CollateralMurder is an independent public archive of one event and everything that grew out of it: the United States Army helicopter attack in eastern Baghdad on 12 July 2007, and the cockpit video WikiLeaks published on 5 April 2010 under the title Collateral Murder.
What this site is for
The problem this archive tries to solve
The story is scattered. Parts of it live in an Army investigation, parts in court transcripts, parts in news reports from three different decades, and parts in a video that most people have only seen in a cut-down form. Someone coming to it fresh has to assemble it from pieces, and a lot of what they find online is either an argument or a summary of an argument.
What we do instead
This archive tries to be the other thing: an ordered record. Each page says what is known, who says it, and where you can go to see the same material yourself. Where the accounts disagree — and on this subject they often do — the page sets out the disagreement rather than resolving it quietly.
Who writes this
Pages are researched, written and maintained by the CollateralMurder Archive Desk, the small editorial team that runs this site. We are not journalists who covered the war, and we do not claim to be. We are compilers. Our work is reading the public record carefully, laying it out clearly, and being honest about the edges of what it shows.
Why a desk byline
We write under a desk byline rather than invented personal names, because that is the truthful description of how the pages are made. Research and drafting here are AI-assisted and checked by a person against the sources before publication, which the editorial policy sets out in full. Every page carries the date it was published and the date it was last reviewed. If you want to know how a page was put together, the editorial policy sets out the method step by step.
What we are not
- We have no connection to WikiLeaks, to Julian Assange or to any organisation campaigning for or against him.
- We have no connection to Reuters, though two Reuters staff are central to the story.
- We have no connection to the United States Department of Defense or to any government.
- We are not a campaign. This archive does not exist to win an argument about the Iraq war.
How the site is organised
The quickest way in
There are six topic sections and a handful of reference pages, and the sitemap lists every one of them on a single page. The quickest way in is the page about the video itself. From there, the timeline puts every dated event in order, the people page names everyone in the public record, and the sources page lists the documents, reports and recordings the whole archive rests on.
About the pictures
The images on this site are illustrations, generated for the archive, and every one of them is captioned as artwork. They are not frames from the footage, not press photographs, and not depictions of any real person's face. We use them because a wall of text is hard to read and because reproducing the real imagery would mean either infringing someone's copyright or publishing pictures of people dying. Nothing on this site is presented as a photograph of the events described.
Talking to us
Corrections are the most useful thing you can send. If something here is wrong, incomplete, or gives a misleading impression, the corrections page explains what happens next and the contact page has the address. We would rather be corrected than be consistent.