WikiRebels: The Documentary Page #4

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Nobody really believes the people on the ground

when they're trying to tell

what the war crimes are occurring.

And that happened to the people there.

So I offered to help with this in any which way possible.

Bush Master, Crazy Horse. We have individuals going to the scene.

Looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.

Let me engage.

We need a doctor.

Can I shoot?

They're picking up the wounded.

Yeah, I'm trying to get permission to engage.

Come on. Let us shoot.

A father, driving his children to school,

catches sight of the injured man and stops to help him.

It's Bush Master 7. Go ahead.

Roger. We have a black Bongo truck picking up the bodies.

Request permission to engage.

Bush Master 7. Roger.

This is Bush Master 7. Roger. Engage.

18, OK. Clear.

Come on.

Clear.

Clear. One again.

Why do it?

Well, there's two reasons.

One - because it's fun to kill people.

If you're being in that environment,

removed from all the effects of killing people for a long time.

It's a video game. You want to get a high score.

The other is

they brag after a kill...streak

about how many people they kill.

They go back to base and go, "Hey...killed 13 today."

Oh, yeah, look at that. Right through the windshield.

Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards.

Nice. 26, Crazy Horse 18.

When the ground troops arrive,

they see that there are children in the car.

They're bringing their kids to a battle.

That's right.

After viewing the video hundreds of times...

..It became almost an obsession

to get the identity of the people there.

We knew the identity of Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saaed Chmagh

the Reuters employees.

But, for me, it was important to establish

the identity of the other people there,

especially the children in the mini-van.

We decided that it was worthwhile to go there and interview them.

It turns out that the children survived the attack.

Hrafnsson flies to Baghdad in search of more facts.

He traces the whereabouts of the children

and shows the helicopter film to the victim's family.

I think we could establish fairly well

from a journalistic point of view

that the reason why the mini-van was there

was basically a coincidence

that the driver stumbled upon the scene.

He was driving his kids to a tutorial.

On 5 April 2010, WikiLeaks publishes

the 'Collateral Murder' film.

The impact is no less than extraordinary.

Disturbing footage apparently showing

civilians being killed by the US military in Iraq...

It was leaked from within the defence community to a website.

By putting all their resources into the helicopter video,

WikiLeaks have managed to attract the attention

of some of the biggest players in the news business.

This is precisely what Assange needs

to help him handle the rest of the leaked US material.

I had been looking at this release and studying it

and understanding how to come up with a way

to deal with such a tremendously large volume of material...

..That would actually not simply drown any one organisation.

Assange proceeds to contact 'The New York Times',

'The Guardian' and 'Der Spiegel'.

He manages to persuade the chief editors

of these globally respected papers

to publish his material in a coordinated fashion,

with Assange pulling the strings.

What is new is us

enforcing cooperation between

competitive organisations that would otherwise be rivals

to do the best by the story,

as opposed to simply just

doing the best by their own organisation.

In late July 2010,

the Afghanistan reports are published at the same time and day.

One of the biggest leaks in US military history

has exposed several cover-ups over the war in Afghanistan.

The real story of this material is that it's war.

It's one damn thing after another.

The publication of the material is met with praise

as well as strong criticism.

The Defense Department demands that WikiLeaks

return immediately to the US Government

all versions of documents obtained directly or indirectly

from the Department of Defense databases or records.

For the first time,

WikiLeaks are now facing

criticism that they find hard to respond to.

The material includes the names of civilian Afghanis,

putting them at risk of being targeted by the Taliban.

The battlefield consequences of the release of these documents

are potentially severe and dangerous.

Mr Assange can say whatever he likes

about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing,

but the truth is, they might already have on their hands

the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.

Releasing classified material can be very risky.

But Assange says that the end justifies the means.

We would have had to have released all this material,

without separating out any of it,

or release none.

The value, the extraordinary value of this historic record

to the progress of that war

and its potential to save lives

outweighs the danger to innocents.

WikiLeaks now takes steps to avoid making the same mistake again.

Their next publication -

400,000 military reports from the Iraq War -

are painstakingly edited and names removed.

They also start reinforcing

their network of experienced journalists.

Hi. Hey.

A camera.

How are you?

Iain Overton is editor of the independent London-based

Bureau of Investigative Journalism,

who are now going to analyse the material

and produce their own documentaries.

There's a frantic rush of

getting the best people we could on board.

And we drew up a team of 25 people over a weekend,

and my phone went red-hot calling people.

It was Saturday night in the middle of August,

and about sort of five or six of us

at the bureau met with Julian.

About an hour later I end up sort of leaving the place

with a USB stick full of 400,000 classified military documents.

The material is essentially an encyclopedia of this war,

with reports issued day by day, hour by hour, corpse by corpse.

Absolutely we felt these are the reports

written by people on the ground straight afterwards.

It's kind of the day-to-day war through their eyes.

And that's new.

We haven't been able to do that before, ever, really.

The material tells of tens of thousands of civilian casualties.

Figures that the US have withheld to date.

And the widespread practice of torture

that the US said they'd put a stop to

is still being practised by the Iraqi allies.

I think there are stories that...

..Cause you to be filled with grief.

Some are incredibly harrowing.

I mean, you do have children tortured to death

or shot in front of parents.

And it's not material you can read and not be affected by.

When I was reading the reports,

you read a young American soldier writing

in a very, very bureaucratic,

anodyne, sterile way

about a father who's driving his children to back home

and he's going too fast, and they open fire at the car.

And the father, fearing that his children will be hit,

calls all his children to lie on the floor.

All of the children are killed, three children.

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