Wikileaks Collateral Murder Video

[p0lar_bear]

:roe101:

Then that changes a good few things about my argument, as I didn't know the specifics of ROE. That chopper gunner should probably be dishonorably discharged for his actions, hell, maybe even the superior that gave him permission to engage, unless he was solely going by what the gunner was telling him (i.e. no video fed to him). Despite what I said about impulsive actions, if he broke the rules for an excuse to shoot something (which that scenario is becoming more and more apparent), it's inexcusable. The fact that this was covered up is equally as disgusting.

Why yes, yes there is. It's called The Scale of Snafubar. We page Snaf everytime we're about to drop a bomb or something. He replies with an animated image of himself. If he's smiling, we're G2G. If he's stone faced, abort-abort.

Why don't we have this system in place in our military?

[Bodzilla]

I'm not sure of how this unit conducts itself, but typically there is an After-Action-Review/Report done when it comes to training exercises and actual missions.

Thats all well and good but they arn't allowing external reviews or information on sensitive matters so they can fill the propaganda metre for another week by saying they did everything they could to not attack civs... or run over bodies... or care for kids they just wounded...

Which is all kinds of wrong.

[Kornman00]

Not everything the military does is meant for the public and thus external review. However, this excuse gets thrown around and abused so it loses its value when actually used.

[Bodzilla]

looking at the comments from soldiers though none of them knew anything about it.

it looks like big brother said, "look you fucked up, but let us take care of it. we'll fix it so nobody knows"
and when none of the solys on the ground know, its gunna happen again.

[Kornman00]

One thing that I don't get is why, if they were seriously photographers, there was no chatter from those ground units remarking "uhhhh, crazy horse, I don't see any weapons down here...uhhh, only cameras...lots and lots of cameras"

I mean, someone in that patrol had to realize "these bodies don't have any weapons, and we shot them dead... whats goin' on here eh?".

[Cojafoji]

while thats a good idea in itself (camera enhancements ect) why i'm saying is that when the shit hits the fan with whatever your doing you need to do a review on it and reassess if what your doing is the right way to do it.
have to do it all the time in cabinet making, from the way we make cupboards, and tops, the orders we do it in, how we do it... everything is up to scrutiny or atleast should be.
if you take the approach "well thats the way we do things 'round 'ere, been doing it since dickity two, so therefore we cant even think about changing anything" well thats just a crazy way of denying and ignoring the evidence in front of you that suggests that, yes things could be done better and yes we should always try to do better.

Those re-evaluations would come with a pretty hefty price tag. You'd be asking the people making those assessments to increase their risk of being killed. While I'm sure that it would net a few lives, namely innocents, I think that it'd inevitably bind the hands of soldiers in the field. If they wait to make a positive ID, they could be killed. Remember, all of these things happen within a span of minutes. At this point, I'm taking on the role of devils advocate, so feel free to berate me with eager questions of "why."

[paladin]

One thing that I don't get is why, if they were seriously photographers, there was no chatter from those ground units remarking "uhhhh, crazy horse, I don't see any weapons down here...uhhh, only cameras...lots and lots of cameras"

I mean, someone in that patrol had to realize "these bodies don't have any weapons, and we shot them dead... whats goin' on here eh?".

Their cameras were in the shapes of ak47s and the telephoto lenses where rpgs. They wanted the most authentic situations. Looks like they got it :/

[Cagerrin]

One thing that I don't get is why, if they were seriously photographers, there was no chatter from those ground units remarking "uhhhh, crazy horse, I don't see any weapons down here...uhhh, only cameras...lots and lots of cameras"

I mean, someone in that patrol had to realize "these bodies don't have any weapons, and we shot them dead... whats goin' on here eh?".

Isn't it possible that there weren't any intact cameras after the chopper opened fire?

[Kornman00]

Yeah, .50 cal (or whatever it was) would do that to a person

oh, and fragile objects like cameras.

But you'd still figure that the ground troops who came in to handle the bodies and munitions would be like 'wtf?' when all they got where bodies. Not saying I think they WERE hauling around AKs and RPGs, just...I'm pretty sure there was at least ONE soldier in that bunch to smell something fishy

[Rob Oplawar]

suggesting that the military revamp it's ROE, to possibly include a more definitive requirement for recognizing weapons, or perhaps some sort of recognition software that could be loaded into these cameras which would help to define possible weapons more accurately?

I was about to post on the troubles of software recognition, and that got me thinking about the nature of the situation in general: in almost all situations, you're dealing with incomplete information. It's usually possible to create an algorithm that makes the correct decision in every case when given all the relevant information, but by definition when the information is incomplete there will be times when you make an incorrect decision. In terms of software, if you had some sort of image recognition suite that for example highlighted people carrying weapons for the gunner to shoot, it would be a matter of time before that suite made a false positive (or a false negative, allowing a combatant to get away), and then the scandal would be on the people who developed the software. Is the programmer to blame for the deaths of the people caused by the failure of his software?

But in general, people will do the same thing. Actually, the human eye is far, far better at object and pattern recognition than software. The human eye tends to be more reliable at picking out something that looks like a gun. It's still imperfect, though, relying on incomplete information, and to complicate it further the human brain has built-in biases for situations- it's pretty common to distort what you're seeing in order to make it fit with what you expect to see.

In this case, a soldier was looking through a grainy black and white camera at an area where US ground forces were being attacked and saw people carrying what looked like weapons.


Now, once again, a wrong decision is a wrong decision, and those involved rightly bear the blame. But I still don't think we can condemn them entirely because of the simple fact that from a probabilistic standpoint, this sort of misidentification is bound to happen again and again. The only solution is to continually refine imaging technology, always provide as much information as possible to people making decisions- in this case, simply provide a larger, clearer image. But by nature it is impossible to always get all the information and so by definition there will always be mistakes.