2 Journalists Gunned Down in Iraq

Guess its like South Park, when Jimbo and Ned Gerblansky take the kids hunting, and for it to be a legal shot they simply have to yell ‘It’s coming right for us!!’

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional.

Would you call the people that died on 9/11 or 7/7 casualties? I don’t think so.

For those that argue about ‘clean’ shoot, I suggest you put yourself in an Iraqi civilians shoes for a day and see how much you enjoy it. :slight_smile:

One of the articles mentions the original video was 35 minutes, edited for time. Not sure if there is anything of relevance in the edited part, but one with an agenda could easily…

EDIT: Nevermind, the full version is out there. Just didn’t watch it.

[quote]kodiak82 wrote:
I despise journalists, they got exactly what they deserve. those 30mm rounds pack a punch.[/quote]
Wow.

[quote]cremaster wrote:

[quote]AlisaV wrote:
…Here’s the thing. The article reports as fact that in the group of men several had guns and one had an RPG. Now the AUDIO says that, but I do not see that. Maybe I’m just unobservant? Do any of you see that?
[/quote]

Alisa, from 3:37 - 4:02 you can see men with rifles (or something suspiciously like rifles) in their hands.

And, 4:06 - 4:26 - lokk at the corner of the building, you can see a man kneeling peeking around corner, with something long, straight, black in his hands. One of the soldiers then says they were being fired upon.

[/quote]
Yeah, I was going to post this. To me it is very clear that the cameras could have been mistaken for weapons. I don’t know why whoever was talking said they saw 5-6 guys with AKs, the most it would be is 2 guys… so that’s questionable. But the soldiers did nothing wrong from their point of view.

[quote]kodiak82 wrote:

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
We spent a billion dollars a week in Iraq for several years, ostensibly trying to rebuild it. What a fucking waste of money. It should have been spent right here in America instead. People complain that using tax dollars for healthcare reform is a violation of their civil liberties. If anything, spending my tax dollars in IRAQ is a violation of my civil liberties.[/quote]

so liberal, how is it a violation of your civil liberties.[/quote]

I’m not a liberal, first off. Never voted democrat in my life. Secondly, my point is that IF taxation for things we don’t support is a violation of civil liberties (an argument I myself would never make, but have heard others make on this forum in the past), then by that logic, is this war not also a violation of my civil liberties? I rarely, if ever, hear people decry the war in Afghanistan or Iraq as a wasteful expenditure then turn around and decry healthcare reform as a wasteful expenditure as well. I hear people lament about the waste of taxes regarding one or the other, but almost never both. But I don’t want to turn this thread into another healthcare debate again. I’m beyond burnt out on the issue at this point.

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional. [/quote]
What are you talking about? U.S. Soldiers are some of the best trained out there. When I saw the video for the first time without knowing any of the details, two things I noticed…

  1. When the guy with the camera was kneeling around the building, it looked to me EXACTLY like an RPG was about to be fired. You can tell the Soldier thought this too by the urgency in his voice as they became blocked by the building as they panned around.

  2. I did not see any kids the first time I saw the video, and neither did those talking in the video. You see some other person in the passenger seat in the van when it is zoomed in, but no one would be able to tell if that was a kid, and it was ZOOMED in. The Soldiers were not watching this video feedback zoomed in on the passenger seat window.

The Iraqi men driving the truck were stupid to bring their kids anywhere near that area after 8 guys just got blasted.

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional.

[/quote]

Have you been in war? I grew up with a dad who was military, a number of my close friends and my last roommate was military with combat duty.

Regardless of what the verdict will be, it has nothing to do with being poorly trained. talk with enough of your close friends who’ve seen people blown up beside them, or shot down, or whatever, and it starts to become a little clearer—my ex-roommate and very good friend shared a lot of stories about combat in cav.

There comes a point where you just snap. Not like Mei Lei, but the stress of constant awareness and strain gets to you and you start doing things no fresh soldier does. My roommate did two tours, and reached a point in BOTH of them where he and others in his unit literally just started kicking potential IEDs they identified along the road.

It’s not what you’re trained for. You’re trained to identify and disarm or control detonate. He explained it like so “at some point you just start figuring well: either it’s a pile of trash or I won’t have to deal with the sandbox anymore”. It doesn’t take a stretch of imagination to see how if the stress can make you literally start to kick potential explosives, then stress might be able to make you think you see things that aren’t there. That’s war. It’s not pretty but it’s real, and it has nothing to do with the quality of training a soldier or officer receives.

The point here is that the strain war takes on someone who’s been deployed for a long time does things to them that seem completely stupid–or shady-- to other people sitting in the safety of their homes 5000 miles away. It messes with your mind and your perceptions, and after a certain amount of sleepless nights and 30 hour days you start acting differently whether you want to or not.

So think about this before we start tearing these soldiers a new asshole. It could be they saw what they say, or it could be they made it up in order to murder people, or it could be that their fatigue and stress levels led them to see things that weren’t there, but that were potential threats to their lives and acted accordingly. My money is firmly on either options 1 or 3.

And I agree. If you’re a reporter/cameraman you should put some sort of red cross or other identifying mark on your person or van.

[quote]Aragorn wrote:

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional.

[/quote]

Have you been in war? I grew up with a dad who was military, a number of my close friends and my last roommate was military with combat duty.

Regardless of what the verdict will be, it has nothing to do with being poorly trained. talk with enough of your close friends who’ve seen people blown up beside them, or shot down, or whatever, and it starts to become a little clearer—my ex-roommate and very good friend shared a lot of stories about combat in cav.

There comes a point where you just snap. Not like Mei Lei, but the stress of constant awareness and strain gets to you and you start doing things no fresh soldier does. My roommate did two tours, and reached a point in BOTH of them where he and others in his unit literally just started kicking potential IEDs they identified along the road.

It’s not what you’re trained for. You’re trained to identify and disarm or control detonate. He explained it like so “at some point you just start figuring well: either it’s a pile of trash or I won’t have to deal with the sandbox anymore”. It doesn’t take a stretch of imagination to see how if the stress can make you literally start to kick potential explosives, then stress might be able to make you think you see things that aren’t there. That’s war. It’s not pretty but it’s real, and it has nothing to do with the quality of training a soldier or officer receives.

The point here is that the strain war takes on someone who’s been deployed for a long time does things to them that seem completely stupid–or shady-- to other people sitting in the safety of their homes 5000 miles away. It messes with your mind and your perceptions, and after a certain amount of sleepless nights and 30 hour days you start acting differently whether you want to or not.

So think about this before we start tearing these soldiers a new asshole. It could be they saw what they say, or it could be they made it up in order to murder people, or it could be that their fatigue and stress levels led them to see things that weren’t there, but that were potential threats to their lives and acted accordingly. My money is firmly on either options 1 or 3.

And I agree. If you’re a reporter/cameraman you should put some sort of red cross or other identifying mark on your person or van.[/quote]

  1. Stress is a poor excuse to justify mistakes. I’m not saying these guys made a mistake, it was a judgement call, and from what I can tell they followed their rules of engagement. But if they had made a mistake, blaming it on the fog of war would be inappropriate, because that’s what the rules of engagement are specifically designed to deal with.

  2. If they (the journalists) wore giant red crosses, I wonder if we’d be talking about how ‘a lot of insurgents wear red-cross/crescent mock-ups to get better access to shooting RPG’s at US crews’, thus justifying the shooting.

Aragorn: that makes sense and that’s what I’d guess is going on.

Here’s what I hear from people in the military and their friends:

The US is trying to do a lot with too few people. You could go two ways with that: blame civilians for not signing up, or blame the government for getting into too many wars for too long. I tend to believe the latter, but the former also makes sense. The upshot is, though, that it’s insanely, unfairly hard to be in the military, and that the stress levels will, sooner or later, invite these kinds of accidents.

I know it’s not conventional, or not part of the code or something, for soldiers to complain. I respect that. But everything I’ve learned suggests that they have something to complain about.

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:
Guess its like South Park, when Jimbo and Ned Gerblansky take the kids hunting, and for it to be a legal shot they simply have to yell ‘It’s coming right for us!!’

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional.

Would you call the people that died on 9/11 or 7/7 casualties? I don’t think so.

For those that argue about ‘clean’ shoot, I suggest you put yourself in an Iraqi civilians shoes for a day and see how much you enjoy it. :)[/quote]

Get the fuck out of here man. Our soldiers are the best in the world. Let’s throw you in some shithole desert halfway around the world and start blowing shit up around you everyday, blowing up your buddies, shooting at you from all over the place and see how you handle it.

This is a fucked up war, doomed from the start. But it is NOT because of the shortcomings of our troops. War is fucked up, period. And anyone who would try to glorify it or blame some of the tragedy that occurs during it (such as killing civilians) simply doesn’t have a grasp on reality. My cousin is a SEAL in Afghanistan; I’d like to hear you tell him how poorly trained he is. Even he has a “questionable” kill under his belt due to the stress of war and he’s a Professional Bad Ass, literally. The absolute elite of the elite, but even he isn’t infallible.

You probably couldn’t even play Gears of War in the comfort of your home without dropping the controller every ten seconds if I was throwing tiny little bottle rockets at you the whole time. What do you think real war is like? Knowingly killing unarmed people like in My Lai or something along those lines is one thing, but killing a civilian in the midst of a heated battle is entirely different. If you want to know how crazy war can get, read Jon Krakauer’s latest book, “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman”. You’ll understand why the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is totally fucked and why it has nothing to do with our soldiers.

[quote]PB Andy wrote:

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional. [/quote]
What are you talking about? U.S. Soldiers are some of the best trained out there. When I saw the video for the first time without knowing any of the details, two things I noticed…

  1. When the guy with the camera was kneeling around the building, it looked to me EXACTLY like an RPG was about to be fired. You can tell the Soldier thought this too by the urgency in his voice as they became blocked by the building as they panned around.

  2. I did not see any kids the first time I saw the video, and neither did those talking in the video. You see some other person in the passenger seat in the van when it is zoomed in, but no one would be able to tell if that was a kid, and it was ZOOMED in. The Soldiers were not watching this video feedback zoomed in on the passenger seat window.

The Iraqi men driving the truck were stupid to bring their kids anywhere near that area after 8 guys just got blasted.[/quote]

Maybe the people in the truck were going to try to save someone’s life, but who knows.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to justify murder, all you have to do is:
declare war on a country>invade>shoot anyone that has something that might resemble a weapon.

I don’t get why the Iraqis just don’t give up while a foreign country is occupying them, that’s what you would do, isn’t it?

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:
Guess its like South Park, when Jimbo and Ned Gerblansky take the kids hunting, and for it to be a legal shot they simply have to yell ‘It’s coming right for us!!’

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional.

Would you call the people that died on 9/11 or 7/7 casualties? I don’t think so.

For those that argue about ‘clean’ shoot, I suggest you put yourself in an Iraqi civilians shoes for a day and see how much you enjoy it. :)[/quote]

Get the fuck out of here man. Our soldiers are the best in the world. Let’s throw you in some shithole desert halfway around the world and start blowing shit up around you everyday, blowing up your buddies, shooting at you from all over the place and see how you handle it.

This is a fucked up war, doomed from the start. But it is NOT because of the shortcomings of our troops. War is fucked up, period. And anyone who would try to glorify it or blame some of the tragedy that occurs during it (such as killing civilians) simply doesn’t have a grasp on reality. My cousin is a SEAL in Afghanistan; I’d like to hear you tell him how poorly trained he is. Even he has a “questionable” kill under his belt due to the stress of war and he’s a Professional Bad Ass, literally. The absolute elite of the elite, but even he isn’t infallible.

You probably couldn’t even play Gears of War in the comfort of your home without dropping the controller every ten seconds if I was throwing tiny little bottle rockets at you the whole time. What do you think real war is like? Knowingly killing unarmed people like in My Lai or something along those lines is one thing, but killing a civilian in the midst of a heated battle is entirely different. If you want to know how crazy war can get, read Jon Krakauer’s latest book, “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman”. You’ll understand why the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is totally fucked and why it has nothing to do with our soldiers.[/quote]

Maybe your country should get the fuck out of places it doesn’t belong, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but that wouldn’t be very profitable for those interested.

[quote]Otep wrote:

  1. Stress is a poor excuse to justify mistakes. I’m not saying these guys made a mistake, it was a judgement call, and from what I can tell they followed their rules of engagement. But if they had made a mistake, blaming it on the fog of war would be inappropriate, because that’s what the rules of engagement are specifically designed to deal with.

  2. If they (the journalists) wore giant red crosses, I wonder if we’d be talking about how ‘a lot of insurgents wear red-cross/crescent mock-ups to get better access to shooting RPG’s at US crews’, thus justifying the shooting.[/quote]

Good points. However, I’m not advocating the use of “stress” as an excuse to justify mistakes. It is, on the other hand, and unavoidable and largely insoluble part of war. And it does change people’s behaviors and perceptions, often against their will, as my friend can tell you. It’s not like they consciously choose one day and say “hey, I’m going to start kicking bombs instead of control detonating them like I’m trained to do”.

I agree with you that the ROE are designed to deal with the fog of war. However, the fundamental situation will always come down to perception and judgement. Once those are altered, ROE can help only so much. Besides, as any soldier can probably tell you, ROE is not perfect and following them has also caused some problems. It’s largely insoluble however. One way or the other shit is going to happen.

  1. good point. It’s mostly wishful thinking on my part I suppose because I know that is exactly what would happen.

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:

[quote]PB Andy wrote:

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional. [/quote]
What are you talking about? U.S. Soldiers are some of the best trained out there. When I saw the video for the first time without knowing any of the details, two things I noticed…

  1. When the guy with the camera was kneeling around the building, it looked to me EXACTLY like an RPG was about to be fired. You can tell the Soldier thought this too by the urgency in his voice as they became blocked by the building as they panned around.

  2. I did not see any kids the first time I saw the video, and neither did those talking in the video. You see some other person in the passenger seat in the van when it is zoomed in, but no one would be able to tell if that was a kid, and it was ZOOMED in. The Soldiers were not watching this video feedback zoomed in on the passenger seat window.

The Iraqi men driving the truck were stupid to bring their kids anywhere near that area after 8 guys just got blasted.[/quote]

Maybe the people in the truck were going to try to save someone’s life, but who knows.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to justify murder, all you have to do is:
declare war on a country>invade>shoot anyone that has something that might resemble a weapon.

I don’t get why the Iraqis just don’t give up while a foreign country is occupying them, that’s what you would do, isn’t it?

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:
Guess its like South Park, when Jimbo and Ned Gerblansky take the kids hunting, and for it to be a legal shot they simply have to yell ‘It’s coming right for us!!’

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional.

Would you call the people that died on 9/11 or 7/7 casualties? I don’t think so.

For those that argue about ‘clean’ shoot, I suggest you put yourself in an Iraqi civilians shoes for a day and see how much you enjoy it. :)[/quote]

Get the fuck out of here man. Our soldiers are the best in the world. Let’s throw you in some shithole desert halfway around the world and start blowing shit up around you everyday, blowing up your buddies, shooting at you from all over the place and see how you handle it.

This is a fucked up war, doomed from the start. But it is NOT because of the shortcomings of our troops. War is fucked up, period. And anyone who would try to glorify it or blame some of the tragedy that occurs during it (such as killing civilians) simply doesn’t have a grasp on reality. My cousin is a SEAL in Afghanistan; I’d like to hear you tell him how poorly trained he is. Even he has a “questionable” kill under his belt due to the stress of war and he’s a Professional Bad Ass, literally. The absolute elite of the elite, but even he isn’t infallible.

You probably couldn’t even play Gears of War in the comfort of your home without dropping the controller every ten seconds if I was throwing tiny little bottle rockets at you the whole time. What do you think real war is like? Knowingly killing unarmed people like in My Lai or something along those lines is one thing, but killing a civilian in the midst of a heated battle is entirely different. If you want to know how crazy war can get, read Jon Krakauer’s latest book, “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman”. You’ll understand why the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is totally fucked and why it has nothing to do with our soldiers.[/quote]

Maybe your country should get the fuck out of places it doesn’t belong, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but that wouldn’t be very profitable for those interested.[/quote]

You’re right, we should get the fuck out places we don’t belong. And we don’t belong in Iraq. But what does this have to do with people who slam our soldiers and their actions in war? What are they supposed to do, sign up to fight those who attacked us on 9/11 and then refuse to serve in Iraq while their buddies are over there getting killed? Trust me, there are a lot of soldiers in Iraq who are against us being there, but voicing that opposition isn’t their job. They are soldiers, they do what they are told and all of their anti-Iraq War sentiments go right out the window when the bullets start flying. Then it’s all about survival, nothing else.

And by the way, what magnanimous country are you from?

[quote]AlisaV wrote:
Aragorn: that makes sense and that’s what I’d guess is going on.

Here’s what I hear from people in the military and their friends:

The US is trying to do a lot with too few people. You could go two ways with that: blame civilians for not signing up, or blame the government for getting into too many wars for too long. I tend to believe the latter, but the former also makes sense. The upshot is, though, that it’s insanely, unfairly hard to be in the military, and that the stress levels will, sooner or later, invite these kinds of accidents.

I know it’s conventional, or not part of the code or something, for soldiers to complain. I respect that. But everything I’ve learned suggests that they have something to complain about.[/quote]

I thoroughly agree with you. My interactions with my various friends and relations have tended to bear this out.

DBCooper, I like you. I disagree thoroughly with you on a lot of what you post in this forum but you generally have a well thought out post or process to your positions.

And I thoroughly agree with your posts in this thread.

[quote]DBCooper wrote:
You’re right, we should get the fuck out places we don’t belong. And we don’t belong in Iraq. But what does this have to do with people who slam our soldiers and their actions in war? What are they supposed to do, sign up to fight those who attacked us on 9/11 and then refuse to serve in Iraq while their buddies are over there getting killed? Trust me, there are a lot of soldiers in Iraq who are against us being there, but voicing that opposition isn’t their job. They are soldiers, they do what they are told and all of their anti-Iraq War sentiments go right out the window when the bullets start flying. Then it’s all about survival, nothing else.

And by the way, what magnanimous country are you from? [/quote]

I’m Canadian.

That comment about them not being trained well wasn’t accurate, I apologize for that, they are well-trained but I guess like most employees, they get driven into the ground.

Asfaik it wasn’t Iraq that instigated 9/11 either.

Laughing about killing people isn’t cool tho.

[quote]Aragorn wrote:
DBCooper, I like you. I disagree thoroughly with you on a lot of what you post in this forum but you generally have a well thought out post or process to your positions.

And I thoroughly agree with your posts in this thread.[/quote]

I agree with him also.

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:

[quote]PB Andy wrote:

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional. [/quote]
What are you talking about? U.S. Soldiers are some of the best trained out there. When I saw the video for the first time without knowing any of the details, two things I noticed…

  1. When the guy with the camera was kneeling around the building, it looked to me EXACTLY like an RPG was about to be fired. You can tell the Soldier thought this too by the urgency in his voice as they became blocked by the building as they panned around.

  2. I did not see any kids the first time I saw the video, and neither did those talking in the video. You see some other person in the passenger seat in the van when it is zoomed in, but no one would be able to tell if that was a kid, and it was ZOOMED in. The Soldiers were not watching this video feedback zoomed in on the passenger seat window.

The Iraqi men driving the truck were stupid to bring their kids anywhere near that area after 8 guys just got blasted.[/quote]

Maybe the people in the truck were going to try to save someone’s life, but who knows.

I guess the moral of the story is that if you want to justify murder, all you have to do is:
declare war on a country>invade>shoot anyone that has something that might resemble a weapon.

I don’t get why the Iraqis just don’t give up while a foreign country is occupying them, that’s what you would do, isn’t it?

[quote]DBCooper wrote:

[quote]MattyG35 wrote:
Guess its like South Park, when Jimbo and Ned Gerblansky take the kids hunting, and for it to be a legal shot they simply have to yell ‘It’s coming right for us!!’

To me, that video shows how poorly trained those US soldiers are, ‘seeing’ guns that don’t exist and shooting kids isn’t professional.

Would you call the people that died on 9/11 or 7/7 casualties? I don’t think so.

For those that argue about ‘clean’ shoot, I suggest you put yourself in an Iraqi civilians shoes for a day and see how much you enjoy it. :)[/quote]

Get the fuck out of here man. Our soldiers are the best in the world. Let’s throw you in some shithole desert halfway around the world and start blowing shit up around you everyday, blowing up your buddies, shooting at you from all over the place and see how you handle it.

This is a fucked up war, doomed from the start. But it is NOT because of the shortcomings of our troops. War is fucked up, period. And anyone who would try to glorify it or blame some of the tragedy that occurs during it (such as killing civilians) simply doesn’t have a grasp on reality. My cousin is a SEAL in Afghanistan; I’d like to hear you tell him how poorly trained he is. Even he has a “questionable” kill under his belt due to the stress of war and he’s a Professional Bad Ass, literally. The absolute elite of the elite, but even he isn’t infallible.

You probably couldn’t even play Gears of War in the comfort of your home without dropping the controller every ten seconds if I was throwing tiny little bottle rockets at you the whole time. What do you think real war is like? Knowingly killing unarmed people like in My Lai or something along those lines is one thing, but killing a civilian in the midst of a heated battle is entirely different. If you want to know how crazy war can get, read Jon Krakauer’s latest book, “Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman”. You’ll understand why the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is totally fucked and why it has nothing to do with our soldiers.[/quote]

Maybe your country should get the fuck out of places it doesn’t belong, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion, but that wouldn’t be very profitable for those interested.[/quote]

why don’t you die and go to hell. you scumbag. we will go where we want to. nothing useful ever comes out of Canada. you remind me why I hate Canadians.

Happy travels there mate.

[quote]Aragorn wrote:
DBCooper, I like you. I disagree thoroughly with you on a lot of what you post in this forum but you generally have a well thought out post or process to your positions.

And I thoroughly agree with your posts in this thread.[/quote]

Shit dude. Don’t stop there; tell me more! In all seriousness, thanks. I know I’m not always right. I just try to present a reasonable argument and stick to the issue rather than personal attacks and so forth. I’ll tell you man, when I AM wrong, it’s a well-reasoned argument/explanation that makes me reassess my stance on something. Even if someone was telling me that 2 + 2 = 4, I might not be quick to agree with them if they’re being a total ass about arguing why they are right.