal people are fairly useless by comparison, unless you can get them to kill people that they can't physically see.

If we're going to have wars, then we should celebrate psychopaths, not condemn them. And of course we do generally celebrate them – give them medals in fact. There is not such thing as a clean and fair war. And it is a complete waste of time trying to achieve one. imho of course.

For an intelligent bloke, that's a really stupid post.

OK just checked, not 10% of the population (of course) about 1%. About 20% of prisoners though, so 10% of soldiers sounds feasible.

backhander – you are perfectly entitled to consider my post to be "really stupid". But you have no right however, to assume that you know my intelligence.

myheadsashed i believe you are correct

Well research show the first kill by US Apaches in the first Gulf war were on US troops 😯

Ernie raises an interesting point. One of the major "issues" for the modern army is the necessary desensitization of it's troops. You need soldiers to be able to act decisively under massive amounts of stress (the modern battlefield) this in turn neuters certain "normal" human emotions and reactions to the horror around them. Fine perhaps in the heat of battle, not so fine perhaps once these poor sods get back to civvie street. I suspect as a society we will be dealing with the mental fallout from these conflicts for a long time

Having just watched that video its all pretty sickening. The sentiment that "it's a war – soldiers kill – it's expected" is rubbish. Whatever, happened to "soldiers protect"? As far as I can see they killed a dozen people. Of that dozen – two were armed(?), one was a photographer and several were possibly children.

I didn't see or hear any stress in the gunner or pilot's voices to indicate they were stressed.

Stressed? That's "desserts" spelt backwards and perhaps they'll get theirs too.

The sentiment that "it's a war – soldiers kill – it's expected" is rubbish. Whatever, happened to "soldiers protect"?

ffs, to kill another human being is completely unnatural. To do that, a normal person, needs to,
turn off…..ignore…..whatever …. their "moral switch/valve/sensor/whatever". You can't expect them to do that when the circumstances require it, and then, just simply turn it back on, when the circumstances "no longer" require it.

OK, maybe some remarkable people can sometimes do that. But to expect all people to be able to do it all of the time, is quite frankly ridiculous, imo. We're talking about human beings here – not **** machines with mechanical switches. I expect all soldiers in theatres of war to have morally impaired judgement.

And they don't just kill, they do other thoroughly unpleasant things such as rape – rape is extraordinarily common in war situations. In fact it's sometimes so widespread, that it's the ones which don't engage in it, who are the exceptions.

War is nasty. Either get used to it or, don't elect warmongers as leaders. There aren't any other fairyland alternatives.

Quite clearly you've been watching too much Platoon and Casualties of War.

Never seen them mudsux……films which bring home the reality of war have never really appealed to me. I go to the pictures (and I tend only to watch films at the pictures) to be entertained and precisely to escape reality.

Quite clearly you've been following too many murder stories in the news, if you think that killing a member of your own species such a simple process.

Surely the issue here is that the people who decided to fire were miles away in an aircraft looking at pictures on a TV screen, and don't see the results close up. So they don't have to dehumanise anyone, that's done for them by the fact that they appear to be playing a giant video game – they sound like my teenage son and his friends on Modern Warfare 2.

There are now people who go to work every day in the US, and remotely fly drones over Afghanistan and Pakistan and take out buildings, vehicles, and groups of people in this way with hellfire missiles… and then when their shift is over they drive home to their normal family life. No horror of war for them.

Just watched the footage from the heli gunship and found it disturbing, okay some of those guys appeared to be armed, but they were not firing on anyone, one guy behind the wall on the corner looked like he had a camera, I don't think the Americans were justified in firing on them and killing like they did, you see why so many civilians women & children get killed, Collateral damage they call it, pish trigger happy Americans more like.

That Apache footage… man, that's pretty f*cked up right there… it's not often you're confronted with imagery of people being killed in pretty much cold-blood… chilling and really sickening 🙁

Seems pretty clear that those guys on the ground weren't posing a threat to the Apaches, but there were ground troops in the area that they may have been a construed as a threat to??

And why the **** did they take out the van… that alone should result in charges, surely?

Trigger happy yanks indeed… 🙁

Surely the issue here is that the people who decided to fire were miles away in an aircraft looking at pictures on a TV screen, and don't see the results close up. So they don't have to dehumanise anyone, that's done for them by the fact that they appear to be playing a giant video game – they sound like my teenage son and his friends on Modern Warfare 2.

There are now people who go to work every day in the US, and remotely fly drones over Afghanistan and Pakistan and take out buildings, vehicles, and groups of people in this way with hellfire missiles… and then when their shift is over they drive home to their normal family life. No horror of war for them.

Absolutely spot on, imo.

Specially : "So they don't have to dehumanise anyone, that's done for them ….."

Watching the film was pretty sickening. What is also sickening, in its own way, is that people are prepared to claim black is white, and defend what was done.

After a quick skim through some of the above, and reading the smart-arse responses to my previous post, I thought I'd chuck in a couple more points;

Some of you clearly have too much time on your hands.

No-one is suggesting there is some sort of military-civvy them and us theme developing here, grow up people.

The times article states that it's source was an Afghan investigator and the incident involved US and Afghan SF – did I mention how corrupt the Afghan are? (not all clearly, but a lot of them).

People are still getting tied up in knots about things they can't change, or don't know the full story about.

Regards to roper,anokdale and backhander.

OUT.

It's one thing to mistakenly shoot people who appear to be armed when viewed via a grainy gunsight camera system. It's a mistake, but it's something I can understand.

What I really don't like is "They're picking up the bodies in a bongo van, permission to engage". To me, that's as bad as shooting an ambulance, which would be a massive incident in news / diplomatic terms. The vehicle may not be an ambulance with a red cross / crescent painted on the side, but this is Iraq we're talking about, not the western world where we have the luxury of infrastructure and a half decent ambulance service.

I think its fair to say there is no right or wrong in this case. It's not the soldiers fault they have been shipped out to a war that basically breaks the geneva convention. We are an imperiallistic foriegn force in someone elses country, the soldiers shooting aren't accountable its the people that sent them there. I think the reason no one wants the general public to see operational footage is because thre vast majority of people would be appauled that we are allowing our soldiers and our money to be frivolously wasted like a bag of rice at a wedding. Are we really being protected from global terrorism or are we threatening people who can't really fight us fairly? I have to say I for one am not surrprised that they play dirty, making it harder for soldiers to differentiate between civilian and miltia. If we sent our politicians in with guns no air support etc the war wouldn't have lasted this long and we could go back to normal and we wouldn't have wasted billions of public money which it now turns out we didn't have in the first place for what is basically totally unjustified.

I think its fair to say there is no right or wrong in this case.

Unbelievable.

why do people just do that on forums read a sentence then form an opinion. If you read the whole post you would see that I disagree with the war, I feel that by taking people and training them in a way that generates a certain response is the fault of the politicians not the soldiers. It isn't the soldiers fault they have been trained in that way. It is the politicians fault that they have broken the geneva convention to invade a country. The soldiers aren't to be held responsible for how they are trained nor for which conflicts they are sent to. And yes there is right and wrong in this case but obviously you're too far up your own ar$e to read on so I'll not write my opionion in future because no matter what I write you'll just select a small part edit it and then get on your high horse.

I thought I'd chuck in a couple more points;

Except you haven't actually made any points at all have you.

It isn't the soldiers fault they have been trained in that way

Soldiers are trained to follow the rules of engagement.
Quite clearly, imbeciles, morons and psychopaths would be excluded from the selection process due to their inability to follow orders and make a judgment in such situations.

So to say "soldiers shooting aren't accountable its the people that sent them there" is wrong. Unless you have accountability up and down the chain of command (and that includes decision makers in government) you have no control at all.

I dare say combat training does desensitize an individual to their actions. Desensitized and moral impairment – two different things. The actions of a helicopter pilot and his gunner could be compared to [list]shooting fish in a barrel[/list]. Where does moral impairment come into it?