WikiLeaks publishes apparent negligent attack on civillians in Iraq video

[Husar]

The "callous" comments made are what I think people would have to say as a defense of their own psyche in a war situation.

I've been thinking about that, but is it really the point of that war? Is it right to go there to protect the innocent people from all sorts of horrible things and then turn into a monster yourself?
A soldier without any compassion is just a killing machine, I found it quite telling when he was wishing for the guy crawling on the ground to pick up a weapon so he could shoot him (what he did later anyway when the van arrived), no regard for human life at all, in fact I could envision the taliban saying the same things after killing americans, so what exactly makes these soldiers better again?

Why would they do that?

Because some people help those who are in need of help, it's called human compassion, it may be surprising to you but it also exists in the middle east.

I don't mean to question your obvious expertise in long range target identification, but if you examine the video posted at 3:40, there clearly looks to be a man with a weapon.

Yeah, I saw the guy carrying the tripod for the camera, too...

Further, at 4 minutes in, it very much looks like a man with an RPG is crouching and peering around the corner. It even startles the pilots.

Oh yes, the guy kneeling around the corner holding this 20cm long RPG in one hand who then disappears behind a building in the next second, that's clearly enough evidence to warrant killing 8 people...
I didn't hear anyone being startled either, I'm probably too hardass and not caring enough about those poor soldiers in that gunship, 2km or so away from the scene.

Even from a video as heavily edited as that, I'm still not convinced that the pilots erroneously saw weapons that weren't there.

Yeah, sure, but oh what fun they had when the HMMWV drove over a body, I'm sure they're good christians and all that.