For some reason, I read your original post in the voice of "Debbie Downer" and I actually thought you were being pretty darn funny.

Then I read your response, and realized you are being serious.

...or ARE you?

Maybe your sense of humor is overly-strict. Maybe you're just having a bad day. Maybe you're the next Andy Kaufman, goofing us all with a lecture on what makes jokes funny. I'm too tired to figure it out, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

Responding to jokes like Debbie Downer because you don't think they are funny does not add anything to the conversation. Responding, as you did, in perfect sincerity is worthy of a /. WHOOSH.

Defending your post with a checklist of what a joke requires to be funny just makes you look even MORE stiff and grumpy. If you don't like /. humor, set your preferences to down-rank +funny mods or just scroll down.

I'll give you the benefit of doubt though. We all have bad days. I've groaned at horrible jokes and typed out bitter responses only to be saved by the "cancel" button. I've also missed obvious jokes and written stuff so dumb I wish I could erase it. Preview and Cancel are my friends now.

Now, if you'd signed your original post
" - Debbie Downer"
THAT would have been funny!

Well it looks like somebody with an ax to grind and mod-points to burn went through and blanked-modded my posts Flamebait and Troll.

I had mod points when this thread started, but because I understand that Flamebait and Troll are not substitutes for "-1 I disagree", I participated in the discussion with an on-topic, rational presentation of facts, with citations.

People may still come to different conclusions, but nobody was able to refute any of my points. Modding me a troll is admitting that you lack an intellectually sound response. I hope meta-moderation bites those cowards in the ass.

Surrender is protected sure, but retreat and surrender are sort of mutually exclusive. You don't surrender by running away, you put up a "white flag" as it were.

I understand that this was not a regular military force in a conventional battle, but you completely dismiss the point I made about the vans. Vans just like that one were the popular mode of insurgent transportation, and while in an urban setting many vehicles would be innocently coming and going, civilian vehicles tend to drive away from combat, or at the very least not stop in the middle of it. Again, keep in mind that the Iraqis had been specifically and repeatedly warned NOT to take actions like this van driver did. I'll agree that it might have been too harsh a response, but it was completely reasonable to make the assumption this was not a civilian vehicle.

You're still looking at this decision with the after-knowledge that all the van driver was trying to do was help wounded people, which is a noble motivation, and that he had children with him, which made it a tragedy. That's not a fair way to judge the decision. Had this guy been another insurgent with no kids riding along, I doubt any of this would be an issue.

Also, the helicopter was not in any danger, it was acting to protect the convoy. I'm no tactical expert, but I'm pretty certain that when a convoy is in hostile territory, staying in place is a bad option. Especially if it had already come under attack earlier.

You were sorta almost right this time:
Two of the soldiers on the ground have written an open apology. The sight of the children was obviously traumatizing to these two (as it would be to anyone), and the apology probably helped them deal with it, but this was an expression of condolence and regret over a tragic accident, not an admission that they "fucked up" the situation.

I am not aware of any apology to the Reuters employees' families. These were grown men who knowingly broke the rules of their own profession, and knowingly put themselves in harms way.

I have listened to the interview with one of the two soldiers who wrote the apology, Ethan McCord. He confirmed that the initial group were armed with AKs and RPGs, and had no problem with that attack. He seemed agonized over the van being shot at, but again, this is all in 20/20 hindsight. He admits that the Iraqis knew not to pick up wounded, but he was the one who pulled the injured children out of the van. Such a experience must scar the psyche, and a natural response in situations like these is to dwell on ways the event could have been prevented. He is second-guessing choices with the knowledge they lead to a bad outcome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sSuEf4BAVk

I've thoroughly dismantled the Wikileaks version of events, again, but I doubt it will be the last time. I'm calling it quits for tonight.

This is a nice class-warfare dream, but in reality, unpaid ER bills either get passed on to EVERYONE's bill, rich and poor (this just bankrupts the uninsured poor even faster) and/or offset by cutbacks in the ER budget (which means longer wait time for everyone).

The catch 22 is that people don't pay the bill because it is too expensive, but if everyone paid the bills, the price would come down.

/Emergency Departments are tremendously expensive to operate, so I doubt they would ever be cheap, but the % of patients who pay nothing is high enough to have a significant effect.

Taking combatants off the battlefield while not appropriately marked as a medical unit makes you a legitimate target under anyone's rules of combat. It always has, and always will. Medical units are given safe passage, retreating units are not.

This is the way things HAVE to be. Mucking around with these concepts is what made the rules of engagement in Afghanistan such a cockup: Enemy fires, drops his weapon, and is now an "illegal target" able to stand up and walk away unmolested.

In Iraq, insurgents were being ferried to and from fights in vans just like the one in the video. If one or more vans pull up behind an enemy position, do you stop and check to make sure each and every one loads/unloads non-civilians before firing, or do you make the relatively safe assumption that a vehicle driving into combat is filled or will be filled with combatants?

Again, keep in mind that the convoy was almost literally "around the corner" at this point.

Let's see: I cited the actual incident report, so the "facts" are not in question, except that you seem to throw them all out in favor of your personal interpretation of the video and the supposed testimony of a survivor (Who? One of the kids?)

So what then, do you think an entire squad^H^H^H platoon^H^H^H brigade^H^H^H division^H^H^H the whole gorram ARMY lied to cover this up? I've rebutted every one of your arguments with sound logic and facts, but you won't budge. Back to childish insults like calling the helicopter pilot a "hick with a gun".

You're like a 9/11 truther: anything that contradicts your preconceived notion of the event is discarded outright, because you know THE TRUTH! God help me, I actually hope you're trolling me at this point.

Le Sigh...

1) It was AKs and RPGs. They were strewn around the bodies.

2) The helicopter pilot was anxious to fire because:
a) the approaching convoy had already come under attack.
b) he spotted one of the RPG launchers, then mistakenly thought a telephoto lens* was an RPG peeking around a building and being pointed towards the approaching convoy.
c) due to the flight path of the helicopter, he temporarily lost his view of the situation as the convoy came closer to the danger.

Tell me: If you were in that situation, where your friends had already come under fire and were now driving right into an ambush you had in your sights, would you not be eager to fire? You know NOW that there were no additional combatants or weapons in the van, but children. Without that knowledge, would you not want to ensure that the threat was completely neutralized before the convoy got there?

The death of the reporter and the injuries of the children were tragic, but 20/20 hindsight doesn't mean the helicopter pilot acted inappropriately.

*incidentally, the photographer with the mistaken-for-an-RPG telephoto lens was found on top of an actual RPG round, which is some kind of irony.

And it's like you keep ignoring all the facts, preferring to construct your own narrative based on what you can deduce arm-chair-general-style from the biased, incomplete wikileaks presentation.

Unarmed civilians with an armed escort? Really? You are willing to go through that kind of mental gymnastics to avoid accepting the fact that these were insurgents? So some innocent bystanders just happened to be hanging around guys with AKs and RPGs who were setting up an ambush, just talking about the weather? This needs Epic Facepalm.

The van driver may have been just an innocent bystander trying to help injured people, but removing insurgents from the battlefield was a hostile act. The Iraqis knew it, because it was well publicized in order to prevent situations like this. How often do I have to repeat that? There was no way to know that the van did not contain additional combatants and weapons. Had an ambulance pulled up and been fired upon, THAT would have been a war crime. Shooting at retreating combatants is not.

Go read the relevant parts of the Geneva Convention, articles 12 and 51:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Geneva_Convention/Protocol_I

And somewhere in there I believe it assigns culpability for civilian deaths resulting from legitimate military targets to the side that was hiding among the civilians, not the attackers.

Look, whether the US should be there at all is not the question. Regarding the context of a country in the middle of a civil war, being armed is also not the central issue. The central issue here is that you don't loiter outside, heavily armed, in a combat zone, waiting for a non-friendly military convoy to approach, unless you are a combatant. I know of no other reasonable explanation for that behavior.

I'm not trying to defend the decision to invade Iraq, or the continued presence there, but far too many people let their opinions about the conflict blind them to the facts of this situation. Even when I lay them out clearly, people like you respond with childish insults and weak reasoning like "in the throws of a civil war you *want* to be armed", trying to desperately explain away the fact that these were armed insurgents setting up to attack a convoy. Do you want this to be a massacre, because it fits in with your narrative of the USA's actions?

GODDAMNITSOMUCH...

This is what pisses me off so much about Wikileaks, they turned what should be cold facts into propaganda to advance an agenda. If all you see is the "collateral murder" video, one would think it was a massacre of unarmed civilians. THIS IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED.

In the incident report - which was public, yet not linked to, referenced or even mentioned by Wikileaks - the soldiers on the ground who came up after the attack found multiple assault rifles, an RPG launcher and RPG rounds. Yes, the pilot mistook a camera lens for an RPG, but IIRC from the report, the Reuters photographer* that was killed was found lying on top of a RPG round!

Again, if you read the actual incident report rather than arm-chair quarterback from a grainy Youtube video, you would know that there was a convoy approaching that location. It doesn't take much reasoning to figure out that people with AKs and RPGs loitering around next to the route of an approaching convoy that has already been attacked = ambush. The last pictures recovered from the camera show the lead vehicle in the convoy just coming around the corner of the intersection.

Here's a link to the report (Names and parts of pictures are redacted). People can argue that it is all lies, but if this were truly a massacre of unarmed civilians, I find it hard to believe that nobody involved has come forward yet. That would have been huge news.
http://www.mediafire.com/?nywzknqymyk

*who incidentally, was NOT wearing any journalist identification, and had NOT told his superiors where he would be and what he was going to do that day. The presence of a camera does not create the assumption that a person is journalist, insurgents frequently use cameras to photograph attacks and gather intelligence.

I never said that the people in the van were insurgents. They may have been unarmed (the hidden children certainly were). However, the driver of the van ceased to be a civilian when he picked up insurgents. It may be ugly and brutal, but it is not a war crime to shoot unarmed combatants. Everyone else in the crowd was armed or in such close proximity to a weapon that you can't seriously argue they were non-combatants. Especially not when they were setting up an ambush.

I'll repeat this since people constantly ignore the facts: Iraqis were specifically instructed NOT to remove insurgents from the battlefield, and warned that such actions would be considered hostile and would draw fire.

Wikileaks left out massive amounts of widely available and crucial background information then editorialized the hell out of the video. It was a hatchet job pure and simple. I'm as sad as the next guy that innocent children were hurt, but the fact that so many people STILL believe this was some sort of civilian massacre saddens me.

Not only did I watch the video, I read the report and looked at the photos that were recovered from the camera.

TL:DR version - A group of insurgents was lingering near an intersection waiting to ambush an approaching convoy. The helicopter took them out. When a van came by to gather the wounded, it fired on that too. Sadly, unidentified and unauthorized journalists embedded with the insurgents also died, and the insurgent van contained hidden children who were injured.

More specifically:

You are right in that the helicopter was out of range from the group on the ground, but it was not firing in self defense, rather to protect a convoy that was approaching the location of the insurgents. This was a convoy that had already been attacked not far from this area, which is why the helicopter was scouting the route ahead. People don't just innocently loiter outside with rifles and RPGs, not even in Iraq.

You are wrong about the RPG. The helicopter pilot did mistake the camera lens for an RPG launcher, but there was at least one RPG launcher recovered at the scene with multiple rounds, and quite a few rifles. Now you can claim that the entire platoon lied in their write-ups, but I don't think such a conspiracy would have held together.

As for firing at the van, picking up wounded insurgents was considered a hostile act. You can debate the right or wrong of that policy, but it was the policy, and the Iraqis knew about it.

I know I'm no professional, but some people who are (Christopher Nolan for example) seem to think it isn't worth the cinematic trade-off. I love the way Nolan's films look. If he thinks 3D would limit him more than benefit, I'm inclined to believe he's telling the truth and not just a neo-Luddite.

Sure, 2D is a kludge when it comes to representing the world, but until we develop a Star Trek-style holodeck and suitable recording devices, stereoscopic "3D" is just as much a kludge. It is an imperfect approximation of how we see the world through our own eyes. It works better in some situations than in others, but I think that sometimes it is better to just forgo an effect rather than have it work poorly.