Iraq and "Collateral Murder": The White House Response

Robert Gibbs, the White House Press Secretary, fields a question about the "collateral murder" video from Iraq in 2007, first appealing to the assembled journalists --- "Many of you know colleagues that have reported from exceedingly dangerous places in the world" --- and then declaring:

Our military will take every precaution necessary to ensure the safety and security of civilians, and in particular those who report in those dangerous places of behalf of news organisations.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGQmhzRTIkM#t=103[/youtube]

UPDATED Iraq: Reactions to the “Collateral Murder” Video
US Military & Iraq’s Civilians: The “Collateral Murder” Video

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.

UPDATED Iraq Latest: 8 Bombings Kill at Least 35

UPDATE 1500 GMT: Iraq's Interior Ministry says there were seven explosions, killing 35 and injuring at least 140. The attacks were a mix of car and suicide bombings. All but one were in resdential areas, most of them Shi'a, destroying three apartment buildings. The other explosion was near Haifa Street in central Baghdad.

0900 GMT: A police source has told Reuters that at least 28 people are dead. Associated Press is claiming, from sources, at least 34 dead and 100 wounded.

NEW Iraq: Reactions to the “Collateral Murder” Video
US Military & Iraq’s Civilians: The “Collateral Murder” Video

Four bombs this morning in Baghdad have killed at least 11 people. Iraqi security forces say two to four buildings have collapsed.


One of the attacks was a suicide bomber,who detonated explosives on Haifa Street near the National Museum in central Baghdad. Two explosions were in the Khadamiya district, killing at least five, and a car bomb in Shula in western Baghdad destroyed the buildings and left at least two dead.

The attacks follow Sunday's triple suicide bombing with a toll of 42 dead and hundreds wounded.

UPDATED Iraq: The Latest on Sunday's Embassy Bombings

UPDATE 5 APRIL: Iraq is on high alert, with the toll now at 42 and "hundreds injured". No one has claimed responsibility, although Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari has claimed that the attacks bear the hallmarks of Al Qa'eda in Iraq.

UPDATE 1630 GMT: Iraqi officials are now saying 30 dead and 224 injured. Among those killed are the Egyptian mission's Iraqi head of security and an Iraqi guard at the German embassy.

Iraq Latest: Moqtada al-Sadr Makes A Move

Beyond the three attacks, security forces stopped a bomb-laden car in Masbah, central Baghdad.


UPDATE 1055 GMT: The BBC has a slightly different report, saying that one of the two Mansour bombs was near the Syrian Embassy and --- perhaps more significantly --- the offices of the Iraqi National Congress, headed by controversial politician Ahmad Chalabi.

UPDATE 1050 GMT: An Interior Ministry source says the toll is now 30 dead and 168 wounded.

Three suicide car bombers struck this morning near foreign embassies. Two of the bombs were in the Mansour district near the German and Egyptian Embassies. The third was in central Baghdad near the Iranian diplomatic post.

The three explosions were co-ordinated, beginning at 11:10 a.m. local time (0810 GMT). Roads in the capital have been blocked off.

Latest reports of casualties are between 20 and 30 killed with 55 injured. The figure is almost certain to rise.

Earlier on Sunday, a roadside bomb targeting a police patrol in Baghdad wounded five officers and five civilians. Two mortar rounds landed in the Green Zone, the area of government offices and the US Embassy compound.

Sunday's bombs follow an attack early Saturday that killed 25 people, including members of Iraqi security forces and Sunni "Awakening Councils" allied with the US military, in the village of Albusaifi just to the south of Baghdad. Mortars were fired on the heavily fortified Green Zone later in the day.

Iraq Latest: Moqtada al-Sadr Makes A Move

Amidst the continuing power plays over who will lead the next Iraq Government, almost a month after the 7 March election, the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr took over the headlines on Friday, as his party held a referendum over whom they would support as Iraqi Prime Minister. (The vote was open to all Iraqis, not just Sadrists.)

Iraq: The Latest Political Moves

Sadr's party won 40 seats in the 325-member Iraqi Parliament, compared to the 91 of the Iraqqiya list headed by former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and the 89 of current Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law list. That does not make the Sadrists "a kingmaker", as The New York Times is at pains to point out. However, it does mark a notable shift of power: within the Iraqi National Alliance list of "religious Shia" groups, the Sadrists overtooked the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which had been the dominant party.


The effect in the non-Iraqi media has been marked. Only a few days ago, some reporters were still stuck in the misleading narrative that Allawi "won" because Iraqqiya had a narrow plurality of seats. That was plainly not the case, given the difficulties for Allawi in putting together a coalition of 163 seats. At the same time, many journalists were making the mistake of writing out the Iraqi National Alliance as the "third-place" group.

Now the pendulum has swung. The simple maths --- 91+ the 70 of the INA puts Allawi on the verge of a majority in Parliament; same for Maliki with 89+70 --- highlight that INA has a top-table seat in a deal, and Sadr is trying, with the weight of the 7 March result behind him, to be the leading INA representative.

So Friday's move for a referendum is politically significant. Unless Maliki and Allawi can resolve their personal differences and deep animosities between their two lists to forge a "grand coalition", Sadr will get what he has long sought: a place inside the Iraqi tent of power.

Mark the change, especially for those who see Iraq as a continuing narrative of American power. Less than six years ago, US officials were putting out orders to capture or kill the upstart cleric Sadr; less than two years ago, the US military was pushing and joining Maliki and Iraqi forces to "crush" the Sadrists.

This is now, first and foremost, an Iraqi story. And I suspect there are many chapters to come.