Reply #30: Vid shows more than that. Vid shows those in the chopper cooking/distorting....

[TheMadMonk]

...the intel in order to get permission to open fire.

They wanted a reason to play with their toys, and lied through their teeth to get it.


It might, just might, barely be possible to give them the benefit of the doubt on the presence of a rifle, but not a chance on the RPG. (Even my untrained eye can tell the difference between an RPG and the trapezoidal outline of a camera lens with anti-glare shroud.) But one (possible) rifle being carried at waist height was not the intel passed on. The claim was multiple AK-47s and RPGs.

And I can clearly see that the two in the passenger seat of the van were well under 5 feet in height and much smaller than the men that pass in front of them at least twice, before the pilots opened fire. Either the pilots didn't care that they were firing on children, or more likely were so busy looking for reasons to shoot that they simply did not see them.

I would dearly like to be able to rule out the first possibility entirely. However, Mai Lai and innumerable other similar incidents in Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Central America, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere make that impossible. Even the behaviour of US military personel on leave in allied countries and the stereotypical American tourist, wherever he goes, speaks very very loudly. There are Americans, and then there are the lesser peoples of the world.

I know this is not true of all Americans, but it most certainly representative of the face that America as a nation presents to the world.