WikiLeaks, the secret-spilling group that has published thousands of classified documents pertaining to U.S. foreign policy, is now seeking footage from the recent bombing of a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
Through its website on Thursday, WikiLeaks said it’s looking for video footage and cockpit audio from the U.S. AC-130 gunship that launched the Oct. 3 assault that left 22 people dead, all workers or patients of the humanitarian group also known as Médecins Sans Frontières, or MSF.
“MSF believes that the killings amount to a war crime. The AC-130 records its attacks with high resolution gun cameras. According to military procedure, this footage should have been retained along with the cockpit audio. A post-massacre inquiry report referred to as an ’AR 15-6’ should have also been commissioned,” WikiLeaks said.
The group is raising a $50,000 bounty to compensate anyone willing to be WikiLeaks’ source. Donors had contributed more than $4,000, or around 8 percent of the goal, by Friday.
President Obama personally apologized to the head of the humanitarian group earlier this week and said the government will conduct a full investigation of the incident.
WikiLeaks has previously launched crowd-funding campaigns in an attempt to finance two international trade agreements and has raised more than $200,000 toward their awards. On Thursday, the group released a chapter from one of those documents, the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
In 2010, WikiLeaks published a recording taken from a U.S. Apache helicopter as it opened fire on a group of civilians and mortally wounded two Reuters journalists. The source of the video, Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning, is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for convictions stemming from her role in that disclosure, as well as hundreds of thousands of documents taken from Defense and State Department computers shared with WikiLeaks.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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