Current affairs
WE ARE BELLINGCAT
AN INTELLIGENCE AGENCY FOR THE PEOPLE
ELIOT HIGGINS
Bloomsbury, 272pp, £20
Bellingcat is an investigative journalism website founded by Eliot Higgins, who ten years ago was a college dropout who became obsessed with the Arab Spring and the discovery that by searching online ‘you could find facts that neither the press nor the experts knew yet’.
During the Libyan war he posted a rebel soldiers’ video from YouTube under the ’s live blog which contradicted the regime’s claim of controlling a certain town. A reader challenged the information and he proceeded to draw a map of the streets that the rebels were walking and found it matched a Google map of the same area. ‘Sat in my office in Middle England… I had clarified the front line of a war zone thousands of miles away.’ He has gone on to piece together evidence of gas attacks in Syria, the shooting down over Ukraine of MH17 by separatists using a Russian-supplied missile, and the attempted
