Originally posted by DigiNut
I suppose that's one way of looking at it. But if Canada ever landed in an out-and-out war (hah, who are we kidding) then I'd want to know that our soldiers and especially pilots are as emotionally detached as possible while in combat situations.
But we are involved in an out-and-out war...
What do yo think we are doing in Afghanastan???
Peace keeping???
Canada is executing offensive operations in that country. And the situation is 10 times harsher than in Iraq...
The only reason that the US is more involved in Iraq is because of the Bush family...
Abercrombie
Anyone who willingly hangs around militants with weapons in a warzone knows they are a target.
Whether they are 16-18 year old "children" or reporters, these 'martyrs' asked for it.
Here's my award for their bravery.
gummybear
quote:
Originally posted by DigiNut
What society lacks is sense, not empathy. For every one person like Yohan who actually attempts to interpret the events and try to understand what happened, there seem to be 50 more who draw immediate conclusions based on knee-jerk emotional reactions (case in point).
Again, none of that makes it any less tragic, and I'm sure I'd be "singing a different tune" if those people were my family. But what's your point? That doesn't change the fact that whoever made this video chose to edit out any and all context in order to turn it into a piece of agitprop.
And what this really highlights is the difference in mentality between sides in this war. We don't get bombarded with videos of suicide bombs and terrorist attacks because the victims' families don't want that crap plastered all over the internet and the TV news channels. They've got enough grief to deal with as it is. On the other hand, the terrorists (sorry, "insurgents") love it, because even though they see people as disposable commodities, they know we'll weep over it and it helps them justify their actions.
oh GAWD just shut the up already..seriously..you're such a Muslim hater and you make it so obvious in every post that you spew about this issue..
you may be fooling some people on here with your pseudo intellect and pretty words but puuhhhhhhlease don't think I don't have your number..you are utterly transparent my dear.
Abercrombie
quote:
Originally posted by gummybear
oh GAWD just shut the up already..seriously..you're such a Muslim hater and you make it so obvious in every post that you spew about this issue..
you may be fooling some people on here with your pseudo intellect and pretty words but puuhhhhhhlease don't think I don't have your number..you are utterly transparent my dear.
I don't know how you can say that... very harsh! You shouldn't accuse a person like that.
If you don't like what he posts, block his posts simple as that.
yankeeBaby
quote:
Originally posted by gummybear
oh GAWD just shut the up already..seriously..you're such a Muslim hater and you make it so obvious in every post that you spew about this issue..
you may be fooling some people on here with your pseudo intellect and pretty words but puuhhhhhhlease don't think I don't have your number..you are utterly transparent my dear.
I usually dont normally agree with Digi, but I think him and Yohan make very solid points on this topic.
War is very cruel and its hard to understand what kind of mentality these soldiers have, on BOTH sides. Its very easy to judge while we are sitting at our computers in our cozy houses, but we will never fully understand the stress and reactions to war unless we have been there. Yohan's questionning of the video was one of the most intelligent responses on TA to date, because it is rational and seeks more info before jumping to conclusions.
Surely most people here do not WANT innocent civilians to die, regardless of their take on the video. But, some people are on the "lets be the good guys" cloud, which is totally unrealistic to what really occurs during war. Its a sad fact, but most of us are HERE today because soldiers in past wars (ie: WWII, etc...) saw the enemy with a weapon and SHOT, as opposed to standing there being nice guys.
Its an unfortunate part of war to lose civilians, but the overraction to such an event tells me that people are either unaware or unsympathetic that the "enemy insurgents" would have no problem doing the same to us.
Abercrombie
quote:
Originally posted by yankeeBaby
I usually dont normally agree with Digi, but I think him and Yohan make very solid points on this topic.
War is very cruel and its hard to understand what kind of mentality these soldiers have, on BOTH sides. Its very easy to judge while we are sitting at our computers in our cozy houses, but we will never fully understand the stress and reactions to war unless we have been there. Yohan's questionning of the video was one of the most intelligent responses on TA to date, because it is rational and seeks more info before jumping to conclusions.
Surely most people here do not WANT innocent civilians to die, regardless of their take on the video. But, some people are on the "lets be the good guys" cloud, which is totally unrealistic to what really occurs during war. Its a sad fact, but most of us are HERE today because soldiers in past wars (ie: WWII, etc...) saw the enemy with a weapon and SHOT, as opposed to standing there being nice guys.
Its an unfortunate part of war to lose civilians, but the overraction to such an event tells me that people are either unaware or unsympathetic that the "enemy insurgents" would have no problem doing the same to us.
rational post
yankeeBaby
quote:
Originally posted by Abercrombie
rational post
lol first it was excellent, now rational, eh? ;) ;) I can accept that but I liked it better when it was excellent lol ;)
Xavier Moriarty
quote:
Originally posted by yankeeBaby
I usually dont normally agree with Digi, but I think him and Yohan make very solid points on this topic.
War is very cruel and its hard to understand what kind of mentality these soldiers have, on BOTH sides. Its very easy to judge while we are sitting at our computers in our cozy houses, but we will never fully understand the stress and reactions to war unless we have been there. Yohan's questionning of the video was one of the most intelligent responses on TA to date, because it is rational and seeks more info before jumping to conclusions.
Surely most people here do not WANT innocent civilians to die, regardless of their take on the video. But, some people are on the "lets be the good guys" cloud, which is totally unrealistic to what really occurs during war. Its a sad fact, but most of us are HERE today because soldiers in past wars (ie: WWII, etc...) saw the enemy with a weapon and SHOT, as opposed to standing there being nice guys.
Its an unfortunate part of war to lose civilians, but the overraction to such an event tells me that people are either unaware or unsympathetic that the "enemy insurgents" would have no problem doing the same to us.
huh. i was hoping it wouldnt come to this :
WARNING : do not open if you have a weak stomach. WARNING : not for everybody. WARNING : you may regret opening this.
seriously, think twice and then think twice more before you click play. some thing cant be unseen !!!!
overreaction you say?? its a well known and well documented fact that usa army has been and is still using bombs with/made of depleted uranium because "it can penetrate tanks". this is what their "peacekeeping" is leaving to our young and our future.
quote:
rational post
nope. biased and uneducated post.
quote:
Its very easy to judge while we are sitting at our computers in our cozy houses, but we will never fully understand the stress and reactions to war unless we have been there.
been there??? some of us still gotta live with reminders of these horrors, to this very day.
wanna kick it up a notch??? this is NOTHING.
wing
Good to see this topic is active in different areas of TA :toothless.
Editor of Wikileaks elaborates on the video.
He also goes on about the authenticity of the footage
"Just 20 minutes after that serious and disturbing event, a hellfire missile attack is conducted on a nearby house that from the roof appears to be under construction. and that attack killed another *something* military records 6 people but potenially, maybe significantly more another 6"
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/0374165734/
^I think that's the book the editor of Wikileaks was talking about. Can someone photocopy the chapter about the "Collateral Murder" in Baghdad? :D
---
Wikileaks screencap analysis
http://www.collateralmurder.com/en/photos-1.html
VDub
quote:
Originally posted by Xavier Moriarty
huh. i was hoping it wouldnt come to this :
Oh ing please man!!!!
It's a damn war over there!!!
Do you know what the a-bombs in Japan did to ppl in WWII???
How about napalm in Vietnam???
Where are your videos of children being used as suicide bombers or their victims in a market in all of the wars going on now???
Do not make it sound like these brutalities are anything new!!!
WE ARE AT WAR AND WAR IS HELL!!!!
End of story...
PivotTechno
quote:
Originally posted by VDub
WE ARE AT WAR AND WAR IS HELL!!!!
"We" are at war?
No, "you" are sitting comfortably at your desk or on your couch typing away, while the military factions of various countries are at war. Big difference.
For a shift in perspective, here's an article that seeks to allay the myth that this type of occurrence is somehow out of the ordinary in day-to-day military operations:
I was just on Democracy Now along with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange discussing the Iraq video they released yesterday, and there's one vital point I want to emphasize. Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents myth and propaganda from distorting those realities. That's why the administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the same with regard to the Afghan massacre), and why whistle-blowers, real journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. The discussions many people are having today -- about the brutal reality of what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation -- is exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.
But there's a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn't. It's the opposite: it's par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that's rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we're seeing it on video not because it's rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed, and (b) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. But what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety -- as though there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.
A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars. That's why it's repulsive to watch people -- including some "liberals" -- attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because "our guys are the good guys" and they act differently "99.99999999% of the time." That is blatantly false. Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu Ghraib abusers as rogue "bad apples" once their conduct was exposed with photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false. In a perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is some sort of rare and unusual event: those who support having the U.S. invade and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior.
As the video demonstrates, the soldiers in the Apache did not take a single step -- including killing those unarmed men who tried to rescue the wounded -- without first receiving formal permission from their superiors. Beyond that, the Pentagon yesterday -- once the video was released -- suddenly embraced the wisdom of transparency by posting online the reports of the so-called "investigations" it undertook into this incident (as a result of pressure from Reuters). Those formal investigations not only found that every action taken by those soldiers was completely justified -- including the firing on the unarmed civilian rescuers -- but also found that there's no need for any remedial steps to be taken to prevent future re-occurence. What we see on that video is what the U.S. does on a constant and regular basis in these countries, and it's what we've been doing for years. It's obviously consistent with our policies and practices for how we fight in these countries, which is exactly what those investigative reports concluded.
The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved -- at least not primarily. Of course those who aren't accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they're taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indictment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.
All of this is usually kept from us. Unlike those in the Muslim world, who are shown these realities quite frequently by their free press, we don't usually see what is done by us. We stay blissfully insulated from it, so that in those rare instances when we're graphically exposed to it, we can tell ourselves that it's all very unusual and rare. That's how we collectively dismissed the Abu Ghraib photos, and it's why the Obama administration took such extraordinary steps to suppress all the rest of the torture photos: because further disclosure would have revealed that behavior to be standard and common, not at all unusual or extraordinary.
Precisely the same dynamic applies to the Pentagon's admission yesterday that its original claims about the brutal February killing of five civilians in Eastern Afghanistan were totally false. What happened there -- the slaughter of unthreatening civilians, official lies told about the incident, the dissemination of those lies by an uncritical U.S. media -- is what happens constantly (the same deceitful cover-up behavior took place with the Iraq video). The lies about the Afghan killings were exposed in this instance not because they're rare, but because one very intrepid, relentless reporter happened to be able to travel to the remote province and speak to witnesses and investigate the event, forcing the Pentagon to acknowledge the truth.
The value of the Wikileaks/Iraq video and the Afghanistan revelation is not that they exposed unusually horrific events. The value is in realizing that these event are anything but unusual.
----------
So the question that ultimately arises for me is "why are they there?" Can someone give me a clear answer? I mean, for all intents and purposes, the U.S. homefront seems to be largely in or headed for the ter these days, yet they continue with unabated and unprecedented military expenditure. Could it be that they actually don't have the public's interest at heart and are simply in it because at its root, war is highly profitable for those who choose to wage it?
There have been no completed attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11 (just several that were magically foiled at the 11th hour), yet the U.S. spends four times as much on military expenditure as it does on education and 28 times the amount it allocates to the EPA. Does this honestly make sense to most of you?
Jayx1
thank god we didnt have the internet in world war 2 because i think wed all be speaking german today.
