By Robert Fisk
May 6— The pictures are appalling, the words devastating.
As a wounded Iraqi crawls from beneath a burning truck, an American
helicopter pilot tells his commander that one of three men has survived
his night air attack. “Someone wounded, the pilot cries. Then he
received the reply: “Hit him, hit the truck and him. As the helicopter’s
gun camera captures the scene on video, the pilot fires a 30mm gun at
the wounded man, vaporizing him in a second.
British and most European television stations censored the tape off
the air last night on the grounds that the pictures were too terrible
to show. But, deliberately shooting a wounded man is a war crime under
the Geneva Conventions and this extraordinary film of US air crews in
action over Iraq is likely to create yet another international outcry.
American and British personnel have been trying for weeks to persuade
Western television stations to show the video of the attack. Despite
the efforts of reports in Baghdad and New York, most television controllers
preferred to hide the evidence from viewers. Only Canal Plus in France,
ABC television in the United States and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
have so far had the courage to show the shocking footage. UK military
personnel in the Gulf region have confirmed that the tape is genuine.
The camera, mounted beside the 30mm cannon of a US Apache helicopter
on patrol over central Iraq on Dec. 1, picks up movement on a country
road, apparently several hundred meters from an American military checkpoint.
A lorry and a smaller vehicle, probably a pick-up, come into view and
a man — apparently unaware of the hovering helicopter — is
seen moving to a field on the left of the screen.
He is carrying what seems to be a tube with a covering; it may be a
rocket-propelled grenade. One of two helicopter pilots is heard to say:
“Big truck over here. He’s having a little pow-wow.’
The driver of the pick-up looks around, reaches into the vehicle, takes
out the tube-shaped object and runs from the road into the field. He
drops the object and returns to the truck. The pilot then radios: ”I
got a guy running, throwing a weapon.’ Another pilot, or a ground
controller, instructs him: “Engage...smoke him.’
At this point, a tractor arrives close to where the man from the lorry
dropped the object in the field. One of the Iraqis approaches the tractor
driver. The Apache pilot opens fire with his 30mm cannon, killing first
the Iraqi in the field and then the tractor driver. The camera registers
the bullets hitting the first man. All that is left is a smudge on the
ground.
The pilot then turns his attention to the large truck, opens fire and
waits to see if he has hit the last of the three men. The third man
is then seen crawling, obviously badly wounded, from his cover beneath
the blazing truck.
The pilot reports: “Wait. Someone wounded by the truck.” An
officer replies: “Hit him. Hit the truck and him.”
The video tape shows that the incident took four minutes, during which
the two helicopter pilots — whose names are listed as Nager and
Alioto — expended 300 high-velocity cannon rounds at their targets.
The tape shows that the first 15 rounds missed the men. One of the pilots
says: “Fuck, switching to range auto.” The tape then documents
the firing of four bursts of 20 rounds each at the three men.
The pictures, apparently taken through thermal-imaging cameras, leave
no doubt that the pilot knew his third victim was wounded and crawling
along the ground — and that whoever gave him the order to hit him
also knew this.
Coming only days after the appalling photographs of Iraqis being tortured
and humiliated by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, the new
pictures can only further inflame Arab opinion throughout the Middle
East.
It is common Israeli practice to kill wounded enemies from the air;
a devastating helicopter assault by Israel on a Hizbollah training camp
in Lebanon 10 years ago was accompanied by a series of attacks in which
pilots sought out wounded guerrillas as they hid behind rocks in the
Bekaa Valley and then fired at them.
The film, while it shows men acting in an apparently suspicious manner,
does not prove they were handling weapons. The occupation authorities
in Baghdad chose to keep the incident secret when it occurred in December.
Watching the video images, it is easy to understand why.
Source: ZNet
