the Informer

This week a video surfaced on the Internet of a 2007 U.S. Army attack on a suburb in New Baghdad in Iraq. 
The intensely graphic video surfaced on YouTube via a Web site called WikiLeaks, which is an organization that attempts to obtain confidential and controversial documents and release them on the Internet. 

The video is from the cockpit view of an attack helicopter hovering over the Iraqi suburb. Audio on the video suggests that soldiers identified the people as Iraqi insurgents carrying weapons such as AK-47s and rocket propelled grenade launchers. 

From there, the people on the helicopter receive authorization to fire on the so-called “insurgents” and then the soldiers fire on them, leaving one wounded, the other six or seven people appear to be killed in the attack.

Two Reuters news staff were killed in the attack. Namir Noor-Eldeen was killed in the initial attack and is identified in the video. Those “AK-47s” and “RPGs”? They were cameras slung over Noor-Eldeen and colleague Saeed Chmagh’s shoulder, thanks for playing though. 
Later, a man is shown crawling away from the scene, apparently suffering from bullet wounds to his leg. A van arrives on the scene, carrying who are later determined to be Iraqi civillians trying to help the wounded person. In a shocking turn of events, the soldiers receive authorization to shoot at the vehicle as well, unprovoked by the sight of civillians trying to help out a wounded person. 
They shoot, leaving everyone in the vehicle dead. That wounded man? Chmagh was the victim of an apparent unfortunate and terrible mistake in judgment by soldiers and officers in the military. 

At no point in the video do those cameras mistaken for guns and grenade launchers leave the journalists’ shoulders while they’re alive. They don’t wave their cameras at the helicopter in a threatening manner. They appear to be doing a great job of ignoring the helicopter as if it wasn’t even there. In other words they posed no immediate threat to the people in the air or soldiers on the ground. 

It feels like something that the media gets their hands on all the time–the thrill of an alleged coverup by the military, but nothing ever seems to come of it. This is the antithesis of that, where an anonymous group obtains serious evidence of a coverup.

While the validity of the video has yet to be determined, it definitely does not look like something that can be faked without a pretty high operating and filming budget. Wiki Leaks has done a great thing by obtaining access when others couldn’t get it. Reuters asked for a copy of that video under the Freedom of Information act, but their requests weren’t successful. 

Maybe, now that the video is public, members of the military associated with this action against indefensible Iraqis will come out of the woodwork and apologize or admit their wrongdoings–or hell, even defend their actions.