Fact check, please!
Posted on:: September 25th, 2004
Someone sent me a link to a grainy video that seems to show a US helicopter pilot blowing up a dozen people in Fallujah.
I don’t know if this is an unaltered video.
I don’t know if it in fact shows an incident recently in Fallujah.
I don’t know if the event it shows is as unjustifiable as it seems to be.
Do you?
Categories: Uncategorized dw
David,
I just saw this story this morning at NYTImes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/25/international/middleeast/25CND-IRAQ.html?ex=1253851200&
Is it referring to the same event? I don’t know. I think the video in question is older.
“The US military said it had carried out a ‘precision strike’ on a building where supporters loyal to ‘al-Qaida-linked’ Abu Musab al-Zarqawi were believed to be meeting.
Reuters quotes the US military as saying: ‘There were no innocent civilians reported in the immediate area at the time of the strike. Multinational forces took multiple measures to minimise collateral damage and civilian casualties.'”
al-Jazeera
It looks about right. Note the kids tailing or walking to the rear of the group. How else is something like this–which continues night and day–reported by the U.S. military? “We took out some ragheads.” I think not.
Reuters shows this video, perhaps of the aftermath. Remember, night vision makes it impossible to ascertain the time of day the strike took place. Either way, documented evidence (videos) of indiscriminate shootings and bombings such as this would fill a feature length movie.
David,
I don’t know about the video. But this KR story says that US troops and Iraqi police saved killed twice as many civilians as Iraqi insurgents have.
I am against the war, but the time between targeting and the actual balst seems too short. I didn’t saw the rocket either (couldn’t be a bomb, since the plane/helicopter was not over the group, but rather far from it.
My bet is that it is a fake.
Ghali Hassan writes (at InformationClearingHouse):
“The indiscriminate slaughter of Iraqi citizens in Fallujah, Najaf, Baghdad, Tel Afar, Kut and other Iraqi cities, the outrageous treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war and civilian detainees, and the destruction of the nation of Iraq have not registered in the Moral consciousness of the ‘civilised’ Western world.”
Luci’s comment attests to that lack of registration (the seconds from launch to slaughter are counted off in the lower right-hand corner of the HUD). Besides NewsGateway being a Canadian outfit (it’s not CBS), I reckon Stan Goff (a prolific and informed writer) would be able to attest to the video’s authenticity. From the same Web page:
“Stan Goff retired as a Master Sergeant from the US Army in 1996, his last assignment being 3rd Special Forces Group. He entered military service January, 1970, and his first assignment was as an infantryman with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam. His service took him to seven more conflict areas after Vietnam, including Guatemala, Grenada, El Salvador, Peru, Colombia, Somalia, and Haiti. His assignments included 2nd Ranger Battalion, 1st Ranger Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta, 7th Special Forces, the Jungle Operations Training Center, and the US Military Academy at West Point, where he taught military science.”
it’s all true, I swear to God.
Not that I am a supporter of the war, but…
The video is at least a month old, it is not related to the bombings in September referenced in the links of others.
Note at the beginning of the video, the targetting is on the building. As the people leave the building, the target is restablished as the group of people.
Maybe, just maybe, the military had information (or a targetting beacon) in the building to tell them where the insurgents were. When the insurgents left the building, they were targetted.
The idea that military pilots randomly target civilians is wrong.
Our military is over there trying to win an unwinnable war at the direction of a misguided administration. You can dislike the leaders and consider them immoral and unethical, but the military is doing what we ask of them, killing enemies. They are not randomly dropping bombs on people.
Go read the article by Scott Taylor, the kidnapped journalist, where he describes the insurgents leaving their buildings just before US attacks. http://www.espritdecorps.ca/new_page_243.htm
military.com has many videos and also the one you ar e looking for.