Thirteen years after two of his colleagues were killed by US soldiers who covered up the murder, Dean Yates, the former Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad, has come out in defense of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange, who published leaked footage showing the truth, but is now indicted under the Espionage Act for it.
Yates, who worked closely with both photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver/fixer Saeed Chmagh, the two Reuters journalists who were killed in Iraq on July 12, 2007, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC) RN Breakfast podcast on Tuesday that “the truth needs to come out.”
The two were killed, alongside nine Iraqi citizens, by a group of US Army attack helicopters that raked the Baghdad street corner with cannonfire as well as a van that stopped to help the wounded. However, the US Army told the public one version of the story and Reuters another, neither of which was the complete truth.
“Because that was an off-the-record briefing, and as journalists, we are supposed to keep off-the-record agreements, a year later, when we had been trying to get the tape from the Pentagon, I suggested to my editors that we break that off-the-record agreement because I felt that we'd given the US military enough time to give us the tape,” he said, noting the editors declined his suggestion. “We were being honorable with the US military – they were not being honorable with us,” Yates…
