David Finkel

The logs of Chelsea Manning's IM chats with Adrian Lamo state that David Finkel had the video which was released as Collateral Murder by WikiLeaks but did not release it. David Finkel has never publicly disclosed whether he had the video or not. In a washingtonpost.com webchat, he said, "I based the account in my book The Good Soldiers on multiple sources, all unclassified. Without going into details, I'll say the best source of information was being there [in Iraq]." At a February 2013 pretrial hearing, Manning stated that Finkel "was quoting, I feel in verbatim, the audio communications of the aerial weapons team crew." She said, however, that she was "aghast" at Finkel's portrayal of the incident. "Reading his account," she explained, "one would believe the engagement was somehow justified as 'payback' for an earlier attack that led to the death of a soldier."

Finkel's book The Good Soldiers describes several months he spent in 2007 as an embedded reporter with 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, also known as the "2-16 Rangers", as they worked to stabilize a portion of Baghdad.

David Louis Finkel (born October 28, 1955) is an American journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 as a staff writer at The Washington Post. As of January 2017, he was national enterprise editor at the Post. He has also worked for the Post' s foreign staff division. He wrote The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service. He is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow.