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Collateral Murder Favorite
In July 12 2007, during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, two United States Apache helicopters opened fire to a group of men claiming they were armed and dangerous. Two journalists that belonged to Reuters agency, as well as two children, were part of the attacked group.
After three attacks, several men were killed, including the reporters who´s cameras were mistaken for weapons.
After several attempts of obtaining the official video through the Freedom on Information Act, in 2010, Wikileaks released two videos showing the attacks’ footage. One, a short version of 17 minutes documented the first parts of the attack and a 39-minute video documenting the whole attack. Videos ere identified as authentic by an anonymous U.S. defense official. The footage was released in a press conference by the name of Collateral Murder.
While there has been a debate around the possibility of the men attacked and have they been armed or not, and the possible exaggeration and anti-war biases of the video, there seems to be an agreement that US soldiers over reacted and that some of the casualties, particularly the reports and unarmed civilians could have been avoided. Whether the released footage offered a limited perspective or not, and whether the attacks were responses to previous aggression of people on the ground are issues that still haven´t been completely solved but there seems to be a consensus around the belief that the reporters and children were innocent victims of the attacks and the soldiers actions were, at least in part, unjustified.
After the release of the video Bradley Manning, a US Army Specialist, was arrested. The allegation is that he might have been who gave the official footage to Wikileaks prior to it being made public.
On June 2010, Democracy Now, an independent news channel transmitted a program where Daniel Ellsberg, Birgitta Jónsdóttir and Glenn Greenwald discuss the videos issues and the role of free information in global contemporary context.
