The Wikileaks collection

[Seabee]

To take this waaaay of track... I have taken part in a few operations as a lowly other rank where only years later, with the help of google, have I had anything near a clear picture of what we did, the reasons behind it and the "bigger picture".

In one case at least it was objectively nothing like we thought it was when we were boots on the ground....

[Polarbear1605]

For glaterze:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Polarbear1605
I am a little surprised by the general comments on this one. I think most of you should go back and read the Rules of War (FM27-10) and then the ROEs. (You might also want to get jmm99 involved in this one.) If I am a civilian and pickup a weapon on the battle field I become a combatant and btw, if I drop the weapon, I do not become a non-combatant again. This group of Iraqi "civilians" engaged our troops with AK-47s and RPGs. They were then treated like insurgents. They were tracked down and they were killed. If they are not tracked down and killed, they will reture to kill you (or Iraqi civilians, usually the ones on our side) later. The war crime was not US soldiers killing civilians but the war crime was insurgents using civilians as shields.

Imagine this is in Afghanistan today and go tell McChrystal...

For Fuchs:
Fuchs, I am still not sure where you are going here. Let me ask this question: In your opinion, what would have made this legal and acceptable to the laws of war? If the answer is the attack helo team should have not fired at all then you are basically going with the General McCrystal policy path and here is the problem with the NATO Afghan solution; for the sake of preventing civilian deaths we have grounded our air force ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/op...18dadkhah.html ) and we are putting our soldiers and Marines at risk ( http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/...s-vs.-soldiers ).
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/...n6338832.shtml
Based on these policies you would expect that civilian casualties in Afghanistan would be going down, however, civilian Afghan casualties between 2008 and 2009 went up substantially, in fact, civilian deaths due to insurgent activity when up over 40%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilia...2%80%93present)
The question then becomes if we are not hunting down and killing insurgents are we causing more civilian deaths then compared to civilian deaths committed out of military necessity?