Some thoughts: does anybody really believe this was an accident rather than premeditated? Even on just the evidence in the video the helicopter crew was mighty casual about killing the first group of people, while the attack on civilians attempting to carry off the wounded and dead is a straight warcrime. But put this atrocity in context: two of the people killed were journalists, in a war in which non-embedded journalists often seemed acceptable targets to the US military — the attack on the Al Jazeera office in Kabul, the shooting of that Baghdad hotel many journalists stayed at, various other careless or targeted killings. Each time the military had an excuse, some explenation for their mistakes, but put them all together and it’s clear that if the army doesn’t deliberately sets out to kill uncontrolled journalists, it at the very least doesn’t care if it does so.
Also, also: remember that story back in 2005 about the Al-Jazeera bombing memo? That showed that Bush was talking about bombing the Al-Jazeera offices in Qatar during the attack on Fallujah in 2004. If the US considered that kind of action outside of Iraq, it’s no surprise unfriendly journalists inside Iraq tended to die or disappear… Most of the cases that get attention in the American and European media concern western journalists; but many more Iraqi journalists have been killed as well, either by the Americans or Iraqi internal security.
And of course excuses can and were made in each case: that’s not the point. When there’s a pattern of such killings, during an already illegal and immoral wars, such mistakes are murders. These accidents fit a long standing US army policy of “controlling the information battlefield” by embedding journalists and denying independent reporters access — if a few of the latter are killed on the battlefield, no great loss…