This is what fuels the insurgency and trashes our legitimacy in the Middle East. Have a look at the wikileaks.org video from the Apache helicopter, if you have the stomach for graphic violence.
It’s not that I expect that our guys on the ground to be perfect. It’s that I expect that government won’t go after whistle blowers or try to destroy the legitimacy of organizations that try to tell the truth. War is ugly, nasty business that should be avoided because of “collateral damage”. That’s why the public needs to see things like this.
They took out a Reuters photographer, his driver, some pedestrians, a van (with two children on board) driven by some poor schmuck who tried to rescue one of the wounded. To sort of layer some additional horror on top of it the US military tried to insist that they were insurgents even though no weapons were found and no shots are fired from the ground. If you had some foreign cowboy types circling your neighborhood killing your neighbors on a whim, how would you feel about them?
I’m not so concerned that the military punishes these soldiers for what they’ve done; it’s obvious they were doing exactly what the military expected of them. You and I can sit in the faraway safety of our living rooms and clearly see that other than the two journalists, no one else was carrying anything – no weapons, no RPGs, nothing. The men in the street weren’t hiding or acting suspicious, they were a bunch of mates just strolling down the street, relaxed and chatting to each other. The guy behind the building is looking up at the circling helicopter, but there are no shots being fired from the ground. None.
To give as much benefit of the doubt as I humanly can, there was hostile activity going on in the area, and it is possible the guys in the helicopter may not have been lying; they may have seen what they expected to see, what they wanted to see – AK47s and RPGs that didn't exist – asked for and got permission from distant superiors who had no way to judge the threat other than from what they were told by the helicopter crew. Then they killed everyone in sight. Did it by the book.
It's just that the book is rotten.
That is the true horror – our military is becoming no better than Blackwater. Kill anyone you want, no problem, we’ll cover it up and make excuses. Including shipping two small children we’ve shot to an inadequately staffed local hospital where they’ll most likely conveniently die, rather than to a US Army hospital where they have a better chance of survival… and telling their side of the story to an American media.
