So in other words you can't define when the battlefield was inactive. Got it.
Think about what you are trying to argue here. Nobody's shooting, nobody's there, nobody's in line of sight, it's been quiet for minutes... and you're trying to make up some nitpicking complaint out of nowhere that "inactive" has been insufficiently defined for your personal tastes.
No. Surprise, surprise. When combatants dress as civilians then civilians will get mistaken for combatants. It is the fault of the illegally dressed combatants that this happens and it is against the rules of war as defined in the Geneva Conventions.
Are you under the mistaken impression that the GCs have some sort of universal get-out clause that says "If someone on the other side breaks the rules, you can break them as much as you like?". (As opposed to the GCs explicitly saying the exact opposite?). Or is this just a straw man, an attempt to sneak away from the topic of whether it is okay to shoot at civilians dressed as civilians assisting the wounded after a battle is over? Because the fact that some other people also broke the rules of war is in no way a Get Out Of War Crimes Free card for US forces to cash in later.
One of the things that makes an illegal combatant an illegal combatant is the lack of a uniform or other identifiable markings. Stop arguing about something that you apparently know nothing about. It makes you look like a fool.
You've stopped making sense entirely at this point. It's not even clear any more what errors you are making, because your post is so confused.
You
could be trying to argue that because illegal combatants lack uniforms, people who lack uniforms are illegal combatants. That would be a classic logical fallacy.
Or you
could have no idea about the GCs, and think that the GCs say that if there is an illegal combatant dressed as a civilian somewhere in a city, that the GCs say that it's open season on all people dressed as civilians in that city.
Well, except for the weapons found with their bodies and that the ground forces had been shot at with weapons just like them of course...
Do you even believe the things you are typing? Or are you just bashing the keyboard in an angry haze, convinced that it's your moral duty to post something that seems to disagree with everything I say?
Every armed faction in Iraq had rifles and rpgs. If you're seriously trying to argue that everyone in Iraq with a rifle or an rpg had to have been in on that one previous attack, then you must think that attack looked like a music festival, or Times Square on New Year's Eve.
Common sense says that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and looks like a duck that it's probably a duck. Unless of course you really want it to be a goose...
Apologist foolishness says that if you saw this one duck this one time, everything else you ever see that has webbed feet is
that one duck.
Now you might have noticed, if you were paying attention, that nobody is claiming that the initial attack was a war crime. The targets did have weapons, and while it's clear with hindsight that they probably had nothing to do with the original attack because of the way they were behaving, the people who killed them have a sketch of a defence at least by saying "We were looking for bad guys with guns dressed as civilians, they were guys with guns dressed as civilians in the same kind of area, we goofed but it was defensible".
That's not to say that rational people watching the video might not have serious second thoughts about what the hell US forces in Iraq are actually doing, if their previous understanding had been based on the version of the war packaged for domestic consumption. The myth of "our brave boys fighting for freedom" doesn't mesh well with our boys in the safety of a flying pillbox a kilometre or more from danger massacring people who weren't obviously doing anything wrong. However it's probably not a war crime - just relevant, important information the US armed forces didn't want the US population to know.
Conquered areas are not war zones.
You're playing semantic games now?
Conquered areas are not war zones if you are doing it right. However that would have cost money in the short term, and the Bush government was trying to conquer Iraq on the cheap. US forces had wiped out the Iraqi government forces, but they hadn't moved to fill the power vacuum they created.
My facts are sound and verifiable. You are conflating facts with your opinion which is apparently less than sound and made up in your head as you go.
Fact: Combatants dressed as civilians were firing on US forces.
Fact: Said combatants had civilians in their midst.
Fact: Said civilians did not have any identifiable markings discerning them from combatants (such as a Red Cross or Red Crescent). As such they were treated as combatants in a combat situation.
Fact: Combat was still in process when the civilians were fired upon. That the civilians did or did not not know this is irrelevant and is why this action was not a crime. It's very sad but this is how it works out sometimes.
You are free to think what you may however the facts will not change.
Do you really think, here of all places and with me of all people, that you were going to get away with the "three truths and then a huge lie" attack?
When the Good Samaritans were fired upon there was no ongoing engagement. You can make up some semantic waffle about "still in process" where "still in process" means whatever you want it to mean, but there was no ongoing engagement and at that point civilians are absolutely protected by the GCs when they are assisting the wounded.
The US occupiers in Iraq were upset that wounded insurgents were being retrieved from the battlefield. The US occupiers would rather those people had bled out and died, or been captured so they could torture them for information. So the US occupiers decided that they would kill civilians assisting the wounded after hostilities had ceased, which is a war crime. (Torturing people isn't cool either, but that's a different topic). That's the story. Just because you don't like the taste doesn't make it any less true.
