For the full text go here
The video here
Aboriginal News Group Press Statement
06.09.2010
“If certain acts and violations of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. We are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”
-- Justice Robert H. Jackson, Prosecutor, Nürnberg War Crimes Trials
At this time, the editors of the Aboriginal News Group wish to extend our condolences and solidarity to the families, friends and colleagues of Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen, Saeed Chmagh, and to the other innocent Iraqi non-combatants shot to death as the result of an unprovoked aerial assault on the civilian neighbourhood of New Baghdad on July 12th, 2007 by American military forces. It is in the spirit and desire for justice, peace and an end to the war and occupation that we present the following commentary.
As of this writing, more than 2.5 million people have viewed a copy of a classified military video that was clandestinely obtained, analysed and eventually made public on April 5th of this year, at great personal risk, by wikileaks.org,1 a citizen-journalism portal that specialises in making whistle-blower data available to the general public. Presented as a piece of evidence, this video has proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the 2007 incident was not only unnecessary but completely inconsistent with the initially-reported “dangerous conditions” on the ground that supposedly led to the attack in the first place.
Although it is duly acknowledged that skirmishes had occurred earlier that morning in a related region, (the very reason for the presence of the two Reuters reporters) there was no visible fighting or disturbances on the street in which Noor-Eldeen, Chmagh and the other unfortunate victims were walking through. Not only does the video show in graphic detail the vicious needlessness of the initial shooting attack, but more importantly, it documents the purely sadistic second attack on the family, which included two young children, that stopped to rescue a severely wounded survivor of the initial ambushWithout reservation, the editors of The Aboriginal News Group roundly condemns the unprovoked attack on our fellow journalists and the other innocent Iraqi civilians wrongfully shot to death in the residential community of New Baghdad, Iraq, 06:21:09 Zulu Time, July 12th, 2007 as an act of unmitigated colonialist violence.
While we wholeheartedly support the growing public demand that the Obama administration immediately compel the United States military to objectively reinvestigate this matter without delay or prejudice, the Aboriginal News Group does not believe that the US government can be expected to investigate or judge its own illicit use of deadly military force impartially. Instead, we call for the creation of an autonomous, citizen-led review commission based on the model of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunals of 1966-67 that would serve to critically reaffirm the rule of international law and the responsibilities of combative states to protect common citizens from unwarranted military violence.
Perhaps this is an obvious point, but all of this clearly illustrates that the United States military war machine has yet again shown itself to be little more than a willing agent of brutal anti-human physical destruction under the auspices of defending the laudable ideals of “freedom and democracy”. As Indigenous people we point to the painfully obvious “colonialist attitudes” displayed by the helicopter crews clearly intent on opening fire on the pedestrians milling peacefully below them. We perceive this to be nothing less than “Indian Hunting”, the colonialist practise of indiscriminately seeking out native citizenry to violently prey upon, perhaps the ugliest by-product of all wars and conflict. The audio commentary overheard during the video is without qualification disgusting as well, but it provides us with further evidence of the obvious disregard many US military personnel have developed towards the human rights and safety of Iraq’s civilian society.
In our view it is not by chance or mistake that the helicopters used in the 2007 attack are called “Apache”, or that one of the mission crews used “Crazyhorse” as an identification monicker. As conscious Indigenous people, we understand that the imperio-colonialist’s subconscious rationale behind the utterly disrespectful use of these and other proud North American Indigenous names and symbols is concretely indicative of their lack of comprehension, compassion or sense of responsibility towards the victims of their violent belligerence.
Stop the violence by stopping the war.
The Aboriginal News Group
I encourage you to read the full statement here.
Hat tip censored news
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