Julian Assange by Julian Assange

Author:Julian Assange [Assange, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

11

COLLATERAL MURDER

After a brief time on the road, including a trip to Oslo to speak at a conference, we came back to Iceland in March 2010 and rented a house. The people we rented from thought we were there to watch the volcanoes: that was our cover, and it explained why we had so many computers and so much video equipment. But the real reason was the Baghdad video. We had decided this was our most important leak to date, and the video would have to be analysed, understood and made ready for presentation. I wanted the whole world to see this video. It was that important, not only for an understanding of war in general, but for an ethical comprehension of what the war in Iraq had become, and how it impacted on daily lives.

The main house we rented became a den. It was full of coffee cups and computer wires and chocolate, the debris of strung-out lives. A profile writer from the New Yorker came round and he caught pretty well the chaos and the sleeplessness. I barely left my computer for weeks. I had my hair cut while sitting at my terminal, working against the clock to edit the video so all the static noise, the crackle, was at a minimum, and the final version was as clear as possible. People fluttered in and out of the room, full of exclamations, ideas, tears. None of the crazy schedules and lunges across continents familiar from our previous work could stand comparison with the preparation of the ‘Collateral Murder’ video. I think my reputation for workaholism and infrequent bathing must have started there; it was unavoidable, with the amount we had to do, and the sense that this leak, above all, would change the public’s perception of a dreadful war and play a part in bringing that horrible invasion to an end.

The video has now had more than eleven million viewings on YouTube, as well as many more millions on television. It is a famous document of our times. But when I first saw the footage, it wasn’t at all clear what was going on; the images were jagged and the sequence lacked drama and impact, though what it depicted, eventually, was truly devastating. I did careful research as I went along, finding out who the people in the video were, when it was shot, from which angles, and how it had all come together to tell the story of this multiple murder in broad daylight. We broke the film into three parts, to better understand the sequence of events. The work was slow, but sobering and mesmerising. When all was said and done, the video, without doubt, showed twelve men – two of them Reuters journalists, going about their business – being shot to ribbons by 35mm cannon-fire from a US Apache helicopter. It took me some time to work out who was involved in the initial massacre, and then to see that the two men who survived the initial attack, only to be taken out individually, were the men from Reuters.

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