Read the explanation here before deciding whether to watch the video.
An excerpt:
5th April 2010 10:44 EST 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...
After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".
About 2000 comments on the Reddit thread already, including these:
Why isn't this on CNN yet?*
Its on the front page of Al Jazeera http://english.aljazeera.net/
Because, they're an actual news organization.
Because Tiger Woods returning to the golf course is more important...
If it's any consolation it's on the front page of Norway's biggest newspaper. Link
Update: The story is now posted at CNN.
Addendum: An excerpt from Glenn Greenwald's column this past week re the U.S. government's response to the existence of Wikileaks:
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." In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report -- obtained and posted by WikiLeaks -- devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled "Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?", ways it would seek to destroy the organization. It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but "even accessing the website itself is a crime," and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks' destruction...Second addendum: some measured interpretation of the incident.
Third addendum: Some salient comments from "WordyNinja" on a different Reddit thread re the concept that the important aspect about this video is not to place blame on the soldiers, but to be concerned about the suppression of its release and the creation of phony cover stories:
We don't get angry at a cop who shoots a teenager holding a toy gun in a dark alleyway [think Sgt. Al Powell in Die Hard]. We mourn for the child, grieve for the police officer having to be in that a situation, and very rarely assign blame in the wake of such a tragedy. BUT... If that same cop panics and plants crack and a real gun on the body to cover up his mistake, it's almost as if he had shot the kid out of malice.
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