One Day After 2007 Attack, Witnesses Describe US Killings of Iraqi Civilians

Watch the video.

We begin today with a Democracy Now! exclusive. As the U.S. Central Command says it has no plans to re-open an investigation into the July 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff, we’ll play never-before-seen eyewitness interviews filmed the day after the attack.

Military lawyers have reportedly been reviewing the classified video of the airstrikes released by the website Wikileaks on Monday. But Rear Admiral Hal Pittman, director of communications at Central Command, which oversees the war in Iraq, said in a statement to Reuters: “Central Command has no current plans to reinvestigate or review this combat action.”

However, CENTCOM did make public a redacted series of records on the case, including investigations days after the attack by the air cavalry and infantry units that were involved in the incident. According to an investigation by the 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, the military concluded the aircrew “accurately assessed that the criteria to find and terminate the threat to friendly forces were met in accordance with the law of armed conflict and rules of engagement.”

The chilling video footage taken from the US military helicopter shows US forces indiscriminately firing on Iraqis in the New Baghdad neighborhood of the Iraq capital. The dead included two employees of the Reuters news agency, photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh.

Before we go to the exclusive interviews with eyewitnesses to the attack, I want to play a short clip from the video released by Wikileaks. This is the moment US forces first open fire.

Minutes later the video shows US forces watching as a van pulls up to evacuate the wounded. They again open fire, killing several more people and wounding two children inside the van.

That video is from the July 12, 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 and filed this exclusive report for Democracy Now!

Rick Rowley, independent journalist with Big Noise Films. He has traveled to Iraq frequently as an unembedded journalist since the 2003 invasion. He was at the site of the 2007 helicopter attack the next day.

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