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Killing civilians and covering it up

So Wikileaks has this video online, leaked from the DoD (but confirmed as genuine) of Blackhawk helicopters in 2007 Baghdad taking out a bunch of people identified in the audio as insurgents with AK47s and RPGs, but (as it turns out) civilians including two Reuters photographers.

Here’s the edited version of the video.  It’s long, and it’s got some editorializing front and back, but the core of it is … a glimpse into a bloody conflict, and how shit happens in war.

This article talks about some of the dangers of unverified and out-of-context video …

The disjuncture between the images captured by the camera and the information being verbally reported by the helicopter crew is striking. (For example, the crew reports that they are seeing adult males armed with AK47s, but the men on the ground appear unarmed.) Could the film be a fake, and how would we know? (Wikileaks has provided almost no information on its website about the video’s source other than a non-working link. The big “Click here to donate” link above the video on the Wikileaks site works fine, which is troubling.)

I am not saying I don’t believe some Apache gunners made gross errors and the military covered it up, only that user-generated content should always be verified before conclusions are drawn, and Wikileaks’ confidentiality policies make that difficult.

And, in part because it’s video from two choppers, there are video cuts.  And some odd gaps in the audio that I can’t attribute one way or another.

But … let’s take the video (the core video) at face value.  Never mind the framing — take it as given that the people on the ground are not, in fact, insurgents.  They’re a bunch of civilians and a couple of Reuters photogs.

So, do we see some trigger-happy Blackhawk gunners, pilots, and their command staff just blowing the shit out of people and stuff with their 30mm cannon? (For those unmetric, those are shells a little under an inch-and-a-quarter in diameter.  They will give you a really bad day.)

No.  We hear and see pilots spotting a bunch of guys congregrating, and one or two of them have stuff slung over their shoulders.  And, at one point, one of them is peering around the corner with (what we know is) a camera.

And on the audio, we hear, in the aftermath of reported small arms fire in the area, the Blackhawk crew reporting several guys.  With AK47s.  Oh, and an RPG.  And one of them is peering around a corner aiming it. Not actually firing, but, clearly, in their viewpoint, black hats that are an imminent danger.  (Note: Wikileaks indicates that there may well be some weapons visible in the video. I certainly can’t tell it from the video shown.)

And then bang, boom, rat-a-tat, and they’re down.  Except for the one guy trying to crawl away.

And as part of it, they’re calling for approval to fire.  And they’re calling for a team to come in and confirm the situation.  And they report the guy crawling, but they don’t shoot any more — until a van rolls up (a Good Samaritan, as it turns out) and tries to take away wounded “insurgents.”  And, after asking permission to engage, it’s given.  And they do so, killing still more people (and injuring two children in the van).

It really doesn’t sound like guys out just to blow away some Ay-rabs or something.  It doesn’t even sound like guys trying to cover up that they want to blow away some Ay-rabs or something.  It sounds like guys expecting to see something, seeing enough clues to indicate it, and acting on the “proven” assumption.  They’re satisfied, even pleased by what they’ve done.  These are bad guys — of course the troops are going to be happy taking them down. Eight insurgents down in the street are eight insurgents not shooting at fellow troops, or planting IEDs, or blowing up civilians.

Who wouldn’t have a grim satisfaction over that?

But they made a mistake.

It happens.  If you engage in major combat operations (or even minor combat operations) in a crowded urban setting, you will, in fact, kill people by accident.  Sometimes it will be standers-by.  In other cases (as in this instance) it will be people mistaken for bad guys, and killed for that mistaken identity.  It’s going to happen.

It’s not an excuse.  It’s not a justification.  In fact, it’s meant to demonstrate why these sorts of operations need to be taken even more carefully and rarely and only for the greatest of reasons.  Not the casual “We’ll go in, mop ’em up, and Mission Accomplished!” kind of way we entered Iraq.

You can argue that the guys in the choppers could have been more careful.  Or should have been more careful.  I don’t know.  I haven’t been involved in those sorts of combat operations.  I don’t know what it’s like looking at the ground (or camera) up in the chopper, what the risks are, what the experience of the guys involved was.  I’m not willing to second-guess that at this point.

But it’s at this point that the story gets nasty.  As the facts on the ground became clear — no AK47s, no RPGs — the local command and the Defense Dept. decided that, though a mistake had been made, that just wasn’t acceptable press.  Instead, a tale of being “fired on” and “no civilians were intentionally targeted” and so forth was placed.  The official report passed it off as normal military ops.  A lot was technically correct — the choppers obeyed the rules of engagement, arguably had some justification, and did their job.  That the result was tragic could have been a valuable lesson.

Instead, it became a lesson in cover0up.  It was unacceptable to admit the mistake.

Hiding the truth became more important than doing what was right.

The DoD refused to release the film.  Reuters filed a Freedom of Information Act request.  An internal military investigation ruled that everything was copacetic. The choppers were engaged against armed insurgents in “a firefight.”  The journalists were collateral deaths in a danger zone.

And now, the video has leaked (via WikiLeaks).  And what was “merely” a tragic mistake is now a scandal.

It’s never the wrong that gets you.  It’s the cover-up.

More from the BBC and Agonist (who references some additional footage not in the above) and Boing-Boing.  The video timeline is here.

Let me be clear — in the video as released, I don’t see horrific war crimes on the part of the the troops involved.  Some callousness, perhaps.  Some eagerness, in places.  Mistakes, bloody mistakes, maybe (I’m not qualified to say) even sloppy mistakes. That’s war.  Consider it a cautionary note before we waltz in somewhere in the future, blithely assuming “surgical strikes” and “professional military” will avoid loss of life.

What I find unconscionable is that, once the evidence was together, the government (or, at least the military) decided to lie.  To not only hide the truth from the world and the nation, but de facto indict the soldiers involved by making what they did effectively too terrible to admit.

If you are honest, and in the right, and fighting on principle, then you admit your mistakes, show you’re trying to learn by them, and move on.  You hold people appropriately accountable. You take responsibility for your actions.  You “man up.”

Instead, now we have this.

Honestly speaking, I don’t expect any blowback onto the military officials involved, which is a crying shame.  I just hope their conscience, their realization of what they’ve done to the honor of the military, the reputation of the nation, and the safety of the troops in Iraq — not the guys on the ground or in those choppers, but they, the officers and bureaucrats who covered this up — haunts them every night for the rest of their lives.

Because that video will haunt this country for a long, long time.

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6 thoughts on “Killing civilians and covering it up”

  1. Remarkably enough, the DoD has now released all its investigative materials. http://www2.centcom.mil/sites/foia/rr/CENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%2025210/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fsites%2ffoia%2frr%2fCENTCOM%20Regulation%20CCR%2025210%2fDeath%20of%20Reuters%20Journalists&FolderCTID=&View={41BA1AAF-785A-481A-A630-12470AFCD6FD}

    As Glenn Greenwald notes:

    Beyond that, the Pentagon yesterday — once the video was released — suddenly embraced the wisdom of transparency by posting online the reports of the so-called “investigations” it undertook into this incident (as a result of pressure from Reuters). Those formal investigations not only found that every action taken by those soldiers was completely justified — including the firing on the unarmed civilian rescuers — but also found that there’s no need for any remedial steps to be taken to prevent future re-occurence. What we see on that video is what the U.S. does on a constant and regular basis in these countries, and it’s what we’ve been doing for years. It’s obviously consistent with our policies and practices for how we fight in these countries, which is exactly what those investigative reports concluded.

    Which doesn’t explain the cover-up, except for the whole “You can’t handle the truth!” concept, which may or may not be true, but which doesn’t play well in a democracy.

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