[moving to P&WA]
KingNothing said:
I invite you to watch a video. However, I warn you that it is extremely disturbing. Do NOT watch this if you are extremely sensitive to violence.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/CollateralMurder.ogv
This is a video that was leaked from combat in the middle-east. The soldier who leaked the video has been detained for nearly a year (6 months of which were solitary confinement) and has not had a trial.
I guess you weren't around when this was fresh. If you just want to see a lot of peoples' thoughts, do a search of P&WA and you'll find hundreds of posts in at least a dozen threads on the subject. But a quick summary:
1. The video is extremely disturbing as is shows people dying. That has a tendency to make people emotional and judge the video based on how terrible it is, not based on the facts and logic of what it shows. You'll find an awful lot of that in your search.
2. If you use the standard/legal definitions of the words and apply them faithfully, the issue is clear-cut: These are two textbook cases of collateral damage. They are not murder.
3. In the first event, you have two civilian reporters mingling with soldiers in a war zone. Their deaths, while unfortunate, are their fault because they chose to risk their lives to cover the war. Getting shot at is a clearly understood occupational hazard of following soldiers around in a war zone.
3a. The soldiers who fired on the group mis-identified the reporters for armed combatants. Don't let that distract you from the reality: This error has no bearing on the legal situation, as the soldiers who fired on the group correctly identified the armed insurgents as armed insurgents, making the group a perfectly legitimate target.
3b. If the soldiers had correctly identified the reporters, they may not have fired on the group. This has no bearing on the legal situation; such a decision would be made purely for PR/propaganda reasons.
4. The children brought into the battle scene died because of the decision of the people who brought them into the battle scene. But they, again, are a textbook example of collateral damage because the Americans had no way of knowing they were there.
5. I'm not sure what your point is with your last sentence. The way it is worded almost implies you haven't been following the case (really, the whole post implies you haven't been paying attention and just now stumbled on what may be the biggest international news story of the past two years). Here's the wiki on him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning. Note: Americans have a right to a speedy trial, but they also have a right to a fair trial and fair is much more important than speedy. He stands accused of espionage on an epic scale, having released hundreds of thousands of government documents including war documents into the public domain. That sort of thing takes a long time to investigate and build cases for and against. And while he was caught red-handed, he's still entitled to a trial - they can't just take him out back and shoot him (note: though that penalty is available, prosecutors have apparently taken it off the table).
