COMMENTARY
I have watched this video story many times ... and it confirms to me every thime that the military may be powerful but they are also extremely limited.

I have always wanted to be in a place where the military are the best in the world ... but I think I understand that the military are good at a very limited set of activities. In the post-invation occupation of Iraq, the military had few skills that were of much relevance. I blame Bush / Sheney / Rumsfeld / Rice for this incredible failure of US policy ... and to some extent blamce myself for being unable to ge the attention of decision makers to think through the alternative.

Progress, in my view is not killing the most people, but improving quality if life for ordinary civialain human beings. Soldiers are human beings ... but their training is to be efficient at killing people.

Years ago I refused to leave a country after a coup. I argued to the US Ambassador that our company had a job to do, and I did not want politics to get in the way. The instruction to 'leave the country' meant the pllitical coup leaders won ... which was a local issue and may or may not have been justified ... but our job was to do something important in the economic sector! I suggested that the US could be helpful by giving me some marines to protect us so that we could get on with the factory building that we were meant to be doing.

We did not leave. We did not get US marines to protect us. We did get huge support from the local people who understood that we were interested in local social welfore and local economics more than we cared about politics and the agendas of the rich and powerful.

The US contractors in Iraq had a very different attitude than we had ... and I am disgusted that the US has demonstrated not only its capacity to kill but also its capacity to rip off any economy it chooses.
Peter Burgess

Permission to Engage Victims' families and an ex-US soldier unpick the Wikileaks film that showed US forces killing Iraqi civilians in 2007.

Filmmaker: Shuchen Tan

On July 12, 2007, the US military shot several Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, an event that shocked the world when footage of the attack was later released by Wikileaks.

'The attack took place on a Thursday, when residents of the area had gone to a local market,' explains filmmaker Shuchen Tan. 'When they saw helicopters hovering over, they ran to their houses, thinking they'd be safe in there but it was those very houses that were blown up.'

Permission to Engage traces the people involved in that fateful day and hears their versions of what happened.

Those killed included a young Iraqi photojournalist and his assistant, a father out with his children and some neighbours who were caught in the attack while trying to help the wounded.

'It was quite challenging to track down the victims and their families. We didn't have names, didn't have addresses, we didn't have anything,' explains Tan.

'And when we found them, most of them didn't want to share their stories. They felt they had been left by the West and not treated well.'

The families of the victims and a disillusioned former US soldier who was serving in Iraq around that time unpick the footage in forensic detail and relate their accounts of what happened.

This episode of Witness can be seen from Wednesday, August 22, at the following times GMT: Wednesday: 2000; Thursday: 1200; Friday: 0100; Saturday: 0600; Sunday: 2000; Monday: 1200; Tuesday: 0100.

Bringing global issues into focus through courageous and inspiring human stories. Watch more Witness.

Source: Al Jazeera