On 12 July 2007, American soldiers aboard an Apache helicopter killed 14 civilians in Baghdad. The U.S. military has always maintained these men were insurgents. The shooting was filmed on video and British-Canadian news agency Reuters had been looking for the footage for years. On Monday, the video was finally released by the American whistleblower website Wikileaks.com.

The footage shows American servicemen aboard the Apache asking for permission to shoot. They are following a group of 20 people, of whom five or six are allegedly carrying Russian machine guns and even a rocket grenade. In reality, it’s a group of Iraqi civilians, including two children, and two Iraqi journalists working for Reuters.
The video, which was shot from the helicopter, shows the shooting incident and the soldiers’ comments. Laughing can be heard and compliments are exchanged. When the children, sitting in a van, are hit, someone remarks: “You shouldn’t bring your child to war”.
The incident was investigated by the U.S. military shortly afterwards, but it found no irregularities had taken place. The footage was, however, eventually leaked to the Wikileaks website. It took the team behind the website several months to decode the secret images.
The footage proved to be quite shocking, says Dutch internet activist Rob Gonggrijp who worked with Wikileaks during this project. “If you watch the images of wounded children and their scars, it becomes real”, he told Radio Netherlands Worldwide. “I tried to keep my distance, but that was very difficult, especially after I saw the colour images of what happened. It was really upsetting”.
Wikileaks was established in 2006 and specializes in uncovering classified material from governments and businesses. In 2007 it published secret details of a deal between Iceland and the Netherlands regarding the Icesave bank scandal.
Wikileaks pulled out all the stops for the Iraq video. Every frame was investigated for its authenticity. The researchers launched a dedicated website and even sent a group of journalists to Baghdad to meet survivors and relatives of the men who were killed.
The US army has admitted the footage is genuine, saying that the soldiers probably thought the telephoto lens one of the photographers was carrying, was a rocket launcher.
However, that still doesn’t justify the shooting, says Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, who lead the investigation. “You may come up with an excuse for mistakes made in the heat of the moment, but that doesn’t extend to the entire attack. The U.S. army has been telling us lies about this incident and that’s why they kept it secret for so many years. If it hadn’t been leaked to us, we still wouldn’t know anything about this”.
The obvious question is: who leaked the video? Assange remains cautious: “We never mention details about our sources, but it’s certainly true that there’s a number of people in the U.S. military who are unhappy with this kind of content and who want to do something about it”.
That’s exactly what Wikileaks was established for, Assange adds. “This one is a bit more unique, in that it covers a broad spectrum of what happened during the war in Iraq and by extension what must be happening in Afghanistan, which we haven’t seen before”.
(Source: Radio Netherlands)