http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/6/massacre_caught_on_tape_us_militaryMassacre Caught on Tape: US Military Confirms Authenticity of Their Own Chilling Video Showing Killing of Journalists
The US military has confirmed the authenticity of newly released video showing US forces indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians. On Monday, the website WikiLeaks.org posted footage taken from a US military helicopter in July 2007 as it killed twelve people and wounded two children. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency, photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh. We speak with WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald.
<snip>
AMY GOODMAN: Video footage from a July 2007 attack on Iraqi civilians by US troops, released Monday by the website WikiLeaks.org.
Well, we’re joined now by two guests. Julian Assange is the co-founder of WikiLeaks.org, oversaw the release of this top-secret US military footage. He’s joining us from Washington, DC. And by video stream from Brazil, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, the constitutional law attorney and blogger for Salon.com. We called the Pentagon and the US Army, but they didn’t respond to our request for them to be on the broadcast.
Julian Assange, tell us how you got this footage.
JULIAN ASSANGE: We got this footage sometime last year. We don’t disclose precise times for reasons of source protection. When we first got it, we were told that it was important and that it showed the killing of journalists, but we didn’t have any other context, and we spent quite some months after breaking the decryption looking closely into this. And the more we looked, the more disturbing it became.
This is a sequence which has a lot of detail and, I think, in some ways covers most of the bad aspects of the aerial war in Iraq and what we must be able to infer is going on in Afghanistan. So we see not only this initial opening shot on a crowd, which is clearly mostly unarmed. There may be some confusion as to whether two people are armed or whether there’s a camera or arm, but it’s clear that the majority of the people are in fact unarmed. And as it later turns out, two of those people are simply holding cameras. But we go on from there into seeing the shooting of people rescuing a wounded man, and none of those people are armed.
What’s important to remember is that every step that the Apache takes in opening fire is authorized. It does pause before shooting. It explains the situation, sometimes exaggerating a little to its commanders, and gets authorized permission.
These are not bad apples. This is standard practice. You can hear it from the tones of the voices of the pilots that this is in fact another day at the office. These pilots have evidently and gunners have evidently become so corrupted, morally corrupted, by the war that they are looking for excuses to kill. That is why you hear this segment, “Come on, buddy! Just pick up a weapon,” when Saeed, one of the Reuters employees, is crawling on the curb. They don’t want him for intelligence value to understand the situation. The man is clearly of no threat whatsoever. He’s prostate on the ground. Everyone else has been killed. They just want an excuse to kill. And it’s some kind of—appears to me to be some kind of video game mentality where they just want to get a high score, get their kill count up. And later on you’ll hear them proudly proclaiming how they killed twelve to fifteen people.
..more..
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
