Collateral Murder: Apache gun-camera video, New Baghdad, 12 July 2007

The video was recorded from one of two US Army Apache helicopters searching for insurgents in the New Baghdad district of Baghdad on 12 July 2007, and includes the crews' radio communications. It shows the lead helicopter, callsign Crazyhorse, opening fire on a group of men that included the Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, who was carrying a camera, and his colleague Saeed Chmagh, 40; both were killed.

The helicopter then fired on a van that stopped to help the wounded Chmagh; two children inside were wounded. The Guardian noted that the US military had initially said all the dead were insurgents and later that the helicopters had responded to an active firefight. Reuters had sought the footage under the Freedom of Information Act without success, and a subsequent US military investigation concluded that the soldiers had acted in accordance with the law of armed conflict and the rules of engagement, according to us.

I published the full 38-minute recording and a shorter edited version with subtitles and our own analysis, titled 'Collateral Murder', together with the classified US rules of engagement for Iraq for 2006, 2007 and 2008.

I screened the video at the National Press Club in Washington on 5 April 2010 (Columbia Journalism Review) and posted it online the same day. We said we had obtained the video and supporting documents from military whistleblowers, and I told the Guardian that we had had to break the military's encryption to view it. A US defence official confirmed to Reuters that the video was authentic (Committee to Protect Journalists).

Chelsea Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst convicted in 2013 over our disclosures, addressed leaking the video in a statement read to her court-martial when pleading guilty to lesser charges on 28 February 2013 (NPR). Manning was sentenced to 35 years in August 2013; the sentence was commuted in January 2017.