Kaelik wrote:Yeah, you also have a sneaking suspicion that they fired on him because he was brown, even though they managed to not fire on millions of brown people they could have just that fucking day.
Your sneaking suspicion is just you stating what you wish was true, and have no evidence whatsoever is true.
Once again, I'll reiterate: they fired on a group of people that were
peacefully walking down a street and used the possession of "weapons" to justify their gunplay despite the fact that their targets were not taking any threatening actions at all whatsoever towards them. And then they murdered a bunch of civilians that showed up to help the people that they have wounded earlier. The vehicle that they were driving could have very well been an unmarked ambulance, what with Iraq being bombed into the Stone Age and all. And they shot a few children to boot.
At best you can argue that they exercised poor judgment, but given their thoroughly unprofessional behavior and their obvious jubilation at gunning their targets down, this does not seem to be nearly as likely a motivator as opposed to wanting to gun down Iraqis for "payback" or shooting journalists for fun because they knew they could get away from it.
The video speaks for itself. I think that most reasonable people that watch and listen realize that their excuse for gunning down these people is a deliberate falsehood that was further compounded by a cover up. Your interpretation of events asks me to completely ignore what the people on the ground were doing before they decided to open fire, the gleeful chatter on the radio as they cut people down, and the fact that
they murdered a bunch of people that tried to help the injured and dying and ended their killing spree with the quip "you shouldn't have brought your kids into a war zone".
Now if it eventually comes to light that the video is doctored or that the audio was tampered with or that there is credible evidence that clears their names, I'll be glad to withdraw my statements. But based on the evidence available, it looks like
they did it for the lulz.
Kaelik wrote:You know who's in that unit and has access to that footage? The fucking gunner.
You know who might have an actual reason to leek the footage? The fucking Gunner.
There's a number of people who could have had access to the footage, but the gunner is the
least likely person to leak it. There's still a very slim chance that shit might have been discovered by someone with a conscience, and who wants to risk a nice long stay at a federal prison?
Kaelik wrote:You have no idea who leaked the footage, but you have no problem just calling the gunner a racist, a liar, and a deliberate journalist murderer based on no evidence whatsoever.
Kaelik, we know the gunner is a murderer. There's no question about that. These weren't insurgents - they were innocent civilians. And he killed a lot of them. And the video shows that he had a grand old time gunning those people down. Frankly, I've seen more professional World of Warcraft raids then this "military operation".
Kaelik wrote:Why would the gunner, who was apparently a big fat asshole who hates brownies and had been given explicit permission to shoot journalist and knew he was going to destroy the footage lie on the radio? Why would he present every possible appearance of someone who genuinely thought they were a threat, even up to trying to justify his earlier assumptions when it had been discovered he was wrong?
Justifying himself to who? The people who told him to shoot journalists
Maybe because they needed to get authorization to fire and couldn't yell out their actual intentions to the person that needed to clear them? Or the fact that it's a radio transmission that could have been overheard or intercepted by someone else? No one's gonna say "hey, I want to kill these guys because I fucking hate journalists" or "hey, I'm gonna mow these guys down because one of my buddies got killed by an IED last week and now I'm gonna make these fuckers pay". You just say that someone has an "RPG" or that you're taking "incoming fire", wink knowingly to each other, and then open fire when cleared. It's the same thing with the Pentagon - they don't just come out and say "hey, we're gonna kill all of the journalists that aren't embedded with us and broadcasting what we want them to say". No, they just say "we can't guarantee your safety" and send some rockets hurtling into your hotel building.
Alas, we still haven't reached the point where we have become so brazen and arrogant in the exercise of our military might that we are ready to have the Melian Dialogue with the Iraqi people. Some of our citizens still demand that we justify the use of force, and until they can be convinced that the usage of violence against others is a noble end in and of itself, there will always have to be a covery story - even if it is as flimsy as a Kleenex.
Kaelik wrote:So in other words, the reason you are absolutely 100% certain that a lower class 20 year old black guy who lives in a city with hundreds of thousands or Arabs is racist is because an upper class 50 year old white guy who has never met aforementioned black guy is an idiot?
You know, one of the things that I'll always remember about 9/11 was when I went to work the afternoon of the attacks and got to hear everyone's opinions about what we should do with the Arabs and the Muslims. Some of them wanted to round them up and put them in internment camps like we did with the Japanese in WW2; some of them thought we should deport them; others still whispered to their closest confidents that we should simply murder them wholesale, like the Nazis did with the Jews. This was the very same day that the Twin Towers fell, mind you. Tempers ran high, and no one was afraid to speak their mind, no matter how outrageous and monstrous their suggestions may have been. Everyone agreed that it was
their fault and that
they needed to pay and that no price was too high to exact vengeance for the lives that had been lost that day.
And it wasn't just white people that were saying these things - there were folks that were blacker then Wesley Snipes that could not acknowledge the cognitive dissonance inherent in advocating that the Arabs should be rounded up and shot while completely disregarding their own ancestor's experiences with racial profiling. And as time went on, most of these people realized how foolish their words were, and they set aside their anger and moved on with their lives. But there are still some people that harbor a grudge against Muslims and Arabs to this every day. And I suspect that there are more then a few soldiers that went overseas and watched their friends get blasted to pieces that have since cultivated that attitude. Do all soldiers feel this way? Certainly not. But whenever I see a video of soldiers gunning down civilians under the flimsiest of pretenses, I have to wonder what their real motivation is, and this certainly registers as a likely possibility to me.
Kaelik wrote:It's great to see your logical processes in action. It really does my belittling work for me.
You're one to talk. You and Zinegata are more then happy to discard both evidence and reason to support your position, all the while crowing about how "might makes right" and how "insurgents go into combat with their kids" and the like.
So call me all the names that you like. Whatever. Your opinions are meaningless to me.
