UPDATED Iraq: Reactions to the "Collateral Murder" Video

UPDATE 7 APRIL: Juan Cole, highlighting a discussion on Reddit including a number of soldiers, offers these "main conclusions":

1. The cover-up of the pilots' mistake in killing the Reuters cameramen and mistaking their cameras for an RPG is the worst thing about this episode.

2. While the pilots who fired at apparently armed men (and at least 3 were actually armed) thought they were saving US ground troops who had been pinned down from men with small arms, they had less justification for firing on the van. Indeed, the latter action may have been a war crime since the van was trying to pick up the wounded and it is illegal to fire on the wounded and those hors de combat.

Iraq and “Collateral Murder”: The White House Response
US Military & Iraq’s Civilians: The “Collateral Murder” Video

3. While many actions of the pilots may not have been completely wrong under their rules of engagement, nevertheless they often acted inexcusably, and their attitude is inhuman and deplorable.


The US military's Central Command has posted a set of documents, released under the Freedom of Information Act, on the deaths in Iraq in 2007 of Reuters journalists, who were among killed in the "collateral murder" video released yesterday by Wikileaks.

James Fallows of The Atlantic, who has covered Iraq extensively over the last decade, reacts:

I can't pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people down. That's not where the real responsibility lies.

Bill Roggio of The Weekly Standard has a different view:

There is nothing in that video that is inconsistent with the military's report. What you see is the air weapons team engaging armed men.

Second, note how empty the streets are in the video. The only people visible on the streets are the armed men and the accompanying Reuters cameramen. This is a very good indicator that there was a battle going on in the vicinity. Civilians smartly clear the streets during a gunfight.

Third, several of the men are clearly armed with assault rifles; one appears to have an RPG. Wikileaks purposely chooses not to identify them, but instead focuses on the Reuters cameraman. Why?

Glenn Greenwald of Salon challenges this by putting the video in the context of the Pentagon's fight against Wikileaks and other cover-ups of civilian deaths:

WikiLeaks released a video of the U.S. military, from an Apache helicopter, slaughtering civilians in Iraq in 2007 -- including a Reuters photojournalist and his driver -- and then killing and wounding several Iraqis who, minutes later, showed up at the scene to carry away the dead and wounded (including two of their children).  The video (posted below) is truly gruesome and difficult even for the most hardened person to watch, but it should be viewed by everyone with responsibility for what the U.S. has done in Iraq and Afghanistan (i.e., every American citizen).

Reuters has been attempting for two years to obtain this video through a FOIA request, but has been met with stonewalling by the U.S. military.  As Dan Froomkin documents, the videotape demonstrates that military officials made outright false statements about what happened here and were clearly engaged in a cover-up:  exactly as is true for the Afghanistan incident I wrote about earlier today, which should be read in conjunction with this post.