The Collateral Murder video is gun-camera footage from a 2007 U.S. Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, published by WikiLeaks in April 2010. John Kiriakou credits Chelsea Manning with leaking it as part of a larger trove that included the Iraq and Afghan war logs, other Guantanamo files, and the State Department cables released via WikiLeaks starting in 2009–2010.[1]
What the footage shows
In Kiriakou’s description the video — which he refers to in the plural, as “the collateral murder videos” — is military footage of helicopter gunships in Iraq killing journalists and cameramen working for Reuters, and then firing on the rescuers and on the ambulance dispatched to help them. Several people were killed, and the incident was then covered up by the government; Americans, he says, had no idea the military had done this until Julian Assange said so.[2][3]
He places the release in the wider context of the tranche it arrived in. By his account roughly 99 percent of the Manning documents were routine day-in-the-life State Department reporting cables on subjects most people do not care about — some embarrassing to the government, but unremarkable — and the American government paid Assange little attention until that 2009 release.[4][2] The video is what changed that, and in his account it is the reason the CIA and the FBI “set out to silence” Assange thereafter.[3]
Corroborating abuses and touching off the Arab Spring
Kiriakou says the WikiLeaks State Department cables describing Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s corruption were “all the rage” in the media for three weeks leading up to Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, and that this coverage helped touch off the Arab Spring revolt in Tunisia.[5] He also says the Iraq war logs helped defeat the Obama administration’s attempt to negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement to keep American troops in Iraq, since the atrocities the logs revealed became a political deal-breaker.[6]