Obviously, I wasn't there. But I think this incident boils down to this:

The helos were operating in an area of Baghdad which was at the time, a hotspot of AIF activity - an insurgent safe haven is how it has been described to me by folks who were there.

Allegedly US forces had gotten into a contact earlier near the same area, and the Apaches were there for overwatch.

The Apache IDs a group of military-aged males with what appear to be weapons. Indeed, along with the camera equipment carried by the journos, I spotted at least two AKs carried by other men in the group. One of the military-aged males trains a "weapon" in the direction of US ground troops a couple of hundred metres away (and out of frame).

Apache crews ask for permission to engage. Permission is granted. The group of men is engaged.

That is how it started and up to this point IMO it was a righteous decision based on information the Apache crew had at the time. As for the excitable nature of the helo crews... they were doing their job, taking out what they thought were insurgents. They were doing exactly what they should have been doing in order to protect the groundpounders.

I'm not going to comment on the van incident where the children were wounded - that would involve looking at OPSEC material and commenting on it - a no-no regardless of whether the ROE is "historical" or not. I will ask this question - Is it worth destroying a civilian vehicle which is clearly being used to evac a wounded man simply because they MIGHT" be recovering a shot-up AK or two?

I don't like the cut in the video before the hellfire strike on the building - From the comms chatter it appears that a group of insurgents had been tracked to that building. If that's so, then who were the men who were lit up in the first part of the video? 3 missiles to take out a building in a residential area? That whole segment is out of context and proves nothing to me except that the Apache crew had no qualms about incurring collateral damage (civilians near the building).

I believe the video was suppressed by the US DoD and it is going to bite them back - big time.

Yesterday's mad scramble to post the docs up on the Centcom FOI page is clear evidence of either a culture of cover up or total bureaucratic incompetence. Once the initial investigations were over, they could have released this material along with an apology to Reuters and the families of it's employees who were killed, and avoided some of the unpleasantness.

I swear, sometimes the US (and Australian) mil headshed act like freakin' naughty children. Each time there is a backbone failure like this, the more locals get off the fence and pick up a weapon.