As mentioned yesterday on Boing Boing, NPR host Alex Chadwick interviewed blogger / journalist Kevin Sites about footage Sites videotaped in Iraq last November that appeared to show a U.S. Marine shooting an unarmed Iraqi in a Fallujah mosque. Their interview (Sites' first in America since the incident) airs on the NPR show "Day to Day" today, and the audio is also available online.
The U.S. Marine Corps announced that it won't prosecute that Marine corporal, who was not identified, for his actions. Sites was on assignment for NBC on Nov. 13, 2004, and was following a squad into a mosque that the day before insurgents were using to fire on U.S. troops. The Marines were part of a U.S.-led offensive to clear Fallujah of its insurgent strongholds. Sites' video shows five men wounded from the previous day's fighting lying on the floor of the mosque. One Marine can be heard shouting to others that a man was only "playing dead." The Marine corporal in question appears to fire a round from his weapon into the Iraqi's head, and another Marine says, "Dead now."
Sites has made the complete, unedited video available for viewing online. During the discussion with NPR's Chadwick, Sites said that while releasing only an edited version of the tape seemed at the time like the most responsible thing to do, given the heated political context — he now questions that decision. Should media second-guess the public's ability to handle the whole truth? Would the additional detail have provided context that might have changed the way the public understood the incident?
The unedited video Sites took in the Fallujah mosque last November is available here, and archived audio of the NPR interview is here.
