U.S. Apache Helicopter Killing Civilians in Iraq
April 6th, 2010
Wikileaks is a website launched in December 2006 that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive documents from governments and other organizations, while preserving the anonymity of its sources. A senior military official confirmed to the Associated Press that this video showing the murder of two Reuters journalists in 2007 is authentic. As the Huffington Posts’s Dan Froomkin reported yesterday, the video shows “a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver — and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.”
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald makes the important point that this is not an aberration in these dirty wars. “It’s the opposite: it’s par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that’s rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we’re seeing it on video not because it’s rare, but because it just so happened… to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed.”
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