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.

I'll admit it is possible to do 3D well/right even in a dialog-centric movie, but you haven't addressed my main concern: My (non-professional) understanding, and the GGGP's worry, is that there are shots that Just Don't Work in 3D. Thus, making the choice to go 3D places limitations - possibly painful, possibly insignificant - on the cinematography. It is a trade-off. Unlike bacon, 3D does not automagically make things better, and I don't want it to be the default "because we can" choice.

Personally, I find 3D to break my sense of immersion about as often as it increases it, so I'm pretty skeptical towards it. If new technology and techniques solve these problems, great.

HD was really only a game changer for television people*, who if anything could just change from lower-rez TV techniques to film ones. Sure, costs go up for more detailed CGI and physical models, but I highly doubt any technique that is practical in 480 became impractical in 1080p. In regards to 3D, I agree that in certain situations it can add to the sense of immersion. The problem is it can also detract from immersion. If you want part of the movie 3D for the benefit, then you either turn it on and off, or film the whole thing 3D. As the GP said, this obliges one to restrict the way scenes are filmed to avoid having the 3D break immersion. Who knows, technology and techniques might evolve in a way I haven't thought about, but outside of action movies, I don't foresee 3D ever adding enough to make up for this. I just don't see how it might benefit a dialog-centric drama or comedy.

*HD resolution is far below what you get with even 35mm film, it is only now that 4k digital cameras are coming out that things are comparable. IMAX is still far beyond anything but digital still cameras.

I have no more mod points, so I'll post. I've often tried to state the same thing, but you articulated it better than I have been able.

I think directors will mostly outgrow the "random stuff flying at audience" gimmick as the novelty wears off. After that, I think they will realize that unlike previous technology jumps, 3D doesn't give directors and cinematographers more freedom to be creative, it restricts them to filming in a way that "works in 3D".

/God help us if Paul "Shakey-cam" Greengrass ever start filming in 3D

I realized after I hit "Submit" that my long-winded screed about prescriptions wasn't really all that on-topic to your post. I'd just seen some of that sentiment earlier in the thread, plus I'm tired and grumpy and vented on you.

Somewhat related, I'm tired because I got up early this morning to volunteer at a free clinic...

Actually, I pretty much completely agree with your post. I know both types of doctors. Very few are completely uninterested in making money, but the vast majority of them value good patient care over the extra money they could get from being profit-driven assholes.

Goddamnitsomuch, I hate this meme... You're either a troll or supremely ignorant.

Doctors don't make ANY money from writing prescriptions. They never have, aside from the days of yore when doctors personally purchased the ingredients to mix up and sell*. Even then, it wasn't long before chemists/pharmacists took that over.

They can bill for exams, tests and procedures, but in the USA, Canada, UK and (AFAIK) all of Europe, they don't get anything for writing a prescription. NOTHING. They don't even get to bill for the paper it is written on (which has security features and can be surprisingly expensive).

There have been some rare (and I mean rare) cases of kickbacks from pharmaceutical companies to doctors. The only examples I know about are for chemotherapy drugs costing thousands of dollars per dose, e.g. an oncologist getting money for putting all his patients on drug A over competitor's drug B, which wasn't necessarily cheaper or more effective. The people involved were caught fairly quickly and punished severely.

This only happened because the base cost of the drug was very high (many chemo drugs are wickedly hard to make), the markup is high (to recoup massive development costs), AND the market is small (Only oncologists treating a specific subset of cancer patients, possibly only a few thousand people). The profit of a handful of additional sales was enough to tempt people into breaking the law. The odds of this happening with mass market drugs are practically nil. No doctor is going to take that kind of personal risk unless there is significant money involved, and a company is not likely to spend that money and take a huge legal risk to drive sales of XYZ antibiotic up from 500,000/year to 500,100/year.

Seriously, this meme needs to die. As for getting gifts and other non-money compensation, in the USA, drug companies aren't even giving out free pens and post-its anymore, and that wasn't done based on number of prescriptions written anyhow.

*Snake-oil salesman were/are sometimes doctors, and thus could have "prescribed" something to the scam victim, but it's not a traditional doctor/patient relationship.