Via Think Progress…

“Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” That’s a comment from an American soldier viewing the aftermath of an horrific war crime on the streets of a eastern Baghdad suburb on July 12, 2007. A U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopter crew apparently mistook the camera equipment of a Reuters journalist for a weapon, and opened fire with a 30 mm automatic chain gun.

Photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed. Nine other civilians, including two men who stopped and tried to help the wounded Reuters driver, were also killed. In the van driven by the would-be rescuers, two children were wounded.

This morning at the National Press Club, whistleblower website Wikileaks unveiled a video, obtained from unnamed military sources, from one of the Apache helicopters involved in the attack. The classified video was originally encrypted (Warning: violent imagery).

From Wikileaks:

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, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The video shows unmistakable violations of the U.S. rules of engagement, and the Law of Land Warfare.

I wish I could say incidents like this are rare, and preventable. That’s not the case. Most such occurrences receive little attention, and seem to have been common in the course of military operations against insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Recently, General Stanley McChrystal told the New York Times about the prevalence of U.S. and NATO attacks on civilian noncombatants in Afghanistan:

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat.”

UPDATE: NATO Now Admits Killing Civilians in February Afghanistan Raid Glenn Greenwald has more, particularly about how the U.S. media uncritically reported the original false cover story about this atrocity.

UPDATE: Danger Room has more, including the news that Wikileaks has plans to release video of an air strike last year in Afghanistan that reportedly claimed the lives of dozens of civilians.

UPDATE: On Monday, cable news channels ignored the Wikileaks scoop, with the notable exception of Dylan Ratigan’s MSNBC show. Rachel Maddow showed a snippet Tuesday. And CNN put a black box over the picture so their viewers couldn’t see what happened.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald reminds us not to miss the point:

The value of the Wikileaks/Iraq video and the Afghanistan revelation is not that they exposed unusually horrific events. The value is in realizing that these events are anything but unusual.

UPDATE: Follow-up on the children wounded in the attack, Sayad and Doaha. Their father was taking them to school when he stopped to help the wounded Reuters driver.

UPDATE: Military can’t find its copy of Iraq killing video. Imagine that.

UPDATE: A Reuters reporter wrote a story about the killings that quoted war crime experts. The piece was spiked by order of David Schlesinger, the editor in chief of Reuters. But Raw Story obtained a copy.

[H]uman rights lawyers and other experts who have viewed the footage say they have many concerns about how the pilots operated, particularly when it came to firing on the van, which was also carrying two children who were wounded in the attack.

“I don’t think there’s any question that this is a violation of the Geneva Conventions,” said Clive Stafford-Smith, a U.S.-British human rights lawyer who runs the charity Reprieve,referring to the body of laws that governs armed conflict.

“There are two aspects to it — firstly it was clear that these people were unarmed or not fighting, and then there’s the shooting of the wounded man as he was trying to crawl away and people were coming to help him,” he told Reuters.

The Geneva Conventions state that protection must be given to those who “collect and care” for the wounded in a conflict”whether friend or foe”, but lawyers said that principle appeared to have been abandoned in this case.

…Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British army officer who has conducted investigations in war zones, said knowing exactly what rules of engagement the pilots were operating under was critical to understanding whether they had acted appropriately.

But even then, he said, the decision to fire on the van as unarmed men came to help one of the wounded appeared to be a clear breach of the laws governing military conduct in war.

“Engaging the people picking up the wounded is outrageous,”he said. “That is the element that is blatant. That is against all humanitarian law and the rules of conflict — most definitely and without a doubt,” he told Reuters.