It cannot be that war crimes are not prosecuted and someone who has provided a platform to reveal them to the world public is prosecuted and punished.

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To make it clear once again whoever publishes war crimes is not a perpetrator!

The question should be were the war criminals in this helicopter held accountable?

A state and no matter which one protects the murderers in its army has no moral compass and has a great humanity deficit.

Due to the following scenes in the movie can be disturbing for sensitive people.

WikiLeaks, a website that publishes anonymously sourced documents, has released a video showing what apparently is a US military helicopter firing at unarmed civilians in Iraq. WikiLeaks said the footage, filmed from a helicopter cockpit, shows a missile strike and shooting on a square in a Baghdad neighbourhood in July 2007. The website said 12 civilians were killed in the attack, including two journalists, Namir Nour El Deen and Saeed Chmagh, who worked for the Reuters news agency. This is the full, unedited version of the footage.

Anyone with a moral compass knows that there is no secret betrayal when it comes to war crimes.

Any law system that treats the other is inherently wrong and does not serve equality but only state interests.

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Under Julian Assange, Wikileaks released the Collateral Murder video.

The footage shows Reuters journalists, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen and several other innocent people being gunned down by a US Apache helicopter.

George Bush and Tony Blair are not in prison, but Assange is jailed in the UK, with the US pursuing extradition to imprison him for 175 years. 🤔

Wikileaks - under Assange - released The Collateral Murder video.

The footage shows Reuters journalists, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen being gunned down by a US Apache helicopter.

Several others were killed while the US pilots laughed.

Assange was arrested for leaks like this and Bradly Manning was detained by the CIA for leaking the video and when he was released became Chelsa Manning.

Nothing like some good old American history.

“Governments Are Trying to Frighten Journalists”: Fmr. Guardian Head Alan Rusbridger on Assan FEB 23, 2024

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

"On Monday, April 5th, 2010, Julian Assange released a shocking video at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The now-infamous tape, which WikiLeaks titled “Collateral Murder,” was shot in 2007 from a U.S. military Apache helicopter flying over New Baghdad, Iraq. It shows U.S. forces killing 12 people, including two Reuters employees: Saeed Chmagh, 40 years old, and Namir Noor-Eldeen. He was an up-and-coming Reuters videographer. The video comes from the Apache Helicopter.

 The video’s release was followed by the publication of hundreds of thousands of digital records from the U.S. military dubbed the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary."

VIDEO https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/23/julian_assange_alan_rusbridger

FEB 23, 2024

Press Freedom on Trial: Julian Assange’s Lawyer on Extradition Case & Criminalizing Journalism

VIDEO https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/23/julian_assange_extradition_case_jennifer_robinson

2007-Namir Noor-Eldeen

Namir Noor-Eldeen (Arabic: نمير نورالدين; September 1, 1984 – July 12, 2007) was an Iraqi war photographer for Reuters. Noor-Eldeen, his assistant, Saeed Chmagh, and eight others were fired upon by U.S. military forces in the New Baghdad district of Baghdad, Iraq, during an airstrike on July 12, 2007.

Dean Yates was working in Reuters’ Jakarta newsroom on the night of 12 October 2002, when he took a call from a stringer in Bali. There had been a blast, the caller explained, with flaming cars and multiple victims.

“I can hear this screaming in the background,” Yates recalls 20 years later, “I can hear this noise.”

After filing a news alert, Yates caught the first plane from Jakarta, then a taxi to Kuta beach where the still-smoking bomb site had yet to be cordoned off. He went over for a closer look. “I could just feel this evil in the air,” Yates says, describing the moment he accidentally dislodged a piece of debris with his foot, revealing a bloodied hand.

“It was just shocking, to be standing at that scene of such devastation. But I had a job to do, so I was taking notes, I was constructing sentences in my head and on my notepad, ready to dictate through to our bureau in Jakarta.”

To those of us watching events like these unfold over TV, radio or newspapers, it’s difficult to forget when and where we were when the news broke. But for reporters such as Yates, working shoulder to shoulder with first responders to bring those stories to the world, such moments can be even harder to shake.

For much of Yates’ two decades overseas as a journalist and editor for Reuters, this “ringside seat” to history was part of the appeal. The professional trade-off, he says, was detachment. “My generation of journalists, we weren’t ever taught about feelings, acknowledging our emotions,” Yates explains over the phone, rugged up from his current home in northern Tasmania. “Detachment was considered a strength in those days, because you were seen as being that impartial observer – that was valued.

“I was just the perfect fit for that old-fashioned news agency journalist. But what it meant was that the detachment I was able to show as a journalist became entwined with who I was. So when the trauma started and the numbness started to emerge, I started to shut myself down – my emotions, my feelings.”

Yates left frontline reporting a decade ago, but the experience of covering the Bali bombing, and the Boxing Day tsunami two years later, stayed with him. Then there was the stint leading Reuters’ Baghdad bureau, when on 12 July 2007, his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed by a US Apache helicopter. The attack was later highlighted by Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks in an infamous leaked video dubbed “Collateral Murder”.

For Yates, his perceived failure in preventing his staff’s death and then holding the American military to account, led to a tipping point that saw him diagnosed with PTSD and eventually admitted to Ward 17 at Melbourne’s Heidelberg Repatriation hospital in 2016.

It was in Ward 17 that Yates began writing what would eventually become a memoir, Line in the Sand, an unsparing account of a seven-year quest to understand his trauma and find a way to heal for himself, his wife – fellow ex-Reuters journalist Mary Binks – and their family.

Sharing a ward with veterans, police officers and the occasional chef or truck driver, Yates resolved to tell their stories alongside his own. “I found myself among this group of traumatised people, who were just like me, who found themselves adrift in the world.”

But as he began furiously journalling and researching, he underestimated the scope of what lay before him. “I thought I’d walk out of Ward 17 a new man – because again, I was sort of using all these tools of journalism, to work my way through what I thought were the problems.”

Yates was “knocked flat” when his psychiatrist explained he was only at the beginning of treatment. “She just looked at me and she said, ‘Yeah, I feel like I’ve been listening to a journalist reporting a story.’”

The clinician told Yates he was “intellectualising” his trauma, which prevented him from feeling and processing those emotions. It was something that would eventually take Yates several years and two return visits to Ward 17, to fully understand.

“It just wasn’t in my DNA to feel. So I was struggling, not only with the PTSD symptoms of numbness, but against that journalist who had gone into these places, reported on these events, who just went from one story to the next. There was never time to process any other stuff.”

As Line in the Sand reveals, unpacking that trauma meant forgetting about a “way to normal”, and finding peace with something new.

“There is no ‘aha’ moment – it’s not a straight line where you all of a sudden start to feel well,” he says.

“When you do work at healing from trauma, what you find is, actually, you can find a better life, you can find a new normal – a higher level of functioning, greater levels of empathy. And that can be found in the journey of recovery itself.”

As he releases his book into the world, Yates now worries about the current generation working in shrinking newsrooms where journalists are often overworked, under-supported and can be exposed to “horrendous” material.

His concern for this generation is about their exposure to “vicarious trauma”, which results from witnessing trauma or dealing with trauma survivors. It has typically been associated with first responders, such as medical professionals or emergency services, but is increasingly being recognised as something endured also by journalists. Even for those not out in the field, “the images that come through, the video, the photographs” can be deeply upsetting. “It comes in unfiltered, it’s coming in raw from wherever, and it’s often young journalists who have to verify this material and then edit it.”

This risk of trauma, he says, is still being understood by many news organisations – and not being taken seriously enough in many quarters. “I get journalists from around the world reaching out to me, asking how they should seek help.”

Vicarious trauma is increasingly being recognised as a serious hazard in workplaces, one which employers need to better protect staff from. In 2020, vicarious trauma made headlines when a Victorian lawyer was awarded $435,000 after working in a specialist sexual offences unit left her with PTSD and major depression due to exposure to high volumes of graphic evidence.

“The brain doesn’t differentiate between whether they are in their office or the field,” Yates says. “Ten minutes later, they might be sitting down to dinner with their family – but the trauma is just as real.”

For now, the publication of Line in the Sand means Yates has done something that might once have been unthinkable to that old-fashioned wire journalist: putting himself and his feelings at the heart of the story.

“Mary and I, we really wanted this book to be a true accounting of our life, and the trauma that we have gone through – and we wanted it to be absolutely honest.

“Not being part of a story has been thrown out the window,” he reflects, “In more ways than one.”

Wikileaks Collateral Murder US Military casually murders civilians and children and now corporate christ-crusader, Islamophobe Mike Pompeo wants to Murder the Journalist who Exposed this crime

“Collateral Murder in Iraq.” By Amy Goodman 

A United States military video was released this week showing the indiscriminate targeting and killing of civilians in Baghdad. The nonprofit news organization WikiLeaks obtained the video and made it available on the Internet. The video was made July 12, 2007, by a U.S. military Apache helicopter gunship, and includes audio of military radio transmissions.

Two Reuters employees—a journalist and his driver—were killed in the attack, along with at least eight other people, and two children were injured. The radio transmissions show not only the utter callousness of the soldiers, laughing and swearing as they kill, but also the strict procedure they follow, ensuring that all of their attacks are clearly authorized by their chain of command. The leaked video is a grim depiction of how routine the killing of civilians has become, and is a stark reminder of how necessary journalism is, and how dangerous its practice has become.

After photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed, Reuters demanded a full investigation. Noor-Eldeen, despite his youth, had been described by colleagues as one of the pre-eminent war photographers in Iraq. Chmagh was a father of four.

The video shows a group of men in an open square in Baghdad, leading the two Reuters employees to a building nearby. Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh are shown, each carrying a camera with a telephoto lens. A U.S. soldier in the helicopter says: “OK, we got a target 15 coming at you. It’s a guy with a weapon.” There is much back and forth between two helicopters and ground troops in armored vehicles nearby:

“Have five to six individuals with AK-47s. Request permission to engage.”

“Roger that. Uh, we have no personnel east of our position. So, uh, you are free to engage. Over.”

The helicopter circles around, with the cross hairs squarely in the center of the group of about eight men. WikiLeaks and its partner for this story, the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service, added subtitles to the video, as well as arrows indicating the Reuters employees.

Sustained automatic-weapon fire erupts, and most of the men are killed instantly. Noor-Eldeen runs away, and the cross hairs follow him, shooting nonstop, until he falls, dead.

The radio transmission continues, “All right, hahaha, I hit ’em …” and then, “Yeah, we got one guy crawling around down there. …”

Chmagh, seriously wounded, was dragging himself away from the other bodies. A voice in the helicopter, seeking a rationale to shoot, said: “Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon. … If we see a weapon, we’re gonna engage.”

A van pulled up, and several men, clearly unarmed, came out and lifted Chmagh, ostensibly to carry him to medical care. The soldiers on the Apache sought and received permission to “engage” the van and opened fire, tearing apart the front of the van and killing the men. The weapon used was a 30-millimeter machine gun, used to pierce armor. With everyone in sight apparently dead, U.S. armored vehicles moved in. When a vehicle drove over Noor-Eldeen’s corpse, an observer in the helicopter said, laughing, “I think they just drove over a body.” The troops discovered two children in the van, who had miraculously survived. One voice on the military radio requests permission to evacuate them to a U.S. military hospital. Another voice commands them to hand over the wounded children to Iraqi police for delivery to a local clinic, ensuring delayed and less-adequate treatment.

The U.S. military inquiry into the killings cleared the soldiers of any wrongdoing, and Reuters’ Freedom of Information requests for the video were denied. Despite the Pentagon’s whitewash, the attack was brutal and might have involved a war crime, since those removing the wounded are protected by the Geneva Conventions. WikiLeaks says it obtained the video “from a number of military whistle-blowers.” Wikileaks.org, founded in late 2006 as a secure site for whistle-blowers to safely release documents, has come under attack from the U.S. and other governments.

WikiLeaks has broken numerous stories and has received awards. It and members of the Icelandic Parliament are working together to make Iceland a world center of investigative journalism, putting solid free speech and privacy protections into law. The words of legendary journalist I.F. Stone still hold true: “Governments lie.” Because of that, we need courageous journalists and media workers, like Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, and we need whistle-blowers and news organizations that will carefully protect whistle-blowers’ identities while bringing their exposés to public scrutiny.

On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released ”Collateral Murder”: a video showing a July 12, 2007 US Apache attack helicopter attack upon individuals in a Baghdad suburb. Amongst the over twelve people killed by the 30mm cannon fire were two Reuters journalists. (Image: Wikileaks/'Collateral Murder' video/Screenshot) “...WikiLeaks release of classified U.S. military footage depicting the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrikes against unarmed civilians. The attack killed a dozen innocent civilians, including two Reuters’ journalists, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh.”

From Bombing of Hiroshima to Collateral Murder; War Crimes of Empire and Prosecution of Free Press

August 05, 2020 by Nozomi Hayase

“British investigative journalist Robert Fisk once said, “War is a total failure of the human spirit”

[Julian] Assange is being held on remand in Belmarsh Prison, solely on the basis of a U.S. extradition request. He would face 175 years in prison if convicted.

Assange’s extradition is recognized by free speech groups as the most important press freedom case of the 21st century. What is this prosecution of a publisher really about? Here, a story of an Australian journalist who exposed the brutal truth of war at the end of WWII can provide a historical context and help us better understand the significance of this case.

Wilfred Burchett has become known as the first Western journalist to enter Hiroshima after the city was bombed, where he reported from one of the few hospitals operating. In the story headlined “The Atomic Plague”, Burchett wrote, “Hiroshima looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of existence.

Enemy of the state

Burchett, a veteran reporter for the UK’s Daily Express, believed that a duty of journalists is to be independent from doctrines and political ideologies and that their responsibility is to get facts right and publish the truth. For his fierce commitment to performing this duty, he became a controversial figure, being ostracized and made into the public enemy No. 1. Australia’s right wing magazine depicted him as a traitor and his fellow countryman turned against him. The Australian government deprived him of his passport for 17 years and he was barred from his own country.

From Hiroshima to New Bagdad, Burchett and Assange, two Australian journalists generations apart, confronted the cruelty of nuclear arms and the machinery of war with love for humanity. With great courage, they tried to demonstrate to us that it is possible to win peace through non-violence, in fact that’s the only way to truly end the war.

According to Assange’s lawyers, the US may soon drop its existing extradition request and then re-arrest him on the same 18 charges after a new extradition request. Assange’s extradition hearing starts in a London court on September 7.

READ MORE https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/08/05/bombing-hiroshima-collateral-murder-war-crimes-empire-and-prosecution-free-press

6 Comments

“ I knew another pair of journalists persecuted for their reporting.Bill and Sylvia Powell were journalists in China during the Korean War.   They reported returning soldiers’ reports that the US was using biological weapons.  When they returned, in the midst of the McCarthy period, they were prosecuted for sedition.  Although they were found innocent, no paper would hire them.  They made ends meet by fixing up old San Francisco homes, and later running Houses of Charm, an antiques store on Church Street.  In 1981, Bill published an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that the Japanese Unit 731 [Google: “Unit 731 Wikipedia” for more info (although this article doesn’t mention Powell’s earlier expose)] had done human experiments and used biological weapons during WWII, and that the US had exonerated the war criminals responsible so that it could gain their secrets.

'All lies': how the US military covered up gunning down two journalists in Iraq

Former Reuters journalist Dean Yates was in charge of the bureau in Baghdad when his Iraqi colleagues Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed. A WikiLeaks video called Collateral Murder later revealed details of their death

source https://feedimo.com/story/92557390

Only Superman Can Save Julian Assange Now? Back in the early 1960s, us kids could not wait to get home from school to catch another TV episode of The Adventures of Superman. Back then TV was all black and white, and so was our view on the world. I’ll never forget the intro to the show and the part that told of the strange visitor from another planet who “fights a never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way.” As I sit here typing this story, only Superman can save the modern Daily Planet publisher Julian Assange. Death to Mild Mannered Reporters Reading and watching news about WikiLeaks whistle-blower Julian Assange these last weeks since his arrest, I’ve come to the conclusion humanity is on its last legs. Forget about oil for money. Don’t even worry about global warming. None of us are going to survive past Phase 2 of the Julian Assange crucifixion, the rolling back of press freedoms and the public’s right to information. The weight and might of the same denizens Superman, aka Clark Kent, fought against in the 50s and 60s, it’s being leveled onto the man who is closest kin to the editor in chief of the mythical Daily Planet, Perry White. Yes, it’s going to take the “man of steel” streaking across the sky and landing on the White House lawn to get the people to pay attention to the trials of Julian Assange. A certification that Assange is being subjected to torture by United Nations special rapporteur on torture and ill-treatment, Nils Melzer hardly stirred the planet. Federal Judge John Koeltl’s dismissal of a ludicrous Democratic National Committee (DNC) case against the WikiLeaks publisher because their accusations were “boundless” has had no tangible effect. People, the organisms Assange has been in self-exile to protect for most of a decade, they just don’t seem to care about his fate. It’s not only sad, it bears a foreboding. Assange is the central figure in a much larger case involving the fate of all humanity. Maybe this is why a superhero may be his only hope. From my perspective as an analyst and reporter on Mr. Assange’s activities, I cannot even fathom how the man is being left to wither away psychologically and physically in Belmarsh Prison. The situation with Assange is intolerable, the UN’s Melzer added in his recent statement, he had: “…never seen a group of democratic states ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.” Free Speech Kryptonite The aforementioned Federal Judge Koeltl even brought to bear the central argument for Julian Assange, the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution, and the precedent that bears most fervently on Julian Assange’s innocence. The judge told reporters on the dismissal of the DNC case: “In New York Times Co. v. United States, the landmark ‘Pentagon Papers’ case, the Supreme Court upheld the press’s right to publish information of public concern obtained from documents stolen by a third party.” Let me square something here. I do not even know Julian Assange. What I do know of his personality and past makes me dislike him at face value. He seems typically arrogant, flippant, a self-important smartass if you ask me. But no matter what first impressions may tell us about the WikiLeaks founder, he’s a brave man who did humanity an incalculable service. Few who are reading this will recall Assange’s history as one of the world’s most notable hackers. Assange started “blowing the whistle” on the NSA and other entities way back in 1999 when he cautioned the world about the security agency’s patents on eavesdropping technology. Later, in the intro to his book Cypherpunks (2012), Assange summarized: “The Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen” The list of WikiLeaks revelations which the world would know nothing about without Julian Assange is too lengthy to even speak of here. Of all the revelations we’ve been privy to, the gun camera footage of the airstrike of 12 July 2007 in Baghdad, showing the deaths of journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh by a US helicopter is the most poignant. The dastardly conduct of United States servicemen in this raw video rival the Mai Lai debacle from the Vietnam War once you realize it was no isolated incident. If you are an America, I hope your senses force you to ask the question; “How can we have peace in the world by ordering murder in the Middle East or elsewhere?” And the citizen of Atlanta or Des Moines wonders where terrorists come from. For a wider perspective on just who is out to get Julian Assange, the following from a Newsweek report on Assange’s strange meeting with Google CEO Eric Schmidt back in 2011 reveals a comic book level conspiracy at work. The Assange/Schmidt conversation boiled down to this: “For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with U.S. foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-Western countries to Western companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the Internet’s future that has only gathered force subsequently.” Now my constant references to the technocrats and their role in the liberal world order become more pertinent. This is “who” is out to annihilate Assange and anyone who stands in their way. Superman No Show Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, us kids were introduced to Perry White, who headed the newspaper Superman (Clark Kent) worked for. He was a character who maintained very high ethical and journalistic standards. He was the archetype for the journalistic hero, someone who would not bend no matter what pressure was applied. Perry, like Assange, won many awards for leading the charge for truth and justice. Assange reminds me of him for several reasons, but mostly because the forces arrayed against him are evil on an epic scale. I would ask the reader to consider this. How is it that Julian Assange has won countless awards for his journalism and publishing, and he’s sought for crucifixion in the country that is supposed to represent such freedoms? The United States government wants to drain the blood out of a man who’s won the Sam Adams Award, the Le Monde readers’ choice award for person of the year, the Time readers’ choice award for person of the year, the Walkley Award for “Most outstanding contribution to journalism”, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, the Sydney Peace Foundation Gold Medal for Peace with Justice, the Amnesty International UK Media Award, and many more accolades. Are you feeling the need to point overhead and chanting “Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no it’s Superman?” Assange is the Nelson Mandela of press freedom and the public’s right to truth, and he’s being mentally waterboarded in a Brit prison. If you’re the U.S. president and you want to be remembered, grow a set and pardon Julian Assange before he is even put on trial. Trump can throw off the bonds of being the world’s biggest blowhard by taking up for Assange. And no, I am not the only one who would applaud his intervention. Unfortunately for Julian Assange and free speech, Superman seems to be long dead and gone. There’s no one to rescue Julian Assange. The poor man does not even have a Lois Lane or Jimmy Olsen to visit him in Belmarsh Prison. Just lawyers, interrogators, and Baywatch starlet Pamela Anderson. Hey, maybe Pam can reach Superman or the people of Metropolis one?