{"id":5778,"date":"2022-01-08T22:28:23","date_gmt":"2022-01-08T22:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cubasupport.ie\/latest\/?p=5778"},"modified":"2022-01-08T22:28:27","modified_gmt":"2022-01-08T22:28:27","slug":"the-war-criminal-rewarded-the-truth-teller-punished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cubasupport.ie\/latest\/the-war-criminal-rewarded-the-truth-teller-punished\/","title":{"rendered":"The war criminal rewarded, the truth-teller punished"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On 12 July 2007, two US AH-64 Apache helicopters fired 30-millimetre cannon rounds at a group of Iraqi civilians in New Baghdad. These US Army gunners murdered at least a dozen people, including Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and his driver Saeed Chmagh. Reuters immediately asked for the US to conduct a probe into the killing. Instead, they were fed the official story by the US government that soldiers of Bravo Company, 2-16 infantry had been attacked by small arms fire as part of their Operation Ilaaj in the al-Amin al-Thaniyah neighbourhood. The soldiers called in air strikes, which came in and cleared the streets of insurgents. Reuters had information that the helicopters filmed the attack, and so the media house\u00a0requested<\/a>\u00a0the video from the US military. The United States refused, claiming that there was no such video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two years later, Washington Post<\/em> reporter David Finkel published The Good Soldiers<\/em>, a book based on his time embedded in the 2-16 battalion. Finkel was with the soldiers in the al-Amin al-Thaniyah neighbourhood when they heard the Apache helicopters in action. He defended the US military, writing that \u2018the Apache crew had followed the rules of engagement\u2019 and that \u2018everyone had acted appropriately\u2019. The soldiers, Finkel wrote, were \u2018good soldiers, and the time had come for dinner\u2019. In his recounting, Finkel made it clear that he had watched a video of the incident, even as the US government denied its existence to Reuters and to human rights organisations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 5 January 2010, Chelsea Manning, a US soldier in Iraq, downloaded a tranche of documents and videos pertaining to the war onto compact discs and took them back with her to the United States. On 21 February 2010, Manning passed on the material related to Iraq to the WikiLeaks organisation, which had been set up in 2006 by a group of engaged people led by an Australian national by the name of Julian Assange. WikiLeaks and Assange went through the footage and published the full video from the Apache helicopters on their\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0under the title \u2018Collateral Murder\u2019 on 5 April 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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