Posted on 09/21/2003 8:34:13 AM PDT by joan
So, being there is all that necessary to prove claims? Let's see, all the unsupported claims you made: you "counted" the 4,000+/-15, you have pictures but you won't show them, you give dead links, and so on, as your "proof."
Last, but not least, I "just want to cover up war crimes." Fat chance. But, then you seem to be fabricating them, and not too skillfully I might add.
Hoplite, maybe your delicate fingers can touch an M-16 trigger set on automatic and fire a single round. That will be the day. The weapon in question was desinged for 10-round bursts minimum, 25 maximum.
Single bullet is an option, but that's not what your "sniper" pictures shows. It shows a machine gun on a tripod that has a tailstock and is obviously not a .50 cal as you and some others claimed, and a whole bunch of ammo attached to it. The clip shows Radovan firing indiscriminantly on buildings which appear but are not necessarily empty. I didn't see any evidence that he was aiming at any civilians. I have already said that his firing in the direction of the city was reprehensible.
What seems to be the disagreement? The fact that you called someone a sniper when it was not a sniper, or that you mistook a 7.62 mm machine gun for a .50 cal?
Again, civilians were targetted on both sides. Not all people targetted were civilians. Is there a problem with that? Or are you simply denying that the Muslim side ever did anything wrong?
Concur. In either case, the guilty should be judged. If we are to take the American example of justice, one low level (junior) Serb commander should be sentenced to life, then his sentence reduced to 10 years, then he should be placed in a house arrest and then finally pardoned by the president three years later. That's what happend to Lt Calley. See any parallels?
Like I said, can we expect others to be better than we are?
1. Visiting a war somewhere and taking potshots has been termed "Sniper Tourism".
2. I can and have fired single shots from an M-60 and M-249 though the simple expedient of trigger control, but, again, this does not speak to the core issue here.
3. Nobody said the weapon in the picture was a .50 cal. You said automatic weapons could not be used in the sniper role, and I corrected you, though that effort is looking to be a complete waste of time, leaving you just as ignorant of the capabilities of automatic weapons as when we started this discussion.
Of course, I keep thinking that gaining knowledge is a good thing, but if I were in your shoes and looking to excuse the seige of Sarajevo and the criminal nature of it's prosecution by Bosnian Serb forces, ignorance would probably seem attractive.
So your behavior is understandable in that context.
No parallel with Srebrenica. Calley & his platoon acted on their own--that's why Calley--the "one low level" commander you referred to was convicted. Calley's company commander, IMO, should have been charged & convicted of failure to perform his duty--but the prosecutors over-reached & tried to charge him with murder & he was found not guilty. The division commander was later relieved, administratively demoted in rank, and ushered out of the Army for failure to properly follow-up on indicators that a crime had occurred at My Lai.
However, unlike Srebrenica, My Lai was an isolated incident, not a program of criminal acts deliberately planned & coordinated by HQ & executed by various subordinate units.
Maybe you didn't hear that Nikolich retracted his story. This is no different than trying to prove the complicity of Croatian HQ in the Medak Pocket. You don't know what the commanders of Lt Calley knew, what they should have known even if they didn't know -- it was on their watch and that's the whole little blame game all the way up the ladder -- they should have known.
What I said to Joan, and what prompted your reply was the following:
"There is no such thing -- anyone who has been in the military knows that anything firing on automatic (see the stacked bullets) is not a precision weapon."
Anything firing on automatic (see the stacked bullets)...Hoplite. I stand by what I said. This hole discussion has evolved from you jumping the gun (no pun intended) and not reading carefully what I wrote.
If you bothered to view the footage you would have realized that the idiot was firing on automatic all over the buildings. My comment therefore was in context of the post in question.
"Sniper tourism" is misleading and misses the point. "Machine gun maniac" would have been a much better one.
Well, there were a couple trials by court martial and an investigative commission with published results. So we know that the company had three platoons in action that day and only one--Calley's--committed crimes. We know that the company commander gave all his subordinates the same orders at the same time prior to the operation, but only one--Calley--led his men in massacring civilians. Besides all the testimony, its pretty clear from those circumstances alone that the problem was with Calley and his platoon, not with the entire organization.
Again, the company commander, IMO was negligent in his duty & should have been court-martialed for that. It was clear, based on the sound of firing and the situation reports plus the body count & # of weapons captured and the lack of calls for fire support that there was a major diconnect in the normal patterns of either a battle against a fighting enemy or else just a routine search of a civilian village. And later, similar incongruities in reports should have been spotted as they went up the chain of command. The failure to do so is in essence why Major General Koster was eventually relieved and demoted.
Having said that, there is a HUGE difference between not spotting a report that should have cued some questions or an investigation to uncover a crime versus the actions of Serb senior leadership in planning & coordinating the commission of a crime.
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