• 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.

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.

publiccommunication:

Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission—Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough (C//NF)

The fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan demonstrates the fragility of European support for the NATO-led ISAF mission. Some NATO states, notably France and Germany, have counted on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to the mission, but indifference might turn into active hostility if spring and summer fighting results in an upsurge in military or Afghan civilian casualties and if a Dutch- style debate spills over into other states contributing troops. 

The proposed PR strategies focus on pressure points that have been identified within these countries. For France it is the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it is the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as for Germany’s standing in the NATO. The memo is an recipe for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in two NATO ally countries, written by the CIA. It is classified as Confidential / No Foreign Nationals.

(AKA: How to Sell the War.)

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.

vruz:(via ericmortensen)

• Sources have said the FBI was in the second day of raids around the southeastern Michigan city of Adrian that are connected to a militia group, known as the Hutaree, an Adrian-based group whose members describe themselves as Christian soldiers preparing for the arrival and battle with the anti-Christ.
• Lackomar said he heard from other militia members that the FBI targeted the Hutaree after its members made threats of violence against Islamic organizations.
  
  

• Bomb makers who have been active in Afghanistan may already have the ability to produce a “dirty bomb” using knowledge acquired over the internet.
• It is feared that terrorists could transport an improvised nuclear device up the Thames and detonate it in the heart of London. Bristol, Liverpool Newcastle, Glasgow and Belfast are also thought to be vulnerable.
• Lord West, the Security Minister, also raised the possibility of terrorists using small craft to enter ports and launch an attack similar to that in Mumbai in 2008, when more than 150 people were killed.
• The Government is so concerned about the threat that it is setting up a command centre to track suspicious boats.
• The terrorism threat level was raised from “substantial” to “severe” in January after the failed attempt to blow up an aircraft over Detroit on Christmas Day.
• Three separate reviews of the country’s ability to prevent a major terrorist attack were published simultaneously yesterday, before an international meeting on nuclear security in Washington next month.
• Downing Street released an update to the National Security Strategy in which it stated that “the UK does face nuclear threats now” and added that there was “the possibility that nuclear weapons or nuclear material [could] fall into the hands of rogue states or terrorist groups”.
• The International Atomic Energy Authority recorded 1,562 incidents where nuclear material was lost or stolen between 1993 and 2008, mostly in the former Soviet Union, and 65 per cent of the losses were never recovered.

Those lost nukes in an attack would be a perfect no-paper-trail-instrument for intelligence agencies working in collusion with other power brokers who want to expand their ubiquitous presence and control. Never mind the non-existent al-qaeda bogey man, if this goes down it wasn’t because of some farmers growing poppies. Plus, John Robb is right, if regional reactionaries want to hurt the US/UK hegemony, the things to blow up are in their own backyard (oil pipelines, electrical and water infrastructure). 

Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a “James Bond” character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere “we think it would be in your interest to…”.

Developing world violence aside, we’ve become used to the level of security service interest in us and have established procedures to ignore that interest.

But the increase in surveillance activities this last month, in a time when we are barely publishing due to fundraising, are excessive. Some of the new interest is related to a film exposing a U.S. massacre we will release at the U.S. National Press Club on April 5.

The spying includes attempted covert following, photographng, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland on Monday night.

I, and others were in Iceland to advise Icelandic parliamentarians on the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a new package of laws designed to protect investigative journalists and internet services from spying and censorship. As such, the spying has an extra poignancy.

The possible triggers:

• our ongoing work on a classified film revealing civilian casualties occurring under the command of the U.S, general, David Petraeus.
• our release of a classified 32 page US intelligence report on how to fatally marginalize WikiLeaks (expose our sources, destroy our reputation for integrity, hack us).
• our release of a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Reykjavik reporting on contact between the U.S. and the U.K. over billions of euros in claimed loan guarantees.
• pending releases related to the collapse of the Icelandic banks and Icelandic “oligarchs”.

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.

pieto:

Insurgency is the organized use of subversion and violence to seize, nullify or challenge political control of a region. As such, it is primarily a political struggle, in which both sides use armed force to create space for their political, economic and influence activities to be effective.

U.S. Government Counterinsurgency Guide

download document here

• 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