Seems like I have to side with MrBubbles on this one. Those reporters knew full well they were walking around with a group of armed men during a time of heated war. Sorry, but at a time when people are committing suicide bombings and driving explosive trucks into buildings, the army has to er on the side of caution. When you have suicide killers every other day in the news and you see a large bunch of men in an active city with guns, what are you supposed to think? Would you rather they go up to the crowd and say "hey, you guys. ya'll wouldn't happen to be terrorists right?"

You may all be quick to jump against them, but they took the proper precautions. They asked for permission and they did not shoot the unarmed crawling man. They also took several circles around to make sure those men were armed. When the van comes out of nowhere, you have to wonder what their intentions may be. Again, at a time of war you can't be naive and assume that everyone is just trying to live a normal life.


Had the reporters been with military guards rather than people wielding guns and t-shirts, they might not have been mistaken for targets. As for the kids; who brings their children to an active war zone? The war is nothing new. Exiting the country or at least keeping the children indoors would have been better.

Flame me if you must, but in a war where you have people conducting all kinds of guerrilla warfare, there are bound to be some unintended casualties.

Perhaps this is cheap of me to add, but maybe it will show you where i derive my stance from. I've been an army brat for well over 20 years. My father served in Iraq for nearly 3 years. Once while on guard at a market place, he and his group were fired upon by plain clothed civilian terrorists. The scars on his body show that you can't go about trusting people on the streets; the ones who openly carry deadly weapons with a large group of people aren't exactly the least suspicious men in the world

Erm it is kinda naive to assume everyone individual is there to cause mayhem and havoc, the only reason the children got involve as someone wait let me say sa "regard" of life and decide to salvage everything they could of hopefully his life.

How was it proper precautions telling the higher bullshit information to feed their trigger happy ticks, really I don't really see anyone can defend this.

I think everyone's getting things wrong, I read and watched the video last night. The targeted group had no weapons, the soldiers mistook the camera equipment as weapons. The soldiers acted without further investigation and killed everyone. A van then came to help the journalist and and the van was also shot (while occupying two children which can been in the back window). While doing all this, the solidiers were acting as if it was a game of Modern Warfare over Live. It's sickening and I hope they get the punishment they deserve.

The US military then made up a story, hid the the tape and fabricated any other story that was released until Reuturs claimed the video and allowed Wikileaks to decrypt the video and leak it.

Firstly, they didn't have guns, they saw a guy with a camera and thought it was a gun. How on Earth does a fully trained soldier of the US army mistake a camera for an AK-47 or an RPG? They're completely different dimensions. So it's OK now to shoot people carrying cameras if you ask for permission from command first?

Secondly, none of them actually had guns, they were all civilians. So actually they shot all targets did not have weapons. So it's OK to shoot 8 unarmed men but it's OK c'os when he was on the ground and injured they didn't shoot him?

Thirdly, I thought the intent of the van was pretty clear when they didn't see any weapons and tried to carry the injured guy into the vehicle. It's possible they were just some guys on the road, saw someone injured and decided to help. They got killed and their kids orphaned for trying to help someone, and killed the guy who they'd mistakenly shot in the first place.

Lastly, if you're an army brat and think this is OK, then this suggests to me a fundamental flaw in the combat procedure of the military. This was one of the most botched operations I've seen since the air strike on British troops by US fighter jets.

They were all unarmed. The "RPG" was a camera.

Yeah I saw this on the news were they also confirmed their were no camera's....


I got horrible sick when he said....'Come on let us shoot'....Like he was playing a game or something.

This kind of stuff probably happens all the time in war. You can call it what you want,but if your the soldier second guessing could get you killed. You have to constantly be on your guard. Don't get me wrong,collertal damage is sad and terrible,but that's the reality of fighting in a war.

you need to watch the video again. and reread the comments.  then you will realize that you are wrong, so i will preemptively forgive you for saying that.   i forgive you for stating they were unarmed. mistakes can happen and im glad you realized your error.

From what I can see there was two guys carrying something that looked like AK47's, and they were correctly interpreted as AK47's by the US soldiers. But the whole incident seems to have been sparked by them mistakenly spotting cameras as being RPGs, the decision to engage was based on the RPGs (cameras), not the AK47's.

We can criticize them for mistaking cameras for RPGs, but if we imagine for a second that they were in fact RPGs, because that's clearly what the US soldiers thought, the question is was it still wrong by them to engage the group and how they did it.

Assuming their orders were "you can engage any unauthorized groups of people carrying multiple guns as long as collateral damage is kept to a minimum" then I think it was right to engage. Their actions when the van arrives though, that's harder to judge, I'm leaning towards it being wrong to engage the van since they were only gonna pick up wounded.

That is sad and what is even more of a let down is a few of them seem to be enjoying it.