• US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.
• Two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother were shot on February 12 when US and Afghan special forces stormed their home in Khataba village, outside Gardez in eastern Afghanistan. The precise composition of the force has never been made public.

justinfinity:orlingrabbe:

In the US, 11,750 allegations of church priest child sex abuse have so far featured in actions settled by archdioceses – in Los Angeles for $660m and in Boston for $100m.

In 2005 a test case in Texas failed because the Vatican sought and obtained the intercession of President Bush, who agreed to claim sovereign (ie head of state) immunity on the pope’s behalf. Bush lawyer John B Bellinger III certified that Pope Benedict the XVI was immune from suit “as the head of a foreign state”. Bellinger is now notorious for his defence of Bush administration torture policies.

vruz:

by Dan Froomkin

[…]The helicopter crew, which was patrolling an area that had been the scene of fierce fighting that morning, said they spotted weapons on members of the first group — although the video shows one gun, at most. The crew also mistook a telephoto lens for a rocket-propelled grenade.

The shooting, which killed Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, took place on July 12, 2007, in a southeastern neighborhood of Baghdad.
The next day, the New York Times reported the military’s official cover story:

The American military said in a statement late Thursday that 11 people had been killed: nine insurgents and two civilians. According to the statement, American troops were conducting a raid when they were hit by small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades. The American troops called in reinforcements and attack helicopters. In the ensuing fight, the statement said, the two Reuters employees and nine insurgents were killed.

“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” said Lt. Col. Scott Bleichwehl, a spokesman for the multinational forces in Baghdad.

The video shows otherwise.

Washington Post reporter David Finkel described the incident — and the video — in great detail in his September 2009 book, “The Good Soldiers”. A summary can be found here.

Finkel also described a review session after Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, commander of the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment and his soldiers returned to base, which “concluded that everyone had acted appropriately.” (Kauzlarich was also involved in the Army’s Pat Tillman cover-up, and later told ESPN that the reluctance of Tillman’s parents to accept the military’s story that he was killed by enemy action, rather than friendly fire, was the unfortunate result of their lack of Christian faith.)

[…] WikiLeaks, a small, independent Web site that invites people to post information and documents that powerful interests would prefer to keep secret, says it received the video and supporting documents from military whistleblowers.

Julian Assange, the editor of the site, said the killings either violated the the army’s rules of engagement, or those rules of engagement “are very, deeply wrong.”

—read more—

Collateral Murder 

• 5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.
• Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
• The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.
• After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own “Rules of Engagement”.
• Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.
• WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.
• WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.
• WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves.

This is the pure madness of war. Very hard to stomach, but this needs to be seen.

Wikileaks and Whistle-blowers on Vimeo

recommended.

Thousands rally in ‘Day of Wrath’ against Putin day before bombing underneath FSB Intelligence Agency in Moscow

• The bombing happened underneath the offices of the FSB, the Federal Security Service, according to the BBC. Now reports are coming in that the organization claiming responsibility used Shahidka female bombers. Of course they are not Islamic, but Wahhabi…a favorite sect for the global intelligence/drug trade/terror network. Interesting to note that former KGB agent Putin is known to have used terror to secure his Dark Rise to Power.

• The trial of the Pirate Bay operators in Sweden has generated huge amounts of media coverage. But one of the most interesting things about Pirate Bay hasn’t got a mention.
• In his daily dispatches for WiReD, court correspondent Oscar Schwartz swoons over the boyish charm of “likeable” and “winning” Pirate Bay PR guy Peter Sunde. But there seems to be something about Pirate Bay that no one wants you to read: its debt to one of the most notorious fascists in Europe.
• Reg readers will already know a little about Carl Lundström’s background. But as Andrew Brown, author of the autobiographical Fishing in Utopia, points out, no English language coverage of the trial has mentioned this. Thanks to Brown’s blog, we know a little more about Lundström.
• For example, Lundström was linked to a gang of skinheads that attacked Latin American tourists in Stockholm in the mid-1980s. [Expo.se report (Swe) - 2005]. Over the years, Lundström has switched his support from Keep Sweden Swedish to the far-right headbangers party New Democracy - but was thrown out for being too right wing. He’s currently bankrolling 100 candidates for the Swedish equivalent of the BNP.
• Lundström is alleged to own 40 per cent of The Pirate Bay - the largest share - and gave it servers and bandwidth to get going. As one of the four defendants, been a regular attendee in court. But the presence of this significant national political player hasn’t been worthy of a WiReD mention since the trial kicked off. Or a mention anywhere else. Why would that be?
• For me, there are two interesting aspects to this peculiar, and very selective silence.
• One is that anti-copyright activists like to think of themselves as thoroughly decent, forward-thinking progressive people - because the internet is a new democracy, they’re reflecting a fairer world. They like to contrast the hygenic efficiency of the technology with the old (and implicitly corrupt) copyright businesses. It’s almost a badge of moral superiority.
• But like the Futurists a hundred years ago - the original Freetards - they don’t mind jumping into bed with neo-Nazis when it suits them. In this case, that’s so long as the free music and movies keep flowing.
• The second is WiReD’s choice of Oscar Schwartz to file courtroom dispatches from the Pirate Bay trial. He’s the only English language courtroom reporter, and bloggers and professional publications take their cue from his reports.

Thanks to a FOIA request, new evidence has emerged from the FBI’s own internal communications that appear to support many of the claims made by Sibel Edmonds regarding (largely though not exclusively) GOP collusion in the spying activities of the Turkish government.

This is no small matter, as it involves blackmail and bribery of high-level officials like former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, PNAC signatory Richard Perle, Congressman Roy Blunt, Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, Turkish Ambassador Marc Grossman, Congressman Stephen Solarz, Asst. Sec. Def. Douglas Feith, Congressman Dan Burton and others to “look the other way” from those engaged in spying activities with a foreign government against the United States.

Per the report from the Boiling Frogs website:

Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization repeatedly named by Ms. Edmonds as being complicit in the crimes that she became aware of when she was a translator at the FBI.

The documents released under FOIA are almost completely redacted, but they do support many of Edmonds’ claims, including:

• There were a number of very serious FBI investigations into “Turkish activity in Chicago” involving a number of targets, including TACA.
• These investigations were related to “National Security” among other things.
• These investigations were regarded as so sensitive that no files were to be uploaded to FBI’s computer system.
• Congressional corruption was involved.
• The FBI repeatedly conducted actual “physical surveillance” against Turkish and American targets.
  Some of these investigations were shut down in 2001.

What makes it more suspicious is the near universal silence on the part of the corporate media about this whole affair. They spent more energy investigating the deaths of Lacey Peterson or Michael Jackson than they have on this.

It should also be noted that this incident is also tied up with the events surrounding the Valerie Plame/Brewster Jennings outing.

thedaytheytriedtokillme:

Keep following this one.

A scary tweet from Wiki:

1. If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film. And you know who is responsible. 7:33 PM Mar 23rd via bit.ly

criminalwisdom:

“Operation Northwoods was a plan circulated in the U.S. government in 1962 to stage false flag terrorist attacks inside the U.S. and abroad to provoke “military intervention in Cuba”. The plan called for Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) or other operatives to commit genuine acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro. One part of the Operation Northwoods plan was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington.”

And ever since Florida has become the USA hub for some very dirty deals and false flag operators. See The Deep History of the Venice Municipal Airport and The Ultimate Hedge if you think you have the stomach for it.

• UK patents are being declared state secrets more than three times as often as those filed in the US, according to information released to New Scientist.
• An average of nine secrecy orders were imposed for every 10,000 patents filed in the UK since 2003, compared with less than three per 10,000 filed in the US, figures released for the first time by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) reveal.
• The difference is surprising because the US government spends far more of its overall R&D budget on military research than does the UK. In 2009, the Pentagon spent $80 billion (0.16 per cent of GDP), or 57 per cent of the US public research budget, on defence R&D - against the Ministry of Defence’s $3.4 billion (0.56 per cent of GDP), or 9 per cent of overall UK R&D funding.
• A secrecy order is applied to a patent if patent office staff and their military advisers think the idea could be used to threaten national security. A patent cannot then be published until the technology is no longer considered to be a threat.
• Inventions related to cryptography, uranium enrichment and biological and chemical weapons are often made secret. Governments won’t confirm it, but seemingly benign inventions can also be made secret if they could be “dual-use”, for example, an airborne crop duster that might be used to spread bioweapons.

• Full patent data released by UK IPO (online spreadsheet)

  Data on R&D spending from OECD Science, Technology and Industry Scoreboard 2009

• David Miliband said today that there was “compelling evidence” that Israel was responsible for misuse of British passports as part of a plot to kill a prominent member of Hamas.
• The foreign secretary confirmed that Britain had demanded the withdrawal of an Israeli diplomat following the “intolerable” use of 12 forged British passports by a hit squad that killed the founder of Hamas’s military wing in Dubai.
• Miliband attacked the “profound disregard” for UK sovereignty and said the apparent involvement of a friendly nation “added insult to injury”.
• Israel’s ambassador to London, Ron Prosor, said he was “disappointed by the decision of the British government”, but pledged that the two countries would retain close ties. “The relationship between Israel and the United Kingdom is of mutual importance,” he said.
• Miliband’s statement will be seen around the world as the first definitive allegation from a western government of Israeli responsibility for the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel in January.

• By early 2008, top U.S. military officials had become convinced that extremists planning attacks on American forces in Iraq were making use of a Web site set up by the Saudi government and the CIA to uncover terrorist plots in the kingdom.
• Elite U.S. military computer specialists, over the objections of the CIA, mounted a cyberattack that dismantled the online forum. Although some Saudi officials had been informed in advance about the Pentagon’s plan, several key princes were “absolutely furious” at the loss of an intelligence-gathering tool, according to another former U.S. official.
• Four former senior U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, said the creation and shutting down of the site illustrate the need for clearer policies governing cyberwar. The use of computers to gather intelligence or to disrupt the enemy presents complex questions: When is a cyberattack outside the theater of war allowed? Is taking out an extremist Web site a covert operation or a traditional military activity? Should Congress be informed?
• “The point of the story is it hasn’t been sorted out yet in a way that all the persons involved in cyber-operations have a clear understanding of doctrine, legal authorities and policy, and a clear understanding of the distinction between what is considered intelligence activity and wartime [Defense Department] authority,” said one former senior national security official.
• CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf said, “It’s sheer lunacy to suggest that any part of our government would do anything to facilitate the movement of foreign fighters to Iraq.”
• The Pentagon, the Justice Department and the National Security Agency, whose director oversaw the operation to take down the site, declined to comment for this story, as did officials at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.