THE WIKILEAKS VIDEO: READING THE REPORT
Posted by Raffi Khatchadourian
The military has now released the findings of its informal legal investigation into Operation ILAAJ (CURE), a mission that took place in Baghdad in 2007, and was documented by a video camera mounted on an Apache helicopter. (The footage was publicized by WikiLeaks earlier this week.) As far as I can tell, the military has not released the accompanying investigatory materials, such as the sworn statements of the soldiers involved or the battle damage assessment. It is hard to make a complete judgment of these findings without all the evidence supporting it, but there are a few details worth noting.
The report notes that the gunner in the Apache perceived an escalation of the immediate threat to our ground troops after observing an individual peering around a building, preparing to fire an RPG, in this case at a Humvee that was about a block away. The individual appears to be Namir Noor-Eldeen, the Reuters photographer, and the perceived R.P.G. his telephoto lens. The findings note that soldiers in the Apache, having observed a hostile act, then continued to transition for the attack.
These observations are in one sense confirmed by the video, but in another they are undermined by it. They omit that the Apache had been given the authority to shoot the men, and was maneuvering to do so before Noor-Eldeen was seen peering around the building. A more in-depth legal review might ask: What were the conditions on the ground that brought about the permission to fire in the first place? At that earlier point, the pilots saw a couple of men with weaponsin their words, AK-47sambling around with a large group of people. Was the authority to attack all of them at that time justified?
The report also notes that a black van arrived to retrieve one of the wounded insurgents. The van was not black (even though it appears that way in the black-and-white video), and the wounded man who was being rescued, we now have strong reason to believe, was not an insurgent but a Reuters journalist named Saeed Chmagh. Family members of people in the vanalong with two children who were in it, who survivedhave said that the driver lived nearby, was driving his children to a tutoring session at a local school, and used his vehicle as a part-time taxi. Was he going to the scene of the attack to retrieve anyone specific, or did he drive by incidentally and retrieve an injured man who was struggling for his life on the ground? The choice of language is significant.
This document raises a more fundamental question about how civilian deaths are investigated: Must a legal inquiry first attempt to establish the facts, then measure the soldiers perceptions against those facts, to conclude whether the perceptions were reasonable? It would seem so. If the soldiers reasonably apprehended a threat, and acted with necessary force, then its possible to conclude that a tragic misunderstanding occurred. If they did not reasonably perceive a threat, or if they acted with disproportionate force, then something more troubling happened, and the incident requires further legal scrutiny. In this inquiry, the facts and the soldiers perceptions are mixed together with little distinction, so it is hard to see how the investigating officer could determine what was reasonable about the perceptions and what was not. The imprecision makes this document appear sloppy, whether its conclusions are justified or not.
There is another telling detail. This legal inquiry focusses only upon the deaths of the two Reuters journalists. It notes that the van was completely disabled, but it does not acknowledge that there were children inside the van, and that they were wounded, and that the wounding of children itself might be the object of legal analysis. It does not address the use of three Hellfire missiles to attack a building (which, as I pointed out in a post earlier this week, appears to be the most indiscriminate use of lethal force in the video.) Reportedly, the building was inhabited by three families. CNN has reported that the military is currently analyzing the video in it entirety. It will be interesting to see how the militarys analysis will address some of these other issues.
News Desk: The WikiLeaks Video: Reading the Report : The New Yorker