
Photo of Namir Noor-Eldeen.
Namir was an editors dream. He was the best photographer in Mosul, he was on top of every story, and if he didn’t shoot the pictures himself, he knew where to find them. His nose had been broken more than once, he’d been shot in the leg, detained, harrassed and threatened, but his quick smile and energy never faded. He lived more in 22 years than most people do in a lifetime and it’s very very sad to know I’ll never get one of his bearhug greetings again.
Bob Strong, former Reuters Chief Photographer, Iraq.
I watched the video yesterday of this amazingly gifted young man gunned down in his prime and cried.

Photo taken by Namir Noor-Eldeen
Namir's photo of an elderly Iraqi woman gesturing, "What are we to do about this? How can we stop this?," toward a bullet hole speaks a thousand words about the pain left behind in its wake.
Namir's body was riddled with bullet holes, machine gunned down by young Americans hovering over him in Apache helicopters, who claimed to mistake Namir's camera for a missile launcher and couldn't wait to pull the trigger again and again on a wounded man crawling away from the carnage, who they hoped would pick up something they could claim was a gun and then blast away at a van that stopped to save him, which they could claim was there to collect weapons, but actually contained two children, who they could claim shouldn't be there...thus satisfying the "rules of engagement."
That bullet hole is like a black hole, the gravity of which has consumed the souls of not only our soldiers, who joyfully shoot human beings as though playing a video game, but our entire nation, who funds this madness, claiming they believed Bush's stories about yellowcake, mushroom clouds, and Iraq teeming with weapons of mass destruction, but then voted for "change we could believe in" by electing Obama, who now tells us that we must remain to finish the "job," whatever the Pentagon claims that "job" is.
Reuters photo slideshow and MSNBC's photo slide show of Namir's work.
Chris Helgren, Reuters Chief Photographer:
...it quickly became obvious he was going to become one of the new stars in Iraqi photojournalism. He had an urgency that suited the front pages of the news business but also a tender eye that brought humanity via quiet moments to a vicious war. One of the first pictures he sent me was of bewildered U.S. Army soldiers surrounded by a flock of sheep, another I remember was of a wounded Kurdish girl with her legs in bandages while wrapped in a faux fur coat, or one of a boy picking up shards of broken plates in the family dining room after an ammunition dump blast rocked their house.
Reuters was shown the brutal video shortly after the massacre, but their Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a copy has not been granted for over two years.
Reuters reported that 139 journalists (36 of whom were photojournalists) have been killed in Iraq between March 2003 and October 2009, 7 of whom worked for Reuters. 6 out of the 7 Reuters employees were killed by Americans.
If you go to this link, Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War, and click on Profiles and then click on Dean Yates, you can bear witness to profiles of Namir Noor-Eldeen and his brave driver, Saeed Chmagh, both of whom were killed in the video. Noor-Eldeen's photographs appear in Bearing Witness's Timeline, which displays a powerful pictoral progression of the Iraq War.
Family Weeps at Video of Son’s Death in U.S. Strike, NY Times
His family
watched the video of it late Monday and burst into tears as they saw what appeared to be the crews of two American Apache attack helicopters kill their son and 11 other people, gloating at what the crewmen seemed to think was a successful strike on insurgents.
The military reported that the attack went according to "rules of engagement." They claimed that Noor-Eldeen and Chmagh were walking among insurgents.
The video tells a story that should not be permitted under any "rule of engagement." Not only does it reveal the gunmen's perverse enjoyment performing the massacre, but clearly shows that the military has perfected the art of covering up the true nature of their killing sprees by recording claims of "plausible deniability" that can be interpreted to obey the "rules of engagement."
"Look at those dead bastards," one of the cockpit voices says. "Nice."
When a vehicle arrives at the scene to help the wounded, the helicopters fire into it. United States troops call for a child who had been in the vehicle to be taken to the hospital.
"Well, it’s their fault bringing their kids into the battle," one of the cockpit voices says.
I am surprised that there does not already exist computer programs that can distinquish a camera from a rocket launcher, just as Namir's brother wondered:
"My question is, how could those highly skilled American pilots with all their high-tech information not distinguish between a camera and a rocket launcher?" the photographer’s brother, Nabeel Noor-Eldeen, an archaeology professor at Mosul University, said on Tuesday after watching the video with the rest of the family a few hours earlier.
So many video and photo journalists have been killed in Iraq that the military needs to get on this problem right away.
"At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth. If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?"
asked Namir's dad.
This is a good question.
Another good question is whether the military will do justice to Namir and the 11 men killed and two children wounded and thoroughly investigate this massacre.
Glenn Greenwald asks in Follow-up points on the WikiLeaks video:
What rational person can insist that incidents like the one in the Iraq video are extraordinary and rare when the top General in Afghanistan is stating publicly that -- even in Afghanistan, where avoidance of civilian casualties is a claimed top priority -- we're shooting an "amazing number" of completely innocent people, including "families"? Do you think if we had videos of those checkpoint shootings (or the countless air attacks on civilians) that they would be any less appalling than what we see in the one WikiLeaks released?
Clearly, this WikiLeaks video is just the tip of the iceberg. Sadly, the military has stonewalled on investigating thousands upon thousands of wrongful killings of innocent civilians by perfecting the art of abiding by the "rules of engagement" in much the same way they have "legalized" torture.
Isn't it time to step away from this appalling video game that has no true object and malleable rules of engagement?
Is the "job" worth finishing when we spill real blood and lose the treasure of real people like Namir Noor-Eldeen along with the heart and soul of our country?