The mistaken killing of innocents, exposed.

And now, via The New York Times, a sad day. Excerpt:

Specialist Manning and the former hacker, Adrian Lamo, traded instant messages about what Mr. Lamo described as Specialist Manning’s personal troubles with the military.

But over the course of those exchanges, Mr. Lamo said in a telephone interview on Monday, Specialist Manning also took credit for leaking a classified, explosive video of an American helicopter attack in Baghdad that left 12 people dead, including two employees of the Reuters news agency, which the Web site Wikileaks.org posted in April…Specialist Manning also claimed he gave Wikileaks 260,000 classified United States diplomatic cables and video of a United States airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year…

…Mr. Lamo said he had promised the F.B.I. he would testify against the specialist. “I’ll keep my word, but I won’t do it happily,” he said. “I hope that his parents can forgive me. I’m sorry about what happened to their boy. But I was backed into a corner ethically.”

…hacking into The Times, which he acknowledged was illegal but did not, he said, compromise national security.

…for the ful story, click over to the New York Times.

Video (warning: sickening to watch).

Please note: This is a full uncut version of the video primarily intended for research purposes. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrf… for a short and concise version with added context.

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Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com