US sniper guilty of Iraqi murder

I didn't really follow the chain on the impulse thing but, impulse implies without fore-thought or reasoning, to me.

Most units/teams are trained daily on a variety of situations and contingencies. They run the whole gamut of possibilities when prepping for an operation in addition to their standard war-fighting taskings. Such as raids, ambushes, recons, static defense, etc. In the course of those they go through talk-through, crawl-throughs, walk-throughs and run-throughs of any number of situations that could possibly happen during the operation.

So if an unsavory sort jumps out and poses a threat to the team, then he will be eneded and it will generally happen before rational thought kicks in.

That is the ideal way it should go down. A highly trained individual will determine friend or foe in the brief time it takes to move your finger from safe position to trigger and take up the slack. If that person hasn't registered as non-threatening in that period of time, then he will be nuetralized.

But make no mistake, eventhough the process took less time than the telling of it, it was not acted on impulse. It was a trained, directed response.

Hope that clears that up.
 
I generally agree with the definition of TexasDan though I disagree that simply because something is a conditioned response, it's not impulsive.
 
Texas007, if you read the story you'll see that the six man team sent the teenage son away then executed his father. If they were so concerned about someone revealing their position why did they send the son away?

It's up the shooter to prove the necessity of killing the man. He posed no obvious threat and the shooter readily admits his decision making was clouded from lack of sleep and exhaustion. Well hell, if he was so exhausted that his decision making capacity is that reduced he shouldn't be on a sniper mission anyways. I'm sure six men can hold one guy for a couple of hours until backup can arrive to take him away or move positions. You just don't kill an innocent person because you're unwilling to move positions or waste three days' effort.
 
No, I don't think we should have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I also don't think we should just bomb large cities. Collateral damage is acceptable so long as it is not the result of carelessness. Intentional attacks on civilians are not.
 
This thread is about the legitimacy of killing unarmed civilians to preserve a sniper team's mission, and then you say RollingwoodHorn ought to be content with just that to enjoy the freedoms he/she has today. There's a logical disconnect between the freedoms we enjoy today and whether or not a sniper team kills an unarmed civilian to preserve their mission.
 
that our military has the balls to convict their own for mistakes made is what separates the free world from the rest of the world who live to a much lower standard.
 
Is it something to be proud of but step down from your high horse a bit. Even Russia has tried and convicted some of its military officers for murdering Chechen civilians.
 
I wonder how many american soldiers have lost their lives because they decided to ask questions first? And why can't we try and convict suicide bombers?
 
I don't know. Equally pertinent is how many Iraqi civilians have been killed by American soldiers worried about suicide bombers or having to move sniper positions. I would guess it's significantly higher.

I'm not trying to say a soldier's choice is always clear, I totally understand it's not. I'm also willing to give the individual soldiers some leeway given the complexities and demands of their situation. I come down hard on those that put them in that situation. But for me leeway is not a carte blanche because there are consequences for their actions that involve the lives of equally innocent people. There is still a high threshold of necessity to kill someone that has to proven after the fact.

If five innocent people are killed to save one American soldier's life, is it worth it? The American soldier, his comrades and family say "Hell yes" and the Iraqi families and friends say "Hell no." How do we weigh these situations? Default to nationality and say a fellow countryman's life is worth more? If so, how much more? If that's the case, is it OK for Iraqis to think the same way, that it's worth letting five American solders get blown up so that a single Iraqi civilian doesn't get shot accidentally driving down the freeway?
 
"War is at best barbarism. . . . Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell."
William T. Sherman


"It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
Robert E. Lee
 
I cannot support US actions in Iraq and the military presence as this is an aggressive imperilaist action not done for the sake of the tired and worthless cliche of "freedom" but for US economic interests. As such each US soldier is part of this aggression and cannot be seen as someone whose life is more valuable than the Iraqi civlian whom he murders so easily. Those who are fighting the US invaders are much more morally righteous.
 
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