You pick the title – How war works, How collateral damage works, How mistakes work, How coverups work, or something else

Wikileaks today released a video that has been rumored for several weeks:

Collateral Murder

WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

You can watch the released video yourself on that page (it is also available on YouTube under the name “collateral murder”), but please be aware that the video contains both profanity and violence.

It is one of those videos that makes you think on many different levels: about war, about life, about human beings, about horrible mistakes and about how we should ethically respond when horrible mistakes happen.

As this article points out, Wikileaks is playing a growing role in exposing these types of coverups:

The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters

All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous government and economic elites around the world, including the U.S. Government. As The New York Times put it last week: “To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.”

If you are so inclined, put your preferred title in the comments.

See also:
- How the Rules of War Work
- Technology of War

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