A harrowing 2007 video released by Wikileaks shows a number of people -- including two Reuters journalists -- being killed by U.S. troops in Iraq who believed they were carrying weapons (at least one of the "weapons" was a video camera). The Pentagon maintains that the soldiers in question acted lawfully. After the initial shooting, a van arrives to pick up some of the dead bodies. In the video taken by the two Apache helicopters at the scene, there are two children visible in the front of the van before the second round of shooting starts. At the time, a spokesperson for the Department of Defense said that there was "no question" that "coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force."
I don't have much to add to what's already been written except to say that the exigencies of combat and the circumstances of the wars the U.S. is fighting make it very difficult to discern who is an enemy target and who isn't. This is something to keep in mind as the debate over the use of drone strikes against suspected terrorist targets continues and escalates. The best estimates we have of how many civilian deaths the strikes actually cause are dependent on press estimates, which are themselves often dependent on the official story. State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh recently defended the strikes as legal.
-- A. Serwer
