First, we have the gunner and pilot assessing a situation. They see guns and an RPG man, who ducks behind the wall. That constitutes as an imminent threat, and they decide to engage in self-defense. So, as they roll up and gun them down, that's completely legal and comlpetely reasonable.
This is true.
According to Lt. Col. David Bolgiano, U.S. Air Force:
The confusion over the inherent right of self-defense doesn't come from the written word. It doesn't come from the law. …
The confusion over the inherent right of self-defense comes from assessing judgment-based shootings after the fact that, in the clear vision of 20/20 hindsight, may not appear to be reasonable when, in fact, by law and by tactics, they were. Let me give a prime example (see that website's 3rd answer).
Self-Defense implies that they were being threatened by imminent attack. But Self-Defense isn't the issue here.
Now, there's also this:
[What is positive identification?]
… Positive identification is a targeting term that's used against a declared hostile. For instance, we'll take a notional rules of engagement … where our command authority at a high level will designate terrorist group ABC as a designated hostile.
To engage that person, all one needs to do is ascertain positive ID -- in other words, to reasonably believe that that particular person is a member of the ABC terrorist group. We're unconcerned about whether or not that person is presenting an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury. It matters little under the law or tactics.
However:
PID is nearly always irrelevant when it comes to responding to an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury in a self-defense capacity. I don't care whether or not the person shooting at me is a member of ABC terrorist group. I don't care if, in fact, they're an insurgent. All I care about is, by their actions, are they presenting an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to myself or friendly forces? That's all the legal authority I need to engage them. So too oftentimes this PID term is incorrectly sprinkled into what is, in fact, a self-defense scenario.
And so Gary Solis, an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law School; Marine (Ret.) says this on PID:
Can you explain positive identification? …
PID, positive identification, is as the term implies: Before you can fire on an individual, you must positively identify that individual as representing a threat to you or your fellow Marines or soldiers. And if you cannot do that, then you are not supposed to fire on him or her.
So he contradicts what the Lt. Col. says, but let's hear him out:
The question is always, what constitutes PID? Some of us may have seen the shooting of a wounded individual in a mosque in Fallujah that happened some time ago. When one observes that, you may initially say, "Well, there's no PID there. There's no threat evident there. That looks like a murder in combat."
And the question is not what I think or some other viewer thinks. The question is, what was in the mind of the Marine who shot the individual? Did he honestly and reasonably believe that that individual presented a threat to him and/or his fellow Marines? And, if he did, then no offense has been committed.
So it's not only an objective assessment, but then it's also a largely subjective assessment. … That's why one person may say yes; another person may say no. The question is, what did the shooter feel? …
So from the US soldiers' point of view they did the right thing. Even with the van, it can be argued that he still did the right thing. His buddies were approaching that area, he had no idea what was in the van, even if they're putting a wounded "fighter" in it, he's not sure what's in there, but he's not going to take the chance to wait and find out if the enemy will try crashing that van into his buddies on the ground and exploding them to bits.
I didn't get that at all from the video,.. I didn't see a positive ID. The Air Crew immediately declared to command that they saw fighters with AKs and an RPG. Command acted reasonably and gave permission to fire. If it was a self defense scenario, they wouldn't have floated over the "terrorists" in a helo waiting for permission. They would have been chased off while waiting for permission to engage. Trouble is, they had time to check, but made up their minds without taking a second look. That's not positive ID.
EDIT: And let me say, I'm not educated on what an AK looks like through a blurry black and white camera. Even if they were, I cannot believe that was the only way for the Air Force crew to tell if the "terrorists" had AKs. Again, our soldiers can't be deployed with only drunk vision-like screens. So just again, feels completely lacking of a positive ID.
Gary Myers, Attorney for Lance Cpl. Justin Sharratt, says:
[… Over the course of this war our tactics have changed. Our understanding of the strategy has changed. How have these rules of engagement changed as well?]
Well, frequently they're local rules of engagement that address a given set of circumstances. Fallujah II is an example of where the rules of engagement were dramatically relaxed to allow for Marines to fire much more liberally, shall we say, than they would be in other environments. But Fallujah II is considered by the Marine Corps, and by those who were associated with it, to be one of the most significant battles in the history of the Marine Corps. And so the rules of engagement there were relaxed.
Rules of engagement are promulgated on the local level and so there are many rules of engagement that adjust to individual circumstances. So it's impossible to tell you there hasn't been a generic shift in the rules of engagement. The fundamentals are still the same -- right to self-defense, positive ID, so on. But there are, under certain circumstances, alterations in the rules of engagement to take into account the anticipated operational circumstance.
The "Rules of Engagement" aren't really on trial here though. It's the cover-up and violations of international law that are.
So this shows that these rules can be more flexible at times. However, Gen. James Conway of the US Marines brings up an interesting point to the interviewer's question:
[Can you talk about the insurgent tactic of hiding behind civilians? We've heard elsewhere that it's actually a tactic for the insurgents to actually bait U.S. forces into firing on civilians. Why would they do that? How would they do that?]
.....Let me give you an example. Before we crossed the berm in Kuwait in '03, we had an expression that we used to help our commanders understand application of the rules of engagement. We said if we initiate fire, the issue is collateral damage; if the enemy initiates fire against you, the issue is proportionality, OK, so that if you take a single sniper round from a building, if you can identify the window that that fire came from, then you can put fire on that window, certainly.
That you would destroy the entire building with a 500-pound bomb does not meet this concern for proportionality, and it's not something we would encourage our troops to do. So that's, again, the nature of an insurgency. If this were open warfare and we knew those buildings were cleared, the village was empty, we wouldn't hesitate. But where there are civilians, we must exercise those concerns. ...
The helicopter gunner didn't drop bomps on these guys, he used the right amount of firepower to deal with the perceived threat. So, even though there were reporters among these perceived insurgents, they're still fair game since the perceived insurgents were using them as shields.
When those "insurgents" identification becomes clear at aa later time, this still has no bearing on the legality of the decisions made by the soliders right before they engaged them.
The main reason why the Pentagon wanted to cover this up is because the public would react wildly while not really understanding the sensible reasoning on part of the US soldiers (much like what has been seen here in this thread and I'm sure in many parts of the world).
Let's give Gen. James Conway the final word:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... onway.html
[I understand you can't talk in specifics about rules of engagement on the ground. But can you talk generally about how the rules of engagement are different in an insurgency than from other conventional conflicts?]
The rules of engagement are not terribly different. The rules of engagement that we put into place as we crossed the berm going into Iraq in '03 are exactly the same rules of engagement that are in place today.
At its essence, what the rules of engagement say are that if you feel threatened by an enemy force or by an incident that's taking place in front of you, you are authorized to engage. That hasn't changed, nor should it change, be it a conventional environment or an insurgent environment. ...
Thanks for reading, hope this clears everything up.[/quote]
You can't just shoot human shields. I believe you can only refuse negotiations and allow them to be shot, or fire to save lives perceived to be in immediate danger. Like if another plane were hijacked and headed towards the Pentagon. Then a pilot can fire. But if a plan is just circling over the Midwest he/she cannot. Collateral Damage is not an internationally recognized term, we made it up in the 1990s as a way to circumvent the Geneva Convention and hold public support even as we killed 35,000 civilians. The second it is used, you know that something Illegal happened.
I don't really want to search through my 6 or so books on the subject for the exact law however.... the definition is a dead give away:
Collateral Damage:
(DOD) Unintentional or incidental injury or damage to persons or objects that would not be lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time. Such damage is not unlawful so long as it is not excessive in light of the overall military advantage anticipated from the attack.
Remember, it is an American term not an international one. No international treaty uses the term "Collateral Damage." We are attempting to re-write our obligations to the Geneva Convention with new terms. Furthermore, the Iraqi Civilian-US Soldier-Insurgent death to kill ratio should tell you that soldiers are shooting without positive IDs. Or that they don't really care. Rumsfield himself ordered 50 missal strikes that he knew would all kill 30+ civilians.
The military also, mind you, did make a pay-out to the victims families. Here in the US that can be construed as an admission of guilt, even though they say they are investigating it further. They also blocked the Iraqis from holding their own investigation. To me, this is probably our SOFA being exposed. Iraqis likely don't have the right to investigate. Another example of this standard SOFA provision would be when that American Helicopter crashed into a Japanese University and armed Marines blocked the Japanese Police from investigating the scene, or firefighters from even getting near it. (2004?)
jefjef wrote:The rules of warfare and protocol were being followed.
American Defined.
You can forget hearing or not listen to the part where they are obviously concerned about the weapon they thought he was holding, which any of the new men could pick up and use...or ignore it...but its there, and its obvious it was the threat of the original weapon, and any new weapons, which could easily have been in the van.
