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I'm sorry, I must have missed that. What argument did I make? That you're retarded? I assume that's either because your parents mistreated you as a child or you were born that way.

His 10k title should be Straw Man.

You're so predictable. I knew you would ask that since you don't have an answer for the question. You claimed that I said something "outrageous", so I'm challenging your claim by asking you to give me a logical reason why IG or any legal representative would risk their career covering up something that isn't illegal while kicking people out of military and sending them to jail by uncovering real crimes?

So, please, give me a reason why they would do that?


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So far no one has shown any war crimes, nothing but death polls.... you know, the thing that happens during war.

Once again, I don't deny that any war crimes were done, but once again, only a fool would send up a SITREP telling on himself. These SITREPS are from the people who are in the mission. So, how is it that you believe that IG and the legal system would cover up a war crime, but at the same time you believe that the people who committed the war crimes would voluntarily tell on themselves and NOT COVER it up. If anyone were to lie about it happening, it would be the people who done the crime.

Not only that, even if you found records of war crimes, where is the proof that these individuals weren't punished? Given the fact that EVERYTHING that has been provided so far has been nothing but death tolls, it is obvious that these are not specifically war crimes, but the entire database of all SIGACTs off the CPOF system (central data base system). Else, every report would be about war-crimes. How can you not see that this is emotionally driven? Why say all the people who were legally killed other than to stir up emotion?

Not reporting death tolls is not a war crime nor do you need to know. Are you so naive that you don't think innocent people aren't dying in a war during URBAN OPERATIONS?!?! What's next, do you want to know when every military person gets convicted of a crime? How does it matter if the situation is being fixed? Don't get me wrong, I don't believe that the nation should be kept totally in the dark, but you can't say "war crimes" and make a bunch of negative assumptions and accusations just because you do know what is going on.

You know what, never mind. Moe's right. I'm retarded for getting sucked into arguing with you. Even worse is that I wasn't even trying to argue with you.

If this was one set of documents from one command post in one location, you'd have a point. But this is a collection of documents from many command posts in many areas. The reality is that hundreds of eyes read through each of these reports. Any one of them could have reported wrong doing. And each of those reports of wrong doing would have gone to a different person.

To argue for a cover-up conspiracy, one would have to assume that the same cover up of the same information happened repeatedly at dozens of locations and with hundreds of people. That's well beyond the realm of probability or even possibility.

It is far far more reasonable to assume that the events being reported, while shocking to those not present, are really just the sorts of unfortunate events which do occur in war zones and don't represent some kind of unusual activity which would warrant a cover up.


It's interesting because I'm reminded of a scene in the series "Band of Brothers". The company has just liberated a town in Holland. The townsfolk are cheering and waving flags as they walk through town. As they are going through, the same townsfolk are rounding up the **** collaborators lining them against a wall and shooting them. Historically, this sort of thing does tend to happen when oppressive regimes are overthrown, and we didn't tend to get involved or stop it then either. Should we have stopped in the middle of a war and spent time and energy bringing to justice those who did this? Should we have demanded trials for them all? In a perfect world? Sure. But we don't live in a perfect world. And things like that happen.


Many of the events which I've heard about involve similar acts, mostly in the first year or so after the liberation of Iraq. As with what happened in Europe, it's unfortunate, but you really can't spend that much effort tracking it down. You do pretty much exactly what we did. You record it. You pass it on to the appropriate senior officers to examine and make recommendations and whatnot, and you move on. We can't say from those reports what conversations occurred diplomatically between the US and Iraqi forces as a result. We can't say to what degree reprisals entered into negotiations in those meetings. To look at just the ground level military reports and attempt to draw a larger picture is unfair at best.




I'm not sure what you mean by "brought it to light". Unless you're arguing that all operational documents generated by our military at all levels must be made public, then you must accept that these sorts of things have to be handled within the system itself. And that means that the responses and actions based on those reports are *also* going to be something that isn't going to be public knowledge. Looking at just one part of the puzzle isn't going to give you the whole picture. But you can't see the whole puzzle.


I guess what I'm getting at is that this kind of leak serves only the purpose of pushing doubt into people's minds. And it's unfair because you can *always* push that doubt, but by necessity the full information needed to clarify things can't be made available. That's why we shouldn't place that much stock in these documents. Unless there is a clear "smoking gun" in there (which I have yet to hear about), then it's really just rumor and speculation. If someone had a story to write about a specific action and cover-up, you'd think they would have zeroed in on that. That they just dumped 400k pages of documents tells me that they didn't find anything and just figured if they dumped enough stuff, some people would assume that there must be something in there.


It's pretty obviously politically motivated. It's naive at best to think that there's some motive of "truth" going on here.

The whole fUcking war was a crime.

The bombing, the killing, the torture. The whole damn thing.

Everyone involved with prosecuting it should be locked up for a very long time.

What was the point of quoting me if you weren't going to address a single thing that I wrote?




Edited, Oct 29th 2010 2:45am by Eske

posting on page 5 of a non-gay marriage thread.

Watch the press conference where 'the guy who blogged' is actually an international panel of subject matter experts (professors in foreign affairs, security, human rights etc.), and read the articles.

At that point, anyone with a brain can see how bloody ridiculous you are.

Not you though - you won't understand a fUckin' word.

The most cutting insult is the one that you repeat back to someone. Really.

That's interesting because at least before you started going on and on, the discussion was about whether damning information would justify the leaks.

What about the reason that I provided? You know, the one that was the whole point of what I wrote. The one which you didn't address in your post.

EDIT: It occurs to me that you might not know what I was referring to. I'm talking about the so called "Collateral Murder" video that was part of the Bradley Manning leak a while ago. Here's the video:

http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?next_url=http%3A//www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3D5rXPrfnU3G0

And here's the wikipedia summary of the events: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_12,_2007,_Baghdad_airstrike

And here's the relevant portion describing how the military handled the matter:



The military has since determined that their own internal investigation is closed, and that no wrongdoing occurred. Their explanation was fairly limited and contained errors, however. I've heard nothing from any IG on it, either.

That's the reason for skepticism that I'm posing.

Edited, Oct 29th 2010 6:36pm by Eske

Edited, Oct 29th 2010 6:42pm by Eske

Edited, Oct 29th 2010 6:57pm by Eske