ah… yes the video, as presented to us, was extremely biased. i deliberately didn’t read their captions, though, wanting to see it virginally. i even felt the editing was skewed.
i also dont buy that the children were sitting up front, as the video later tries to show us… but even if they were, who knows what that looked like from the bird. they were watching for weapons, not empty hands.
moral of the story, as sombody else already said- don’t embed journalists and children with enemy combatants, and they wont be shot.
i dont know anything about photography, but i saw what was apparently a “lense” and immediately thought it was an RPG as well, even before the crewman said “RPG!”
It looks absolutely righteous to me. There are men with AKs…the guy is peeking the corner… camera lens looks exactly like an RPG. The other van is rescuing bad guys and removing Tangos, weapons and intel from the scene of a battle… fair game. All good:D
"Here is what the U.S. military had to say about the engagement in a July 2007 press release:
Soldiers of 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, both operating in eastern Baghdad under the 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, along with their Iraqi counterparts from the 1st Battalion, 4th Brigade, 1st Division National Police, were conducting a coordinated raid as part of a planned operation when they were attacked by small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. Coalition Forces returned fire and called in attack aviation reinforcement."
At 3:36 in the (fuzzy) video several men come into view top center and at least 2 appear to be armed. The one in the striped shirt on the left looks to be holding an AK and the man immediately right of him has the alleged RPG, (which is pretty clear if you pause at 3:45 as he turns). As these two stop near the pole, the other two advance a bit and the guy on the right also appears to hold something that could be a folding stocked rifle. That guy spots the chopper and goes back to the first two who are also watching the bird. By around 3:55 striped shirt is trying to conceal his rifle before advancing toward the cover of the building in the foreground. The guy poking a camera around the corner does not appear to be the guy with the RPG. Again, blurry video, but given the time and context of the situation I’d say they presented a threat. Most here would be “trigger happy” too if you were looking at an RPG wielding enemy through the windshield of a chopper.
I guess my final take is the video evidence of two planes being flown into the twin towers
while the people on the plane in the towers and on the ground were all civilians !!!
not to mention the other planes that day
that should be the focus of these people that are pissed and to remember NY was not a war zone !
If your eyes are that bad…
OMG IT’S AN RPG
Yeah, insurgents carry around nice cameras with nice telephoto lenses even when it’s been confirmed that the reporters were found dead…herp.
Last photo one of them took:
I see two people on a moped and the rest walking around with no evident guns. Camera bags, tripods, etc are seen.
What a tripod looks like:
You carry them slinged with attachments at bottom and top.
What absolutely sickens me:
COME ON, LET US SHOOT THE WOUNDED PERSON AND EVERYONE TRYING TO HELP THEM MINUTES AFTER THE INITIAL GROUP WAS SLAUGHTERED
What type of vision do they allow on someone who does this job? Are these guys not even trained to identify stuff? How can you not know what a camera looks like? Better tell the population of the region to walk around naked without anything in their hands and for the love of God don’t carry a stick because long things are RPGs and AKs.
COME ON, LET US SHOOT THE WOUNDED PERSON AND EVERYONE TRYING TO HELP THEM MINUTES AFTER THE INITIAL GROUP WAS SLAUGHTERED
From what I read on another forum, insurgents like to clean up the battle field and make it look like coalition forces were wrongful in their attack. They also like to plant IED’s near by or on dead bodies just before soldiers roll on through and investigate the aftermath.
I still say the “RPG guy” who disappears behind the edge of the building at 4:02 is not the guy with the camera who is already kneeling at the buildings corner some 30’ away when he comes into view at 4:05. Pause at 3:45 and compare that profile with all of the objects you have just posted above.
Guys, like I said earlier, hindsight is 20/20. 97% of this is clear as day right now, but over, you HAVE to assume everything is the worst. You HAVE to be suspicious of EVERYTHING. Becoming complacent with your surroundings has proven itself all too often to be deadly. you don’t want “the guy with the camera tripod” to all of a sudden shoulder it and fire at you. While I would have expected them to react slightly differently, I can fully understand their actions.
Volucris, also remember that while its easy to pause, zoom in, rewind and pause again sitting in front of a computer , its very difficult to do all that while managing an aircraft at the same time and watching out for everything else. I can understand the confusion.
Personally, I would have done what they did, as opposed to not doing anything and having my guys get fired at.
Sounds like a bull shit excuse for murdering anything that’s in the area.
Wounded, unarmed individual that dragged himself away from a slaughter is carried to a van by some guys who arrive minutes later, also unarmed, that are all murdered alongside the children in the van because they were trying to help evacuated a wounded person.
This doesn’t smell right at all.
Call of Duty, short in today’s terms for referring to Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare and Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. The first of those allowed you to man an AC130 gunship and fire upon the enemy in the game.
Just stop, from the comfort of your desk you are judging things that were likely viewed on a little tiny heads-up display, or in real time from hundreds of meters away.
There was an announcement over the radio, that someone was taking small arms fire from that general area.
It’s the fog of war.
Why was there such a quick “emergency” vehicle in the middle of 20mm cannon fire? Why is there an announced eight minute gap for US troops to arrive but we don’t get to see the eight minutes? Video editing? If for the mundane, possibly also for the dramatic?
Well I don’t know what the gunners or any of these guys had as views from where they were. It’s just concerning that they’re able to identify and kill targets that they apparently have a pretty piss poor view of to begin with.
Like I said, at first it would have been easy to misidentify everything as weapons and that’s just a shitty deal. But when the van comes and these guys start talking like they have drool coming out of their mouths waiting for the ok to start killing, it’s like they don’t give a damn if it was ok or not. It’s like they just wanted to kill something.
The van was not marked as having anything to do with any medical services, and no one but their insurgent buddies are going to rush in immediately afterward to start cleaning up the bodies and weapons. Then the insurgents will claim a group of school children were mowed down, and there were no weapons.
In other parts of the video you can clearly see people with weapons.
Don’t hang around armed insurgents on the street trying to get a good photo with a US patrol near by unless you want to take the risk of getting mixed in with them.
When you are however many feet in the air, adrenaline pumping, and trying to fly a helicopter at the time you don’t have time to study every single person in the group, and say “oh those must be journalists”.
Let me ask you this. Had they been ID’d as cameramen should that have changed anything? Should the US military not be able to engage armed insurgents because some journalists decided to embed themselves with said insurgents?
The simple fact is they chose to put themselves in danger, and possibly on the receiving end of the US military when they took that risk to get the story. The battle doesn’t stop because some stupid journalists decided to hang out with insurgents. Yeah in hindsight it turns out they weren’t insurgents with RPG’s. Too bad. They took a known risk. The battle doesn’t stop because the media decided to stick themselves inside an active combat zone. You cannot realistically expect guys flying around in helicopters to correctly ID journalists 100% of the time when they are focused on looking for threats, and seeing the battle space on a black a white grainy image. Yeah its easy when you still frame the video, and have however long you want to study the images on a blown up screen.
This is the same justification why you don’t stop for kids in the middle of the road. Because as soon as you stop doing your job because of some innocent people are in the battle space the enemy exploits that, and our guys end up dying. People stop because a kid runs in the middle of the road, and next thing you know an IED goes off followed by RPG’s and SAF. The kid probably gets killed anyways. You don’t shoot at a group of armed insurgents because there is some camera guys there, and next thing you know every group of insurgents has a couple guys with camera bags, and nifty camera. You don’t shoot at a van taking BG’s away along with their weapons they turn the story into our guys shooting up a group of kids hanging out after school. You don’t shoot at a van doing this because they got a couple kids in the vehicle every insurgent vehicle will have a couple kids peering out the windows. Do this same concept enough, and pretty soon we cannot shoot at anything.
In the end it was not the US military who told them to go hang out with insurgents peering around corners, and armed with weapons. Its not the US military who puts kids in the middle of a battle, and puts their life at risk. These fucks have no hurt feelings blowing up their own people or using women and kids as human shields. Unless they know that tactic is not going to work they are going to do it any time they can, and that’s going to be every time. They are not stupid. They look for every means they can to exploit a weakness. They turned to IED’s because they found out pretty quick they could not go toe to toe with us. For the journalists…they knew the risks, and took it. Sad but it was their choice.
I don’t have any problem with the original shoot. They were suspicious looking and in a war zone. Shooting up the van was pretty damn wrong though, it was obvious they were trying to help the injured, that is not good to see. I hope the kids grow up okay.
We are all sitting here free of incoming fire watching a video on a computer. We are not flying an aircraft, checking ammo stores, communicating with command, communicating with other aircraft in the area, watching a tiny video screen in our eyepiece and worrying about our brothers on the ground getting killed if we don’t react in the next nano second. Unfortunately the wrong people got hurt BUT we all would make the same decision the pilot’s did if we were in their shoes. I am sure that the pilot’s care about others in general or they wouldn’t be up their supporting their brothers and sisters on the ground. Anyone stop to think that maybe the pilots are upset about what happened and now they have to live with it for the rest of their lives because the reporters and people on the ground made some pi$$ poor decisions?
If Usama bin Laden had jumped out of that van, would it still be pretty damn wrong? These guys were likely terrorists/jihadists who idolize UBL, and want to kill infidels. How/why is there a quick response emergency vehicle right there on the block that is willing to drive right in to the middle of a one-way 20mm cannon fight?
