Quote:
AMY GOODMAN: The video is from the July 12th, 2007 attack on Iraqi civilians by US troops, released Monday by the website WikiLeaks.org.
Well, independent journalists Rick Rowley and David Enders were on the scene the very next day in 2007 and filed this exclusive report for Democracy Now!
RICK ROWLEY: We came to the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad one day after a US attack helicopter strike that killed twelve Iraqis, including a journalist and a driver working with Reuters. The US military claimed that they were under attack from rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire and that all of the dead, except for the two Reuters employees, were insurgents. But local residents showed us the remains of a burnt-out van spattered with blood and told us a different story.
WITNESS 1: [translated] The helicopter came yesterday from there and hovered around. Then it came right here where a group of people were standing. They didn’t have any weapons or arms of any sort. This area doesn’t have armed insurgents. They destroyed the place and shot at people, and they didn’t let anyone help the wounded.
WITNESS 2: [translated] I swear to God it was helicopters that attacked us. These people are all witnesses. They attacked us twice, not once.
RICK ROWLEY: Another resident went on to describe what happened to the man who tried to help the wounded.
WITNESS 3: [translated] The driver went to carry the injured, who had been shot in front of his eyes. While he was going to pick them up, the pilot of the helicopter kept flying above, watching the scene. They started firing at the wounded and the dead. The driver and the two children were also there. The helicopter continued shooting until none of the bodies were moving.
RICK ROWLEY: We asked the crowd of people what might have prompted the attack, and they said that when the journalist arrived, residents quickly gathered around him.
WITNESS 2: [translated] The group of civilians had gathered here because people need cooking oil and gas. They wanted to demonstrate in front of the media and show that they need things like oil, gas, water and electricity. The situation here is dramatically deteriorating. The journalists were walking around, and then the Americans started shooting. They started shooting randomly and targeted peaceful civilians from the neighborhood.
WITNESS 3: [translated] There were children in the car. Were they carrying weapons? There were two children.
WITNESS 2: [translated] Do we help the wounded or kill them? They killed all the wounded and drove over their bodies. Everyone witnessed it. And the journalist was among those who was injured, and the armored vehicle drove over his body.
WITNESS 3: [translated] The US forces, who call themselves “friendly” forces, were telling us on speakers that they were here to protect and help us. We heard those words very clearly. But what we saw was the opposite of that. We demand the American Congress and President Bush supervise their soldiers’ actions in Iraq.
RICK ROWLEY: For Democracy Now!, this is Rick Rowley and Dave Enders with Big Noise Films.
The point is that there were weapons (we know that); but according to witness #1: "They didn’t have any weapons or arms of any sort. This area doesn’t have armed insurgents." And, per witness #2: "They started shooting randomly and targeted peaceful civilians from the neighborhood."
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AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined by Josh Stieber in Washington, DC, a veteran of the company involved in the July 2007 shooting of twelve Iraqi civilians in the video released by WikiLeaks. He left the military as a conscientious objector last year and is a member of Iraqi Veterans Against the War.
Your reaction when you saw this videotape, Josh?
JOSH STIEBER: When I first saw it, I was, you know, kind of shocked that I recognized exactly what it was. And then, as I watched it a second time and then started to read about some of the reactions from it, I guess I was also surprised a little bit by kind of the nature of the conversations, because, you know, again, not to morally justify what happened—and, you know, as a conscientious objector, obviously I disagreed with our tactics—but I think the statements that have been put out by the military and by Secretary Gates yesterday have reaffirmed that what happened was by no means unusual.
So I guess the nature of the conversation, I think, is the really important thing to focus on here, in that, you know, the easy thing and maybe the natural thing to do would be to instantly judge or criticize the soldiers in this video, and again, not to justify what they did, but militarily speaking, they did exactly what they were trained to do. So I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that if we are shocked by this video—which, again, it is a very shocking video—if we’re shocked by this video, then we need to be asking questions of the larger system, because, again, this is how these soldiers were trained to act.
....
JOSH STIEBER: I guess that is an important thing that I think needs to be considered with that video, is that, again, by no means morally justifying what happened, but I think just the seventeen-minute WikiLeaks clip is taking things a little bit out of context in what was going on that day, was that the troops on the ground were searching house to house, and the helicopters were assigned to keep watch over them, and so part of that is to eliminate any threat that comes up. That was, you know, what we were trained with regularly in the military.
And again, I would take so much of this just back to the training that we had. And one thing that I think about is one exercise. Some of my leaders would ask the younger soldiers what they would do if somebody were to pull a weapon in a marketplace full of unarmed civilians. And not only did your response have to be that you would return fire, even if you knew it was going to hurt innocent civilians, because you’re trying aim at the person with the weapon, the answer had to be yes, but it had to be an instantaneous yes. So, again, these things are just hammered into you through military training. So that’s, you know, the background of what the people in the helicopter had in their minds, so that they saw this as a threat.
And actually, looking at the video myself, you know, based on my training, what I saw in the video of what the people on the ground were holding in their hands, whether or not it was a camera, but again, from my military training, I would have, you know, been told that that was a military—militarily justifiable thing. And, you know, top sources have confirmed this. But again, if you watch the forty-minute video, they actually recovered an RPG shell, so I think there’s evidence that there were weapons involved. And I think, you know, the conversation has to be that the people in the helicopter and the people in the military were responding exactly as they had been trained.
Regards