Cool USA Facts!

On July 12, 2007, US AH-64 Apache helicopters bombed and killed ~15 Iraqi civilians, including two reuters journalists, and wounding two children, in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad. The attacks received worldwide coverage following the leaking of 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage, in a video released by wikileaks titled collateral murder. 22-year-old American Army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning (then known as Bradley Manning) was arrested for leaking the video, along with a video of another airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables, to WikiLeaks. She was being held in prison under the Espionage act, a law used to jail dissidents, intended to prohibit any interference with military operations, until early 2017. 1 On March 8, 2019, Manning was held in contempt of court by a United States District Court judge for refusing to testify to a federal grand jury investigating WikiLeaks. Manning said she was objecting to the "secrecy of the grand jury process". Except for a brief period of release between May 9 and May 16, she continues to be held in the Alexandria City Jail until she agrees to testify. Julian Assange, the founder of wikileaks, has also been the target of the CIA, who (aided by a spanish security firm) continually spied on him while in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.