[fornever]

> I don't see any criminal or even incorrecr decisions by US military in that video. Making decisions based on incomplete information, with certain risk of bad outcomes abd collateral damage is a part of war.

So to paraphrase "they did nothing wrong and even if they did it would have been okay".

First, they clearly shot civilians trying to take other civilians to the hospital by essentially inventing weapons they didn't and couldn't have seen. Secondly, in most countries when you get the responsibility to fly something like an attack helicopter, which takes a fairly long time to learn, you tend to have to be better than some random soldier. The "war is hell" excuse isn't really viable with the attitudes displayed in the video. But if you're trying to say that these are the kind of actions we should expect when the US invades a country then I guess we are in agreement.

[golergka]

How exactly could've you made out these figures as civilians and not enemy combatants? From POV of the camera, you already have seen one of them with an RPG, and the opposing force doesn't really use uniforms either.

Don't fall for a logical fallacy, and try to view the situatiom from the lens of the information that they actually had, not the hindsight.

[fornever]

International law and the rules of engagement requires you to positively identify enemy combatant as well as not engage enemy combatant that are incapacitated. There's nothing in the video indicating that they person getting picked up by the van or that the people picking him up has weapons.

(from the transcript [0])

05:30 There's one guy moving down there but he's uh, he's wounded. ... 06:01 He's getting up. 06:02 Maybe he has a weapon down in his hand? 06:04 No, I haven't seen one yet. ... 06:33 Come on, buddy. 06:38 All you gotta do is pick up a weapon. ... 06:54 This is Two-Six roger. I'll pop flares [drop flares]. We also have one individual moving. We're looking for weapons. If we see a weapon, we're gonna engage. ... 07:18 Bushmaster; Crazyhorse. We have individuals going to the scene, looks like possibly uh picking up bodies and weapons. .... 07:36 Picking up the wounded? 07:38 Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage. ... 07:59 Roger. We have a black SUV-uh Bongo truck [van] picking up the bodies. Request permission to engage.

There's nothing unclear here or anything to be misunderstood. If they had seen weapons they would have engaged already instead of asking for permission. It's just that the crew of the helicopter really wants to shoot them and that they, the US military nor the US public don't really give a shit if they are civilian as long as they can get away with it, which they can.

[0] https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org/en/transcript.html

[hendersoon]

Exactly right. These really were war crimes, and Chelsea did have a moral imperative to leak them.

[boomboomsubban]

Let's give you the benefit of the doubt, not necessarily earned as the other poster points out but let's roll with it. You have successfully defended between two and eleven civilian deaths that were not hidden before the leaks. That leaves you merely with the task of explaining the around twelve thousand that were hidden prior to the leaks.