A while ago I did an article about violent videogames, where I jokingly made reference to accidentally shooting civilians in a helicopter gunship. Watching this footage thats been leaked on the internet of insurgents and civilians (including a reuters cameraman) being slaughtered makes you wonder how far war is from a videogame today. The gunship attacking the crowd doesn’t appear to be at threat, with the pilots chatting casually – and then laughing when they make the kill.
This isn’t the first time journalists have been killed by the US Army – the Al Jazeera offices were bombed not just in Iraq, but also in Afghanistan as well. This slaughter of journalists might have been a mistake, but the attack on Al Jazeera offices twice in two wars must be a deliberate attack on a tv station that is critical of the war on terror.
The footage of this attack must have been extremely hard to obtain, and leak without risk of discovery and or court martial from the US military – it’s very likely there are many more cases like this across Iraq, that we will never see footage of. The mainstream media has ignored research done by institutions like ORB predicting over a million Iraqi casualties, with Iraq Body Count research showing the single largest cause of death was from US/UK forces attacking from the air.
“A lot of my friends are in that video. After watching the video, I would definitely say that that is, nine times out of ten, the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are. If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like. If you don’t like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war.”—Josh Stieber, identified by commondreams.org as a veteran soldier of the same Company depicted in the Iraq killing video.
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2010/04/09