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 Ouze wrote:
TIL any time a military causes collateral damage or deaths it's a war crime.

I disagree.


If that were the case, then most, if not all, of the troops and officers involved in conflicts for the last two centuries would be war criminals.


That's a notion I find ridiculous.


Mistakes happen in conflicts, and civilians have a tendency to become collateral damage in war. That might not set well with people accustomed to the age of "video game" warfare and intolerance of casualties. But it's a sad fact and nature of the beast.

This incident, and others like it, are not war crimes in my view.

I despise the term collateral damage. It exists only to dehumanise the victims of these tragedies.

In this case though, kudos I guess for investigating and accepting that at the least, it was a feth up. Whether it was a war crime or not does not matter because the US gives no gaks about war crimes unless their enemies do them.

 Kovnik Obama wrote:

 Ouze wrote:

 Kovnik Obama wrote:
Let's also note that intentional killing is actually not a requirement constitutive of a war crime acts as defined by the International Criminal Court, which states that directing any attacks against civilians or humanitarian workers in the process of an international conflict fully constitute a war crime. .

This is factually incorrect. The word intentionally is explicitly in that sentence. In fact, every one of those different charges requires an element of intent.

What are war crimes?
“War crimes” include grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict and in conflicts "not of an international character" listed in the Rome Statute, when they are committed as part of a plan or policy or on a large scale. These prohibited acts include:

murder;
mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
taking of hostages;
intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population;
intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historical monuments or hospitals;
pillaging;
rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy or any other form of sexual violence;
conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 years into armed forces or groups or using them to participate actively in hostilities.

This is the set of definitions you freely selected (the ICC), and they're not very long, so you might want to reconsider your post.

You might want to look at ICC art. 7b(v) " Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives". No requirements of intentionality.

Pro-tip : legal documents trumps website FAQ.

I have never met a person that uses the phrase "pro tip" that wasn't a complete donkey-cave.

I am not saying that you are an donkey-cave.

However, you are using an donkey-cave's vocabulary.

Well, that's basically true with all powerful first world nations at this point. There's really no higher authority that would dare challenge them.

Edit: ninjed

America is a bit of a trendsetter in that regard.. Kinda eats into your moral authority where the rest of us are concerned.

Edt to add: I don't really care though. I'm long past caring much about that particular hypocrisy.

Yep, it's pretty sad. OTOH, this doesn't appear to actually be a war crime, so that's a plus.

I would like to see some of those apologists who said it must have been militants come in and admit that they were wrong though.

If the Pentagon is big enough to do it, surely they should be too.

 kronk wrote:


I have never met a person that uses the phrase "pro tip" that wasn't a complete donkey-cave.

I am not saying that you are an donkey-cave.

However, you are using an donkey-cave's vocabulary.

Skirting rule number 1 like a pro.

 Ouze wrote:
TIL any time a military causes collateral damage or deaths it's a war crime.

Damn Ouze........I'm guilty 100 ways to Sunday


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kovnik Obama wrote:

 kronk wrote:


I have never met a person that uses the phrase "pro tip" that wasn't a complete donkey-cave.

I am not saying that you are an donkey-cave.

However, you are using an donkey-cave's vocabulary.

Skirting rule number 1 like a pro.

Forgot this is Kronk? If there's a skirt involv....wait he's married now

 Co'tor Shas wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I could swear we already had a thread on this...

That was back when it actually happend, this is for the response. I didn't want to drag a thread out from months ago.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:


Sounds to me like a case of somebody screwing up in a BIG way. Which happens in conflicts, unfortunately. It's just bad that a hospital ended up getting the shaft.



As far as this goes:

Why did they keep firing, even with no sign of return hostile fire?

Every vid I've seen of insurgents getting waxed, they didn't return fire. Not to say that it doesn't happen. But nine times out of ten, they either get obliterated before they can respond, or they panic and attempt to flee/ seek cover.

I'm not sure what they would return fire with. Are anti-air weapons that common in Afghanistan?

No. This event occured at night, and the AC-130 was some distance away, to the scale of miles, I pointed it out before, but I was actually working in the ISR TOC covering this situation when it happened. While I won't go into specifics, in general, the ability for the Taliban and affiliates to return fire at our aircraft is drastically restricted at this stage in the war, so trying to say "why did they keep firing, even with no sign of return hostile fire" is silly, because they had no means to return fire. Does not mean that the threat didn't exist to friendly forces. That is what the crew believed they were responding to, a threat to coalition forces from a very active battle that had been going on for several days at that point.

This is popular in Afghanistan. Be surprise where these damn things pop up. Commonly called (to us Grunts out the wire) Graboid

It may have been once, but they're incredibly hard to come by now. Once found we waste no time in destroying them.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
TIL any time a military causes collateral damage or deaths it's a war crime.

I disagree.


If that were the case, then most, if not all, of the troops and officers involved in conflicts for the last two centuries would be war criminals.

I think you might have fallen into the sarchasm there. Sorry.

I think that if you decide to go to war, than part of that decision is accepting that there is going to be some unknown quantity of completely innocent people killed, and some percent of friendly fire, and blue on blue, and other such sadness. You try to eliminate it as much as you can, but you can't really eliminate it totally. A gunship is not a scalpel.

From my reading of the incident, it was a tragedy, and there should be internal repercussions - maybe even prosecutions for incompetence.

However, I think any war crime - using almost any commonly accepted definition - requires an element of intent and I don't think that was here. The US has committed war crimes and I don't think this was one.

Da Boss wrote:I despise the term collateral damage. It exists only to dehumanise the victims of these tragedies.

In this case though, kudos I guess for investigating and accepting that at the least, it was a feth up. Whether it was a war crime or not does not matter because the US gives no gaks about war crimes unless their enemies do them.

War, within itself, is dehumanizing. For everybody involved. So, I can sympathize with your point on that one.


The second part is factually incorrect. While some have gotten off light, there are plenty more serving long prison sentences (one or two narrowly escaping the death penalty under the UCMJ) for their crimes.

Ouze wrote:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
TIL any time a military causes collateral damage or deaths it's a war crime.

I disagree.


If that were the case, then most, if not all, of the troops and officers involved in conflicts for the last two centuries would be war criminals.

I think you might have fallen into the sarchasm there. Sorry.

I think that if you decide to go to war, than part of that decision is accepting that there is going to be some unknown quantity of completely innocent people killed, and some percent of friendly fire, and blue on blue, and other such sadness. You try to eliminate it as much as you can, but you can't really eliminate it totally. A gunship is not a scalpel.

From my reading of the incident, it was a tragedy, and there should be internal repercussions - maybe even prosecutions for incompetence.

However, I think any war crime - using almost any commonly accepted definition - requires an element of intent and I don't think that was here. The US has committed war crimes and I don't think this was one.

My bad. Sarcasm doesn't translate very well on forums. Especially since we don't seem to have a proper sarcasm smiley.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
Especially since we don't seem to have a proper sarcasm smiley.

I would suggest a "ork making a jerking off gesture while nodding" emoticon for that.

Alternately, an "ork making air quotes".

 Ouze wrote:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
Especially since we don't seem to have a proper sarcasm smiley.

I would suggest a "ork making a jerking off gesture while nodding" emoticon for that.

Alternately, an "ork making air quotes".

I had to edit a post of me saying some not nice things. Caught me up as well, until I read some of your other posts in here.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
My bad. Sarcasm doesn't translate very well on forums. Especially since we don't seem to have a proper sarcasm smiley.

Some other forums prefer the use of a specific font, or colour, to denote sarcasm.

Sorry for the confusion, I will attempt to be more clear in my posting going forward.

 Ouze wrote:


I think that if you decide to go to war, than part of that decision is accepting that there is going to be some unknown quantity of completely innocent people killed, and some percent of friendly fire, and blue on blue, and other such sadness. You try to eliminate it as much as you can, but you can't really eliminate it totally.

In any other context, in any good court of law, this would amount to criminal negligence. I understand the pragmatics, I get that the world isn't well cut out of legal categories, but it also remains the fact that there is an obvious dissonnance between the civil and military domains of law.

There isn't any cognitive dissonance at all.

There is a clear easily distinguished difference between police officers, whose primary job it is to protect and serve in a civilian environment and use of force is generally rare, and the military dropping 2,000 pound bombs from 15,000 feet up, where civilian casualties are to be avoided when possible but are ultimately acceptable in some scenarios. Targeted aerial bombardment of a factory producing war materiel in a city is almost certain to cause at least some civilian deaths, but it's not unlawful, or even really unreasonable.

I mean, it's only hypocritical if you can't draw a difference between civilian law enforcement and the role of the military on a battlefield during open warfare. There are some areas where it gets a little grey but in the specific examples we have been discussing here I think it's quite clear.

 Ouze wrote:
There isn't any cognitive dissonance at all.

There is a clear easily distinguished difference between police officers, whose primary job it is to protect and serve in a civilian environment and use of force is generally rare, and the military dropping 2,000 pound bombs from 15,000 feet up, where civilian casualties are to be avoided when possible but are ultimately acceptable in some scenarios.

Both are done by State-sponsored institutions holding the monopoly of legitimate violence in situations of conflict. Both share a pretention to most of the same values, including the rule of law. You would surely agree that a police officer planning an operation and freely admitting that they're will be casualties, that he'll try to minimize them, of course, but that's just the business is setting himselft for gross negligence. You do not agree that this is should be the case for military officers. For the rule of law to mean anything, context can't determine standards.

But context does matter! It totally does!

 Kovnik Obama wrote:

Both are done by State-sponsored institutions holding the monopoly of legitimate violence in situations of conflict.

The police do not generally presume that a conflict will occur, and when they do we end up with a controversy about the militarization of the police.

The military generally presumes that a conflict will occur, and when they don't we end up with a controversy regarding the pacification of the military.

Each institution is defined by a different purpose, and therefore subject to different standards of conduct.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
TIL any time a military causes collateral damage or deaths it's a war crime.

I disagree.


If that were the case, then most, if not all, of the troops and officers involved in conflicts for the last two centuries would be war criminals.


That's a notion I find ridiculous.


Mistakes happen in conflicts, and civilians have a tendency to become collateral damage in war. That might not set well with people accustomed to the age of "video game" warfare and intolerance of casualties. But it's a sad fact and nature of the beast.

This incident, and others like it, are not war crimes in my view.

Not all collateral damage is a war crime. But any deliberate targeting of civilians (and that includes the deliberate targetting of civilian areas) is. Deliberately targeting hospitals is also a war crime. Your view on it doesn't really matter when it is literally right there in the Geneva Conventions.
And yes, a lot of the troops and virtually all of the commanding officers deployed in the US' wars of the past century are war criminals (especially those in WW2, Korea and Vietnam). It just so happens that war crimes tend to be nothing but a tool for victor's justice. That is why American or Russian soldiers never get convicted of war crimes despite being somewhat notorious for committing them. Victory justifies the means apparently.

Kovnik Obama wrote:Well, yes. Anytime (well, most of the time) a civilian accidently kills another, it's a manslaughter, which is (most of the time) a crime. God only knows why everyone keeps thinking the military should get a pass on this millenia-old principle.

Probably because it's completely impossible to conduct a war without civilian casualties, and while, "No war, EVER!" is great to put on a sign that you're going to hold up at the main gate of Oceana for me to honk and thumbs-up at as I drive through, it's not something that even the leftiest of lefty governments would ever actually implement.

Kovnik Obama wrote:As to the U.S. not signing, well, no fething surprise, but it still doesn't absolve you, as Article 12 may cover non-participating States acting in a participating States (as to enforcement, I have no clue).

It doesn't absolve us because it doesn't need to in the first place. We're a sovereign nation that recognizes no authority higher than the US government. We're not party to to the ICC agreement, and the ICC has absolutely no means of imposing it on us. You have a "law" (and, really, when we're using that word in reference to the international variety, it really does belong in quotes) that we don't recognize and that you can't enforce.

The problem with that logic is that it boils down to "we do what we want because we have the best ability to project force" and if I disagree with what you do, my only recourse is to also use force, though probably of the terrorist variety since I won't be able to win in a direct fight.

 Da Boss wrote:
The problem with that logic is that it boils down to "we do what we want because we have the best ability to project force" and if I disagree with what you do, my only recourse is to also use force, though probably of the terrorist variety since I won't be able to win in a direct fight.

I'd argue that it could boil down to that, but currently hasn't. Despite the rhetoric used by opponents of the Iraqi War - I've never bothered to even try and understand opponents of the Afghanistan campaign - the US doesn't do anything it wants, there are rules, and we do our best to minimize civilian casualties.

This was a feth-up, not malicious. It was negligent, but not a war crime. CAS is tough gak to do under the best circumstances, to the point where I reflect now and then on how happy I am that I never wound up doing a gun run on the wrong patch of dirt, and these guys weren't under the best circumstances. It was avoidable, but not intentional.

You're not entirely correct about the use of force being the only recourse to dispute that decision, either. Sanctions, diplomatic relations freezes, etc. could all be used. They wouldn't be, in our case, but it's certainly within the realm of possibility. Nobody in the western world's going to try something like that, though. Ultimately, you're correct that "might makes right" on the international scale simply because that's all there is. There's no global government, there's no higher power you can plead your case to. I always feel a little confused in these discussions when others act like they're discovering this for the first time.

I agree that America is better about following the rules than any of the other major military powers - and I am thankful about that. But I think that due to your incredible military dominance, it is essential that you are seen to be a fair and just force for stability (if not "good"), or the entire system starts to break down with increasing terrorist attacks by those whose interests have been trampled.

The problems for the future are being formed in actions in Yemen etc today.

It's easy for me to say that coming from a weak country with no real military which claims "neutrality" while sucking up to america. But America really does make the Spiderman quote a truism, you know?

But with that said, I broadly agree with you - this was a feth up, not an intentional malicious act. I reckon those involved will be punished somehow, but I don't see this as "proof" that america is "evil". Compared to the other options, they are the ones I would back.

 Da Boss wrote:
I agree that America is better about following the rules than any of the other major military powers - and I am thankful about that. But I think that due to your incredible military dominance, it is essential that you are seen to be a fair and just force for stability (if not "good"), or the entire system starts to break down with increasing terrorist attacks by those whose interests have been trampled.

The problems for the future are being formed in actions in Yemen etc today.

It's easy for me to say that coming from a weak country with no real military which claims "neutrality" while sucking up to america. But America really does make the Spiderman quote a truism, you know?

But with that said, I broadly agree with you - this was a feth up, not an intentional malicious act. I reckon those involved will be punished somehow, but I don't see this as "proof" that america is "evil". Compared to the other options, they are the ones I would back.

And if you saw the measures we went to, at times to seemingly stupid lengths, to not cause unnecessary casualties, you'd understand just how much emphasis we do place on it. Unfortunately, there will always be mistakes made, and the nature of propaganda will always allow the enemy to point out those mistakes. It doesn't matter that the Taliban kills more Afghans hands over fist then we do. They are able to use a simple mistake like this to paint us as the great devil.

 djones520 wrote:

And if you saw the measures we went to, at times to seemingly stupid lengths, to not cause unnecessary casualties, you'd understand just how much emphasis we do place on it. Unfortunately, there will always be mistakes made, and the nature of propaganda will always allow the enemy to point out those mistakes. It doesn't matter that the Taliban kills more Afghans hands over fist then we do. They are able to use a simple mistake like this to paint us as the great devil.

Although, to be fair, few people would claim that the Taliban have not committed an enormous amount of war crimes or crimes against humanity. And the people that would are probably all registered SEP members, so...