US pilots charged in friendly fire deaths
Friendly fire deaths will be punished by filing of criminal charges after a thorough investigation of what, 2 and a half months.
The massacre of a wedding party of 50+ afghans will be rewarded with an acquittal after 7 days worth of investigation.
Gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘us’ vs ‘them’.
Akif,
The guy who dropped the bombs is charged with four counts of manslaughter, and eight counts of assault. He and his commander are charged with breaches of protocol and ignoring orders.
That all adds up to a couple of lifetimes in Military prison. Recommending criminal charges is the worst thing that could have come out of the investigation. What is your complaint?
akif
its not really that much of an us vs them issue. Even the Europeans were pissed off when the daredevil jackasses hit cablecar cables and thus killed many tourists a few years ago.
Ohioguy.
I dont think you noticed the comparison.
Canadian soldiers death brought out a thorough investigation and an indictment.
Afghan deaths, those of innocent wedding revellers brought out a quickfire hollow, biased investigation, and was brushed under the carpet within a week.
Fraudia....sure its 'them' as opposed to 'them'. Europeans got a comprehensive apology, alongwith compensation. The afghan party was simply swept under the rug. No doubt there was racism involved. That also explains why america is scared of joining the international criminal court, because their soldiers are filled with such discrepancies.
A crime is a crime whether done by a raggedly dressed 'towel head', or a smartly dressed gi joe.
Akif, there was an investigation into the Afgan wedding deaths. It showed that ground fire came from that area thus no charges, or do you choose to ignore certain facts when reading the news if it would knockout a chance to bash the U.S.?
utd..
that investigation was done by the US, for the US.
And that investigation found out that there were NO weapons found at the scene that had been riddled with AC-130 fire. No anti aircraft guns were found, as opposed to what was alleged by GIjoes.
UN in its report explicitly blamed the US for a cover up. It was specified that US forces covered up evidences at the site!
Now you tell me what media source are you getting your news from and lets compare notes. Dont be so blind for gods sake.
Akif, you believe that the U.S. attacked innocent afgans. on purpose?
Please show me your notes before condeming mine which you haven't seen.
Akif,
UNITED NATIONS (CNN) – The United Nations denied Tuesday that it is investigating the July 1 U.S. airstrikes in Afghanistan that Afghans say killed more than 50 civilians at a wedding party, claiming it has conducted a humanitarian fact-finding mission.
That completed report, the international agency said, has been handed over to U.S. and Afghan government authorities.
“The United Nations was not involved in either an inquiry or an investigation but simply [was] responding to humanitarian needs as it does everywhere in the world in similar situations,” the United Nations said in a statement released Tuesday from the U.N. mission in the Afghan capital, Kabul.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan added, “The U.N. team went there to see what had happened and also to check if there was any need for humanitarian assistance and in the process gathered the fact-finding information that the villagers shared with them.”
Annan also said the team was “asked to clarify some of the judgments and comments” in the initial report.
An article in the Times of London over the weekend leaked details of the U.N. report, indicating the United Nations found no corroboration American military officials’ assertion that U.S. aircraft had been fired on from the ground.
The Times’ report also suggested an attempt had been made to remove evidence and that “shrapnel, bullets and traces of blood” had been cleared from the area in Uruzgan province.
A U.N. spokesman said Tuesday that the U.N. team members had no ballistics or military expertise, so the team’s preliminary conclusions were rejected.
“Our people weren’t qualified to do an investigation,” said U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard
So Akif, you choose to believe leaked material from investigators who in the words of the UN representatives, “weren’t qualified to do an investigation”.
By the way, the AC-130 only operates at night. The gunsights are infared, and a tape machine runs the entire time. The investigation would be very incomplete unless the UN personnel viewed the tapes, which obviously they had not…
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by underthedome: *
Akif, you believe that the U.S. attacked innocent afgans. on purpose?
Please show me your notes before condeming mine which you haven't seen.
[/QUOTE]
I dont know if it was on purpose, maybe just gross negligence or incompetence, the same type of crap which got tourists killed in Europe.
Not sure if it's neglect if you aircraft is being fired upon, dropping a bomb where the attack is coming seems like a resonable response, but you right, there needs to be a better way to stop these accidents from happening and decent compensation should be given to those affected by the wedding bombing.
http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s634617.htm
A British newspaper is reporting that American forces in Afghanistan were involved in a cover-up following the fatal bombing raid on a wedding party last month.
The Times quotes United Nations investigators as saying that American troops arrived on the scene very quickly after the air strikes and cleaned the area of shrapnel, ammunition and blood.
Although the American side said it needed several weeks to collect evidence and make a full report, locals say US officials arrived just hours after the raid taking photographs and filming the scene and the bodies.
**Now there are reports that a preliminary investigation by the United Nations has found the Americans cleaned the area removing evidence of shrapnel, bullets and traces of blood.
The UN investigation is also reported to have found that women at the bomb site had their hands tied.
Moreover according to The Times, the UN report says there was no corroboration of the claim that the American aircraft that launched the attack had first been targeted from the ground.**
Self defense my foot.
did you not see OhioGuys post?
"A U.N. spokesman said Tuesday that the U.N. team members had no ballistics or military expertise, so the team's preliminary conclusions were rejected.
"Our people weren't qualified to do an investigation," said U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard"
OhioGuy, where have you been hiding?
Havent seen such intellect together in one place ever before.
So it requires a ballistics and military expert to determine whether a woman's hands are tied behind her back or not.
It takes a military expert to determine whether blood and shrapnel has been cleaned off in an area.
It takes a military expert to see whether or not there was any anti aircraft gun, the absence of which was proven by the US itself.
Akif,
Tell you what, put some real uniforms on the Taliban and the Al Qaeda, and tell them to stop hiding among the populice, and things like this are a lot less likely to happen.
Shooting up a wedding is not what Americans want to do. They DO want to kill some bad guys. I live in and among thousands of US servicemen. they are not bloodthirsty idiots, nor do they want to hurt innocents. And by the way, the habit of shooting guns up in the air in celebration MAY just be a stupid thing to do when a war is on.
Fraudia–Undoubtedly US pilots screwed up hitting a cable car wire. Then again, pilots have flown into mountains in Columbia, and every week or so some overloaded ferry sinks in some part of the world. I think the veiled accusation is that US pilots are cowboys. The expression is “there are old pilots and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots”. I have a buddy who is now a real estate agent who was booted out of the Navy after 20 years in because he had carpal tunnel syndrome. In the course of his navy career he had to ditch three different planes. It is not a safe occupation. Before stealth technology pilots were trained to fly low under radar, or they would be shot down. That was the essence of the cable car accident, guys flying low like they are trained to do. The guy who lived across the street from me two years ago was a wing commander in the Argentine Air Force. He has six kids. He wanted to come home to his kids, just like we do. But his maximum height during an attack in the Falklands was was about 50 feet above the water. Finding the perfect balance between aggression needed to survive and win a conflict, and responsible warfighting is not an easy dillema.
On the otherhand, the laying of thousands of mines is not a battlefield error in judgement, or a mistake in the fog of war. The mines being laid by Pakistan and India will kill a lot more kids than the US wedding attack. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Read on:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The widespread use of anti-personnel land mines by nations such as India and Pakistan is hampering efforts to eliminate a weapon that kills or maims thousands of people every year, campaigners said on Friday.
India and Pakistan have laid large numbers of such mines along their common border since coming close to war over Kashmir in December 2001, the International Campaign to Ban Land mines said in a report.
Land mines are also widely used by Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, by Russia in Chechnya, and on a smaller scale in Nepal, Somalia and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, the Land mine Monitor Report 2002 said.
The United Nations estimates that land mines still kill about 10,000 people a year around the world, and activists said the devices injure about another 10,000, often requiring the amputation of limbs.
Up to 40 percent of all mine victims are children under 15, according to the United Nations.
http://www.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml?type=worldnews&StoryID=1447042
Ohioguy I dont need to veil any of my words, there is a difference between someone being cowboy and someone being incompetent. voluntary or not, u screw up, u screw up ..period. I know enough about airforce because of personal as well as experiences of family members that i do not need to go to a neighbour.
as far as landmines go. they have their oen issues and there is now a worldwide concern for it. but dragging in that topic here is of no use, because inevitably soemone is going to go on anothe rtangent and start talkign about atomic bombs.
The pilots screwed up. hazards of the job, sure, but is that what they were supposed to do? no..
Fraudia,
My point as far as the cable car incident is that nap of the earth flight is the defacto standard of Air Forces worldwide.
The comment about landmines is to put into perspective the decsions made by various militaries worldwide, and their impact on innocents. And frankly there is a huge difference in culpability between shooting in error which has been part of warfare since the first caveman hit the wrong guy with a rock, and knowingly planting mines to defend a border, KNOWING beyond a shadow of a doubt the the most likely people to be killed are kids.
The standard of perfection that some people hold the US military to is impossibly high. Having wrecked a Cessna T210 in the hills of Pennsyvania when I was 18, I am very aware that the laws of physics have no appeals.
OG,
no one has ever claimed that the US bombed those villages and wedding parties on purpose. Bombing from a safe height, it's inevitable that there will be less accuracy. The central point is that the US refused to accept that a mistake had been made, and to add insult to injury, they accused innocent people of being terrorists. These things might not matter much in the US, but they don't get forgotten about in a hurry in other parts.
Judge,
The people killed in that attack were not bombed. The AC-130 gunship is a propeller driven transport plane loaded with artillery. It only flys at night, because it flys very low and is extremely vulnerable to gound fire. I will try to find a link, but it is a sitting duck for anti-aircraft fire. As a weapons platform it is among the most accurate available, and they definitely hit exactly what they were aiming at.
I agree, when the US is wrong we ought to be big enough to admit our mistakes. Conversely waging war on an enemy who hides behind civilians is bound to have these things happen. My point is that no one can possibly know what really went on unless they view the gun camera video from the plane. That video, shot from low levels would be shed a lot of light on the situation, and perhaps it ought to be released.
Ohiguy, although its unrelated to current discussion, you mentioned the news of landmines being laid by India and Pak. Here is what I came across accidently:
‘Bush administration ‘the scariest’ in history’](Daily Jang: Urdu News - Latest Breaking News update Pakistan - jang.com.pk)
OSLO: The administration of US President George W Bush is the most frightening in the history of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams said on Friday, denouncing US unilateralism.
Williams, the coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) who shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize with her organisation, said Bush’s administration was “the scariest administration of the US history”. “He is worse than Reagan, worse than Nixon. He sees the world in black and white,” the US activist told reporters in Oslo following the publication of a report on landmines.
Williams said she was opposed to a US attack on Iraq, which she qualified as “a violation of international law”. “May any country justify a military invasion by calling it a pre-emptive action?” she asked. “It’s illegal.”
Is the part in bold true?
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Ohioguy: *
Fraudia,
My point as far as the cable car incident is that nap of the earth flight is the defacto standard of Air Forces worldwide. **
but teh standard is not to HIT items in the way. There has to be caution, control and discipline involved.
*The comment about landmines is to put into perspective the decsions made by various militaries worldwide, and their impact on innocents. And frankly there is a huge difference in culpability between shooting in error which has been part of warfare since the first caveman hit the wrong guy with a rock, and knowingly planting mines to defend a border, KNOWING beyond a shadow of a doubt the the most likely people to be killed are kids. *
OG, I do not want to gooff on a tangent since i was just discussing "errors" ..what decreases errors? discipline and training..errors may still happen but you decrease them. If we are going to talk about knowingly doing someting, someone is bound to bring up the atomic bombs in Japan as well as the suffering Iraqi population and we will not get anywhere. Keeping the topic at hand in perspective, the pilotrs did something that they should nto have done. thats it...now they have to figure out how to prevent this stuff from happening again.
*The standard of perfection that some people hold the US military to is impossibly high. Having wrecked a Cessna T210 in the hills of Pennsyvania when I was 18, I am very aware that the laws of physics have no appeals. *
I hold US m,ilitary to the same standard as I would hold RAF or PAF too, two organizations which I am personally very familiar with. I have actually protested on heavy handedness of Pakistan Military in domestic law and order situation and "errors" I am going to do the same whereever I feel that stuf happened which should not have happened.
I know law of physics very well, but aside from law of physics there was something else at play. Either they did not know that there were cablecars lines there..which they should have known, or they still flew to close to them and in the end the tragedy happened.