Here is a video that is doing the rounds at the moment, for those not familiar with Wikileaks it's a wikipedia style site that specialises in leaking sensitive information that various governments, large corporations and tyrants generally would rather you didn't see. This video is from an Apache attack helicopter in Iraq and appears to show the pilots shooting civilians and children in Baghdad, the film has been verified by an unnamed US army source according to the BBC and two Reuters employees were officially killed in this attack, Reuters have made an official complaint to the US government.
It is very hard for us if not impossible to judge what happens in war from afar, maybe the pilots had a better view of the supposed weapons that these people were claimed to have, I can't see any weapons, maybe they just mistook a camera that one of the Reuters men had for an AK-47, all plausible. However, what is inexplicable is what they did when a bystander drove past in his van and stopped to help. How could they have failed to notice the two small faces peering out of the side windows of the vehicle? they're clearly visible to me even in this grainy video, the soldiers simply opened fire on the van killing more adults and wounding the two children who were sitting in the front seat, celebrating their "kill" with emotion and language that betrays and belittles the real bravery going on in Iraq and Afghanistan every day. This is not a video game, enemies or not, the people being dismembered in the street by the 30mm cannon rounds being sprayed on them from above were real human beings, what were they thinking.
2 comments:
I think we're all guilty of thinking that people act rationally when aroused, whatever the source of that arousal. This is factually incorrect and has been proven countless times by psychologists. The migration to a risk taking behaviour can increase by as much as 400%.
You simply cannot be engaged in war (or policing) and be expected to behave rationally.
I wouldn't be too quick to condemn. Judge not, lest ye....
CB, You make a very fair point, it's a very difficult call for these guys. But even so, we're not looking at a bayonet charge here, they were sitting on a gun platform a kilometre away; they surely had time to assess the situation better and marshal ground based resources? I'm not sure rationality was the issue so much as incompetence (they sounded pretty calm).
The key point that wasn't answered was did the ground troops actually find any weapons, I'd like to know that.
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