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Wikileaks defends release of video showing killing of journalists in Iraq

08 April 2010 04:37 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. As my colleague Elisabeth Bumiller reported, a senior American military official confirmed on Monday that a graphic video released by the Web site WikiLeaks.org, which shows an American helicopter shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver during a July 2007 attack in Baghdad, is authentic, APA reports quoting â€œThe New York Timesâ€.
One of the whistle-blowing groupâ€™s founders, Julian Assange, explained and defended the decision to release the graphic, disturbing video shot from the helicopter during interviews in Washington on Monday with Al Jazeera and Russia Today.
Both of those appearances, and an edited version of the leaked video, are available on YouTube. (Be warned that even the edited version shows people being killed.)
Wikileaks uploaded the 17-minute edit to YouTube on Monday morning, along with the complete video, which runs more than 39 minutes.
Soon after releasing the video, Mr. Assange discussed it with Alyona Minkovski, a Washington correspondent for Russia Today, an English-language satellite channel financed by the Russian government.
On Tuesday, an Iraqi journalistsâ€™ union called on the countryâ€™s government to investigate incident. The head of the union, Mouyyad al-Lami said, â€œThis is another crime added to the crimes of the U.S. forces against Iraqi journalists and civilians,â€ The Associated Press reported.
After the video was released, Al Jazeera English broadcast an interview with Nabil Noor-Eldeen, whose brother Namir Noor-Eldeen was one of the two Reuters journalists killed in the attack. He asked: â€œIs this the freedom and democracy that they claim to have brought to Iraq?â€
On Tuesday, The Washington Post published an excerpt from David Finkelâ€™s book â€œThe Good Soldiers,â€ which includes an account of the attack that day from the reporter, who was embedded with American troops who came across the dead and wounded soon after the helicopters fired.
As my colleagues Noam Cohen and Rogene Fisher reported on Monday, WikiLeaks, which describes itself as â€œan intelligence agency of the people,â€ is a nonprofit group, created in the spring of 2007. In March, Stephanie Strom reported in The Times that the groupâ€™s release of an internal Pentagon report had upset the military:
The Pentagon concluded that â€œWikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Armyâ€ â€” or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.
While it seems clear that the American military mistook the camera equipment the two journalists were carrying for weapons, Slateâ€™s Twitter feed points to an analysis of the footage by a blogger named Anthony Martinez, who argues that two of the men in the group they were with may have been armed.
Mr. Martinez, who says that he served in Iraq with the American Army, writes: â€œI have spent quite a lot of time (a conservative estimate would be around 4,500 hours) viewing aerial footage of Iraq.â€ Near the start of his post he says, â€œI support WikiLeaks in their endeavors to bring about transparency in government,â€ but he goes on to criticize the edited version of the video produced by the group for not properly noting what look to him like weapons.
Between 3:13 and 3:30 it is quite clear to me, as both a former infantry sergeant and a photographer, that the two men central to the gun-cameraâ€™s frame are carrying photographic equipment. This much is noted by WikiLeaks, and misidentified by the crew of Crazyhorse 18. At 3:39, the men central to the frame are armed, the one on the far left with some AK variant, and the one in the center with an RPG. The RPG is crystal clear even in the downsized, very low-resolution, video between 3:40 and 3:45 when the man carrying it turns counter-clockwise and then back to the direction of the Apache. This all goes by without any mention whatsoever from WikiLeaks, and that is unacceptable.
He adds that he still finds fault with the actions of the crew that attacked the group â€” and sees absolutely no justification for the subsequent attack on a van driver who arrived after the initial barrage and tried to help the victims:
I have made the call to engage targets from the sky several times, and know (especially during the surge) that such calls are not taken lightly. Had I been personally involved with this mission, and had access to real-time footage, I would have recommended against granting permission. [...]
The point at which I cannot support the actions of [the crew of] Crazyhorse 18, at all, comes when the van arrives somewhere around 9:45 and is engaged. Unless someone had jumped out with an RPG ready to fire on the aircraft, there was no threat warranting a hail of 30mm from above. Might it have been prudent to follow the vehicle (perhaps with a UAV), or at least put out a BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for the vehicle? Absolutely without question. Was this portion of the engagement even remotely understandable, to me? No, it was not.
WikiLeaks also uploaded a video made by an Icelandic journalist the group sent to Iraq to find two children who were wounded in the attack after their father stopped his van to try to rescue some of the victims. The father was also shot and killed in the effort.