[58] Reuters subsequently asked the U.S. military to probe the deaths. Wired.com: But you had been in combat before. They request permission to fire a missile at the building, describing it as "abandoned" or "under construction". They were stating that these people had no weapons whatsoever, that they were just carrying cameras. Reuters also stated that local police described the attack as "random American bombardment". The editors asked to see the remaining footage so Reuters could check whether it had been edited or manipulated. [23] Among the group are two journalists working for Reuters, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh. [43] He walks into a building which has been identified as the source of fire at U.S. ground troops. He was kind of sitting on the floorboard of the van, but with his head laying on the bench seat in the front. The Web site does not slow down the video to show that at least one man in that group was carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, a clearly visible weapon that runs nearly two-thirds the length of his body. You can hear the medic saying on the video, "There's nothing I can do here, she needs to be evac'd." The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. With Russia regularly knocking out Ukraines power grid, the country has turned to high-capacity batteries to keep it connected to the worldand itself. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. With such pain, friendship might be too much to ask. "[32][77] He said that WikiLeaks "does not point out that at least one man was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. Soldier Ethan McCord's Eyewitness Story, "Shadowed, Clamoring, Blurry. I have a huge place in my heart for children, having some of my own. So if people have a different opinion, the full material is there for them to analyse and assess. Gates said that the video provides the public with a view of warfare "as seen through a soda straw". Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Assange responded: Yes, absolutely Our promise to the public is that we will release the full source material. [18][25][31] Chmagh was killed[18][25][31] along with three other men, while two children, not known to be in the van to the U.S. forces, were injured. Ad Choices, U.S. So I just sucked it up and tried to move on with everything. [116] The military did not include the attack on the building in their report. Part of Banksy's, This page was last edited on 20 February 2023, at 21:26. McCord's courage and integrity has nothing to do with his US army training. In the video, you can clearly see that they did have weapons to the trained eye. The ground troops that secured the site of the first two strikes then receive small arms fire from nearby buildings. [58], On July 25, 2007, during an off-the-record briefing in Baghdad by the U.S. military, two Reuters editors were shown "less than three minutes of video from the Apaches gun camera, up to the exact moment it opened fire the first time." I think it is good that they're putting this stuff out there. The men become obscured behind a building as the Apache moves around the group. I was also told that there would be repercussions if I was to go to mental health. Their 43-year-old father, Saleh, had been driving them to a class when he spotted one of the wounded men moving in the street and drove over to help him, only to become a victim of the Apache guns. Wired.com: What did you understand that to mean? In July 2007, McCord, a 33-year-old Army specialist, was engaged in a firefight with insurgents in an Iraqi suburb when his platoon, part of Bravo Company, 2-16 Infantry, got orders to investigate a nearby street. She draws parallels with soldiers who suffered post-traumatic stress disorder in earlier wars. McCord, who served seven years in the military before leaving in the summer of 2009 due to injuries, recently posted an apologetic letter online with fellow soldier Josh Steiber supporting the release of the video and asking the family's forgiveness. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. Responsibility for civilian deaths in such encounters rests with those who violate the rules of war. They were destroyed. Ethan McCord, a former US soldier, has shown great courage and integrity by exposing and condemning US war crimes in Iraq. [86], Ethan McCord, the soldier seen in the video carrying the injured boy, recalled in an interview on The Marc Steiner Show that on arrival at the scene, "The first thing I did was run up to the van". [22], In the video on the morning of July 12, 2007, the crews of two United States Army AH-64 Apache helicopters observe a gathering of men near a section of Baghdad in the path of advancing U.S. ground troops, some armed with AKMs and RPGs. I do know that there was a teenage girl [in there], just because I saw the pictures when I was there, that one of the soldiers took. After getting permission to fire, the Apache crew fired on the van. Ethan McCord, who was one of the first soldiers on the scene in the 2007 attack, told Wired.com that he saw several weapons at the scene, including a rocket propelled grenade launcher. Ethan McCord was a member of the military unit in "Collateral Murder" - the Wikileaks video showing 12 Iraqis being killed from a US helicopter.He rescued the two children severely wounded in the attack and is now speaking out to corroborate the Collateral Murder video. Apache helicopters were called in by a soldier in the Humvee (Hotel 26) under attack from the same position used by Namir Noor-Eldeen to photograph the vehicle. [63] The site stated on its Twitter account on January 8, 2010, that it had a copy of gunsight footage of the incidents. [28] Noor-Eldeen has a camera and Chmagh is talking on his mobile phone. Ahlam Abdelhussein Tuman, the widow of the man who had been driving the van, and the mother of the children McCord had carried out, responded to the open letter in 2010:[75]. I hit 'em" and another member of the crew responds "Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards".[29]. When he is rescued, suddenly that belief changed. They were stating that these people had no weapons whatsoever, that they were just carrying cameras. The Apache crew saw unarmed[25] men exit the vehicle and move to Chmagh. They did have weapons there. McCord: My platoon sergeant knew that I was having a hard time with it and that same night he came into the room and he told me, hey, just so you know, both of the children survived, so you can suck it up now. This is his account of what he saw. That's the hard part to swallow. [92][93] The Internet chats between Manning and Lamo were revealed to the public by Wired. Ethan McCord pulled your daughter and son from the van, and when doing so, saw the faces of his own children back home. It shouldn't have surprised you what you saw. [19], The team observed several individuals from this group, some possibly wounded, run into a large multistory building. McCord states he was yelled at for not "pulling security". [96] Her trial on the remaining charges began on June 3, 2013. They wrote that:[71][72][73][74]. [47] Greenwald called the second airstrike a "plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety". As the pilot positions the helicopter to attack the building, two unarmed men walk towards, and perhaps into, the building. Highlighted in the 17-minute version of the video are Noor-Eldeen with a camera and Chmagh talking on his mobile phone. You are seeing only a very narrow picture of the events". Two children were found in the van, a four-year-old girl with gunshot wounds and embedded windscreen glass wounds and an eight-year-old boy with multiple wounds, including brain damage arising from shrapnel damage to his right temporal lobe. [32] Assange also said "it's ludicrous to allege that we have taken anything out of context in this video". [18] Al Jazeera stated that the Army had received "reports of small arms fire", but were unable to positively identify the gunmen. McCord: I doubt that they were a part of that firefight. How to Make Sure Youre Not Accidentally Sharing Your Location, Security News This Week: Sensitive US Military Emails Exposed. And cracking jokes is a way of pushing that stuff down. [19], Fox News said that of the attack "WikiLeaks appears to have done selective editing that tells only half the story. [59] Reuters requested a copy of the full video under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on the same day. Soldier on 2007 Apache Attack: What I Saw", "Redacted internal US Army report: "Investigation into Civilian Casualties Resulting from an Engagement on 12 July 2007 in the New Baghdad District of Baghdad", "WikiLeaks releases video of slaughter in Iraq", "Military shooting of Reuters men online", "Joan Smith: Now we see what war does to those who wage it", "US soldier on Baghdad airstrike: "Not out of the ordinary in Iraq", "2 soldiers in 'Collateral Murder' video apologize. And where the soldier said [in the video], "Well, you shouldn't take your kids to battle." McCord: I have never seen anybody being shot by a 30-millimeter round before. [But] I was actually starting to get kind of better. But you're not supposed to do that in Iraq. Soldier Ethan McCord speaking about the civilian massacre documented in WikiLeaks's April 2010 vid. Their overall mission that day was to protect us, to provide support for us, so I can see where the initial attack on the group of men was warranted. Ethan McCord had just returned from dropping his children at school earlier this month, when he turned on the TV news to see grainy black-and-white video footage of a soldier running from a bombed-out van with a child in his arms. Two former soldiers from the Army unit responsible for the Wikileaks "Collateral Murder" incident have written an open-letter of "Reconciliation and Responsibility" to those injured in the July 2007 attack, in which U.S. forces wounded two children and killed over a dozen people, including the father of those children and two Reuters employees. I grabbed the medic and we went into the back. US Soldiers from Wikileaks Collateral Murder Video Apologize. A Pentagon spokesman said the video did not contradict the official finding that the helicopters' crew acted within the rules of engagement and said that the inquiry backed the assessment that the group of men were carrying a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG). [18][25][31] As the U.S. soldiers moved towards the site of the attack, a van stopped near Chmagh. We have asked our fellow veterans and service-members, as well as civilians both in the United States and abroad, to sign in support of this letter, and to offer their names as a testimony to our common humanity, to distance ourselves from the destructive policies of our nation's leaders, and to extend our hands to you. [18] Both helicopters strafe a group of ten men with 30 mm rounds once they became visible again. It wasnt like a cry of pain really. That's when I started screaming, "The boy's alive! We were engaged in our own conflict roughly about three or four blocks away. These people were operating in split second situations.". She wrote that the co-pilot urged a dying, unarmed journalist to pick up a weapon as he tried to crawl to safety and that "the Apache crew open[ed] fire on civilians". That's not leaking, that's a pure editorial." US soldiers Ethan McCord's Eyewitness Story of coming across the aftermath of the infamous Wikileaks Collateral Murder in which over a dozen innocent civilians, 2 of which were Reuters journalists, were killed. We humbly ask you what we can do to begin to repair the damage we caused. "I grabbed him and ran to the Bradley myself". He's no longer in the Army. Plus: Microsoft fixes several zero-day bugs, Google patches Chrome and Android, Mozilla rids Firefox of a full-screen vulnerability, and more. I was called a pussy and that I needed to suck it up and a lot of other horrible things. [19] This account of first bringing the wounded children to the Combat Support Hospital appears to be contradicted by orders by radio that form part of the video record, which forbids it and orders that the children be handed over to local police. He gave his view of the context of the killings: the Reuters guys walked into the hottest spot of a very hot morning. [88], McCord requested mental health assistance following his experiences on July 12, but was told by his superior officers to "get the sand out of [his] vagina" and to "suck it up and be a soldier". They're like, oh yeah, we're the "collateral murder" company. [Then] we were just told to move to this [other] location. You joke about the situations and what's happened to push away your true feelings of the matter. Josh states that these casualties demonstrate the impact of U.S. military policy on both the civilians and the soldiers on the ground. McCord, together with another former member of the company, Josh Stieber, have addressed an open "Letter of Reconciliation" to the Iraqi people taking responsibility for their role in this. We are both soldiers who occupied your neighborhood for 14 months. Some of them [say] I don't care what anybody says they're not there. McCord: I wasn't around that building when it happened. You Cant Trust App Developers Privacy Claims on Google Play, Mozilla researchers found that apps often provide inaccurate data use disclosures, giving people a false sense of security., Batteries Are Ukraines Secret Weapon Against Russia. The footage was portrayed as classified,[7] but the individual who leaked it, U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning,[a] testified in 2013 that the video was not classified. Smoked is basically like you're doing pushups a lot, you're doing sit-ups crunches and flutter kicks. Home: Laytonsville, Maryland Served in: Baghdad (Rustamiyah) 07-08 Fort Riley, KS 06-07, 08-09, BACKGROUND ON ETHAN MCCORD: Branch of service: United States Army (USA) Unit: 1st ID Rank: Spc. The Washington Post has denied having any copy of the unedited video prior to WikiLeaks release of their edited version, and Finkel (who was on book leave from The Washington Post at the time) said that he has never made any statement about his sources for the story, except that it was "sourced from unclassified information and my presence in the area that day". On the video, it is then seen that Army soldiers establish a perimeter around the site and extract the children from the burning van. "[112], On April 5, 2010, the same day as the release of the video footage by WikiLeaks, the United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released a collection of documents including two investigative reports. Both of these men, Chmagh and Tomal, were killed in the second strike, and two of Tomal's children were badly wounded. As Russia has accelerated its cyberattacks on its neighbor, it's barraged the country with an unprecedented volume of different data-destroying programs. The majority of us aren't. The WikiLeaks edited video did not add arrows pointing to these men, or label them, as it did with the men carrying cameras. [32] The legal review carried out by the U.S. Army stated that the two children were evacuated to the 28th Combat Support Hospital via Forward Operating Base Loyalty, then transferred to an Iraqi medical facility the next day. [65][66] Hanzlik said images gathered during a military investigation of the incident show multiple weapons around the dead bodies in the courtyard, including at least three RPGs. Describing doubts over his initial enthusiasm in Iraq, McCord said that "I didnt understand why people were throwing rocks at us, why I was being shot at and why we're being blown up, when I have it in my head that I was here to help these people. Now, as far as rules of engagement, [Iraqis] are not supposed to pick up the wounded. From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region. They also found 10-year-old Sajad Mutashar and his five-year-old sister Doaha covered in blood in a van. When the cameraman on the ground aimed his camera in the direction of Bravo Company 216, a pilot remarked "He's getting ready to fire". "[90], James Spione made a short documentary film about the airstrikes called Incident in New Baghdad, featuring a first-person account from Ethan McCord. "[88] In this interview, McCord reports that repercussions for seeking mental health help could include being labeled as a "malingerer", a crime under U.S. military law. What was shown in the Wikileaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created. According to Tom Raju, a reporter at CNN, "the soldiers of Bravo Company, 216 Infantry had been under fire all morning from rocket-propelled grenades and small arms on the first day of Operation Ilaaj in Baghdad". All rights reserved. That classified video created its own firestorm when the whistleblower site Wikileaks posted it April 5 on a website titled "Collateral Murder" and asserted that the attack was unprovoked. [94], WikiLeaks said they were unable to confirm whether or not Manning was the source of the video, stating "we never collect personal information on our sources", but saying that "if [Manning is the] whistleblower then, without doubt, [s]he's a national hero"[95] and "we have taken steps to arrange for [her] protection and legal defence". Our secretary of defense may say the U.S. won't lose its reputation over this, but we stand and say that our reputation's importance pales in comparison to our common humanity. James W. McCord Jr., a security expert who led a band of burglars into the shambles of the Watergate scandal and was the first to expose the White House crimes and cover-ups that precipitated the . . However, I don't feel that the attack on the [rescue] van was necessary. Ethan McCord: Right. Smith describes this reaction as inhuman. The crew then reposition the helicopter and fire two more missiles into the upper floors of the building[44], WikiLeaks said in the preface to one of their videos of the incident that "some of the men appear to have been armed [although] the behavior of nearly everyone was relaxed" in the introductory text of the shorter video. [62] At a February 2013 pretrial hearing, Manning stated that Finkel "was quoting, I feel in verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew". McCord: She had a stomach wound and she had glass in her eyes and in her hair. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. 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