Video of Baghdad war casualties explodes among bloggers
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When an Internet group leaked video this week showing a U.S. military helicopter crew killing a dozen people in Baghdad in 2007, the blogosphere went ballistic.
The video, which was decrypted and posted Monday by WikiLeaks under the title ‘Collateral Murder,’ eventually made its way, in part, onto CNN, but the story lived and bred on the Web.
Commentators were aghast after seeing clips of an Apache helicopter gun down people scurrying on the ground in Iraq, including Reuters journalists Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. The Washington Post reported on the event in 2007.
This week’s assessments from bloggers ran the gamut of commentary about government transparency, war tactics and the risk of on-assignment journalism.
Some of the most interesting analysis came not from political pundits but from those with experience on the battlefield. Former U.S. infantryman Anthony Martinez wrote a thoughtful piece analyzing the intricacies of the attack.
While he notes that he was never a pilot -- contrary to a Yahoo News story linking to his blog -- Martinez has spent much of his time watching Iraq aerial footage: ‘a conservative estimate would be around 4,500 hours,’ he writes. Martinez also served two tours in Iraq with the Army, he notes in his bio.
Martinez condemns WikiLeaks for making erroneous notation in the video about specific scenes. He writes:
There are many veterans with thousands of hours experience in both analyzing aerial video and understanding the often-garbled radio transmissions between units. It is not unreasonable to think any number of us would be willing to make sure everything is identified correctly, and all jargon is translated appropriately, before things go to the presses. Promoting truth with gross errors is just as shameful as an unnecessary engagement.
The New York Times has rounded up reactions from military blogs, including Martinez’s. WikiLeaks defends the tape’s release. Meanwhile, the military said it couldn’t find records of the video. But after an investigation, U.S. Central Command said the aircrew ‘accurately assessed’ the situation.
Much of the dissenting commentary took shots at WikiLeaks. The Jawa Report wrote, ‘These people are beyond stupid, they’re evil. Worst case scenario this is a few innocent being accidentally killed in the fog of war.’
Likewise, Hot Air notes that the reporters who were killed knew the dangers when they signed up for the job: ‘War correspondents take huge risks to bring news of a war to readers far away. What this shows is just how risky it is to embed with terrorists, especially when their enemy controls the air.’
Two other high-profile blogs, the Weekly Standard and the American, also took issue with WikiLeaks’ framing of the incident as a murder.
Mediatedefends the military personnel in the video, who, the writer says, ‘audibly mistook the camera for an RPG, a weapon that can, and has, taken down Apache Helicopters.’
Daily Kos explored the concept of government openness, and wrote, ‘This is a move toward transparency that should have been practiced from the moment the Army found out they killed a number of innocents’
‘Collateral Murder’ has been viewed more than 4.2 million times. It can be viewed on YouTube, but be warned: It is violent and depicts a real-world war scenario.
-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian