Wikileaks has just released this disturbing footage of the killing of Iraqi civilians by US helicopter gunships in August July 2007. This is really horrific. The so-called weapons that the gunship soldiers thought they saw were all in fact cameras. They shot to death a group of people walking down the street, and then slaughtered people with children coming to help the wounded, just because some of them had cameras.

Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com

The Collateral Murder website has a transcript of the video below.

Via PZ Myers, who says:

Perhaps the killers were merely mistaken, as happens in war. Perhaps they had better views of weaponry than can be seen in this video. But that doesn’t explain what happened next, when a van pulls up to help a wounded man and they open fire again, fully aware of what was going on below them, and fire several bursts into the people and into the van.

Maybe they could see weapons more clearly than I can. But then how did they fail to notice two small faces peering out of the passenger side window of the van? They shot journalists and children, all the while laughing and congratulating themselves on the ‘nice’ pile of bodies they had produced. And when they see soldiers on the ground rushing injured children to aid, they say, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.”

I am ashamed. We are the storm troopers, the murderous invaders, the butchers of children, the laughing barbarians. We aren’t in Iraq to help those people, our troops are there to oppress them…when we aren’t gunning them down outright.

There’s also a point in the recordings of voices over the radio where a soldier in a ground vehicle says “I think we just ran over some bodies” and laughs.

Mistakes happen, especially in such a tense situation where there really are sometimes insurgents with weapons. But when they do, cover-ups that call innocent people insurgents, when everybody else in that area knew exactly what had really happened, only make the people of the occupied territory resentful, suspicious, distrusting and vengeful. And they wonder why they’ve failed to win hearts and minds in Iraq?

Kudos to the military whistleblowers who collected and divulged the source material to Wikileaks. We all need to know about these things, no matter how disturbing they are.

Categories: ethics & philosophy, law & order, violence

Tags: shootings