Award winning photographer shot dead by US army in Iraq
 

Summary: passing convoy thinks a journalist (filming with permission) has an RPG, not a camera, and fires on him.

Sucks for the journalist, who left behind four young children. To me, this is just a sign of what the stress and heat and constant guerilla attacks are doing to the troops. I'm sure many of them are tired and punchy, and that's not a condition you want a 22-year old handling deadly weapons to be in.

So, I hope that the weather breaks a little and some of the troop rotations they have been promising to set up start happening.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...n_dc&printer=1

Nasty position the troops are in. On the one hand, they need to rotate in and out. On the other, troop rotation schedules were used in Vietnam and began to demoralize the units as people became more concerned with their exit date than team unity and "cherries" began to endanger veteran squads.

I really wish the armed forces would acknowledge when they make fuckups like that, instead of saying they "engaged" a reporter. I know it's early and they probably still have to issue an official statement, but it would go a long way toward appeasing people if they'd take responsibility for their actions. Doesn't sit well with a lot of people, I'm sure, that the journalist was Palestinian to boot. What a mess.

I guess those troops never went through the "camera are not rocket launchers" training.

Maybe its time to rethink our postion in Iraq and go back to war, so we can kill these sobs that keep killing our troops. Once they are all dead then we should go back to setting up a pupet government.
evo

Help do your part:

http://mywpages.comcast.net/frankiemayo/

They say engaged because they didn't know the entire story about what happened. Before they want to make an official statement they want to make sure they have everything settled in house first. Otherwise, the media spins a million different stories with ten different quotes.

We don't know why the troop shot, so that's the first thing the army tries to find out in a situation like this, for not just us, but for themselves.

no warning shots are fired??

they should've given the guy a chance "to surrender" or to put down the camera.

If you see someone with an RPG pointed at you, you don't fire any warning shots.

Anyone who thinks warning shots are even feasable in a situation like that does not know anything about fighting.

That's easy to say when you're sitting on your ass in front of a computer in the States. Lets take you to Iraq, go through a few attacks, and then have someone point a camera at you from a distance.

For the record, both HarmlessRabbit and I empathize with the soldiers. I'm assuming (from his statements here and in other threads) that he agrees with me that this is a natural outcome of stress, fatigue, and longterm battle atmosphere.

However, they say "engaged" for the same reasons I have laid out in my other posts regarding discursive practices in wartime--it ameliorates and sanitizes the situation.

Is that a problem? I can't imagine that it is, but lets say we change it to something more descriptive, I'm not seeing it have an impact on preventing friendly fire, but anything in general really.

Maybe I'm wrong though, what would you suggest?

have you taken that test? They look alot alike in a heat haze when you only have about a second to make up your mind.

If you havent done it, don't judge

If we really wanted to hurt them we would send over New York and L.A. cop and tell them there are no civil rights laws to get busted for violating

I don't really know if I'm suggesting anything--I just think it's important that we realize how language shapes our perception of reality.

To the soldier in the field and a civilized population that ordinarily disdains war and murder, using neutral phrases allows us to conduct ourselves in ways we deem necessary but would otherwise be constrained from doing due to social norms (beliefs).

One disadvantage, however, is that we do so at the expense of empathy for the people we have to label as our enemies. In this particular case, where we are fighting one segment of the population on the behalf of another segment of the population, we will inevitably harm our allies and, unfortunately, engender hatred and misunderstanding even as we attempt to do something beneficial to the indigenous population.

I guess that if I'm suggesting anything it would be that, given this information, you weigh the costs of these types of discursive practices against the benefits. Not that you wouldn't still think we should continue using such practices, but that you then are not surprised by the "collateral damage" that will definately occur in response to our actions.

I feel sorry for the soldiers who did this; it's not their failure but a failure of policy. There needs to be a clearly defined relationship between the media (not just the embedded media) and armies with well defined policies and conventions. The trouble would be army commanders who created policies so unnecessarily strict as to effectively "ban" the world's media from an area of global interest. People should react to something like that with outrage.

It's a pity we live in an age where people seem to only react strongly to images. A wordsmith correspondent sans camera crew could do a great public service in a war zone and any group of soldiers who mistook his pen and notepad for a gun would rightly be hung out to dry.

Re: Award winning photographer shot dead by US army in Iraq
 

Umm, that's the condition of any troop in combat. That's what they're trained for.

Accidents do happen. However, weren't the soldiers briefed on the camera work that was underway? Highlights the need for media people to take as few risks as possible...

Bad things happen to people in dangerous places.

Tired and punchy...that's a good one :)

I suspect we 'Westerners' are being fed a watered down version of this horrific event.
Here is another version of the story:

http://www.islam-online.net/English/...rticle03.shtml

the truth probably lies somewhere in between this account and the Fox/CNN/BBC version.

To mistake a TV camera for a grenade launcher is unforgivable. Do a google image search if you disagree.

Thanks for the link, jwoody.

There was an interesting article (#13) below that one.

And this from the other day (for anyone following my discussion regarding discursive practices, note the language used):

There are Iraq 'civilians' or where ever they're from blowing up oil pipeplines and vehicle's too.

Where to draw the line?

Oh yes, up close you can tell the difference. From farther away, it's a hell of a lot harder. Throw into account outdoor light, fatigue, and the stance of the camera man and it becomes a hell of a lot harder.

But oh, it's so easy to judge right now. Sitting at your computer in a chair in an air conditioned room, typing in searches in Google, yeah, how in the hell could someone not know a difference.

dont the media wear signs on them like they do in jerusalem?

Listen up.

The primary sight on an M-1 tank is a thermal sight.

The tank in question was approacking an area that had just been attacked by some sort of artillery (mortar, rpg, grenade), they didn't know what kind yet.

From the gunners point of view a man holding a camera on his shoulder and a man holding an RPG on his shoulder look identicle.

The gunner would have yelled "target".

The commander would have identified the target, in this case incorrectly, but given that he was looking through periscopes at someone a couple hundred meteres away in 100+ degree heat, and had a fraction of a second to appraise the situation, maybe we can cut him some slack. "Gunner battlesight troops"

Gunner: "Identified"

Commander: "Fire"

Gunner: "On the way."

The entire proess would have taken about 1.5 seconds from the gunner first sighting him.

Combat zones are dangerous places. Reporters know that. This was a tragic accident. The other tradgedy is that some people wish to use it to further their own agendas...

I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't try.

this is becomming way too common of an occurence.

remember the guy in the repair shop holding spark plugs (?) getting shot cuz the soldier thought it was an rpg or somethin like that?


i'm not blaming this on the soldiers. they're workin long shifts and dont have the best of things. i can understand why they're edgy.

--------------

the military presence in iraq is going to continue for a long time (years?) and more of these incidents will happen.

I'm not at all trying to justify what happened, but for those of you who haven't been in these situations, let me try to give you an idea of what it's like:

You're on duty 24 hours a day. Being in a hostile military environment isn't a 9-5, 5 day a week job. It's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You don't go to your supervisor and say, "Sir, I've been on duty 17 hours, I'm going to go get some sleep." You stay awake until you're relieved, which is whenever your commander damn well feels like it.

It's hot as fucking hell over there. These guys are wearing upwards of 50lbs of equipment in 100+ degree weather. Most of them are around 18-20 years old. They're tired, scared, pissed, hungry, thirsty and don't know when the next guerilla attack is coming. Anyone can be the enemy in this environment.

Now, see debaser's post for a detailed description of what happens next.

Had they not "engaged" the target and it <i>did</i> turn out to be an RPG, there could be many dead soldiers. If there were, we'd be bitching about more American soldiers dying.
As for the terminology used, military-speak is never emotional. For them to say "engaged" is not their attempt to sanitize what happened, it's just simply how they speak.

The person found to be responsible for this is fucked on top of what he's going through knowing he killed an innocent person. No matter how justified his actions (he did what he was supposed to do), the military will hang him out to dry to appease the public over a highly publicized event.

You don't have to like what's going on over there or even agree with it to cut the soldiers a little slack or appreciate that it was not their intent to kill a journalist.

That's exactly what I thought when I first heard about this. Ugh...

No. Give links please.

http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...light=mechanic

we discussed it here on the tfp.

I haven't seen anyone, except one person, express anything other than support and understanding for the soldiers' positions--so you can just lay off asserting otherwise.

That is not just "how they speak." First of all, do some research on discursive practices--it's well documented. Secondly, this was a press release, not an off-the-cuff statement. Thirdly, whether you or they realize it or not, people choose their words for reasons--not just "because."

I doubt they will "hang" anyone out to dry--and no one here has said they should. Every incident up until now has been investigated and the soldiers involved exonerated--there is no evidence that this case would be handled otherwise.

Not even close to the actual events. An approaching car was fired upon.

Anything else said in the article about what the US did? Nope.

Odds are they thought they had the area covered 100%. The approaching car they probably saw as terrorists doing a drive-by, or a car bomb.

Very, very different from this incident.

sry, wrong story.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory...l/iraq/2038968

i'm not a car person and got confused with an "ignition distributor" and a spark plug.

Although the idea seems to be completely lost on some people, I will say it again: war is not fun. People die. Innocent people die. It happens.

I don't really see the point of starting a thread every time that a civilian mistakenly is shot.

war is over. the US is in full control of the country.

it's peacekeeping time.

The war is not over. There is a vicious guerilla war underway in Iraq. Fox News and other entertainment-driven news sources only report a portion of the events that occur, and portray them as disconnected events.

The war will be over when people stop dying every day.

I was not intending to assert that anyone was denouncing the troops for what happened. I was making a general statement. If I left the impression that I was, then I apologize. However, I stand by my statement that many people are not truly aware of the conditions. There is a big difference between empathy and sympathy.

Yes it is how they speak. I'm not going to debate discursive practices regardless of how suspect the Navy Captain's speech may have been. Having served for 5 years during the first war in Iraq, I am very well aware of how those in the military speak. And a confrontation with anyone is termed an engagement. It doesn't matter whether this was a press-release or not, the fact of the matter is that a Naval officer was describing the event in the language with which he is accustomed. I think you give too much credit with the assumption that every word was carefully chosen to exact a particular meaning. Not everyone who speaks does so with as much premeditation as you seem to be claiming.

It is a strong possibility that he will be exonerated and I hope he is; however, the military beauracracy too often offers a sacrificial lamb in cases like these if public pressure becomes great enough.

I've been reading this guys blog since before the war started and it's pretty interesting. He's an Iraqi who's been writing about what is really going on over there. Sounds like the whole country is pretty fucked up.

Here's the site: http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/

I'd like to hear what you guys think...

Hey JumpinJesus, now I see where we're crossing:

I'm not claiming that discursive language is employed in a premeditated fashion by everyone who uses it.

We do, however, speak in patterns that confirm and shape our perceptions and allow us to conduct ourselves in certain ways. Words do not just fly out of our mouths--our brain selects them and then we use them. Our brains select them based on a myriad of reasons--if they didn't carefully select them we would speak gibberish.

I'm not attributing some sinister motive to his words--they are a rational response to the situation. Now that you have a crash course in discursive practices start to listen whether different groups of people speak in different patterns.

Ingot, or slang, allows people in particular groups to share worldviews and communicate with one another. We do this in the office, on the web (LOL, ROFLMA, and etc.), as well as in the military.

The fact that military personel use "engage" to describe any killing of an opponent doesn't detract from the realization that such a word sanitizes the reality (as opposed to the Iraqi usage of "brains and blood" all over the dashboard) that one human being killed another human being.