And if we had some ham we could have some ham and eggs if we had some eggs, Josh. Second-guessing the training and motivations of the pilots three+ years down the line, with the benefit of knowing more now than they did then is a fool's game. You NEVER have enough intel to keep every conceivable scenario from happening, and in the middle of a battle is NOT the time to land, try to gather names, addresses, and party affiliations from people who are trying to kill other soldiers who are on your side.
War is messy, unpleasant, and ambiguous as anything. There is no such thing as a 'perfect' war, or a 'perfect' battle. Even training exercises can and have gone horribly wrong. (Look up 'Exercise Tiger' in WW2, for one example.)
And the object of war, in case you've missed it - is to kill the enemy. Two photographers embedded with the enemy receive pretty much no consideration when the bullets start flying. They're in with the enemy, among the enemy, possibly acting as spotters FOR the enemy - telephoto lenses being pretty useful in that department - so they ARE the enemy. Combat cameramen in WW2 were not protected or seen as noncombatants, neither have they been seen as that in any conflict since then.
It's not wrong in war to want to kill the enemy. It's not wrong to be EAGER to do so. You may find it reprehensible that they were actually EAGER to do it, but that's a lot better than having a bunch of emo boys flying around, sniffling and sniveling and weeping and wailing about how they're being forced to be MEAN to those poor people on the other side, when they don't want to be!
But you know the thing I think that sucks most about something like this?
You're looking at the future of warfare. Where the enemy finds it to their advantage to bring children onto the battlefield, where they GLADLY bring 'noncombatants' like photographers into a firefight, where the Geneva Convention strictures about being easily identifiable as a combatant and trying to keep noncombatants safe are going to be totally ignored.
Because every death they manage to cause of an innocent, every video they can get of a child being shot - is going to be put up as propaganda about how evil and horrible the people who are shooting them are.
And gullible folk like you will lap it up and ask for more, all the time decrying the brutality of our forces.
So remind me again - which side beheads its hostages on camera?
When opinion and reality conflict - guess which one is going to win in the long run.
I might add the wiki leaks is trying to present a narrative and perpetrate a lie. The lie is intended to push exactly the buttons it did. Wikileaks is acting on behalf of the enemy, a long standing Progressive tradition. I suppose it's not going to stop until we start standing people in front of walls for things like this.: http://collateralmurder.wordpress.com/
The fact is that the that van had been running around the area being used to transport Mahdi army fighters and weapons. The last thing on that camera was exactly the kind of tactical intel that the Mahdi folks would have needed when they all gathered around the camera to look at it, as a preliminary to setting up their attack. Which makes the photographers combatants. So both the van and the photographers were legitimate targets.
6 times as many people die in car accidents in America than who have died in our military in the Iraq War. Civilian deaths (very high end) in the Iraq War, over the past 8 years, are comparable to 2 days of deaths (very low end) in WWII.
The pacific war became "no quarter" because the Japanese were ferocious fighters, look at the Battle of Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa for an example.
Iraq is not comparable, it is a joke. It is an insult to the massive war that our planet undertook back then. The comparison here just shows how out of touch people are.
Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is.