Opps, my bad. I meant manslaughter.
Really one of the most frightening machines ever built to ever have on your ass:
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One of the agreed upon rules in war is that you know what youâre blowing up before you blow it up.
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I hate it when I agree with you, but I donât think itâs possible to accidentally commit a war crime. If civilian casualties were war crimes, every army that ever marched was a criminal enterprise. A pacifist may agree with that sentiment, but I donât think the tribunal the The Hague is quite as strict.
A separate issue is negligence, and I think the DoD bombing the wrong target might be negligent. Similarly, all those wedding parties that got blown up. Attacking the wrong target is always unacceptable - but that doesnât make it a war crime.
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But if you blow it up because you thought it was a different building, or if you thought the hospital was on another block, that is horrible and negligent, but it is not the same as going out on a mission with the plan of blowing up the hospital, then dropping cluster bombs on the orphanage. That is one reason that it is a custom in war to mark the roofs of hospitals with a giant red cross or crescent. that way, when the guy on the ground gives you coordinates for a building, you sight in on it, and then say " Hey, that place is marked as a hospital, recheck your coordinates".
It seems to me that 90% of the people commenting here and elsewhere have no idea at all what combat is like, and hold unrealistic expectations of the combat troops that their countries send into battle. There is a great deal of emotion involved, and people make mistakes that often have serious consequences. There is a lot of effort put into reducing the number of those incidents to as close to zero as possible, but zero is unlikely to be obtainable anytime soon.
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But if I go out to kill someone in violation of the law, and happen to kill the wrong person, the law doesnât give me a free pass on it because whoops, wrong person! In this case theyâre actually saying, âYes, the rules of engagement werenât followed. The laws of armed conflict were violated, and as a result, we killed a bunch of civilians. But we were intending to (illegally) kill someone else, so itâs not a crime!â
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The US State Deparment did not hesitate to jump the gun when Israel did a real mistake protecting itself from rockets: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/us-appalled-disgraceful-israeli-shelling-gaza-un-school
Americans are shameless hypocrites:(
Makes me think of the Plastic Surgeons Without Borders skit from Wonder Showzen.
http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/52273/plastic-surgeons-without-borders.jhtml
It precisely hit the wrong target. Whatâs so mystifying?
These are not the war crimes youâre looking for.
The US âwonâ Afghanistan? This is new.
so like neglicent homicide we need a concept of negligent war crimes.
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As much as I love the AC-130 (and I love it a LOT, across a number of different axes), it has always seemed like a highly complex and very expensive solution to a problem that doesnât really exist.
I mean, itâs a freaking transport aircraft, flying donuts and loitering directly over the target. If you own the situation so thoroughly that you can do that with very low risk of casualties (five lost in Vietnam plus one during the 1st Gulf War for a total of six in five decades of operations) ⌠you probably donât really need the AC-130 to begin with.
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Maybe. Maybe it already exists, Iâm no expert.
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No crime was committed, and anyway we reprimanded punished 16 people for committing it so itâs all square now.
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The bombing blamed on Assad may have been an accident as well. But at the same time, he has intentionally done some nasty shit in the past. If it was intentional, that would be the big difference.
Do I really need to link any of the hundreds of barbarous, oppressive, inhumane, callous, nasty acts the USA has brought to the world?
If past behaviour were the standard, America may be the international leader in coups, slaughters, tortures, ârenditionsâ, rapes, lawless imprisonment, propping up dictators - definitely top of the class in nuclear strikes!
Thatâs just internationally, whatever Assad does domestically needs to be compared with slavery, internment, intentional poisoning, genocide, ludicrous incarceration, centuries of crushing racism, and a few other things.
So âAssad is a baddie, and therefore his actions should be held to higher standardsâ is more than a little inappropriate.
America started this particular fire when it got tired of the dictator it bought in Iraq.
Plain to see there is no justice in that land.
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Hmmm⌠that many errors sounds like incompetence to me. You shouldnât be allowed to play with such dangerous toys.
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You might want to research this a little more then. For starters:
Some bullet points:
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there were multiple identifying flags on the roof of that building
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the attack last for hours in multiple phases, and the U.S. Military was radioâd between each attack telling them that they were bombing a fucking hospital
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it was the only hospital in the area and very well known
At a minimum it warrants a 3rd party investigation, and not the military investigating itself.
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I guess you donât know: bombs and missiles used for urban environments are tuned/loaded with a target specific payload, designed to destroy just that target.
During indiscriminate bombing campaigns as seen in that last invasion of Iraq, splash damage is considered an asset and so the bombs, missiles and bomblets are designed for that.
If that missile was made to destroy a different target, there would either be partial damage, or off center scorching as the oversized weapon system annihilated too much stuff.
My point is that the hospital was either the intended target all along, or the building that was supposed to be destroyed was a very, very close match.
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The AC-130âs main armament is a 105mm howitzer. The âtarget specificâ payload consisted of 211 shells, fired over 29 minutes, as the plane flew a circular pattern around the target.
This tactic would reduce most any building to rubble, though I would think that it would also have provided ample opportunities to notice a ICRC emblem.
No outside power, in all recorded history, has ever âwonâ a war in Afghanistan.
Theyâre not in a position to enforce terms on us though, and thatâs pretty much a prerequisite for actually convicting anyone of war crimes.
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