The Human Rights record of the US that calls for investigation reports from Sri Lanka on the incidents alleged to have taken place during the war is now being exposed to the world.
Although the US is in an attempt to cover up the violation of human rights by their Army on foreign soil under the pretext of state secrets, the founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange has started revealing them to the world.
The July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrikes were a series of air-to-ground attacks conducted by a team of two United States Army AH-64 Apache helicopters in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, in the district of New Baghdad in Baghdad, during the Iraqi insurgency which followed the Iraq War. The attacks received worldwide coverage following the release of 39 minutes of classified cockpit gun sight footage in 2010. In the first strike, the crew of the two Apaches directed 30mm cannon fire at a group of nine to eleven men in the path of advancing U.S. Army ground troops. Among the group were two Iraqi war correspondents working for Reuters, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Eight men, including Noor-Eldeen were killed during this first strike. The second strike, also using 30 mm rounds, was directed at a wounded Chmagh and two other unarmed men as they were attempting to help Chmagh into their van just before American soldiers arrived on the ground. Two children inside the van were wounded, the three men were killed, including Chmagh.
In a third strike the helicopter team fired three AGM-114 Hellfire missiles to destroy a building they believed was the source of enemy gunfire. Reuters had unsuccessfully requested the footage of the airstrikes under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007. The footage was acquired from an undisclosed source in 2009 by the Internet leak website WikiLeaks, which released the footage on April 5, 2010, under the name Collateral Murder. Recorded from the gun-sight Target Acquisition and Designation System of one of the attacking helicopters, the video shows the incident and the radio chatter between the aircrews and ground units involved. An anonymous US military official confirmed the authenticity of the footage.
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