Washington, April 09: Editor-in-chief of Reuters News David Schlesinger has refused to cover a story by one of his own reporters which claims that the 2007 killings of two Reuters staffers in Baghdad by US troops may have been war crimes.
Reuters staff Saeed al-Chmagh, a 40-year-old driver and assistant, and Namir Noor-Eldeen, a 22-year-old photographer were among the dozens of people killed by an unprecedented attack by US forces in Baghdad in 2007.
A classified US military video, released on Monday by WikiLeaks, shows innocent civilians being mowed down in Baghdad as an American Apache helicopter gunship hovered over the Iraqi capital on July 12, 2007.
Reuters’ deputy Brussels bureau chief Luke Baker has filed a story repeating charges from several human rights and international law experts that the killings may have constituted war crimes.
Reuters chief David Schlesinger, however, spiked the story and said “it needed more comment from the Pentagon and US lawyers.”
“In this particular case, [I] want to meet with the Pentagon to press the need to learn lessons from this tragedy. These stories are not easy for us to report or to be involved in. They test our commitment to viewing events and actions objectively. What matters in the end is not how we as colleagues and friends feel; what matters is the wider public debate that our stories and this video provoke,” he said in a statement.
The pilots’ radio chatter reveals thier crude bloodthirsty attitudes as they are eager to fire, and delighted to kill. But it speaks more to the specific behavior of US personnel when Washington sends a bunch of young men with billions of dollars worth of lethal toys into a civilian city.
———Reuters