I came across that video of an Apache helicopter shooting of three
people in a field (google under 'apache killing video'), and for the
past two weeks I have felt a bit nauseus. It was a very contentious
issue, and made the online rounds several years ago, but AFAIK it was
never definitively proven that these guys were doing anything wrong.
Some people insisted such strange assertations as "if they were
innocent, why were they in a field at night?" or "if they were
innocent, why was that one person running?" Being in a field at night,
or running don't seem to me to be offenses punishable by death, and
people's willingness to accept that 'they were killed, therefore they
must be guilty of something' makes me deeply ashamed.

There have been assertations that they were just farmers, and other
assertations that they had been tracked directly from a car bombing
site, and that footsoldiers later searched the wreckage and found
weapons. However, all I have found is definitve assertations that the
military is being completely silent on this. That makes me fear the
worst.

There is another site that shows footage of a vehicle randomly shooting
at cars on the road to Bagdhad airport, while some jazzy Elvis tune
plays in the background. Several of the cars react in ways that make it
obvious that the drivers were hit, possibly killed. Certainly, in
almost all of these cases, the drivers were guilty of nothing more than
being behind this vehicle and not noticing that they were gaining on
it; I can't believe they all were carrying car bombs.

I would dearly like to think that our military is above wanton killing,
and has better discipline than this, but the reality is that an army is
a very blunt instrument, and that 'acceptable collateral damage' has
migrated from accidental killing of people caught in crossfire of
legitimate firefights, to deliberate killing of random indiviuals.

My Lei would not even be prosecuted today, I fear. All of this shames
and sickens me; the random killing, the endorsement of it by many
Americans (and the associated attacks on people who condemn it), and
the absolute impossibility of most of it ever coming to justice.

--riverman