Wikileaks: A brutal glimpse into the Iraq war

To see “the brutal reality” of what U.S. troops are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com, this tape is essential viewing. The website Wikileaks.org—an online forum for whistle-blowers to leak government and corporate secrets—has posted footage taken in 2007 from the gun-sight of a U.S. Apache helicopter in Iraq. The tape shows the chopper crew callously gunning down a dozen men in an Iraqi street—two of whom were later identified as unarmed Reuters journalists—then shooting up a van with two children inside as it comes to collect the wounded. “Look at those dead bastards,” chuckles one of the pilots as the dust settles. “Nice,” replies another. The U.S. military claims the massacre was completely justified, since several of the dead allegedly were armed. But thanks to the tape, the “myth and propaganda” that usually shape our perception of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been pierced. “What one sees on the video is how we conduct our wars.”

But what about what we don’t see? said Bill Roggio in The Weekly Standard. The Apache gunship may look as if it’s idly patrolling a residential neighborhood. In fact, the crew had been called to a dangerous part of the city to support U.S. infantrymen pinned down by enemy fire. With “careful watching,” furthermore, you can clearly see that some of the targeted men are carrying assault rifles. As for “the coldblooded merriment” of the soldiers as they riddle people with bullets, said George Packer in NewYorker.com, this “doesn’t make them war criminals.” To do their jobs, soldiers have to adopt a cavalier, bloodthirsty attitude about killing. That’s not “the whole truth” about soldiers or this incident, “but it is a truth.”

Therein lies the value of this tape, said Phil Bronstein in The Huffington Post. The ethics of what happened that day in Baghdad can be endlessly debated, but now anyone can see for themselves what the war in Iraq is truly like, without filter or censorship. For the past three years, the U.S. government refused Freedom of Information Act requests to release this footage. But now it’s out. Thanks to the Internet, and Wikileaks in particular, even an institution as powerful as the U.S. military can no longer keep a lid on its dirty secrets. “Transparency is the victor here.”

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