{"id":17042,"date":"2010-04-05T19:19:54","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T02:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/?p=17042"},"modified":"2010-04-05T19:19:54","modified_gmt":"2010-04-06T02:19:54","slug":"killing-civilians-and-covering-it-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2010\/04\/05\/killing-civilians-and-covering-it-up.html","title":{"rendered":"Killing civilians and covering it up"},"content":{"rendered":"

So Wikileaks has this video online<\/a>, 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here’s the edited version of the video.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

<\/object><\/p>\n

This article<\/a> talks about some of the dangers of unverified and out-of-context video …<\/p>\n

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\u2019s source other than a non-working link. The big \u201cClick here to donate\u201d link above the video on the Wikileaks site works fine, which is troubling.)<\/p>\n

I am not saying I don\u2019t 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\u2019 confidentiality policies make that difficult.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, in part because it’s video from two choppers, there are video cuts.\u00a0 And some odd gaps in the audio that I can’t attribute one way or another.<\/p>\n

But … let’s take the video (the core video) at face value.\u00a0 Never mind the framing — take it as given that the people on the ground are not, in fact, insurgents.\u00a0 They’re a bunch of civilians and a couple of Reuters photogs.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 They will give you a really bad day.)<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0 We hear and see pilots spotting a bunch of guys congregrating, and one or two of them have stuff slung over their shoulders.\u00a0 And, at one point, one of them is peering around the corner with (what we know is) a camera.<\/p>\n

And on the audio, we hear, in the aftermath of reported small arms fire in the area, the Blackhawk crew reporting several guys.\u00a0 With AK47s.\u00a0 Oh, and an RPG.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 (Note: Wikileaks indicates that there may well be some weapons visible in the video. I certainly can’t tell it from the video shown.)<\/p>\n

And then bang, boom, rat-a-tat, and they’re down.\u00a0 Except for the one guy trying to crawl away.<\/p>\n

And as part of it, they’re calling for approval to fire.\u00a0 And they’re calling for a team to come in and confirm the situation.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 And, after asking permission to engage, it’s given.\u00a0 And they do so, killing still more people (and injuring two children in the van).<\/p>\n

It really doesn’t sound like guys out just to blow away some Ay-rabs or something.\u00a0 It doesn’t even sound like guys trying to cover up that they want to blow away some Ay-rabs or something.\u00a0 It sounds like guys expecting to see something, seeing enough clues to indicate it, and acting on the “proven” assumption.\u00a0 They’re satisfied, even pleased by what they’ve done.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Who wouldn’t have a grim satisfaction over that?<\/p>\n

But they made a mistake.<\/p>\n

It happens.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Sometimes it will be standers-by.\u00a0 In other cases (as in this instance) it will be people mistaken for bad guys, and killed for that mistaken identity.\u00a0 It’s going to happen.<\/p>\n

It’s not an excuse.\u00a0 It’s not a justification.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not the casual “We’ll go in, mop ’em up, and Mission Accomplished!” kind of way we entered Iraq.<\/p>\n

You can argue that the guys in the choppers could have been more careful.\u00a0 Or should have been more careful.\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 I haven’t been involved in those sorts of combat operations.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I’m not willing to second-guess that at this point.<\/p>\n

But it’s at this point that the story gets nasty.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Instead, a tale of being “fired on” and “no civilians were intentionally targeted” and so forth was placed.\u00a0 The official report passed it off as normal military ops<\/a>.\u00a0 A lot was technically correct — the choppers obeyed the rules of engagement, arguably had some justification, and did their job.\u00a0 That the result was tragic could have been a valuable lesson.<\/p>\n

Instead, it became a lesson in cover0up.\u00a0 It was unacceptable to admit the mistake.<\/p>\n

Hiding the truth became more important than doing what was right.<\/p>\n

The DoD refused to release the film.\u00a0 Reuters filed a Freedom of Information Act request.\u00a0 An internal military investigation ruled that everything was copacetic. The choppers were engaged against armed insurgents in “a firefight.”\u00a0 The journalists were collateral deaths in a danger zone.<\/p>\n

And now, the video has leaked (via WikiLeaks).\u00a0 And what was “merely” a tragic mistake is now a scandal.<\/p>\n

It’s never the wrong that gets you.\u00a0 It’s the cover-up.<\/p>\n

More from the BBC<\/a> and Agonist<\/a> (who references some additional footage not in the above) and Boing-Boing<\/a>.\u00a0 The video timeline is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Let me be clear — in the video as released, I don’t see horrific war crimes on the part of the the troops involved.\u00a0 Some callousness, perhaps.\u00a0 Some eagerness, in places.\u00a0 Mistakes, bloody mistakes, maybe (I’m not qualified to say) even sloppy mistakes. That’s war.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

What I find unconscionable is that, once the evidence was together, the government (or, at least the military) decided to lie<\/em>.\u00a0 To not only hide the truth from the world and the nation, but de facto <\/em>indict the soldiers involved by making what they did effectively too terrible to admit.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 You hold people appropriately accountable. You take responsibility for your actions.\u00a0 You “man up.”<\/p>\n

Instead, now we have this.<\/p>\n

Honestly speaking, I don’t expect any blowback onto the military officials involved, which is a crying shame.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Because that video will haunt this country for a long, long time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 It’s long, … Continue reading “Killing civilians and covering it up”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,19,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fourth-estate","category-home-improvement","category-politics-law"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":13295,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/01\/27\/but_some_civilian_lives_a.html","url_meta":{"origin":17042,"position":0},"title":"But some civilian lives are worth more than others","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 27-Jan-09 8:56pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Bill O'Reilly thinks Hamed Karzai is an ungrateful little snot, just because Afghan civilians are being killed by US and NATO troops during missions against Taliban fighters. OREILLY: U.S. and...","rel":"","context":"In "Geopolitical Brouhaha"","block_context":{"text":"Geopolitical Brouhaha","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/geopolitical-brouhaha"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":131036,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/09\/on-the-police-and-civilians.html","url_meta":{"origin":17042,"position":1},"title":"On "the Police" and "Civilians"","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 9-Jul-16 12:25am","format":false,"excerpt":"A valuable perspective.'Police are civilians. They are the civil power. They are not soldiers. They are subject to the rule of law adjudicated within civilian courts[1] \u2014 not military justice. They are tasked with special powers and thus burdened with specific responsibilities and duties \u2014 but they\u2019re civilians. They answer\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2227,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2002\/07\/23\/striving_for_th.html","url_meta":{"origin":17042,"position":2},"title":"Striving for the moral low ground","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 23-Jul-02 10:05am","format":false,"excerpt":"Salah Shehade, a top Hamas military leader, certainly seems to have been a legitimate military target in and of himself, and I have no regrets about his death. Both Shehade...","rel":"","context":"In "Geopolitical Brouhaha"","block_context":{"text":"Geopolitical Brouhaha","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/geopolitical-brouhaha"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":24075,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/27\/because-what-could-possibly-go-wrong.html","url_meta":{"origin":17042,"position":3},"title":"Because what could possibly go wrong?","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 27-Nov-11 10:13am","format":false,"excerpt":"I mean, between giving the police drone aircraft for surveillaince and tracking (and I'm certain that, like every other bit of high tech given to them, it will never, ever, possibly be abused), and indirectly opening up same for civilians (though I'm sure crooks and criminals will never make use\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":128876,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/17\/the-problem-with-fighting-daesh-is-that-we-arent-willing-to-kill-more-civilians.html","url_meta":{"origin":17042,"position":4},"title":"The problem with fighting Da'esh is that we aren't willing to kill more civilians","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 17-Nov-15 6:48am","format":false,"excerpt":"That seems to be Ted Cruz' judgment.\"We must immediately recognize that our enemy is not \u2018violent extremism.\u2019 It is the radical Islamism that has declared jihad against the west. It will not be appeased by outreach or declarations of tolerance. It will not be deterred by targeted airstrikes with zero\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":51275,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/27\/the-cop-shooting-videos-the-cops-watch.html","url_meta":{"origin":17042,"position":5},"title":"The cop shooting videos the cops watch","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 27-May-15 3:39pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Though being a policeman is not the most dangerous job in the world (http:\/\/goo.gl\/1O6TnH), it's certainly riskier than, say, sitting behind a desk all day (except for the health risks of sitting behind a desk all day). And while the public is more and more seeing videos of police using\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}