Wikileaks Defends Release of Video Showing Killing of Journalists in Iraq - NYT

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Wikileaks Defends Release of Video Showing Killing of Journalists in Iraq
By ROBERT MACKEY
April 6, 2010, 11:49 am

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As my colleague Elisabeth Bumiller reported, a senior American military official confirmed on Monday that a graphic video released by the Web site WikiLeaks.org, which shows an American helicopter shooting and killing a Reuters photographer and driver during a July 2007 attack in Baghdad, is authentic.

One of the whistle-blowing group’s founders, Julian Assange, explained and defended the decision to release the graphic, disturbing video shot from the helicopter during interviews in Washington on Monday with Al Jazeera and Russia Today.

Both of those appearances, and an edited version of the leaked video, are available on YouTube. (Be warned that even the edited version shows people being killed.) Wikileaks uploaded the 17-minute edit to YouTube on Monday morning, along with the complete video, which runs more than 39 minutes.

Soon after releasing the video, Mr. Assange discussed it with Alyona Minkovski, a Washington correspondent for Russia Today, an English-language satellite channel financed by the Russian government.

And...

As my colleagues Noam Cohen and Rogene Fisher reported on Monday, Wikileaks, which describes itself as “an intelligence agency of the people,” is a nonprofit group, created in the spring of 2007. In March, Stephanie Strom reported in The Times that the group’s release of an internal Pentagon report had upset the military:

The Pentagon concluded that “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army” — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.

On a page of links to additional information and reports on the strike, Wikileaks points to this blog post from Reuters in 2007 about the two slain journalists.

The group also uploaded a video made by an Icelandic journalist the group sent to Iraq to find two children who were wounded in the attack after their father stopped his van to try to rescue some of the victims. The father was also shot and killed in the effort.

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Link: http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/wikileaks-defends-release-of-video-showing-killing-of-journalists-in-iraq/#more-17583

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