ThatDamnedPanda -> RE: Suprised no one posted the new video of our military murdering Iraqis. Here it is. (4/5/2010 9:37:26 PM)
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I've watched this several more times over the last hour or so, and the more I look at it the less fault I find with the helicopter crew. If you look at the video in that link, at the 3:40 mark you can clearly see at least two men with weapons - one apparently an AK-47, or similar weapon with a banana clip, and the other with what seems clearly to be an RPG. These men are obviously insurgents, and correctly identified as such. The reporters are mingling with this group and moving through them as they move behind a building, and the men with the assault rifle and RPG disappear behind the same building - at around 4:00 of the video. A few moments later, the man we now know is the photographer pokes his nose around the corner of the building, but there was no way for the helicopter crew to know who he was or what he was pointing. When the helicopter swings around the building to get a clear shot, all the men are mingling again. At this point, I can't think of any reason the helicopter wouldn't shoot. There had been a firefight nearby a short time earlier between insurgents and American ground forces, and that was the reason the helicopter was there. Now they've got more American ground forces heading in that direction, a group of armed insurgents taking positions of concealment behind a building, and it looks as though they're setting up an ambush. Of course they're going to shoot. There's no reason for them not to. The more I look at this, the more it looks to me as though the Reuters reporters were embedding themselves with an insurgent unit hoping to get footage of an ambush. I could be wrong, but that's the way it looks to me. If that's the case, they've got nobody but themselves to blame for being dead. Even at best - at the very least - they knew damned well that they were with a group of armed insurgents in an area where American forces had just been attacked. This was a predictable outcome, and they knew it. C'est la vie. Or rather, c'est la guerre.
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