WikiLeaks plans to post video showing US massacre of Afghani civilians

John Byrne
Raw Story
Apr. 12, 2010

The whisteblower website WikiLeaks — which exploded onto the national stage earlier this month after it released a video recording showing US servicemembers shooting two reporters and six others to death — says they plan to release another, even more harrowing clip.

The clip will show previously classified footage from US warplanes that had been tapped to bomb Taliban positions in Farah province, Afghanistan last year.

Adds the UK Telegraph: “The Afghan government said at the time that the strikes by F-18 and B1 planes near Granai killed 147 civilians. An independent Afghan inquiry later put the toll at 86.”

“Video footage of the strike could prove highly damaging to the Nato-led coalition if it showed pilots failing to safeguard civilian lives,” the paper continues.

As recently as today, Afghanis protested the deaths of four other civilians who were killed when US forces fired on a bus on Monday.

About 200 men took to the streets of Kandahar to demonstrate over the killings on a highway outside the southern Afghan city, burning tyres and shouting “death to America, death to Karzai, death to this government”.

Hours later, three Taliban militants wearing suicide vests and carrying guns tried to storm the office of Afghanistan’s premier spy agency in Kandahar, sparking a shoot-out with security forces.

The incidents reflected chronic insecurity in the province of Kandahar, where US-led military forces are preparing a major push to dislodge the Taliban from their spiritual capital.

The Afghan government said a woman and a child were among the dead and 18 others were wounded in the shooting, which occurred when the bus neared a NATO convoy on the highway linking Kandahar and the western province of Herat.