Posted April 5, 2010
A just released video from the internet news agency WikiLeaks shows gun-sight footage of Iraqi civilians being mowed down from a US Apache helicopter during the summer of 2007. Those killed included two Reuters reporters, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. Reuters’ attempts to probe the military were met with responses that the reporters were part of a “hostile force.”
WikiLeaks’ footage, titled “Collateral Murder,” clearly shows a group armed only with cameras. As one of the victims crawls to a rescue van, he (and other civilians, including two children, inside the vehicle) are fired on again (warning, this is obviously chilling and disturbing footage):
A transcript is also available.
These eight murdered civilians are a fraction of around 100,000 documented deaths since the US occupation began — but the incriminating footage is unique. Please share it far and wide.
Meanwhile, the same routine is at work in Afghanistan — last month General Stanley McChrystal admitted that US troops have “shot an amazing number of people and killed a number” at checkpoints. “None has proven to have been a real threat to the force.”
Yesterday, yet another article was published that revealed new information in the coverup of three Afghan women, two of them pregnant, murdered by NATO forces: Afghan investigators also determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”