Did U.S. troops in Iraq murder innocent civilians?

I've been sitting on this for a bit, because I needed to process it.

Dan Froomkin

Calling it a case of "collateral murder," the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver -- and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.

None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon's initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.

Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.

In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.

"Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards," says one crewman after multiple rounds of 30mm cannon fire left nearly a dozen bodies littering the street.

A crewman begs for permission to open fire on the van and its occupants, even though it has done nothing but stop to help the wounded: "Come on, let us shoot!"

Two crewmen share a laugh when a Bradley fighting vehicle runs over one of the corpses.

And after soldiers on the ground find two small children shot and bleeding in the van, one crewman can be heard saying: "Well, it's their fault bringing their kids to a battle."

The helicopter crew, which was patrolling an area that had been the scene of fierce fighting that morning, said they spotted weapons on members of the first group -- although the video shows one gun, at most. The crew also mistook a telephoto lens for a rocket-propelled grenade.

What's worse, the cavalier video game-like attitude, the pleas to kill an unarmed rescue party, the collateral damage, the coverup, or the fact that we're in Iraq illegally?

I don't know.

Oliver Willis via Cesca
In the case of the Wikileaks video, Greenwald characterizes it as “the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety”. Except in the mindset of the soldiers shown, this wasn’t just some guy, but part of a group of insurgents. While it’s very clear that the military coverup of the activities was wrong, and possibly a crime, it galls me that it becomes so simple for people “over here” to Monday morning quarterback the decisions soldiers make in the field when they feel their lives and the lives of others are on the line.

What continues to trouble me is the cavalier manner in which they approached what should be the most deadly serious part of their jobs.

This was Gears of War for them. It was treated as XBox when it was human lives they were ending. If they can be so cavalier and, at times, excited to kill, well that leads to not taking the appropriate care to make sure that they're in fact targeting terrorists and not murdering civilians.

The attitude displayed is what really upsets me. I would think that taking a human life would be a little more serious and a lot less fun and funny.

Over at Andrew Sullivan, a reader writes:

I was a member of a unit that killed one and wounded two Americans during Operation Desert Storm. Nothing has awakened the feelings I had that night in 1991 ever, until I watched that video of the Apache attack on the journalists. I had forgotten how sick one can feel at knowing you participated in the death of innocents, and I am deeply saddened today.

I have two things to say: First, and most importantly, is that none of us is qualified to judge what that helicopter crew did that day. I want to judge them. But I don’t know what happened an hour before that, or six hours before, or six days before or six months. We have no idea how close those men have come to dying in an ambush, or being unable to help someone who was. The context of that aircrew matters as much as anything that happened on the ground that day.

But second, and what leads me to want to judge that aircraft crew so unfavorably, is that the ground targets are clearly uninterested in the presence of the aircraft.

The real lasting legacy of this is that this is another loss of the moral high ground for the U.S.. it's another reason for them to hate us.