Collateral Murder Video

This may be the first place you see this video, but if you hang around very much online, I suspect it won’t be the last. The video contains real helicopter gunship footage of American troops gunning down unarmed Iraqi civilians and children in 2007. It has taken this long to come to light because it has been suppressed. If you are of a delicate nature, you may not want to watch it. However, I recommend you steel yourself and watch it anyway; this is the truth and we all need to know it and understand its implications.

The full unedited version without the arrows can be found here.

I found this video via Pharynugla. Personally, I disagree with PZ that the soldiers should have seen the children; certainly, sitting here in my quiet office studying the video intently, I didn’t see them the first time and, even when they were enlarged and indicated, they weren’t obviously children. (**update: I have yet to watch it fully, but apparently they are more obvious in the unedited version.**)

Given the context, it is understandable that the soldiers saw cameras and interpreted them as AK47s. Furthermore, if it had have been an RPG rather than a long-lense then waiting to check could have been fatal, so even firing first and thinking later could be forgiven*.

What is harder to let go, however, is the firing on people attempting to evacuate their wounded simply BECAUSE they were attempting to evacuate their wounded. That has been against the rule of war for as long as there has been a rule of war. To compound the issue, the wounded children were sent to a local hospital even though it was clear they knew it would have a lesser standard of care.

These decisions were knowingly taken by people away from the field. The soldier in the gunship told no lies, he made it quite clear he wanted to fire because and only because someone was trying to help the victims. The tone of the conversation and the subsequent given permission make it quite clear that, in the American forces, helping your wounded is considered sufficient provocation to fire. That seems somewhat at odds with the contents of the Hague and Geneva conventions and, by my count, this one event breaks seven of the ten items in this list.

I agree with the makers of this film, and many others, who believe we should rename the act of killing civilians “collatoral murder”. The term “collatoral damage” was chosen to weaken the impact of the reality and it is time we put that impact back in.

I understand that in order to get soldiers to shoot to kill, it is necessary to get them to stop thinking of the enemy as human. However, a helicopter gunship with remote camera viewing puts a layer of insulation between the person pulling the trigger and their victim that hasn’t existed until comparatively recently. That has been further compounded by the need to request permission to fire from someone who is not even there. Now our soldiers can be so remote from the field of battle that maybe it is time to stop training them to think of the enemy as “other”?

*There’s more to explore here though, because the soldiers had to call in for permission to fire. That procedure was presumably designed to prevent occurrences like this one, but it obviously hasn’t. Instead of thinking “was that actually an RPG, or might it have been a camera lense?” the soldier just spent pointless moments anxiously nagging for permission to fire; moments that may have cost him his life had it actually been a weapon. This system stops soldiers taking action promptly but doesn’t cause them to take proper stock of their target; it removes a level of trust and responsibility from them and puts it under the control of someone who is not actually there. It would appear to be rather seriously broken.

***Update***

In the spirit of strong views weakly held, I am reconsidering my position based on new evidence and discussion. I will leave the original post, however, so you can see how my views have changed.

I have learned that the max range of an RPG is 300 m (and usually they are not used on targets further away than 80 m), while the helicopter from which this footage was taken was between 0.5 and 1 mile away (or 800 – 1600 m). “The fog of war” becomes a much less (or perhaps simply “un”) reasonable defense when you are no longer actually in any danger and it is making me reconsider my position that the initial attack was at least understandable.

It has been pointed out to me that the soldier in the helicopter does lie to secure permission to fire on the van because he claims the rescuers are “picking up bodies and weapons” when in fact there are no weapons anywhere around. However, even if this particular soldier told lies, I think there is still strong evidence that his attitude is endemic in the US army; they have shown no evidence of any disciplinary action, willingness to learn lessons or prevent this happening again and there is very strong evidence of a cover-up and of many other similar attacks on civilians. It may not be so clear cut as I initially thought, but it is still quite damning. (*update 3*: I have watched the unedited video again since writing this para and the permission to engage is quite clearly given because they are picking up bodies, not weapons. I am fully back to believing the entire hierarchy is morally bankrupt)

I think my argument for reconsidering how we train our soldiers to think about the enemy now they are so insulated from them has become even stronger in the light of new information about the relative ranges of RPGs and Apache helicopters.

***update 2***

Here is an interesting comparison of the front pages of CNN and Al Jazeera yesterday when this story was breaking, which would you trust the most?

The BBC don’t seem that fussed either, but then it’s an American army atrocity carried out in Iraq, perhaps they don’t consider it’s relevant to their audience?

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s relevant to me. I also think it’s globally relevant and, as I am abroad and see the the slightly less UK-centric front page, I am more than a little disgusted they are almost ignoring it. This sort of story is reported regularly more or less everywhere else in the world, why in the UK are we seeing a sanitized pro-USA version of global events? Don’t answer that; I think I know why :/. “Special relationship” be damned.

There are other issues here to do with WikiLeaks and its value that make this globally relevant for reasons other than this one video.