I'm glad I'm not a soldier, because I would be crappy at it. If I had killed an innocent person, my conscience would tell me to apologise to the families (my guilt or not - I'd still feel guilty as hell). Can't blame the EX GIs for doing what they believed was right (on both occasions).
Thank goodness there is no more military draft in Poland (and in the US) - anyone who goes to Iraq voluntarily is probably aware they may die in there, and that they are there to kill.

Yep.... I hear you.... But.. GTFO brings more problems long term...
How do you deal with the hornets nest after you knock the nest around a few times.....
The fact is the whole JWD is great for old school warfare...not so great for war that is more fluid.
Have you seen any insurgent or terrorist apologize for their actions? Nope....
Does the guy have the right to say he is sorry sure.. but I can understand if he feels he would not need to as well....
I can't think of many people here who have never had one of those types of situations. We all do our best, and sometimes, we make mistakes and kill innocents, and sometimes we make mistakes and get those that risk their lives along side us killed.... Either way you can not win.
I mean, im all for discussing solutions... but...just saying leave.... is not a solution we should consider.... I'd be for leaving if we had a plan in place.... I mean the thing with SOFA, we leave dec 31 2012.... all troops and all that... Great... except... 3 MoD personal were killed yesterday... we are here and can not even stop that from happening.. what happens when we leave... another Somalia? Sudan? Genocide?
Sure we could not worry about it... but... we started this mess we should clean it up right?
edit to add goodnight..... and again I respect his decision, and I would also respect if he did not feel it was needed.

The problem is, what do we define as guilt? Guilt over having accidentally killed a noncombatant, or guilt over having acted in the first place? Guilt of a large enough magnitude to lead to punitive action and/or a change in doctrine, or guilt of a small enough magnitude that a fruit basket will be sent?
This is a very murky situation.

So fruit basket guilt. The kind that serves only to make people feel better about themselves while making the most trivial gesture toward another. Works for me. Nothing more is justified, and that helps to mitigate the effect.
When I say "admitting guilt", I mean in a court of law (or public opinion). Sort of like how you NEVER apologize to someone after a traffic accident, because that is admitting guilt. Same thing here.

The helicopter is very far away--close enough to spot and shoot hostiles using the telescopic lens, but too far away for hostiles to reliably fire upon them even if they realise the helicopter has spotted them.
At one point in the video they see what looks very much like a man hiding around a corner readying an RPG. The perceived automatic weapons are reason enough to stay out of range, but an RPG is something a helicopter crew definitely doesn't want to even remotely approach the accurate firing range of: a single shot can take a chopper out of the air in seconds. Soldiers don't always have the luxury of double-checking their targets.

That is a legal matter, not a moral one. Apples and oranges. Besides, if you are in a car accident and you are the one clearly at fault, there is nothing wrong at all in apologizing, unless you are going to be a dick about accepting your responsibility and try to get out of it in court. The situation in war is a completely different matter and in at least this situation, there is absolutely no question about who was responsible for the deaths.

It must be nice to live in a world where morality is the be-all-end-all.
As has been mentioned to death everywhere except for at Wikileaks, this is a pretty grey situation. If you define who is responsible as the person who squeezed the trigger, fine. But if you consider how the situation came into being, it gets a lot more complex. There is fault on both sides, and it is very questionable if anyone did anything wrong.
As such, to accept responsibility and take the guilt for everything can really hurt more than anything else.

Uranus and Pluto stood in conjunction in the sign of the black widow, and I found myself no longer caring for what the little bears did to each other.

All this comes from two things that most people don't realize.
* for decades now, armies' propaganda and news programs sold us the "clean war" concept, like you push a button in a remote bunker and the missile goes off, aims its target and destroy it. No casualties on your side, only the "bad guys" dead on the other side. Who wouldn't such a war. Except that IT JUST DOESN'T EXIST !! Hello world, wake up !!! First, a device, however sophisticated it may be, can still be fautly and stray off its course, hitting the overcrowded hospital a hundred meters away from the target. And there's nothing you can do about that, there's always the probability that something will go wrong. In addition, successfully hitting a target is also a matter of "intelligence": if you don't know that this former factory is now a major enemy HQ, then you'll never attack it. Or if you know there's a HQ there, but your information is two months old, you have no means to know if it's still a HQ... So, Intelligence means that you have to have some of your people out there. And this means potential injuries and/or casualties.
So the "clean war" concept is nothing but a concept, it has nothing to do with reality. It was just a nice marketing campaign that was launched durning the 1st Gulf War, just to reassure people: "look, let us send our boys there, there won't be any casualties, we master the Clean War"!! Bullshit.
* most people refer to the War in Iraq. But it's wrong. There was a war when Saddam still had an army, but the very moment this army surrendered and some armed movements rose, it became nothing more than a friggin' guerilla!! Like back jn Vietnam, or like what the French experienced in Algeria in the 1950's. And in both cases, History told us that you can't win a guerilla with an army. Period. Or what is shown in the video of the helicopter shooting down people will happen again and again. Consequences? Simple enough: the locals will be mad at you because there will be lots of unavoidable collateral damage and some of them will even go and take part in the guerilla. Back at home, people will start to think: why are we still fighting this war over there and get our soldiers killed in bloody, meaningless suicide terrorist attacks or road-side mines explosions? Let thos people kill themselves if they want to, but bring our boys back home!
You win a war with an army. You win a guerilla with intelligence and counter-intelligence.
So, I don't really blame the american soldiers over there in Afghanistan or in Iraq. What happened HAD TO happen, given the configuration of things. The ones I blame are the militaro-industral complex-backed politicians, who sell you a clean war, don't want to take responsibilities for the unavoidable casualties and make lots of money selling weapons...

Agreed. True. Agreed. Respectively.
Yeah, I do realize just leaving isn't a decent method either. I do believe we should extricate ourselves from the situation, but it will take time. As for what happens after we leave? I might sound cold here, but I don't think it is our problem. I don't think it is our responsibility to keep people from killing each other willy-nilly. I am actually morbidly curious whether Israel would be wiped out, if they would wipe everyone else out, or both.
i would totally be a dick then :P. There is no way I am admitting guilt in the litigious society we have today. As soon as someone admits guilt, some other, perhaps less honest, people see dollar signs. It is not that I don't want to dot he right thing, but neither do I want to be raked over the coals by some greedy person.
I had a friend, a son of a doctor, that hit a kid that was playing chicken with cars on a bicycle (had the kid died, he would have been a Darwin Award candidate). The kid broke his hip, but made a full recovery (or as full as one can from that sort of thing). Nonetheless, the parents tied it up in court for years while they searched and searched for more money from my friend's extended family. The were just certain my friend's parents were hiding money, or something. All because my friend admit he was speeding. Had he kept his mouth shut (the skid mark were inconclusive), there wouldn't have been such a big hub-bub. There probably would have been a lawsuit, but it probably would have been settled much quicker.

Respect for those soldiers who show that despite their current daily job still have feelings and show moral and decency.
You might not agree with it, I do.
They're apologizing on a personal notice, not on behalf of the army.
The tactics used by the "rebellions" like hiding amongst civilians, suicide bombing, etc. are disgusting.
However so are techniques like shooting missiles into civilian areas to kill 1 military target, not to mention bombing wedding parties in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Not to mention the use of corporations like Blackwater which don't fall under the Geneva convention.
Both sides use questionable methods which lead to innocent victims.
Both sides are wrong in doing so.
Here in Europe we still remember both World Wars, so we do understand.

While I think it is more complicated than what tb said, there IS a pretty big difference between the World Wars and the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars.
WW1 and WW2 were pretty much viewed as wars by the entire world (shocker :p). And, WWII pretty much has a pretty well accepted sense of who was right and who was wrong.
Iraq/Afghanistan have neither. Because the opening battles were so one-sided in both cases, most people view the war as over. Plus, the pretenses to the war are questionable, even when you take into account all the facts. So it is viewed as an occupation by most of the world (and, in many ways, it is).
Plus, the right and wrong get murky. Because, let's face it, a lot of the world doesn't like the US. Admittedly, we are dicks. But it is also because most of Europe still remember when they were the superpowers and we were the little kids asking if we could play too. And, as mentioned, there are some morally questionable tactics used by everyone involved (and most people forget about the morally questionable tactics used in WW1 and WW2). So when you see someone you don't like cut in line (even if they are just talking to a friend), you tend to make a big stink out of it. Less tolerance for screw-ups.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot more to the mixed opinions of what is going on than what tb said. But I just felt the need to point out that remembering the World Wars doesn't necessarily help much (outside of understanding that war is hell).

Bingo.
We've been fighting a traditional war (whatever that is in the 21st century) against and metaphorical hydra, with no central head to cut to kill it.
And being prissy effed us over in the first place, if we had won the first gulf war, we wouldn't have been there a decade later, adding another front in a larger war (*cough* campaign *cough*) on terror.
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As far as the soldiers go, they ones involved should be punished for failing to make a proper judgment, and if it is determined that they did it knowing they were civilians then they have a lot coming to them. If they didn't know, then they made a mistake. Happens.

Yeah, but at that time, the motto was "a dictator under our control is better than a democracy that might not do what we want". Otherwise, Saddam would have been shot during the First Gulf War. Period.
Let's be clear : I'm not specially blaming the USA for that, I do know that any other country in the position of the USA (power, world influence and domination, etc.) would have done exactly the same thing.