War Crime

This is the video posted to Wikileaks the other day, showing the slaughter of a number of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists. I can't say I recommend viewing it for yourself; it's pretty brutal.

I can sort of see how the troops may have mistaken a camera for an RPG. And maybe a group of people walking casually down the middle of the road looks like an insurgent attack. (One guy *might* have been carrying a rifle!) But blowing up the van, with no weapons visible at all, that pulled up to tend to the wounded? It'd be charitable to say the troops fucked up big time, but this incident quacks like a war crime. And the fact that the subsequent US military investigation cleared the troops of wrongdoing just pushes culpability for their crime up the ladder several rungs.



What gets me is that, based on the radio chatter, it never even entered into the troops' heads that it might actually have been a camera. Shouldn't checking for cameras be part of their training? Not to mention checking for other factors: as far as I can tell, the only reason they opened fire is because they saw two things that looked a little bit like weapons. They did not see people behaving as though they were part of an attack.



The counterargument will be, "Oh, but if you stop to make sure everything that looks like a weapon actually is, they'll shoot you first!" And that's probably true. But the continuing claim is that we're there for the good of the Iraqi people. Slaughtering them by the dozens over an unexamined misunderstanding--AND THEN COVERING IT UP--does nothing to support that claim.