And....we're back off topic again. C'mon people, Gimmie wants to do some American Bashing!!!!
no i want people like you to acknowledge what our country has done. the proof is in the documents. if it were china i would bash them. if it were palestinians or israelis or norwegians i would bash them. hundreds of thousands of people dead at the hands of the american military and its "allies in the war on turrrrr" when iraq did not a fucking thing to deserve it...
it is fine if you want to take a potshot at me, but i am willing to bet you did not read the original post or refer to the link i posted twice.
i wonder why i am not surprised, it is nothing new, it is an every day occurrance around here...people would rather take a shot at the poster instead discuss the article posted...and we wonder why we can not have a serious dialogue in this country because people would rather point fingers instead of addressing the issue...
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
50 years ago isn't that long ago in terms of history
I didn't say it was, but it's also not an insignificant period of time within which to gain a pretty good picture of a nations foreign policy. We're talking about wars of aggression and compared to the U.S China comes nowhere close.
i wonder why i am not surprised, it is nothing new, it is an every day occurrance around here...people would rather take a shot at the poster instead discuss the article posted...and we wonder why we can not have a serious dialogue in this country because people would rather point fingers instead of addressing the issue...
But China invaded Tibet in 1959 therefore America's illegal occupation of Iraq and subsequent war crimes are perfectly acceptable.
Makes me laugh how Americans always talk about Iran and China like they're some kind of evil bogeymen when neither country has done anything in 50 years. It's just a pathetic attempt to deflect attention.
i wonder why i am not surprised, it is nothing new, it is an every day occurrance around here...people would rather take a shot at the poster instead discuss the article posted...and we wonder why we can not have a serious dialogue in this country because people would rather point fingers instead of addressing the issue...
But China invaded Tibet in 1959 therefore America's illegal occupation of Iraq and subsequent war crimes are perfectly acceptable.
Makes me laugh how Americans always talk about Iran and China like they're some kind of evil bogeymen when neither country has done anything in 50 years. It's just a pathetic attempt to deflect attention.
our leaders have to play the fear card all the time..that is what keeps an indifferent population on it's toes....if there was nothing to be afraid of, then maybe people would realize how badly they are getting screwed by the system and the corporations and actually want to try to do something about it. a scared population is a population that is easy to control and manipulate....
and it seems that deflecting attention is something that we are very good at..."hey, look, kurt warner is about to dance...."
:?
Post edited by gimmesometruth27 on
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US
Sunday, 24 October 2010
As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.
Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."
Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I've identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.
It's always tempting to avoid a story by saying "nothing new". The "old story" idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And it's true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The "evidence" of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was farmed out to The New York Times's Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to attack the Americans.
But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the "81" bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations?
The Americans scored no better last time round. In Kuwait, US troops could hear Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations after the liberation of the city from Saddam Hussein's legions in 1991. A member of the Kuwaiti royal family was involved in the torture. US forces did not intervene. They just complained to the royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. After all, what was Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky of the Israeli army told when he reported to his officer in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere," Grabovsky was told by his battalion commander. This was during the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacre.
The quotation comes from Israel's 1983 Kahan commission report – heaven knows what we could read if WikiLeaks got its hands on the barrels of military files in the Israeli defence ministry (or the Syrian version, for that matter). But, of course, back in those days, we didn't know how to use a computer, let alone how to write on it. And that, of course, is one of the important lessons of the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon.
Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story before he died. No WikiLeaks then.
But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative journalism that The Sunday Times used to practise? What is the point of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military "deep throats", if almost half a million secret military documents are going to float up in front of you on a screen?
We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace's consternation – "I don't think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."
The significance of this remark – cryptically sadistic in its way – was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: "Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture them.
So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur. And so General David Petraeus – widely loved by the US press corps – was presumably responsible for the dramatic increase in US air strikes over two years; 229 bombing attacks in Iraq in 2006, but 1,447 in 2007. Interestingly enough, US air strikes in Afghanistan have risen by 172 per cent since Petraeus took over there. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the Pentagon is now bleating that WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands. The Pentagon has been covered in blood since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and for an institution that ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – wasn't that civilian death toll more than 66,000 by their own count, out of a total of 109,000 recorded? – to claim that WikiLeaks is culpable of homicide is preposterous.
The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told.
US official documents detail extraordinary scale of wrongdoing
WikiLeaks yesterday released on its website some 391,832 US military messages documenting actions and reports in Iraq over the period 2004-2009. Here are the main points:
Prisoners abused, raped and murdered
Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these are itemised in US reports, American authorities now face accusations of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are calling for an official investigation.
Civilian death toll cover-up
Coalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian deaths, raising their total to 122,000.
The shooting of men trying to surrender
In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."
Private security firm abuses
Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.
Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombing
A teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with learning difficulties to insurgents.
Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints
Out of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.
Iranian influence
Reports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US
Sunday, 24 October 2010
As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.
Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."
Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I've identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.
It's always tempting to avoid a story by saying "nothing new". The "old story" idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And it's true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The "evidence" of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was farmed out to The New York Times's Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to attack the Americans.
But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the "81" bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations?
The Americans scored no better last time round. In Kuwait, US troops could hear Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations after the liberation of the city from Saddam Hussein's legions in 1991. A member of the Kuwaiti royal family was involved in the torture. US forces did not intervene. They just complained to the royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. After all, what was Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky of the Israeli army told when he reported to his officer in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere," Grabovsky was told by his battalion commander. This was during the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacre.
The quotation comes from Israel's 1983 Kahan commission report – heaven knows what we could read if WikiLeaks got its hands on the barrels of military files in the Israeli defence ministry (or the Syrian version, for that matter). But, of course, back in those days, we didn't know how to use a computer, let alone how to write on it. And that, of course, is one of the important lessons of the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon.
Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story before he died. No WikiLeaks then.
But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative journalism that The Sunday Times used to practise? What is the point of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military "deep throats", if almost half a million secret military documents are going to float up in front of you on a screen?
We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace's consternation – "I don't think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."
The significance of this remark – cryptically sadistic in its way – was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: "Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture them.
So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur. And so General David Petraeus – widely loved by the US press corps – was presumably responsible for the dramatic increase in US air strikes over two years; 229 bombing attacks in Iraq in 2006, but 1,447 in 2007. Interestingly enough, US air strikes in Afghanistan have risen by 172 per cent since Petraeus took over there. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the Pentagon is now bleating that WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands. The Pentagon has been covered in blood since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and for an institution that ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – wasn't that civilian death toll more than 66,000 by their own count, out of a total of 109,000 recorded? – to claim that WikiLeaks is culpable of homicide is preposterous.
The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told.
US official documents detail extraordinary scale of wrongdoing
WikiLeaks yesterday released on its website some 391,832 US military messages documenting actions and reports in Iraq over the period 2004-2009. Here are the main points:
Prisoners abused, raped and murdered
Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these are itemised in US reports, American authorities now face accusations of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are calling for an official investigation.
Civilian death toll cover-up
Coalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian deaths, raising their total to 122,000.
The shooting of men trying to surrender
In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."
Private security firm abuses
Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.
Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombing
A teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with learning difficulties to insurgents.
Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints
Out of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.
Iranian influence
Reports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
hey china did it 50 years ago, so it is ok for us to do it...
:roll:
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US
Sunday, 24 October 2010
As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.
Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."
Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I've identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.
It's always tempting to avoid a story by saying "nothing new". The "old story" idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And it's true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The "evidence" of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was farmed out to The New York Times's Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to attack the Americans.
But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the "81" bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations?
The Americans scored no better last time round. In Kuwait, US troops could hear Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations after the liberation of the city from Saddam Hussein's legions in 1991. A member of the Kuwaiti royal family was involved in the torture. US forces did not intervene. They just complained to the royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. After all, what was Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky of the Israeli army told when he reported to his officer in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere," Grabovsky was told by his battalion commander. This was during the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacre.
The quotation comes from Israel's 1983 Kahan commission report – heaven knows what we could read if WikiLeaks got its hands on the barrels of military files in the Israeli defence ministry (or the Syrian version, for that matter). But, of course, back in those days, we didn't know how to use a computer, let alone how to write on it. And that, of course, is one of the important lessons of the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon.
Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story before he died. No WikiLeaks then.
But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative journalism that The Sunday Times used to practise? What is the point of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military "deep throats", if almost half a million secret military documents are going to float up in front of you on a screen?
We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace's consternation – "I don't think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."
The significance of this remark – cryptically sadistic in its way – was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: "Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture them.
So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur. And so General David Petraeus – widely loved by the US press corps – was presumably responsible for the dramatic increase in US air strikes over two years; 229 bombing attacks in Iraq in 2006, but 1,447 in 2007. Interestingly enough, US air strikes in Afghanistan have risen by 172 per cent since Petraeus took over there. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the Pentagon is now bleating that WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands. The Pentagon has been covered in blood since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and for an institution that ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – wasn't that civilian death toll more than 66,000 by their own count, out of a total of 109,000 recorded? – to claim that WikiLeaks is culpable of homicide is preposterous.
The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told.
US official documents detail extraordinary scale of wrongdoing
WikiLeaks yesterday released on its website some 391,832 US military messages documenting actions and reports in Iraq over the period 2004-2009. Here are the main points:
Prisoners abused, raped and murdered
Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these are itemised in US reports, American authorities now face accusations of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are calling for an official investigation.
Civilian death toll cover-up
Coalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian deaths, raising their total to 122,000.
The shooting of men trying to surrender
In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."
Private security firm abuses
Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.
Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombing
A teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with learning difficulties to insurgents.
Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints
Out of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.
Iranian influence
Reports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
i do like fisk's writing, there is also a very good article by him in saturdays irish independent
Maybe now people will admit that Iraqbodycount was a joke all along?
They've just added the new figures to their tally, so now those deaths recorded by the Americans have been included. Now where does that leave all the unreported deaths?
The Lancet report is still the most accurate survey of Iraqi civilian deaths we have. It's about time Iraq Body Count stepped down and fucked off.
Western academics have studied the subject of alleged Chinese aggression and expansionism in depth. And the conclusion is China is NOT an expansionist state. One such study is by MIT political scientist Fravel Tayor published in his book 'Strong Borders, Secure Nation', which you can access from here:
Here is an except:
"In its territorial disputes, however, China has been less prone to violence and more cooperative than a singular view of an expansionist state suggests. Since 1949, China has participated in twenty-three unique territorial disputes with its neighbors on land and at sea. Yet it has pursued compromise and offered concessions in seventeen of these conflicts. China’s compromises have often been substantial, as it has usually offered to accept less than half of the contested territory in any final settlement. In addition, these compromises have resulted in boundary agreements in which China has abandoned potential irredentist claims to more than 3.4 million square kilometers of land that had been part of the Qing empire at its height in the early nineteenth century. In total, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has contested roughly 238,000 square kilometers or just 7 percent of the territory once part of the Qing...
...Leading theories of international relations would expect a state with China’s characteristics to be uncompromising and prone to using force in territorial disputes, not conciliatory. Contrary to scholars of offensive realism, however, China has rarely exploited its military superiority to bargain hard for the territory that it claims or to seize it through force.4 China has likewise not become increasingly assertive in its territorial disputes as its relative power has grown in the past two decades. Contrary to others who emphasize the violent effects of nationalism, which would suggest inflexibility in conflicts over national sovereignty, China has been quite willing to offer territorial concessions despite historical legacies of external victimization and territorial dismemberment under the Qing...."
In another seminar by Oxford historian Neville Maxwell, he noted that China has settled its land border amicably with 12 of its 14 neighbors. You can listen to his podcast here:
watch the video on the linked page. it is only 7 minutes long, and you will be angered by it...
Iraq war logs: US turned over captives to Iraqi torture squadsNick Clegg calls for answers to 'extremely serious' abuse reports, but says it is up to US to answer for its own forces
Fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks.
The 400,000 field reports published by the whistleblowing website at the weekend contain an official account of deliberate threats by a military interrogator to turn his captive over to the Iraqi "Wolf Brigade".
The interrogator told the prisoner in explicit terms that: "He would be subject to all the pain and agony that the Wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees."
The evidence emerged as the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said the allegations of killings, torture and abuse in Iraq were "extremely serious" and "needed to be looked at".
Clegg, speaking on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show, did not rule out an inquiry into the actions of British forces in Iraq, but said it was up to the US administration to answer for the actions of its forces. His comments contrasted with a statement from the Ministry of Defence today, which warned that the posting of classified US military logs on the WikiLeaks website could endanger the lives of British forces.
Clegg said: "We can bemoan how these leaks occurred, but I think the nature of the allegations made are extraordinarily serious. They are distressing to read about and they are very serious. I am assuming the US administration will want to provide its own answer. It's not for us to tell them how to do that."
Asked if there should be an inquiry into the role of British troops, he said: "I think anything that suggests that basic rules of war, conflict and engagement have been broken or that torture has been in any way condoned are extremely serious and need to be looked at.
"People will want to hear what the answer is to what are very, very serious allegations of a nature which I think everybody will find quite shocking."
A Channel 4 Dispatches programme tomorrow night is expected to add further details based on the logs of alleged abuse directly by coalition forces. Only two cases of alleged involvement of British troops have so far been mentioned.
Within the huge leaked archive is contained a batch of secret field reports from the town of Samarra. They corroborate previous allegations that the US military turned over many prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the interior ministry's special commandos.
In Samarra, the series of log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US infantry, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for "further questioning". Typical entries read: "All 5 detainees were turned over to Ministry of Interior for further questioning" (from 29 November 2004) and "The detainee was then turned over to the 2nd Ministry of Interior Commando Battalion for further questioning" (30 November 2004).
The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films : "US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing," while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.
Maass's 2005 interview at the improvised prison with the Wolf Brigade's US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.
The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects. The then interior minister in charge of them was alleged to have been a former member of the Shia Badr militia.
It is unclear which US unit filed the report of complaint that detainees were being specifically threatened with being turned over to the Wolf Brigade. The entry describes the capture of prisoners near the town of Falluja, west of Baghdad.
It is headed "Alleged detainee abuse by interrogators", and reads: "On 14 December 2005, a raid was conducted whereby five individuals were detained for suspicion of emplacement of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] as a result of a pid [positive identification]. "During the interrogation process the RO [ranking officer] threatened the subject detainee that he would never see his family again and would be sent to the 'Wolf Battalion' where he would be subject to all the pain and agony that the 'Wolf Battalion' is known to exact upon its detainees."
The war logs also disclose that Wolf Brigade members were themselves at risk of reprisals. In January 2007, US soldiers reported a gruesome discovery in a street near Baghdad: "Only the severed head was found.
A wire was run through the ear with the corpse's ID attached to the wire. 3rd bn commander identified the remains as Ahdel Abu Hussain, he was an officer in the NP [national police] Wolf Brigade."
Lawyers said the reports may embroil British as well as US forces in an alleged culture of abuse and extrajudicial killings. Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, appearing alongside the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, at a press conference in London, said some of the deaths may have involved British forces and could now go through the UK courts.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.
66,081 Non combatants out of 109,000
Thats 60.62 percent of all killed were civilians. NON COMBATANTS
Thats not shamefull, thats an atrocity. Every country involved should be held to account.
Thats fucking disgusting.
I knew there wasnt any WMD's in that country. How the fuck does a Dumbarsed storeman in newcastle Australia fucking know that the crap that was fed to us to get involved in Iraq was bullshit,
All those who supported this war
GIVE YOURSELF A FUCKING UPPERCUT.
No wait a minute beat yourself to a pulp. you fucking deserve it
BLAIR AND BUSH, howard as well should all face punishment
sorry for my language and feelings but this was and is fucked
On a hot July day in 2007, taxi driver Salah Mutasher Toman swept his two young children into the passenger seat of his white minivan. He bade his brother, Sabah Toman, farewell and started making his way home, a short drive across the neighbourhood, through militia-held territory.
The area had echoed with explosions that morning. A fight had been brewing. But that was nothing new in Baghdad during that particular bloody summer. Salah planned on bunkering down with his family for the day to ride out the routine of heat and violence. He didn't get further than 400 metres before his van was blown apart by a hovering American helicopter. Salah died, along with six other people in his van. His son Sajad and daughter Duah were gravely wounded.
The events were all filmed by the helicopter that shot at them. The footage was among the first significant leaks from classified military materials in nearly eight years of war in Iraq. It was seen as lifting the lid on an iron-clad secrecy surrounding the US military campaign that had pitched the fighting as a black and white clash between liberators and insurgents. The civilian toll had been difficult to document and until then, impossible to film, let alone broadcast.
As the attack helicopter circled, with its cameras rolling, Salah's van entered the aftermath of an attack launched minutes earlier by the same hovering pilots. They asked for and received permission to fire, then the helicopter's guns pulverised Salah's van. Minutes later, an American patrol arrived on the scene. They approached the wrecked van and found the two children alive. They carried them straight to medics, who drove them to a nearby hospital.
"I remember them carrying me," said Duah, who was aged 4 that day and is now 7. "I was very scared and my stomach hurt a lot."
Her brother Sajad, 12, lifted up his shirt to reveal his scars. "They carried me away as well. I was terrified to be in the arms of an American soldier. But I didn't know what had just happened. And I didn't know where my sister was."
A total of 19 people, their father among them, had just been killed by the helicopter's heavy gun. Eleven had been loitering on a corner, including a Reuters cameraman. The helicopter had been circling in support of a US military operation taking place below. US troops were about to confront a militia they believed was active in the area. The helicopter pilots believed they saw some of the men armed with Kalashnikovs and another with a rocket-propelled grenades.
As rounds from the heavy guns thundered into the bitumen, the unsuspecting men standing below seemed to disintegrate. One survived and attempted to crawl until he was finished off with a second burst. Salah's minivan was on the scene around two minutes later.
His brother, Sabah Saleh Toman, had heard the first series of explosions just as has brother had pulled away from his house. "Then I heard the second [explosions]," he said. "I knew it involved him.
"My brother was only trying to help and they shot at him. They killed him. His children are almost orphans to this day, because their mother is still too [traumatised] to care for them. All day she is either in her room, or in the hospital."
Audio from the helicopter suggests the pilots had mistaken Salah's minivan for reinforcements rushing to the battle. After their initial attack on the van, a mortally wounded man was seen crawling away.
"Come on buddy, all you gotta do is reach for a weapon," one of the pilots said. Sabah and his brother's two children, whom he now cares for, have seen the footage of the attack. Parts of the footage received saturation coverage on Iraqi television channels in June.
"It was shocking to see," says Sabah. "Shocking to see how violent they were and the lack of understanding they showed. My brother arrived to help them. Anyone in this culture would have done the same."
Asked whether there were militias operating in the area that day, Sabah said simply: "Yes." He would not elaborate, but replied with another "yes" when asked whether the militia was the Mehdi Army, a key Shia lslamic player in the sectarian war that was ravaging Baghdad at the time.
In the days following the attack, Sabah looked through all hospitals in east Baghdad for his brother, niece and nephew. He quickly found his brother at the morgue, but could not locate the children. They were in a hospital in the fortified Green Zone. Duah had at least 12 bullet or shrapnel wounds al over her body. She faces more surgery and still complains of stomach pain. Sajad was just as badly wounded. When Sabah had picked up the ruins of his family, he approached the nearby US base. A colonel agreed to see him. "He took me inside and apologised," he said. "They gave me $5,000 and said that is all they could do."
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
these logs should have ZERO impact on anything ... why? ... because for the most part people are either ignorant or they just don't care ...
it was OBVIOUS from the get-go to anyone who cared enough to actually read up on it that iraq was based on greed and exploitation ... if those who didn't get it then, haven't gotten it over the last decade - this document won't change their minds ...
this all falls squarely on the folks that continue to support a political system that has long been corrupt ... yes - if you vote for your typical partisan hacks (in the states that means Democrat or Republican, britain - labour or conservatives) wherever ... you are mostly to blame ... these guys have been governing in the interests of large corporations for decades ... and Iraq was most definitely a decision based on pure greed ... nothing else ... the evil in this world are primarily old guys in suits ...
I wonder how much of the lack of an outcry here is because a lot of people just assumed this all along, and this new round of leaks has people saying, "Yeah, that's about what I figured."
And I listen for the voice inside my head... nothing. I'll do this one myself.
these logs should have ZERO impact on anything ... why? ... because for the most part people are either ignorant or they just don't care ...
it was OBVIOUS from the get-go to anyone who cared enough to actually read up on it that iraq was based on greed and exploitation ... if those who didn't get it then, haven't gotten it over the last decade - this document won't change their minds ...
this all falls squarely on the folks that continue to support a political system that has long been corrupt ... yes - if you vote for your typical partisan hacks (in the states that means Democrat or Republican, britain - labour or conservatives) wherever ... you are mostly to blame ... these guys have been governing in the interests of large corporations for decades ... and Iraq was most definitely a decision based on pure greed ... nothing else ... the evil in this world are primarily old guys in suits ...
i think you nailed it on the head in the part i underlined. these documents SHOULD open people's eyes and trigger them to make sure that is has an impact at the level as high as the policymakers. but it is apparent that people don't give a shit. they just don't. they can't be bothered.
i guess nobody feels much like discussing any of this. how boring and pointless this debate has become.. :(
these wars have bankrupted our country, both morally and financially, and the people of our country do not care. as long as they have their flatscreen tvs and their handy little diversions from cold hard reality, they are fine with it...i guarantee if fox news and other networks actually covered these stories people would be more knowlegible and feel differently about it. most people are too content with the news they get on cable to look at other sources like the guardian for any facts or insight into what is really going on..
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
these logs should have ZERO impact on anything ... why? ... because for the most part people are either ignorant or they just don't care ...
it was OBVIOUS from the get-go to anyone who cared enough to actually read up on it that iraq was based on greed and exploitation ... if those who didn't get it then, haven't gotten it over the last decade - this document won't change their minds ...
this all falls squarely on the folks that continue to support a political system that has long been corrupt ... yes - if you vote for your typical partisan hacks (in the states that means Democrat or Republican, britain - labour or conservatives) wherever ... you are mostly to blame ... these guys have been governing in the interests of large corporations for decades ... and Iraq was most definitely a decision based on pure greed ... nothing else ... the evil in this world are primarily old guys in suits ...
i think you nailed it on the head in the part i underlined. these documents SHOULD open people's eyes and trigger them to make sure that is has an impact at the level as high as the policymakers. but it is apparent that people don't give a shit. they just don't. they can't be bothered.
i guess nobody feels much like discussing any of this. how boring and pointless this debate has become.. :(
these wars have bankrupted our country, both morally and financially, and the people of our country do not care. as long as they have their flatscreen tvs and their handy little diversions from cold hard reality, they are fine with it...i guarantee if fox news and other networks actually covered these stories people would be more knowlegible and feel differently about it. most people are too content with the news they get on cable to look at other sources like the guardian for any facts or insight into what is really going on..
I was actually thinking that last week, when someone (in a discussion about the Tea Party) asked what happened to the liberal anti-war protesters who were so vocal during the Bush administration. The media, by and large, just doesn't cover it anymore. I wonder just how many people out there actually realize the US is still actively fighting in Afghanistan?
And I listen for the voice inside my head... nothing. I'll do this one myself.
the results of survey gives me very little hope that things will ever get better, and that people will not be more aware of current events...it just shows that the fascination with entertainment and tabloid journalism is dumbing down the entire population...i knew all of this stuff before age 12...
A large number of British children believe Buzz Lightyear was the first person to walk on the moon and that Darth Vader's Deathstar from Star Wars is the furthest planet from Earth.
A survey of 2000 children aged 6-12 years in the UK revealed most youngsters have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction, and lacked basic knowledge of key events in history, London's Telegraph newspaper reports.
One in five children believed Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear was the first person to set foot on the moon and one in six said the Deathstar was the most distant planet from Earth.
One- third of the children surveyed also did not know that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, with nine percent giving credit to Deal or No Deal host Noel Edmonds.
One in six children incorrectly identified US President Barack Obama as either Mr T from the A-Team, F1 driver Lewis Hamilton or Nelson Mandela.
But while their knowledge of history was somewhat muddled, the children proved to be far more aware of what was happening in the lives of celebrities.
Close to 65 percent of the children knew Britney Spears had shaved her head and two-thirds identified malaria as the illness suffered by X Factor judge Cheryl Cole.
Children's author Christopher Lloyd told the Telegraph there was a lot of confusion among children about historical events.
''Young people have little or no context when it comes to knowledge about the past," Mr Lloyd said.
"Often they know a great deal about a few topics, but seldom do they have any idea of the big picture - Neil Armstrong would not be happy to learn a plastic action figure is getting the credit for first man to step on the moon."
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
I was actually thinking that last week, when someone (in a discussion about the Tea Party) asked what happened to the liberal anti-war protesters who were so vocal during the Bush administration. The media, by and large, just doesn't cover it anymore. I wonder just how many people out there actually realize the US is still actively fighting in Afghanistan?
I think it is a demonstration of how many people are tied into a 2 party system. The democrats were using the anti-war fever to help pull in votes in the 2008 elections but now that they are effectively running the show while the war rages on, it's a topic that both the republicans and democrats would prefer to sweep under the carpet.
The media more-or-less needs a catalyst to make a news story popular. Every politician is avoiding the issue for obvious reasons. I don't know why the anti-war crowd became silent, but I think it is because their guy is running the show and they are afraid to be vocal about criticism.
the results of survey gives me very little hope that things will ever get better, and that people will not be more aware of current events...it just shows that the fascination with entertainment and tabloid journalism is dumbing down the entire population...i knew all of this stuff before age 12...
A large number of British children believe Buzz Lightyear was the first person to walk on the moon and that Darth Vader's Deathstar from Star Wars is the furthest planet from Earth.
A survey of 2000 children aged 6-12 years in the UK revealed most youngsters have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction, and lacked basic knowledge of key events in history, London's Telegraph newspaper reports.
One in five children believed Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear was the first person to set foot on the moon and one in six said the Deathstar was the most distant planet from Earth.
One- third of the children surveyed also did not know that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, with nine percent giving credit to Deal or No Deal host Noel Edmonds.
One in six children incorrectly identified US President Barack Obama as either Mr T from the A-Team, F1 driver Lewis Hamilton or Nelson Mandela.
But while their knowledge of history was somewhat muddled, the children proved to be far more aware of what was happening in the lives of celebrities.
Close to 65 percent of the children knew Britney Spears had shaved her head and two-thirds identified malaria as the illness suffered by X Factor judge Cheryl Cole.
Children's author Christopher Lloyd told the Telegraph there was a lot of confusion among children about historical events.
''Young people have little or no context when it comes to knowledge about the past," Mr Lloyd said.
"Often they know a great deal about a few topics, but seldom do they have any idea of the big picture - Neil Armstrong would not be happy to learn a plastic action figure is getting the credit for first man to step on the moon."
I seem to remember quite a few years back, a survey was done that showed a percentage of Americans thought Jed Bartlett from the West Wing was actually the president.
While this is taking the discussion further away from your original post (and for that I apologize - I haven't had much time to actually take a look at the leaked items so my knowledge doesn't extend much further than the number of dead being substantially higher than was reported), the emergency number in New Zealand is 111. Always has been. We got the show Rescue 911 on TV for a while (only the best foreign programming for us!), and ended up having to add an extra emergency number - 911 - because so many Kiwis just assumed that 911 was our number. Despite the fact that IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN 111. They ended up renaming the show Rescue 111 in NZ, but it was too late and the damage had been done.
And I listen for the voice inside my head... nothing. I'll do this one myself.
I was actually thinking that last week, when someone (in a discussion about the Tea Party) asked what happened to the liberal anti-war protesters who were so vocal during the Bush administration. The media, by and large, just doesn't cover it anymore. I wonder just how many people out there actually realize the US is still actively fighting in Afghanistan?
I think it is a demonstration of how many people are tied into a 2 party system. The democrats were using the anti-war fever to help pull in votes in the 2008 elections but now that they are effectively running the show while the war rages on, it's a topic that both the republicans and democrats would prefer to sweep under the carpet.
The media more-or-less needs a catalyst to make a news story popular. Every politician is avoiding the issue for obvious reasons. I don't know why the anti-war crowd became silent, but I think it is because their guy is running the show and they are afraid to be vocal about criticism.
i think that the part that i made large is not true at all. i think we are completely discouraged because he said he would end the fighting in iraq, which he has done, but now we are escalating in afghanistan which was not part of the deal. i have been out there protesting all along, and you know what my local news covered as the lead story the day of the largest protest here? britney fucking spears flashing her snatch to the paparazzi...
and you can not pin all of it on obama. we did our best to get him elected and he did not keep his promise. if you look at the dates on the wikileaks, they went up until january 2010, where obama had been in office for 11.5 months. the rest of it, and the most egregious of the atrocites was under bush's watch. both bush and obama share blame, but the majority of it falls on bush for getting us into those wars with no plan for getting out and for committing so many atrocites in the name of the american public.
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
...One in six children incorrectly identified US President Barack Obama as either Mr T from the A-Team, F1 driver Lewis Hamilton or Nelson Mandela.
...
i often get nelson mandela and morgan freeman mixed up.
hear my name
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
I was actually thinking that last week, when someone (in a discussion about the Tea Party) asked what happened to the liberal anti-war protesters who were so vocal during the Bush administration. The media, by and large, just doesn't cover it anymore. I wonder just how many people out there actually realize the US is still actively fighting in Afghanistan?
I think it is a demonstration of how many people are tied into a 2 party system. The democrats were using the anti-war fever to help pull in votes in the 2008 elections but now that they are effectively running the show while the war rages on, it's a topic that both the republicans and democrats would prefer to sweep under the carpet.
The media more-or-less needs a catalyst to make a news story popular. Every politician is avoiding the issue for obvious reasons. I don't know why the anti-war crowd became silent, but I think it is because their guy is running the show and they are afraid to be vocal about criticism.
i think that the part that i made large is not true at all. i think we are completely discouraged because he said he would end the fighting in iraq, which he has done, but now we are escalating in afghanistan which was not part of the deal. i have been out there protesting all along, and you know what my local news covered as the lead story the day of the largest protest here? britney fucking spears flashing her snatch to the paparazzi...
and you can not pin all of it on obama. we did our best to get him elected and he did not keep his promise. if you look at the dates on the wikileaks, they went up until january 2010, where obama had been in office for 11.5 months. the rest of it, and the most egregious of the atrocites was under bush's watch. both bush and obama share blame, but the majority of it falls on bush for getting us into those wars with no plan for getting out and for committing so many atrocites in the name of the american public.
actually that was always part of the deal, his campaign website always said troops would be redeployed from iraq to afghanistan
plus 50,000 or so troops are staying in iraq not to mention he's roughly doubling the amount of mercenaries there.
also, didn't bush already end combat operations? wasn't that the point to him landing on that aircraft carrier with the mission accomplished banner?
WASHINGTON — Hours after making an historic landing aboard a moving aircraft carrier, President Bush told sailors manning the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
I was actually thinking that last week, when someone (in a discussion about the Tea Party) asked what happened to the liberal anti-war protesters who were so vocal during the Bush administration. The media, by and large, just doesn't cover it anymore. I wonder just how many people out there actually realize the US is still actively fighting in Afghanistan?
I think it is a demonstration of how many people are tied into a 2 party system. The democrats were using the anti-war fever to help pull in votes in the 2008 elections but now that they are effectively running the show while the war rages on, it's a topic that both the republicans and democrats would prefer to sweep under the carpet.
The media more-or-less needs a catalyst to make a news story popular. Every politician is avoiding the issue for obvious reasons. I don't know why the anti-war crowd became silent, but I think it is because their guy is running the show and they are afraid to be vocal about criticism.
what about the 10 million people around the world who protested the iraq war before it started? were they democrats too?
I think it is a demonstration of how many people are tied into a 2 party system. The democrats were using the anti-war fever to help pull in votes in the 2008 elections but now that they are effectively running the show while the war rages on, it's a topic that both the republicans and democrats would prefer to sweep under the carpet.
The media more-or-less needs a catalyst to make a news story popular. Every politician is avoiding the issue for obvious reasons. I don't know why the anti-war crowd became silent, but I think it is because their guy is running the show and they are afraid to be vocal about criticism.
what about the 10 million people around the world who protested the iraq war before it started? were they democrats too?
I would have to do a census to determine their political affiliation. :ugeek:
I don't see as many celebrities and musicians protesting as much either since the elections. Has anyone listened to all the boots from PJ's last tour? I have only listened to a few but I would be curious on how much anti-war rhetoric Ed added in. If anyone can provide input I would be interested. I see that the song No More was played sixteen times prior to the general elections and since then it has only been played twice.
I think it is a demonstration of how many people are tied into a 2 party system. The democrats were using the anti-war fever to help pull in votes in the 2008 elections but now that they are effectively running the show while the war rages on, it's a topic that both the republicans and democrats would prefer to sweep under the carpet.
The media more-or-less needs a catalyst to make a news story popular. Every politician is avoiding the issue for obvious reasons. I don't know why the anti-war crowd became silent, but I think it is because their guy is running the show and they are afraid to be vocal about criticism.
what about the 10 million people around the world who protested the iraq war before it started? were they democrats too?
I would have to do a census to determine their political affiliation. :ugeek:
I don't see as many celebrities and musicians protesting as much either since the elections. Has anyone listened to all the boots from PJ's last tour? I have only listened to a few but I would be curious on how much anti-war rhetoric Ed added in. If anyone can provide input I would be interested. I see that the song No More was played sixteen times prior to the general elections and since then it has only been played twice.
i don't think you can gauge an entire movement based on the fact that less celebrities are speaking out and that ed has only played a certain song twice since the elections. when is the last time ed wore a "pro-choice" t-shirt or wrote it on his arm with a black magic marker? that would be like saying the pro-choice line of thinking is dead because fewer celebrities are speaking out about it. it is faulty logic because the last time i checked REAL change begins with normal ordinary people like the protesters in Selma and MLK. they were not celebrities beforehand, but they were leaders who cultivated a movement. just like abby hoffman. if the college age generation were actually engaged in current events there would still be protests. and if therre were still a draft, you would have high school and college age kids who might have to go rioting in the streets...my thoughts on the wars have not changed, but i feel like i have been sold out by those that i voted for. i think apathy has become the real issue in the anti war movement....
"You can tell the greatness of a man by what makes him angry." - Lincoln
I was actually thinking that last week, when someone (in a discussion about the Tea Party) asked what happened to the liberal anti-war protesters who were so vocal during the Bush administration. The media, by and large, just doesn't cover it anymore. I wonder just how many people out there actually realize the US is still actively fighting in Afghanistan?
I think it is a demonstration of how many people are tied into a 2 party system. The democrats were using the anti-war fever to help pull in votes in the 2008 elections but now that they are effectively running the show while the war rages on, it's a topic that both the republicans and democrats would prefer to sweep under the carpet.
The media more-or-less needs a catalyst to make a news story popular. Every politician is avoiding the issue for obvious reasons. I don't know why the anti-war crowd became silent, but I think it is because their guy is running the show and they are afraid to be vocal about criticism.
i think that the part that i made large is not true at all. i think we are completely discouraged because he said he would end the fighting in iraq, which he has done, but now we are escalating in afghanistan which was not part of the deal. i have been out there protesting all along, and you know what my local news covered as the lead story the day of the largest protest here? britney fucking spears flashing her snatch to the paparazzi...
and you can not pin all of it on obama. we did our best to get him elected and he did not keep his promise. if you look at the dates on the wikileaks, they went up until january 2010, where obama had been in office for 11.5 months. the rest of it, and the most egregious of the atrocites was under bush's watch. both bush and obama share blame, but the majority of it falls on bush for getting us into those wars with no plan for getting out and for committing so many atrocites in the name of the american public.
sooooo....ummmm......you got a link to Britneys snatch? :think:
Comments
it is fine if you want to take a potshot at me, but i am willing to bet you did not read the original post or refer to the link i posted twice.
i wonder why i am not surprised, it is nothing new, it is an every day occurrance around here...people would rather take a shot at the poster instead discuss the article posted...and we wonder why we can not have a serious dialogue in this country because people would rather point fingers instead of addressing the issue...
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
I didn't say it was, but it's also not an insignificant period of time within which to gain a pretty good picture of a nations foreign policy. We're talking about wars of aggression and compared to the U.S China comes nowhere close.
But China invaded Tibet in 1959 therefore America's illegal occupation of Iraq and subsequent war crimes are perfectly acceptable.
Makes me laugh how Americans always talk about Iran and China like they're some kind of evil bogeymen when neither country has done anything in 50 years. It's just a pathetic attempt to deflect attention.
oh i know, and don't get me wrong i don't see china as the bad guy, i just feel, unfortunately, this is how the world works
and it seems that deflecting attention is something that we are very good at..."hey, look, kurt warner is about to dance...."
:?
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Robert Fisk: The shaming of America
Our writer delivers a searing dispatch after the WikiLeaks revelations that expose in detail the brutality of the war in Iraq - and the astonishing, disgraceful deceit of the US
Sunday, 24 October 2010
As usual, the Arabs knew. They knew all about the mass torture, the promiscuous shooting of civilians, the outrageous use of air power against family homes, the vicious American and British mercenaries, the cemeteries of the innocent dead. All of Iraq knew. Because they were the victims.
Only we could pretend we did not know. Only we in the West could counter every claim, every allegation against the Americans or British with some worthy general – the ghastly US military spokesman Mark Kimmitt and the awful chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Peter Pace, come to mind – to ring-fence us with lies. Find a man who'd been tortured and you'd be told it was terrorist propaganda; discover a house full of children killed by an American air strike and that, too, would be terrorist propaganda, or "collateral damage", or a simple phrase: "We have nothing on that."
Of course, we all knew they always did have something. And yesterday's ocean of military memos proves it yet again. Al-Jazeera has gone to extraordinary lengths to track down the actual Iraqi families whose men and women are recorded as being wasted at US checkpoints – I've identified one because I reported it in 2004, the bullet-smashed car, the two dead journalists, even the name of the local US captain – and it was The Independent on Sunday that first alerted the world to the hordes of indisciplined gunmen being flown to Baghdad to protect diplomats and generals. These mercenaries, who murdered their way around the cities of Iraq, abused me when I told them I was writing about them way back in 2003.
It's always tempting to avoid a story by saying "nothing new". The "old story" idea is used by governments to dampen journalistic interest as it can be used by us to cover journalistic idleness. And it's true that reporters have seen some of this stuff before. The "evidence" of Iranian involvement in bomb-making in southern Iraq was farmed out to The New York Times's Michael Gordon by the Pentagon in February 2007. The raw material, which we can now read, is far more doubtful than the Pentagon-peddled version. Iranian military material was still lying around all over Iraq from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and most of the attacks on Americans were at that stage carried out by Sunni insurgents. The reports suggesting that Syria allowed insurgents to pass through their territory, by the way, are correct. I have spoken to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers whose sons made their way to Iraq from Lebanon via the Lebanese village of Majdal Aanjar and then via the northern Syrian city of Aleppo to attack the Americans.
But, written in bleak militarese as it may be, here is the evidence of America's shame. This is material that can be used by lawyers in courts. If 66,081 – I loved the "81" bit – is the highest American figure available for dead civilians, then the real civilian mortality score is infinitely higher since this records only those civilians the Americans knew of. Some of them were brought to the Baghdad mortuary in my presence, and it was the senior official there who told me that the Iraqi ministry of health had banned doctors from performing any post-mortems on dead civilians brought in by American troops. Now why should that be? Because some had been tortured to death by Iraqis working for the Americans? Did this hook up with the 1,300 independent US reports of torture in Iraqi police stations?
The Americans scored no better last time round. In Kuwait, US troops could hear Palestinians being tortured by Kuwaitis in police stations after the liberation of the city from Saddam Hussein's legions in 1991. A member of the Kuwaiti royal family was involved in the torture. US forces did not intervene. They just complained to the royal family. Soldiers are always being told not to intervene. After all, what was Lieutenant Avi Grabovsky of the Israeli army told when he reported to his officer in September 1982 that Israel's Phalangist allies had just murdered some women and children? "We know, it's not to our liking, and don't interfere," Grabovsky was told by his battalion commander. This was during the Sabra and Chatila refugee camp massacre.
The quotation comes from Israel's 1983 Kahan commission report – heaven knows what we could read if WikiLeaks got its hands on the barrels of military files in the Israeli defence ministry (or the Syrian version, for that matter). But, of course, back in those days, we didn't know how to use a computer, let alone how to write on it. And that, of course, is one of the important lessons of the whole WikiLeaks phenomenon.
Back in the First World War or the Second World War or Vietnam, you wrote your military reports on paper. They may have been typed in triplicate but you could number your copies, trace any spy and prevent the leaks. The Pentagon Papers was actually written on paper. You needed to find a mole to get them. But paper could always be destroyed, weeded, trashed, all copies destroyed. At the end of the 1914-18 war, for example, a British second lieutenant shot a Chinese man after Chinese workers had looted a French military train. The Chinese man had pulled a knife on the soldier. But during the 1930s, the British soldier's file was "weeded" three times and so no trace of the incident survives. A faint ghost of it remains only in a regimental war diary which records Chinese involvement in the looting of "French provision trains". The only reason I know of the killing is that my father was the British lieutenant and told me the story before he died. No WikiLeaks then.
But I do suspect this massive hoard of material from the Iraq war has serious implications for journalists as well as armies. What is the future of the Seymour Hershes and the old-style investigative journalism that The Sunday Times used to practise? What is the point of sending teams of reporters to examine war crimes and meet military "deep throats", if almost half a million secret military documents are going to float up in front of you on a screen?
We still haven't got to the bottom of the WikiLeaks story, and I rather suspect that there are more than just a few US soldiers involved in this latest revelation. Who knows if it doesn't go close to the top? In its investigations, for example, al-Jazeera found an extract from a run-of-the-mill Pentagon press conference in November 2005. Peter Pace, the uninspiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is briefing journalists on how soldiers should react to the cruel treatment of prisoners, pointing out proudly that an American soldier's duty is to intervene if he sees evidence of torture. Then the camera moves to the far more sinister figure of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who suddenly interrupts – almost in a mutter, and to Pace's consternation – "I don't think you mean they (American soldiers) have an obligation to physically stop it. It's to report it."
The significance of this remark – cryptically sadistic in its way – was lost on the journos, of course. But the secret Frago 242 memo now makes much more sense of the press conference. Presumably sent by General Ricardo Sanchez, this is the instruction that tells soldiers: "Provided the initial report confirms US forces were not involved in the detainee abuse, no further investigation will be conducted unless directed by HHQ [Higher Headquarters]." Abu Ghraib happened under Sanchez's watch in Iraq. It was also Sanchez, by the way, who couldn't explain to me at a press conference why his troops had killed Saddam's sons in a gun battle in Mosul rather than capture them.
So Sanchez's message, it seems, must have had Rumsfeld's imprimatur. And so General David Petraeus – widely loved by the US press corps – was presumably responsible for the dramatic increase in US air strikes over two years; 229 bombing attacks in Iraq in 2006, but 1,447 in 2007. Interestingly enough, US air strikes in Afghanistan have risen by 172 per cent since Petraeus took over there. Which makes it all the more astonishing that the Pentagon is now bleating that WikiLeaks may have blood on its hands. The Pentagon has been covered in blood since the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, and for an institution that ordered the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 – wasn't that civilian death toll more than 66,000 by their own count, out of a total of 109,000 recorded? – to claim that WikiLeaks is culpable of homicide is preposterous.
The truth, of course, is that if this vast treasury of secret reports had proved that the body count was much lower than trumpeted by the press, that US soldiers never tolerated Iraqi police torture, rarely shot civilians at checkpoints and always brought killer mercenaries to account, US generals would be handing these files out to journalists free of charge on the steps of the Pentagon. They are furious not because secrecy has been breached, or because blood may be spilt, but because they have been caught out telling the lies we always knew they told.
US official documents detail extraordinary scale of wrongdoing
WikiLeaks yesterday released on its website some 391,832 US military messages documenting actions and reports in Iraq over the period 2004-2009. Here are the main points:
Prisoners abused, raped and murdered
Hundreds of incidents of abuse and torture of prisoners by Iraqi security services, up to and including rape and murder. Since these are itemised in US reports, American authorities now face accusations of failing to investigate them. UN leaders and campaigners are calling for an official investigation.
Civilian death toll cover-up
Coalition leaders have always said "we don't do death tolls", but the documents reveal many deaths were logged. Respected British group Iraq Body Count says that, after preliminary examination of a sample of the documents, there are an estimated 15,000 extra civilian deaths, raising their total to 122,000.
The shooting of men trying to surrender
In February 2007, an Apache helicopter killed two Iraqis, suspected of firing mortars, as they tried to surrender. A military lawyer is quoted as saying: "They cannot surrender to aircraft and are still valid targets."
Private security firm abuses
Britain's Bureau of Investigative Journalism says it found documents detailing new cases of alleged wrongful killings of civilians involving Blackwater, since renamed Xe Services. Despite this, Xe retains extensive US contracts in Afghanistan.
Al-Qa'ida's use of children and "mentally handicapped" for bombing
A teenage boy with Down's syndrome who killed six and injured 34 in a suicide attack in Diyala was said to be an example of an ongoing al-Qa'ida strategy to recruit those with learning difficulties. A doctor is alleged to have sold a list of female patients with learning difficulties to insurgents.
Hundreds of civilians killed at checkpoints
Out of the 832 deaths recorded at checkpoints in Iraq between 2004 and 2009, analysis by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggests 681 were civilians. Fifty families were shot at and 30 children killed. Only 120 insurgents were killed in checkpoint incidents.
Iranian influence
Reports detail US concerns that Iranian agents had trained, armed and directed militants in Iraq. In one document, the US military warns a militia commander believed to be behind the deaths of US troops and kidnapping of Iraqi officials was trained by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
:roll:
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
i do like fisk's writing, there is also a very good article by him in saturdays irish independent
They've just added the new figures to their tally, so now those deaths recorded by the Americans have been included. Now where does that leave all the unreported deaths?
The Lancet report is still the most accurate survey of Iraqi civilian deaths we have. It's about time Iraq Body Count stepped down and fucked off.
Western academics have studied the subject of alleged Chinese aggression and expansionism in depth. And the conclusion is China is NOT an expansionist state. One such study is by MIT political scientist Fravel Tayor published in his book 'Strong Borders, Secure Nation', which you can access from here:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8782.pdf
Here is an except:
"In its territorial disputes, however, China has been less prone to violence and more cooperative than a singular view of an expansionist state suggests. Since 1949, China has participated in twenty-three unique territorial disputes with its neighbors on land and at sea. Yet it has pursued compromise and offered concessions in seventeen of these conflicts. China’s compromises have often been substantial, as it has usually offered to accept less than half of the contested territory in any final settlement. In addition, these compromises have resulted in boundary agreements in which China has abandoned potential irredentist claims to more than 3.4 million square kilometers of land that had been part of the Qing empire at its height in the early nineteenth century. In total, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has contested roughly 238,000 square kilometers or just 7 percent of the territory once part of the Qing...
...Leading theories of international relations would expect a state with China’s characteristics to be uncompromising and prone to using force in territorial disputes, not conciliatory. Contrary to scholars of offensive realism, however, China has rarely exploited its military superiority to bargain hard for the territory that it claims or to seize it through force.4 China has likewise not become increasingly assertive in its territorial disputes as its relative power has grown in the past two decades. Contrary to others who emphasize the violent effects of nationalism, which would suggest inflexibility in conflicts over national sovereignty, China has been quite willing to offer territorial concessions despite historical legacies of external victimization and territorial dismemberment under the Qing...."
In another seminar by Oxford historian Neville Maxwell, he noted that China has settled its land border amicably with 12 of its 14 neighbors. You can listen to his podcast here:
http://asiapacific.anu.edu.au/podcasts/ ... Border.mp3
Iraq war logs: US turned over captives to Iraqi torture squadsNick Clegg calls for answers to 'extremely serious' abuse reports, but says it is up to US to answer for its own forces
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oc ... qi-torture
Fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks.
The 400,000 field reports published by the whistleblowing website at the weekend contain an official account of deliberate threats by a military interrogator to turn his captive over to the Iraqi "Wolf Brigade".
The interrogator told the prisoner in explicit terms that: "He would be subject to all the pain and agony that the Wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees."
The evidence emerged as the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, said the allegations of killings, torture and abuse in Iraq were "extremely serious" and "needed to be looked at".
Clegg, speaking on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show, did not rule out an inquiry into the actions of British forces in Iraq, but said it was up to the US administration to answer for the actions of its forces. His comments contrasted with a statement from the Ministry of Defence today, which warned that the posting of classified US military logs on the WikiLeaks website could endanger the lives of British forces.
Clegg said: "We can bemoan how these leaks occurred, but I think the nature of the allegations made are extraordinarily serious. They are distressing to read about and they are very serious. I am assuming the US administration will want to provide its own answer. It's not for us to tell them how to do that."
Asked if there should be an inquiry into the role of British troops, he said: "I think anything that suggests that basic rules of war, conflict and engagement have been broken or that torture has been in any way condoned are extremely serious and need to be looked at.
"People will want to hear what the answer is to what are very, very serious allegations of a nature which I think everybody will find quite shocking."
A Channel 4 Dispatches programme tomorrow night is expected to add further details based on the logs of alleged abuse directly by coalition forces. Only two cases of alleged involvement of British troops have so far been mentioned.
Within the huge leaked archive is contained a batch of secret field reports from the town of Samarra. They corroborate previous allegations that the US military turned over many prisoners to the Wolf Brigade, the feared 2nd battalion of the interior ministry's special commandos.
In Samarra, the series of log entries in 2004 and 2005 describe repeated raids by US infantry, who then handed their captives over to the Wolf Brigade for "further questioning". Typical entries read: "All 5 detainees were turned over to Ministry of Interior for further questioning" (from 29 November 2004) and "The detainee was then turned over to the 2nd Ministry of Interior Commando Battalion for further questioning" (30 November 2004).
The field reports chime with allegations made by New York Times writer Peter Maass, who was in Samarra at the time. He told Guardian Films : "US soldiers, US advisers, were standing aside and doing nothing," while members of the Wolf Brigade beat and tortured prisoners. The interior ministry commandos took over the public library in Samarra, and turned it into a detention centre, he said.
Maass's 2005 interview at the improvised prison with the Wolf Brigade's US military adviser, Col James Steele, had been interrupted by the terrified screams of a prisoner outside, he said. Steele was reportedly previously employed as an adviser to help crush an insurgency in El Salvador.
The Wolf Brigade was created and supported by the US in an attempt to re-employ elements of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, this time to terrorise insurgents. Members typically wore red berets, sunglasses and balaclavas, and drove out on raids in convoys of Toyota Landcruisers. They were accused by Iraqis of beating prisoners, torturing them with electric drills and sometimes executing suspects. The then interior minister in charge of them was alleged to have been a former member of the Shia Badr militia.
It is unclear which US unit filed the report of complaint that detainees were being specifically threatened with being turned over to the Wolf Brigade. The entry describes the capture of prisoners near the town of Falluja, west of Baghdad.
It is headed "Alleged detainee abuse by interrogators", and reads: "On 14 December 2005, a raid was conducted whereby five individuals were detained for suspicion of emplacement of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] as a result of a pid [positive identification]. "During the interrogation process the RO [ranking officer] threatened the subject detainee that he would never see his family again and would be sent to the 'Wolf Battalion' where he would be subject to all the pain and agony that the 'Wolf Battalion' is known to exact upon its detainees."
The war logs also disclose that Wolf Brigade members were themselves at risk of reprisals. In January 2007, US soldiers reported a gruesome discovery in a street near Baghdad: "Only the severed head was found.
A wire was run through the ear with the corpse's ID attached to the wire. 3rd bn commander identified the remains as Ahdel Abu Hussain, he was an officer in the NP [national police] Wolf Brigade."
Lawyers said the reports may embroil British as well as US forces in an alleged culture of abuse and extrajudicial killings. Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, appearing alongside the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, at a press conference in London, said some of the deaths may have involved British forces and could now go through the UK courts.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
66,081 Non combatants out of 109,000
Thats 60.62 percent of all killed were civilians. NON COMBATANTS
Thats not shamefull, thats an atrocity. Every country involved should be held to account.
Thats fucking disgusting.
I knew there wasnt any WMD's in that country. How the fuck does a Dumbarsed storeman in newcastle Australia fucking know that the crap that was fed to us to get involved in Iraq was bullshit,
All those who supported this war
GIVE YOURSELF A FUCKING UPPERCUT.
No wait a minute beat yourself to a pulp. you fucking deserve it
BLAIR AND BUSH, howard as well should all face punishment
sorry for my language and feelings but this was and is fucked
"that is all we can do"....god help us...
Iraq war logs: Apache attack's child victims speak out
Cockpit video of gunship attack that killed 19 and gravely injured two children was first major leak of Iraq war material
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oc ... -civilians
On a hot July day in 2007, taxi driver Salah Mutasher Toman swept his two young children into the passenger seat of his white minivan. He bade his brother, Sabah Toman, farewell and started making his way home, a short drive across the neighbourhood, through militia-held territory.
The area had echoed with explosions that morning. A fight had been brewing. But that was nothing new in Baghdad during that particular bloody summer. Salah planned on bunkering down with his family for the day to ride out the routine of heat and violence. He didn't get further than 400 metres before his van was blown apart by a hovering American helicopter. Salah died, along with six other people in his van. His son Sajad and daughter Duah were gravely wounded.
The events were all filmed by the helicopter that shot at them. The footage was among the first significant leaks from classified military materials in nearly eight years of war in Iraq. It was seen as lifting the lid on an iron-clad secrecy surrounding the US military campaign that had pitched the fighting as a black and white clash between liberators and insurgents. The civilian toll had been difficult to document and until then, impossible to film, let alone broadcast.
As the attack helicopter circled, with its cameras rolling, Salah's van entered the aftermath of an attack launched minutes earlier by the same hovering pilots. They asked for and received permission to fire, then the helicopter's guns pulverised Salah's van. Minutes later, an American patrol arrived on the scene. They approached the wrecked van and found the two children alive. They carried them straight to medics, who drove them to a nearby hospital.
"I remember them carrying me," said Duah, who was aged 4 that day and is now 7. "I was very scared and my stomach hurt a lot."
Her brother Sajad, 12, lifted up his shirt to reveal his scars. "They carried me away as well. I was terrified to be in the arms of an American soldier. But I didn't know what had just happened. And I didn't know where my sister was."
A total of 19 people, their father among them, had just been killed by the helicopter's heavy gun. Eleven had been loitering on a corner, including a Reuters cameraman. The helicopter had been circling in support of a US military operation taking place below. US troops were about to confront a militia they believed was active in the area. The helicopter pilots believed they saw some of the men armed with Kalashnikovs and another with a rocket-propelled grenades.
As rounds from the heavy guns thundered into the bitumen, the unsuspecting men standing below seemed to disintegrate. One survived and attempted to crawl until he was finished off with a second burst. Salah's minivan was on the scene around two minutes later.
His brother, Sabah Saleh Toman, had heard the first series of explosions just as has brother had pulled away from his house. "Then I heard the second [explosions]," he said. "I knew it involved him.
"My brother was only trying to help and they shot at him. They killed him. His children are almost orphans to this day, because their mother is still too [traumatised] to care for them. All day she is either in her room, or in the hospital."
Audio from the helicopter suggests the pilots had mistaken Salah's minivan for reinforcements rushing to the battle. After their initial attack on the van, a mortally wounded man was seen crawling away.
"Come on buddy, all you gotta do is reach for a weapon," one of the pilots said. Sabah and his brother's two children, whom he now cares for, have seen the footage of the attack. Parts of the footage received saturation coverage on Iraqi television channels in June.
"It was shocking to see," says Sabah. "Shocking to see how violent they were and the lack of understanding they showed. My brother arrived to help them. Anyone in this culture would have done the same."
Asked whether there were militias operating in the area that day, Sabah said simply: "Yes." He would not elaborate, but replied with another "yes" when asked whether the militia was the Mehdi Army, a key Shia lslamic player in the sectarian war that was ravaging Baghdad at the time.
In the days following the attack, Sabah looked through all hospitals in east Baghdad for his brother, niece and nephew. He quickly found his brother at the morgue, but could not locate the children. They were in a hospital in the fortified Green Zone. Duah had at least 12 bullet or shrapnel wounds al over her body. She faces more surgery and still complains of stomach pain. Sajad was just as badly wounded. When Sabah had picked up the ruins of his family, he approached the nearby US base. A colonel agreed to see him. "He took me inside and apologised," he said. "They gave me $5,000 and said that is all they could do."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
it was OBVIOUS from the get-go to anyone who cared enough to actually read up on it that iraq was based on greed and exploitation ... if those who didn't get it then, haven't gotten it over the last decade - this document won't change their minds ...
this all falls squarely on the folks that continue to support a political system that has long been corrupt ... yes - if you vote for your typical partisan hacks (in the states that means Democrat or Republican, britain - labour or conservatives) wherever ... you are mostly to blame ... these guys have been governing in the interests of large corporations for decades ... and Iraq was most definitely a decision based on pure greed ... nothing else ... the evil in this world are primarily old guys in suits ...
i guess nobody feels much like discussing any of this. how boring and pointless this debate has become.. :(
these wars have bankrupted our country, both morally and financially, and the people of our country do not care. as long as they have their flatscreen tvs and their handy little diversions from cold hard reality, they are fine with it...i guarantee if fox news and other networks actually covered these stories people would be more knowlegible and feel differently about it. most people are too content with the news they get on cable to look at other sources like the guardian for any facts or insight into what is really going on..
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
I was actually thinking that last week, when someone (in a discussion about the Tea Party) asked what happened to the liberal anti-war protesters who were so vocal during the Bush administration. The media, by and large, just doesn't cover it anymore. I wonder just how many people out there actually realize the US is still actively fighting in Afghanistan?
Kids name Buzz Lightyear as first man on moon
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/810163 ... an-on-moon
A large number of British children believe Buzz Lightyear was the first person to walk on the moon and that Darth Vader's Deathstar from Star Wars is the furthest planet from Earth.
A survey of 2000 children aged 6-12 years in the UK revealed most youngsters have trouble distinguishing between fact and fiction, and lacked basic knowledge of key events in history, London's Telegraph newspaper reports.
One in five children believed Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear was the first person to set foot on the moon and one in six said the Deathstar was the most distant planet from Earth.
One- third of the children surveyed also did not know that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, with nine percent giving credit to Deal or No Deal host Noel Edmonds.
One in six children incorrectly identified US President Barack Obama as either Mr T from the A-Team, F1 driver Lewis Hamilton or Nelson Mandela.
But while their knowledge of history was somewhat muddled, the children proved to be far more aware of what was happening in the lives of celebrities.
Close to 65 percent of the children knew Britney Spears had shaved her head and two-thirds identified malaria as the illness suffered by X Factor judge Cheryl Cole.
Children's author Christopher Lloyd told the Telegraph there was a lot of confusion among children about historical events.
''Young people have little or no context when it comes to knowledge about the past," Mr Lloyd said.
"Often they know a great deal about a few topics, but seldom do they have any idea of the big picture - Neil Armstrong would not be happy to learn a plastic action figure is getting the credit for first man to step on the moon."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
The media more-or-less needs a catalyst to make a news story popular. Every politician is avoiding the issue for obvious reasons. I don't know why the anti-war crowd became silent, but I think it is because their guy is running the show and they are afraid to be vocal about criticism.
I seem to remember quite a few years back, a survey was done that showed a percentage of Americans thought Jed Bartlett from the West Wing was actually the president.
While this is taking the discussion further away from your original post (and for that I apologize - I haven't had much time to actually take a look at the leaked items so my knowledge doesn't extend much further than the number of dead being substantially higher than was reported), the emergency number in New Zealand is 111. Always has been. We got the show Rescue 911 on TV for a while (only the best foreign programming for us!), and ended up having to add an extra emergency number - 911 - because so many Kiwis just assumed that 911 was our number. Despite the fact that IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN 111. They ended up renaming the show Rescue 111 in NZ, but it was too late and the damage had been done.
and you can not pin all of it on obama. we did our best to get him elected and he did not keep his promise. if you look at the dates on the wikileaks, they went up until january 2010, where obama had been in office for 11.5 months. the rest of it, and the most egregious of the atrocites was under bush's watch. both bush and obama share blame, but the majority of it falls on bush for getting us into those wars with no plan for getting out and for committing so many atrocites in the name of the american public.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
i often get nelson mandela and morgan freeman mixed up.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
actually that was always part of the deal, his campaign website always said troops would be redeployed from iraq to afghanistan
plus 50,000 or so troops are staying in iraq not to mention he's roughly doubling the amount of mercenaries there.
also, didn't bush already end combat operations? wasn't that the point to him landing on that aircraft carrier with the mission accomplished banner?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,85777,00.html
WASHINGTON — Hours after making an historic landing aboard a moving aircraft carrier, President Bush told sailors manning the USS Abraham Lincoln Thursday that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
I don't see as many celebrities and musicians protesting as much either since the elections. Has anyone listened to all the boots from PJ's last tour? I have only listened to a few but I would be curious on how much anti-war rhetoric Ed added in. If anyone can provide input I would be interested. I see that the song No More was played sixteen times prior to the general elections and since then it has only been played twice.
i don't think you can gauge an entire movement based on the fact that less celebrities are speaking out and that ed has only played a certain song twice since the elections. when is the last time ed wore a "pro-choice" t-shirt or wrote it on his arm with a black magic marker? that would be like saying the pro-choice line of thinking is dead because fewer celebrities are speaking out about it. it is faulty logic because the last time i checked REAL change begins with normal ordinary people like the protesters in Selma and MLK. they were not celebrities beforehand, but they were leaders who cultivated a movement. just like abby hoffman. if the college age generation were actually engaged in current events there would still be protests. and if therre were still a draft, you would have high school and college age kids who might have to go rioting in the streets...my thoughts on the wars have not changed, but i feel like i have been sold out by those that i voted for. i think apathy has become the real issue in the anti war movement....
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
sooooo....ummmm......you got a link to Britneys snatch? :think: