This paper explores the controversy generated by the nonprofit WikiLeakswebsite’s posting of a video documenting the shooting of a group of civilians by U.S.forces situated in a helicopter gunship hovering over a Baghdad neighbourhood.Sparking press attention around the world, the brutal rawness of the black andwhite footage—compounded by the harrowing exchanges between the air crewrecorded on the audio track—proved acutely unsettling to viewers otherwisehabituated to routine (effectively sanitized) renderings of the horrors of a warzone.This paper considers the video as an instance where the cultural normalization ofmilitarization was disrupted in ideological terms, thereby threatening to unravelofficially-sanctioned relations of communicative power.