I dont get it...
They say they have found RPGs and AK rifles on the bodies now?
As someone that's been on the two way range. You're out of your mind on that one.LeMask said:I say return fire only
As someone that's been on the two way range. You're out of your mind on that one.
Your view of war is quite unrealistic.
As to the video, the weapons are there and the fact that you don't see them and refuse to acknowledge them won't change that. Now that Wiki has been caught in their attempt to bend the facts, I've yet to see anyone denying the weapons are present.
You may find what you see on that video rather strange. It's not that unusual in my experiences. You should watch them set up IEDs or watch an armed group move towards your location, stopping to grab a drink en route on a live feed.
That's what's wes dumb ole boys in are miletary do. Wes jes go on over thar and fire them sonsabitches up. Runnin' and gunnin and shootin them ole boys right up even iffen theys aint gots no guns. Is a glad yous is a expert on them things like UW and COIN and stuffs cause Is only been doin it fer like 15 years or so. Maybe yous can give me some of them thar lessons likes Is gots when I graduated the 3rd grade. :sniper:This is peacekeeping mate... You cant go over there with all your big guns out blazing like madmen...
I know it's difficult... But in an urban area like this you cant go there opening fire every time you feel a little threatened...
The very point of terrorism and guerrilla tactics is to deny the enemy the use of his superior firepower.
If you still use them anyway, you are not playing the game and ignoring the rules... And this have a cost.
And it's not that I dont acknowledge them. I just dont see them. Maybe that I missed them as the video is long... Can you post pictures or just tell me the time on the scene?
I know that the van is very suspicious... And I know how amateurish they can be. I've seen videos showing that,the idiots shooting machine guns from the hip and firing RPGs without taking time to aim... I know they are dumb.
But this video is very very disturbing. They didnt seem threatening at all. A little suspicious, but not threatening.
Blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah - some random other boring stuff, blah blah blah, some other stuff that doesnt' make sense, blah blah, some mindless rant, blah blah blah, I'm insecure.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/stie-a23.shtmlUS soldier in WikiLeaks massacre video: “I relive this every day”
By Bill Van Auken, 28 April 2010
Iraq war veteran Ethan McCord, seen running with an Iraqi child in his arms in a video posted by WikiLeaks of a July 2007 massacre in Baghdad, talked to the World Socialist Web Site about the impact of this and similar experiences in Iraq
........In your letter, you state that this was an everyday occurrence. Could you give some examples of what you experienced while you were in Iraq?
One policy that we had that was fairly similar or even more extreme than this was that if a roadside bomb went off then we were supposed to shoot anyone standing in that area. So it pretty much got to the point that the philosophy was to out-terrorize the terrorists. We were told that we needed to make the local population more afraid of us, so that maybe if they see someone trying to plant a bomb they’ll try and stop them rather than having to face whatever we might do afterwards.
Do you think that this kind of thing is almost inevitable given the character of the war itself?
I would definitely say so. A lot of people lost their idealism pretty quickly and would say that the only thing they were fighting for was to make it home alive. There was a lot of pressure to act a certain way and there definitely were some very real threats.
All of this exposes so clearly the fallacy of using war as a tool of foreign policy or as a way to supposedly spread “freedom and democracy” around the world, or whatever other rhetoric you want to attach to it. Even if you do something that may be militarily justifiable and harm civilians, it doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to understand why the local population is not going to look at you as “liberators” or somebody trying to help their country........
Ethan McCord had just returned from dropping his children at school earlier this month, when he turned on the TV news to see grainy black-and-white video footage of a soldier running from a bombed-out van with a child in his arms. It was a scene that had played repeatedly in his mind the last three years, and he knew exactly who the soldier was.
In July 2007, McCord, a 33-year-old Army specialist, was engaged in a firefight with insurgents in an Iraqi suburb when his platoon, part of Bravo Company, 2-16 Infantry, got orders to investigate a nearby street. When they arrived, they found a scene of fresh carnage – the scattered remains of a group of men, believed to be armed, who had just been gunned down by Apache attack helicopters. They also found 10-year-old Sajad Mutashar and his five-year-old sister Doaha covered in blood in a van. Their 43-year-old father, Saleh, had been driving them to a class when he spotted one of the wounded men moving in the street and drove over to help him, only to become a victim of the Apache guns.
McCord was captured in a video shot from one helicopter as he ran frantically to a military vehicle with Sajad in his arms seeking medical care. That classified video created its own firestorm when the whistleblower site Wikileaks posted it April 5 on a website titled “Collateral Murder” and asserted that the attack was unprovoked. More than a dozen people were killed in three attacks captured in the video, including two Reuters journalists, one carrying a camera that was apparently mistaken for a weapon.
McCord, who served seven years in the military before leaving in the summer of 2009 due to injuries, recently posted an apologetic letter online with fellow soldier Josh Steiber supporting the release of the video and asking the family’s forgiveness. McCord is the father of three children.
Wired’s Kim Zetter reached McCord at his home in Kansas. This is his account of what he saw.
No one has the right to do that. DO YOU REALIZE how difficult it is over there. You have to deal with people who are armed and you don't know if they will shoot you in the back when you turn to walk away. Or if they stop you to ask a question to set you up for an insurgent sniper.They dont have the right to kill civilians...
Nope. They do not. It is people like you who want to Mirandize these people when they are captured on the battlefield. Last time I checked, the insurgents were fighting against the LEGITIMATE government of Iraq. Try telling that to an Iraqi policman who has had his family killed by the same insurgents that you want to protect.Because even insurgents have rights.