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The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic...on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange...arrived to rent the place.
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The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange's direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project BAssange's code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007.
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The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange's direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project BAssange's code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007.
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Assange would not identify his source, saying only that the person was unhappy about the attack.
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The video was digitally encrypted, and it took WikiLeaks three months to crack.
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At around three in the afternoon, an Icelandic parliamentarian named Birgitta Jonsdottir walked in.
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Icelandic activists were due to arrive; half a dozen ultimately contributed time to the video, and about as many WikiLeaks volunteers from other countries were participating.
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As Assange reviewed the cut, an activist named Gudmundur Gudmundsson spoke up to say that the banter allowed viewers to 'make an emotional bond' with the soldiers. Assange argued that it was mostly fragmentary and garbled, but Gudmundsson insisted: It is just used all the time for triggering emotions.'
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The video, in its original form, was a puzzlea fragment of evidence divorced from context. Assange and the others in the Bunker spent much of their time trying to piece together details: the units involved, their command structure, the rules of engagement, the jargon soldiers used on the radio, and, most important, whether and how the Iraqis on the ground were armed. 'One of them has a weapon,' Assange said, peering at blurry footage of the men walking down the street. 'See all those people standing out there.' 'And there is a guy with an RPG over his arm,' Gonggrijp said. 'I'm not sure.' Assange said. 'It does look a little bit like an RPG.' He played the footage again. 'I'll tell you what is very strange,' he said. 'If it is an RPG, then there is just one RPG. Where are all the other weapons? All those guys. It is pretty weird.'
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The forensic work was made more difficult because Assange had declined to discuss the matter with military officials. 'I thought it would be more harmful than helpful,' he told me. 'I have approached them before, and, as soon as they hear it is WikiLeaks, they are not terribly cooperative.'
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In conjunction with Iceland's national broadcasting service, RUV, he sent two Icelandic journalists to Baghdad to find them. |
