The Gaming Den

The soldiers wouldn't have taken them to a hospital.

So why is it a 'big fucking deal'?

Do you even know the rules of engagement you're defending?

-Crissa

Let me explain this as I would to a child then.

1) Sometimes you are in a situation in which you have to choose between two things, and you aren't sure. You take your best guess. Do you like to find out afterwords if you were right?

2) You see some guy lying on the street. There is a 50% chance he is the President of the United States, and you love him. There is a 50% chance he is a serial killer, and he will personally murder your family.

Some guys pull up in a van. It is a 50% chance they are the President's Secret Service, and they want to protect the President, but will also heal the serial killer so he can kill again. There is a 50% chance they are the serial killers best friends, and will help him murder even more people. If they find the President, they will murder him too.


If you could create a magic force field to prevent them from picking up the guy on the street, would you?

EDIT: Do you see me defending any RoE?

You're a fucking tool, Kaelik. Ambulances are free targets in your rules.

Zinegata - anyone is free game if the US wants your oil. And apparently every insurgent is a depraved terrorist.

And for Lich Loved, brown people have no rights to life /or/ oil. And it doesn't matter which brown person you shoot back.

What fucking great people you are. And you apparently think it's okay that it's three years later, the investigation is long done, and that it was never, ever released to US media that it happened.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Actually, you're making up arguments where there are none, and assuming limited evidence where there is not limited evidence.

I am responding to what you said, which were demonstrably false. What you are now doing is trying to move the argument away from your outright lies.

Insurgents DO bring kids into the battlefield.

And being a war criminal is not related to PTSD.

These are the facts. That's why you're crossing out 90% of what I said because you've got no case and you're now trying to avoid the topic instead of having the moral fortitude to say you were wrong to say these things.

And if you don't have the moral fortitude to admit you're wrong, I can't see you having the right to question a combat decision.

It's naive to 'think' that the dozens of reports of cover-ups mean there are perhaps cover-ups of things Americans don't care about, and therefore won't fight to have uncovered? WTF.

Yes.

First of all, you need to investigate. Civilian investigations often take a while to finish by dedicated professionals. A wartime is harder to conduct. Assumptions

No, this is you being stupid.

Iraq is NOT America, especially back in 2007. The people do NOT speak English. The fact that some shmucks might shoot at the investigators also seems to have gone over your head.

It is harder to investigate something in an area where people are shooting each other and many of the witnesses don't speak your language. If you don't think these add to the difficulty of conducting an investigation, you're not naive, you're a moron.

Secondly, if you publish information every time a "war crime" *might* have been committed, you'd probably be inundated by a lot of false reports. Again, it's combat against an insurgency. Every time somebody is killed it's a potential war crime because they're not wearing uniforms and the other side is always gonna claim that innocent civilians were killed even if they were not. Straw

Crossing it out doesn't make it any less true. People scream war times all the time even when it doesn't happen.

Thirdly, not everyone plays by these rules. Straw

Crossing it out doesn't make it any less true. Insurgents commit war crimes all the time too and are never punished for it.

Who was shooting at the Bushmaster?

Who was shooting at the Apache?

Who was shooting at the Bradley?

At the time of the gun-cam video: No One.

There isn't even a visible Bradley on the tape. A Bradley was never mentioned in the US Military Report as a cause fo the shooting. A Bushmaster is a 25mm cannon attached to a Bradley and it's retarded to shoot at it. Did you even look at the evidence?

Because you're clearly just raging without thinking.

Again, the RPG ID Kaelik mentioned was the justification for the shootings according to the US Military. Who are claiming that the camera was pointed at a Humvee down the road.

Now, if don't wanna believe the report, it's up to you. But it's clear that you only want to look at the evidence that shows a war crime is committed.

In fact, only the Bradley (and the rest of the soldiers) took fire earlier. What do you think the journalists were looking at? None of the people on the street have weapons at the ready. No one in the video even has a weapon at the ready. Sure, mistakes get made. That is no reason to accept them.

So if you see someone gunning down innocent people, you should shrug and let the shooter get away just because he decided to holster his weapon after the fact?

Because that IS what you are proposing.

Why would you fucking accept the deaths of our allies? Or the three-year coverup? Because I'm Naive? This word means not what you think it means.

Sure. Bring up old laundry. Makes you look like an even more biased bitch whose only interest is to demonize other people up in her high pulpit than actually bothering to INVESTIGATE.

Crissa wrote:You're a fucking tool, Kaelik. Ambulances are free targets in your rules.

That's not what Kaelik said, and if anyone is being a tool other than Gan it's you.

He did not say Ambulances are free targets. He said unmarked vans taking away people for unknown reasons are.

Zinegata - anyone is free game if the US wants your oil. And apparently every insurgent is a depraved terrorist.

You're a double tool.

Firstly, does Afghanistan have oil? No.

You get whacked if it serves US National interests. Which may or may not involve oil wealth (much less if Obama's green economy lessens oil demans). And guess what? Big powers do it all the fucking time.

I live in the Third World and accept it. It's the way things are. To get out of this, we just have to develop economically and not elect whackos as our leaders.

Secondly, I never said every insurgent is a depraved terrorist. I did say however they DO bring kids to battlefields as human shields. And they DO kidnap kids and blow them up - the worst incident being Beslan.

And that like all war criminals, many of them actually live pretty ordinary lives once their terroristing is done (unless they're suicide bombers. But those are real dumb fucks anyway who are fortunately weeding themselves out of their genepool).

And for Lich Loved, brown people have no rights to life /or/ oil. And it doesn't matter which brown person you shoot back.

Racist.

What fucking great people you are. And you apparently think it's okay that it's three years later, the investigation is long done, and that it was never, ever released to US media that it happened.

-Crissa

We're used to seeing war crimes go unpunished. The vast majority of them never do. If you participated in the Holocaust, chances are good you died peacefully of old age in your sleep.

And this incident might not even qualify as an outright war crime.

So excuse us if we don't really feel any outrage. The world is unjust. And it will remain so even if people whine about it, because the whiners are wimps who never pick up a gun or stand for office to try and actually change it.

There isn't even a visible Bradley on the tape. A Bradley was never mentioned in the US Military Report as a cause fo the shooting. A Bushmaster is a 25mm cannon attached to a Bradley and it's retarded to shoot at it. Did you even look at the evidence?

For completeness, it is also an Australian IMV, that also has no connectedness to this event.

Zinegata wrote:Firstly, does Afghanistan have oil? No.

Afghanistan has drugs.

Starmaker wrote:

Zinegata wrote:Firstly, does Afghanistan have oil? No.

Afghanistan has drugs.

And they also have diamonds.

That still doesn't make Crissa's statements any truer. Again, the US is gonna bomb your ass because it serves national interest.

And they also have a proposed massive oil pipe line project backed by US interests in attempts to access certain oil resources without going through Russia.

So they kinda do have oil.

PhoneLobster wrote:And they also have a proposed massive oil pipe line project backed by US interests in attempts to access certain oil resources without going through Russia.

So they kinda do have oil.

I would think that "haven for terrorism" (a national interest issue) is a much bigger reason as to why the Americans whacked the Afghans as opposed to a proposed pipeline that doesn't yet exist.

This contrary attitude is frankly laughably absurd.

That "marked as a medic" concept is absurd.

First, how can anyone expect the people of a country that has been fucked over for 30 years now to come up with a the resources and coordination needed to do this? Sure, it is just some paint, some clothes and some moderate amount of work involved, but that work and paint and clothing will be missing elsewhere. And what's more, you have to coordinate this across the entire country, without all of the infrastructure we take for granted.

Secondly, if all it takes to not get shot at, is an openly displayed cross or half-moon or whatever, what is keeping the actual terrorists from doing the same?

Crissa wrote:Zinegata, you spent two pages claiming you didn't hold these positions, and yet now, you do?

-Crissa

Concern troll that contridicts himself? That's how Zinegata rolls, son.

Ganbare Gincun wrote:

Crissa wrote:Zinegata, you spent two pages claiming you didn't hold these positions, and yet now, you do?

-Crissa

Concern troll that contridicts himself? That's how Zinegata rolls, son.

Again, fuck you too.

General Stanley McChrystal wrote:In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force . . . . [T]o my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."

Link.

Zinegata wrote:Make of it what you will. I am not saying you should believe the report. I'm just saying there are two sides to this story, something even Al Jazeera acknowledges.

Actually, the Al Jazeera story (which I linked to earlier in this thread) clearly condemns the attack and talks about how things went so horribly wrong. There's no "two sides" about it - a bunch of trigger happy goons went gun crazy, and a ton of innocent Iraqis died as a result. And then we covered it up.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:

General Stanley McChrystal wrote:In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force . . . . [T]o my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."

Link.

Again, for the sake of completeness because there are several moronic hacks here, the above statement was preceded by the following:

Q: "On Escalation of force, have you considered engaging the local community on the issue? We could explain at the brigade/battalion level what behavior we find threatening, and how we are trained to react when we feel threatened. We could negotiate with the community leaders over mutually agreeable actions and reactions that are better understood by both and gives part ownership of the issue to the community and empowers them in line with our approach to reintegration."

GEN McChrystal: "That's a great point. I don't know if we have, but we certainly ought to be doing that. We have so many escalation of force issues, and someone gets hurt in the process, and we say, 'They didn't respond like they were supposed to.' Well, they may not have known how they were supposed to respond, so as they approached an area or checkpoint or whatever, they may have taken actions that seemed appropriate to them, and when a warning shot was fired they may have panicked. I think this is a great thing to do, to engage people and tell them the kind of behavior on their part that would lower the chance that they would run into problems.

"I do want to say something that everyone understands. We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations.

Translation: Both sides need to communicate better because a lot of people die in a war zone because of misunderstandings.

Which is why I find all this talk about how it's useless to mark ambulances or put up press signs as retarded. It helps save lives.

Ganbare Gincun wrote:

Zinegata wrote:Make of it what you will. I am not saying you should believe the report. I'm just saying there are two sides to this story, something even Al Jazeera acknowledges.

Actually, the Al Jazeera story (which I linked to earlier in this thread) clearly condemns the attack and talks about how things went so horribly wrong. There's no "two sides" about it - a bunch of trigger happy goons went gun crazy, and a ton of innocent Iraqis died as a result. And then we covered it up.

You are still a moron. Did you again miss the part where I said I watched the Al Jazeera segment and not read the website?

Now that I have read it though, the one you linked clearly isn't updated. It's still saying that this is an unverified video... when they already announced on the live broadcast that the US military confirmed it's authentic.

Also, I find it incredibly ironic how you are completely incapable of interpreting other people's statements without coloring them with your own views or adding outright lies to make yourself look better.

One suspects that if they ever put you in an Apache helicopter, you'd own the world record in the number of friendly-fire deaths because you'd have no fucking clue on whose side somebody is with and wouldn't fucking care anyway as long as you got to kill something.

[Edit: Thought of a better insult]

cthulhu wrote: It's just people making a crap decision based on blurry visuals in a really high pressure situation. If the guy is 'pointing' or even 'vaguely looking in the direction of' a friendly you have like one second to make the decision, and if you make a bum steer you either kill a civilian, or a bunch of grunts take a beating and very likely die.

There's a huge world of difference between misidentifying military vehicles on the battlefield or in the sky and gunning down groups of people casually walking in the street or trying to help the wounded. Once again, watch the video - none of the people that were gunned down were taking any kind of action that would indicate that they were about to start a firefight or that they considered the copters to be a threat (what with them allowing the copter to flank them and all).

Ganbare Gincun wrote:

cthulhu wrote: It's just people making a crap decision based on blurry visuals in a really high pressure situation. If the guy is 'pointing' or even 'vaguely looking in the direction of' a friendly you have like one second to make the decision, and if you make a bum steer you either kill a civilian, or a bunch of grunts take a beating and very likely die.

There's a huge world of difference between misidentifying military vehicles on the battlefield or in the sky and gunning down groups of people casually walking in the street or trying to help the wounded. Once again, watch the video - none of the people that were gunned down were taking any kind of action that would indicate that they were about to start a firefight or that they considered the copters to be a threat (what with them allowing the copter to flank them and all).

Get off your fucking Apache gunship and stop shooting innocent people with your outright lies and partisan hackery. You're not addressing chtulu's points at all, just firing off dumb-ass peacenik talking points.

angelfromanotherpin wrote:In a stark assessment of shootings of locals by US troops at checkpoints in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in little-noticed comments last month that during his time as commander there, "We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force . . . . [T]o my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."

He also said he is not criticizing those at checkpoints for their decisions. It sounds like he is honestly genuinely trying to find a solution to a vexing problem. But anyway...

Sadly, I do no doubt this is true. I wish it were otherwise. In an insurgency, every vehicle is a rolling bomb. To believe otherwise means that one day this eventually happens. The general wants to reduce the confusion at checkpoints to reduce civilian causalities. This is good. It shows we care about their civilians more than those bastards that intentionally blow up women and children at market or kill policemen by blowing up their police station or killing them at home on their way to work.

cthulhu wrote:It's just people making a crap decision based on blurry visuals in a really high pressure situation. If the guy is 'pointing' or even 'vaguely looking in the direction of' a friendly you have like one second to make the decision, and if you make a bum steer you either kill a civilian, or a bunch of grunts take a beating and very likely die.

Unless you are actively fighting a war you are going to have way more harmless scares than actual insurgent activity. If you are going to shoot at people who, when viewed through a blurry decades-old camera, look like they might be getting ready to shoot at someone, you will in 999 out of 1000 cases shoot innocent civilians. That is not acceptable when you are in the country to keep the peace.

Mind you, I am not blaming (most of) the soldiers, except possibly for being dumb enough to join up to "protect their country". They are not trained for these situations. In fact their training is the exact opposite of what is needed. Soldiers blow shit up. Soldiers kill people. Sending people trained to identify and kill threats out to patrol marketplaces is asking for trouble. Expecting them to be able to correctly identify threats on an iPhone-size screen is insane. Even if they make the correct decision 99% of the time you still end up killing civilians instead of insurgents.

Numbers to back the above:
Assume 1 in 1000 is an insurgent. Assume insurgents are dumb enough to walk around in broad daylight and in plain view of your patrols. If you only make one mistake in one hundred of these split second "is this is a terrorist attack" decisions you end up killing 1 terrorist and 10 civilians. However I seriously doubt the false positive ratio is as small as 1%. I also doubt you are going to catch insurgents shooting soldiers in the streets. They seem to mostly planting bombs, right? I suspect the real numbers are more like 1 terrorist per 500 civilians - who promptly gets replaced by some grieving relative.

Conclusion: US actions are both immoral and dumb.

Murtak wrote:Unless you are actively fighting a war you are going to have way more harmless scares than actual insurgent activity. If you are going to shoot at people who, when viewed through a blurry decades-old camera, look like they might be getting ready to shoot at someone, you will in 999 out of 1000 cases shoot innocent civilians. That is not acceptable when you are in the country to keep the peace.

Mind you, I am not blaming (most of) the soldiers, except possibly for being dumb enough to join up to "protect their country". They are not trained for these situations. In fact their training is the exact opposite of what is needed. Soldiers blow shit up. Soldiers kill people. Sending people trained to identify and kill threats out to patrol marketplaces is asking for trouble. Expecting them to be able to correctly identify threats on an iPhone-size screen is insane. Even if they make the correct decision 99% of the time you still end up killing civilians instead of insurgents.

Numbers to back the above:
Assume 1 in 1000 is an insurgent. Assume insurgents are dumb enough to walk around in broad daylight and in plain view of your patrols. If you only make one mistake in one hundred of these split second "is this is a terrorist attack" decisions you end up killing 1 terrorist and 10 civilians. However I seriously doubt the false positive ratio is as small as 1%. I also doubt you are going to catch insurgents shooting soldiers in the streets. They seem to mostly planting bombs, right? I suspect the real numbers are more like 1 terrorist per 500 civilians - who promptly gets replaced by some grieving relative.

Conclusion: US actions are both immoral and dumb.

Except for the potshot calling military people dumb and the usual baseless and subjective proclamations of immorality, yeah, this is a much more reasonable assessment of the situation that takes much more of the evidence into consideration than "RAR! Pro-war statements! Must gun them down with the Apache helicopter of justice!"

Quite refreshing, actually.

Zinegata wrote:blah blah blah ad hominem attacks blah

If opposing the perpetuation of war atrocities and their subsequent cover-up makes me a "peacenik" and a "partisan hack", then I'll gladly wear those labels with pride. It's certainly preferable to blathering idiotic crap about how insurgents go charging into battle with their children like a bunch of soccer moms, or how we are justified in gunning down anyone walking down the street or tending to wounded people lying in the street because they "might" be a threat. *rolls eyes*

Ganbare Gincun wrote:

Zinegata wrote:blah blah blah ad hominem attacks blah

*Gan's own insensible, uninformed, self-righteous bla bla bla. Which was again posted without bothering to read the other person's statements*

ARGH! I am being shot at by Gan's Apache helicopter armed with 25mm outright lies for trying to help poor innocent chtulu! War crimes! War crimes!

Anyone who signed on with the intent of protecting a country as large and powerful as the US from enemies who can only threaten them with scare tactics is dumb. Anyone who believes Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator, was in league with fundamentalist terrorists is dumb. Anyone who believes he is making the US secure by shooting Arabs is dumb. The whole US strategy is dumb. Or possibly evil. But I am going to give them the benefit of doubt and think of them as dumb enough to be brainwashed.