FROOMKIN Re Wikileaks Video: "Where's The Outrage? - I want someone on Capitol Hill to give a shit"

[kpete]

Where's the outrage? Where's the responsibility? Where's the oversight? Hell, where's the basic curiosity? Has anyone on the Hill even asked any questions of the Pentagon or the White House? Hey, President Obama, are you OK with this?


Dan Froomkin
Posted: April 21, 2010 05:19 PM

Wikileaks Video Revisited: What Needs To Happen Now

Earlier this month, the whistleblower website WikiLeaks released a deeply disturbing video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly machine-gunning a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver -- and then opening fire on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men. (Here's my article about it.)

The two Reuters employees were killed. But Reuters, which had been asking to see the video for two and a half years, didn't have much to say right away.

Today, Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger is out with an opinion column entitled "What I want from the Pentagon". His central point: "What I want from the Pentagon -- and from all militaries -- is simple: Acknowledgment, transparency, accountability." Here he is on the accountability part:

**********Let's dig behind the video. Let's fully understand the rules the military were operating under. Let's have a complete picture of what was going through the fliers' minds. Let's hear the Pentagon explain its interpretation of the rules of engagement and the Geneva Convention and how the actions either did or did not accord with them in its view. And importantly, let's keep in mind that while we focus on this particular tragedy, it is the rare circumstance that when a journalist is injured or killed in a conflict area, there is a video of the death, and even more rare as this case demonstrates, for the public to see such a video.
http://blogs.reuters.com/reuters-editors/2010/04/21/what-i-want-from-the-pentagon/

I totally agree. I want what he wants. And here's something else I want.

I want someone on Capitol Hill to give a shit.

They seem utterly uncurious about how exactly it was OK for a bloodthirsty-sounding helicopter crewman to open fire on a group of (apparently) armed men when all they were doing was milling around on a street corner -- not to mention how it was OK to target the Good Samaritan van driver who pulled over to help one of the injured men. (He was killed; his two small children were wounded.)

more:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/21/wikileaks-video-revisited_n_546915.html