this is an interesting perceptual problem grafted onto what i personally take as being a psychotic moment. the perceptual problem is obviously how to gestalt this information, what the sense of a whole is into which this fits & where it comes from.
watching the clip & particularly listening to what gets said, i had the sense that these people were unhinged and that what we are watching is a group of people perhaps stressed by the waiting that's involved with being in a war zone and who basically snap at the same time because they have an opportunity, they think, to fire away. the video game disregard for the kids' lives in particular is stunning.
i can't tell for sure, but this could be an entirely cynical article:
Quote:
Video of Son’s Killing Brings Closure to Family
By MUJAHID YOUSEF
MOSUL, Iraq — The family of a Reuters photographer killed in an American military airstrike watched the video of it late Monday and burst into tears as they saw what appeared to be the crews of two American Apache attack helicopters kill their son and 11 other people, gloating at what the crewmen seemed to think was a successful strike on insurgents.
“At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth,” said Noor Eldeen, the father of the photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was 22 when he was killed in July 2007. “If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?”
Other family members said Tuesday that the video was clear enough to remove any doubt about the identity of their son. Also among the dead was a Reuters driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.
The video was released Monday by Wikileaks.org, an online organization that said it had received it from a military whistle-blower and used donated computing power to decrypt it. United States military officials have confirmed that it appears to be authentic.
In the video, the group of men on the street in the eastern Baghdad district of New Baghdad on July 12, 2007, seemed to be mostly unarmed, although the chatter among the air crews shows they are convinced that the people on the ground have both AK-47s and a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. An American Army ground unit nearby was receiving fire from insurgents at the time.
On the video, there is at least one of the group of victims who appears to be carrying a rifle, but it is dangling at his side in a relaxed manner, and he does not appear to deploy it. In another scene, a large camera lens poking around the corner of a building is interpreted as a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher. The view of the men is obscured by a building as the attacking helicopter circles around it. The helicopter opens fire almost immediately after they come into view again.
“Look at those dead bastards,” one of the cockpit voices says. “Nice.”
When a vehicle arrives at the scene to help the wounded, the helicopters fire into it. United States troops call for a child who had been in the vehicle to be taken to the hospital.
“Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids into the battle,” one of the cockpit voices says.
The Associated Press quoted a spokesman for the United States Central Command, Navy Capt. Jake Hanzlik, as saying that the military had no reason to believe the video is a fake, but that they were still comparing the video and audio to see if it matched the original.
The United States military’s censored version of its report on the episode maintains that the crewmen acted appropriately and within the rules of engagement and that the Reuters employees were mixed in with a group of insurgents so their cameras were easily mistaken for weapons.
“My question is, how could those highly skilled American pilots with all their high-tech information not distinguish between a camera and a rocket launcher?” the photographer’s brother, Nabeel Noor-Eldeen, an archaeology professor at Mosul University, said on Tuesday after watching the video with the rest of the family a few hours earlier.
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Video of Son?s Killing Brings Closure to Family - NYTimes.com
naturally, in fine american style, wikileaks was designated a national security problem in a pentagon report, which later showed up on the site:
Wikileaks in the crosshairs | Joseph Huff-Hannon | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk