Talk:July 12, 2007, Baghdad airstrike

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Hey everyone, this page is in need of some help! There's a plethora of information on this incident I haven't been able to integrate yet. Most of it can be found at collateralmurder.com and wikileaks.org, and is mirrored on all of the major news websites. The Washington Post also has some info. I'm pretty new to editing, so any help with formatting is much appreciated!WhisperingWisdom ^T ^C 02:29, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Whew this grew quick. Work needed: "Incident" section should be expanded - with evidence from the video, a detailed description of the incident can be created, and referenced back to the video.WhisperingWisdom ^T ^C 05:22, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Pentagon

I've heard that the pentagon has denied that this ever took place and that in fact also tried to get wikileaks taken down before April 5th to prevent the video from leaking. Does anyone know if this is true? If so, does it sound like something that should be mentioned in the article? Rafael 06:44, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The US Government (probably not the Pentagon specifically) confirmed the existence of the incident at the time (Reuters started pressuring them very quickly), but it's the more controversial details (what exactly the Apache crew saw and how they made their decisions) that were unknown until now (because the Pentagon denied requests to see this video). Wikileaks has also stated that they've had conflict with US intelligence services, and has posted documents supposedly from the Pentagon talking about the threat Wikileaks might pose and steps that can be taken to stop whistleblowers. I'm not sure if all of these things are directly related, and I don't believe the Pentagon report has been officially confirmed as real (although I wouldn't be surprised if it has been).

More directly: No denial of incident, just denial of access and details. As for taking Wikileaks "down", I haven't seen anything other than the usual paranoia (somewhat rightfully) associated with this kind of event - definitely no verified action against Wikileaks other than the aforementioned conflicts and confrontations. At this point it looks like everything is "acceptable", in the sense that there don't seem to be any "the sky is green" lies or attempts to do anything other than intimidate Wikileaks. 98.246.144.63 (talk) 07:37, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Media Blackout

There clearly wasn't a media blackout, as the incidenct was covered by CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Huffington Post, the BBC, amongst others only a few hours after the incident. It wasn't exactly speedy, but it seems unlikely that they were pressured into not running the story (whether they were pressured into omitting facts is a different matter). The media blackout controversy seemed to have started on reddit soon after the release because it took the MSM a few hours. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 132.177.67.97 (talk) 07:47, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed - reddit has a tendency to hype the conspiracy side of things. I think the section in "Publicity" on the so-called media blackout should be rewritten more neutrally.WhisperingWisdom ^T ^C 09:55, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I just deleted all the media blackout stuff, since, you know, it didn't exist.--132.177.67.97 (talk) 12:57, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Circumstances

Does anyone know why the helicopter crew were suspicious of people walking around? Had people been told to stay indoors or leave the district, for example? New Thought (talk) 12:05, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Is it possible to work out either from the video or from the gap between the gun firing and rounds arriving in the target area how far the helicopter was from the target area? New Thought (talk) 12:18, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Assuming the audio and video are well synched, it's got to be a considerable distance. 33° (talk) 12:21, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia lists the muzzle velocity of the M230 chain gun on the Apache as 805 m/s, the delay between seeing the camera shake (gun being fired) and the bullets hitting the ground is ~2.1sec, which gives an approximate distance of 1690 meter or ~1 mile. -- Grumbel (talk) 12:36, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Also two questions that should be answered in the article: Is it allowed to shoot people caring AK-47 in a non-threatening manner? Some people mentioned that owning and carrying a AK-47 is perfectly legal in Iraq (but maybe not at the time and location of the incident?). Also some people mentioned that the video quality inside the helicopter is substantially better then what we see in the recorded video, is that the case? Does anybody have an example for comparison? -- Grumbel (talk) 12:24, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The range is ~1050m as the helicopter comes around the building, immediately before they open fire. They close to 940m by the time the burst impacts. The range, coupled with their altitude of ~1000ft syncs up pretty well with the gun's muzzle velocity

"Pretext"

I've moved this off the article for further discussion:

although it has also been noted that they seem to be looking for a pretext, with one pilot stating "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon".

This quote is accurate but calling it a pretext implies it happened before shots were fired, whereas actually it comes later. I'm not sure if it should be in the article. 33° (talk) 12:11, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Civilians?

At 3:45 in the 17 minute video, the behaviour of the guys in the top centre of the video looks very suspicious indeed - and the item they are carrying looks very much like an AK-47 or RPG to me. Are we 100% stone cold certain that they are civilians? New Thought (talk) 13:00, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Original synthesis

The Publicity section appears to be completely original synthesis. We need external sources connecting all the dots. It's not our task to do that. __meco (talk) 13:18, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

How it was reported in 2007

someone should include a section for how it was reported in 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/13/world/middleeast/13iraq.html?_r=4&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

this article says the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed. which turned out to be a complete lie.--86.133.232.107 (talk) 15:05, 6 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]