II. This shows us that the US Army cannot be trusted to investigate their own mistakes.

The nicest thing you can say about the actions of these pilots is that they made a terrible mistake. But the Army doesn’t even have the balls to do that. Instead they lie about the circumstances of the attack and try and cover up the evidence. When Bleichwehl says that the Army was engaging a “hostile force” he can only mean 1 of 2 things. Either he is saying that the crowd in the video was hostile, which is a lie, or he is saying that troops elsewhere were engaging hostile forces, and that this somehow justifies the attack we see on the tape. This second possibility is just crazy, because it implies that if someone launches an attack against the Army in one part of a city then the Army believes it is justified in killing anyone in any part of the city.

III. The Army, like Hamas and the Israeli Defence Force, really, really, really doesn’t give a shit about civilian casualties. When the ground troops find the children in the truck the pilots’ only reaction is “well they shouldn’t have brought their kids into a battle”. I’m not going to spend time talking about how this wasn’t a battle, I’ve done that already. But is it really too much to ask that these people show some sort of remorse over what they’ve done? Their attitude is basically “I know I shot their van full of holes but it isn’t my fault they got hurt, and watched their father die right in front of them”.

This level of dissociation from reality is troubling, and when it is combined with the Army’s findings in the matter it becomes more troubling still. Taken together the “I don’t give a shit” attitude and the Army’s cover up completely shield these pilots from the negative consequences of their actions.

On a psychological level this means that they are never going to change their behaviour, because there is no reason for them to change. From their perspective the “plus” side is that they get to blow stuff up, and everyone they meet thinks they are awesome. On the “minus” side there is jack shit, because all of the negative consequences of the lives they’ve destroyed are being kept away from them.

And here's another example of the same phenomenon.

IV. The US Army will kill you, and anyone who is even standing near you, on the flimsiest of evidence.

Anyone who cares to look can see that the people in the video are not engaged in any kind of fighting, and yet they all got killed. Even if Tube-Guy was carrying an RPG is it really justifiable to kill 10 unarmed people, and destroy 3 houses, just to get that one guy?

I must mention that some have claimed that the pilots’ accusations of hostile action are correct, but that you just can’t see the violent people in the video. Indeed, many bloggers and journalists have claimed that while the people in the video are unarmed (except for Tube-Guy who was definitely carrying something horrible, like your mom) the pilots were actually shooting at a group of armed people who you can’t see on camera.

When asked why these hostile people did not run and hide when the helicopters (which according to other journalists were plainly visible) came out, and instead chose to hang about in the street where they were easy targets, these critics remain silent. They also choose not to ask the question of why, if there were all these armed men about, the people operating the camera chose instead to focus on the unarmed people who we can see in the video?

If there were any armed people around I’m certain the camera operators would be focusing on them, but they don’t.

We can of course invent a situation in which men armed with RPGs and AK-47s were rampaging just off camera, but it is exactly that: an invention. It does not correspond to the evidence, and since the Army has clearly lied about other aspects of the case we would be foolish to trust anything else that they say.

Given that the real purpose of the war was to establish an America-loving oil-rich lapdog I'd say this is accurate.

V. Lastly, the most important thing we have learned from this is that we have to remain super-critical of US Army reports. Whenever they announce that they have engaged “insurgents” or “terrorists” or “Al Qaeda” or “terrorists” we all need to stop for a second and remind ourselves that these people are perfectly willing to just plain LIE to us about these things.

It is an undeniable fact that we have all, at one point or another, seen a US Army report that claimed only “bad guys” were killed when in fact civilians were killed as well.

There is no way for us to know which times they are lying and which times they are telling the truth. So the only rational path is to assume that they are always lying, until such time as they earn our respect again.

And we can also hope that Iraq somehow manages to heal itself sometime soon.

Let us join hands and celebrate 50 years of America dropping bombs on children.

[Standard Disclaimer: this post was entirely my own opinion and was not paid for in any way, directly or otherwise, by anyone or anything that stands to gain in any way from the ideas expressed herein.]

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