Re: "Assange is understood to be claiming that he is a journalist"
teknopaul,
I have seen "collaterol murder". That's the video that Wikileaks edited to remove the weapons that the alleged victims were carrying. Admittedly Wikileaks did eventually publish the unedited version, but they lost all credibility by doing that. There was no warcrime there anyway, because the journalist who got killed was with a group of armed people, which was who the helicopter engaged. The gunner shouts "RPG" when he sees the camera poking round the corner of the building, and that's why they fired, which was withing their rules of engagement. If you are a journalist on the front lines, that's unfortunately the risk you take.
So Wikileaks edited the video to make the helicopter crew look guilty when they weren't. Admittedly they also left in the intercom comments, which were in pretty poor taste, but then these were people in a high stress combat environment - it's pretty hard to judge that behaviour unless you've been there. Proper journalism would be to get an experience war correspondent to tell you if that behaviour is normal.
For example an ex US Marine that I know was hit by friendly fire in Afghanistan. And he says that as the first 1,000lb bomb hit near their bunker (and the second was about to hit it) the last thing he remembered was shouting, "They nuked us man! They fuckin' nuked us!" I'd say that line of dialogue came from an over-written action film, except I know it actually happened...
To "add" to Wikileaks journalistic credentials, they also edited out the end of that video for 'Collaterol Murder', as they thought people would be bored. I once read an interesting piece by a US lawyer - who argued that if there was a war crime there, it happend at the end. I've not bothered watching it, but she said that it shows some of the armed people the helicopter crew had engaged going into a building, and the crew firing on the building. She argued that this would be a disproportionate use of force, as they didn't know who else was in that building - and they didn't know those people were going to attack, they might just be hiding. I'm not enough of a lawyer to know how that would stand up, it sounds more like a breach of rules of engagement than rules of war to me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
