Wikileaks reveals video showing US air crew shooting down Iraqi civilians | World news. A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today. The footage of the July 2007 attack was made public in a move that will further anger the Pentagon, which has drawn up a report identifying the whistleblower website as a threat to national security. The US defence department was embarrassed when that confidential report appeared on the Wikileaks site last month alongside a slew of military documents.
The release of the video from Baghdad also comes shortly after the US military admitted that its special forces attempted to cover up the killings of three Afghan women in a raid in February by digging the bullets out of their bodies. The newly released video of the Baghdad attacks was recorded on one of two Apache helicopters hunting for insurgents on 12 July 2007. US drone strikes target rescuers in Pakistan – and the west stays silent | Glenn Greenwald. The US government has long maintained, reasonably enough, that a defining tactic of terrorism is to launch a follow-up attack aimed at those who go to the scene of the original attack to rescue the wounded and remove the dead. Morally, such methods have also been widely condemned by the west as a hallmark of savagery. Yet, as was demonstrated yet again this weekend in Pakistan, this has become one of the favorite tactics of the very same US government.
A 2004 official alert from the FBI warned that "terrorists may use secondary explosive devices to kill and injure emergency personnel responding to an initial attack"; the bulletin advised that such terror devices "are generally detonated less than one hour after initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population". "A van draws up next to the wounded man and Iraqis climb out. They are unarmed and start to carry the victim to the vehicle in what would appear to be an attempt to get him to hospital. A question of legality. A fully armed US military Reaper drone in Afghanistan Attacks by the CIA on rescuers and funeral-goers may be morally questionable. But are such attacks legal? It is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions to attack rescuers wearing emblems of the Red Cross or Red Crescent. But what if rescuers wear no emblems, or if civilians are mixed in with militants, as the Bureau’s investigation into drone attacks in Waziristan has repeatedly found?
Speaking publicly for the first time on the controversial CIA drone strikes, President Obama claimed last week that they are used strictly to target terrorists, rejecting what he called ‘this perception we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly’. He also claimed that the strikes ‘have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties’. Despite such assertions, some international legal experts continue to question the covert drone campaign, arguing that the strikes amount to little more than state-sanctioned extra-judicial executions.
Witnesses speak out. President Obama discusses Pakistan at the White House Situation Room, October 2009 Researchers working for the Bureau in Waziristan spoke to people who had witnessed US drone attacks on both rescuers and funeral-goers. These personal testimonies provide eyewitness accounts of events reported in leading media outlets including the New York Times, CNN, ABC News and Associated Press. The Bureau has also included comments from Washington Post national security correspondent Joby Warrick, on the CIA’s decision to attack a funeral in 2009. ‘We saw that all the people died’ On December 17 2009 CIA drones attacked the village of Degan. But in the aftermath of the attack, as villagers and Taliban tried to retrieve the dead and injured, the drones returned to the attack. That day 30-year old Zahidullah was in Degan visiting his mother’s brother: I was in my uncle’s house and there were approximately six drones in the air.
In a war situation no one is allowed to attack the Red Cross. Get the Data: Obama’s terror drones. The remains of a house destroyed in a CIA drone strike in Waziristan, April 2009 (Noor Behram) As part of its ongoing investigation into the US covert war the Bureau has examined thousands of credible media reports relating to more than 310 Central Intelligence Agency drone strikes in Pakistan. These incidents were reported by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, CNN, ABC News, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and reputable Pakistani media (see bottom table). CIA drone strikes tend to be reported on a case-by-case basis.
Yet it became clear to the Bureau that a number of specific tactics were being deployed. These included multiple attacks by drones on rescuers attempting to aid victims of previous strikes. With the aid of Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai in Peshawar, the Bureau has spent four months working with independent researchers in Waziristan seeking to validate the reports.