Sweet Jesus... 'COMBAT BY CAMERA: Anatomy of an Afghan war tragedy' - LATimes

[WillyT]

COMBAT BY CAMERA: Anatomy of an Afghan war tragedy
U.S. Predator teams and a special operations unit on the ground studying a suspicious convoy make a series of fateful missteps as they try to distinguish friend from foe.
By David S. Cloud, Los Angeles Times
April 10, 2011

<snip>

Nearly three miles above the rugged hills of central Afghanistan, American eyes silently tracked two SUVs and a pickup truck as they snaked down a dirt road in the pre-dawn darkness. The vehicles, packed with people, were 3 1/2 miles from a dozen U.S. special operations soldiers, who had been dropped into the area hours earlier to root out insurgents. The convoy was closing in on them.

At 6:15 a.m., just before the sun crested the mountains, the convoy halted.

"We have 18 pax dismounted and spreading out at this time," an Air Force pilot said from a cramped control room at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, 7,000 miles away. He was flying a Predator drone remotely using a joystick, watching its live video transmissions from the Afghan sky and radioing his crew and the unit on the ground.

The Afghans unfolded what looked like blankets and kneeled. "They're praying. They are praying," said the Predator's camera operator, seated near the pilot.

By now, the Predator crew was sure that the men were Taliban. "This is definitely it, this is their force," the cameraman said. "Praying? I mean, seriously, that's what they do."

"They're gonna do something nefarious," the crew's intelligence coordinator chimed in.

<snip>

Much More: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghanistan-drone-20110410,0,2818134,full.story

:evilfrown:

[Bigmack]

1. OOOpsss.... my bad...

so sorry....

One thing about it, though. Those people don't value human life the way white people do.

Deep, dark, "sucking chest wound" :sarcasm: intended.

[Bonobo]

2. Is there anything more wrongheaded and cowardly then a "predator drone"?

Don't "warriors" have any sense of how non-warrior like it is to operate a drone and fire from not just out of range but ENTIRELY out of the warzone?

It is deserving of shame just for that beyond its obvious immorality due to the number of innocents it has taken.