Friday, April 09, 2010

US War Crimes: Bagdad Massacre & Murdering Afghan Women & Pentagon Targeting Whistleblowers & Wikileaks

Iraq Outrage over US Killing Video

Families of Iraqi civilians, seen being shot and killed by US forces in a leaked video, are seeking justice for their deaths.

Earlier this week Wikileaks, a whistleblower website that publishes anonymously sourced documents, released a video showing the US military firing at a group of civilians in Baghdad three years ago.




American's censor or are dismissive of the video of the war crime in Baghdad. CNN and other mainstream broadcasters merely repeated the military's line- In America the attitude is that to criticize the soldiers or the military in anyway is to give aid and comfort to the Enemy.

If US media doesn't care or is fearful of upsetting the military it is up to media outside US to carry this story and keep updating it and adding more leaked information on other murders massacres or other misdeeds.
But remeber how the Media and most of the world stood by as American government lied about Iraq and no one stopped them out of disinterest indifference or fear of retaliation from the US like calling "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries"- But the French managed to survive such an insult.

Wikileaks co-founder speaks to Alyona-




Like China's stellar internet monitoring program President Obama & the Pentagon and Homeland security want to crack down on wikileaks and all whistleblower web sites which attempt to inform the public about policies and situations the government would prefer hidden. But they also want to set up policies and programs to vastly increase surveillance of not just suspect sites but of the entire Internet. So where's the change.

Wikileaks Blows Whistle; Most Miss the Point by Barrett Brown at Huffington Post ,April 7, 2010.

Monday's much-anticipated D.C. press conference by the Wikileaks organization revealed a leaked video showing that 12 men who had been identified by the Department of Defense as "anti-Iraqi forces" and shot dead in Baghdad in 2008 were killed by U.S. troops acting out of apparent failure to accurately assess the situation. The real issue, though, is larger than a single battle, an ongoing war, or the enterprise of warfare itself, and in fact transcends not only particular nations but even nationhood; still, the crucial lesson risks being lost at a time in which such a lesson most clearly merits the attention of every individual who takes seriously his duties as a citizen of whatever nation-state happens to claim his as its own.


...Among the various uses that entities ranging from the NSA to the Pentagon to the State Department could make of such of McConnell's proposals as are actually adapted, the marginalization and rendering harmless of Wikileaks comes to mind. Over the past few years that organization has served a singularly crucial role in keeping humanity informed about the doings of its less conscientious institutions, such as when it acquired and published a procedures manual from Guantanamo Bay that described how the Red Cross was circumvented, among other things. At least one U.S. agency has concocted a plan to do just that, as was revealed by Wikileaks itself last month when it released a leaked copy of a Secret/NOFORN Army Intelligence document describing the watchdog group at great length and proposing that leakers be identified and targeted for firings, prosecution, and other measures intended to discourage other leakers and eventually weaken Wikileaks by drying up its supply of those willing to risk involuntary mid-life reassessments in providing the organization with significant information.


and he continues...

(Wikileaks) ...staff members were being subjected to aggressive surveillance by U.S. officials under State Department cover, at least two of whom appear to have been following a Wikileaks editor during his departure from Iceland. Iceland has recently become the focus of the two opposing factions insomuch as that there exists proposed legislation which would make that republic a haven for information deemed illegal elsewhere, be it China or the U.S. - and the people at Wikileaks are helping to formulate the proposal. If this is accomplished, it will be a massive setback for the respective intelligence agencies of nations across the globe, not to mention the governments on behalf of which they operate as well as any number of non-government entities including banks, multinationals, and religious institutions. There is quite a bit at stake as of now; luckily for the enemy, few people have any idea what that might be.

Cover-ups, deception, and secrecy in service to individual reputations are poison to individual liberty and functioning representative government.

and see articles on the Massacre and cover-up by Pentagon and the Whitehouse.

Pentagon 'hiding report on killed journalists':
"This is another crime added to the crimes of the U.S. forces against Iraqi journalists and civilians," the head of the journalists' union Mouyyad al-Lami said. "I call upon the government to take a firm stance against the criminals who killed the journalists."


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On the massacre and the attitude of the Pilots their joy in murdering -has the war robbed them of their humanity or any sense of decency or is it just a video game to them or were they deliberately trained to act this way -Like in Vietnam is it all about body counts and blowing stuff up such as hospitals, schools, mosques , minarets or drop kick a dog over a cliff, humiliating children, torturing and abusing POWs shooting people who are going to the corner store, killing the wounded , shooting farmers in their fields ,targeting journalists - basically all of Iraq is still a Free Fire Zone for the troops

'Ha ha I hit them' - moment that US gunship fired on Iraqi civilians:The black-and-white video images of the dusty streets of Baghdad are grainy and shaky but they are clear enough to show American helicopter gunships carrying out an unprovoked attack that killed a dozen Iraqis, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.




Afghan Official Says US Raiders Hid Killings by Gareth Porter April 7,2010

WASHINGTON - The head of the Afghan Ministry of Interior investigation said publicly for the first time his investigators had accepted the testimony of family members of the victims of the Feb. 12 raid by U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) that the U.S. troops had dug bullets out of the bodies of their victims in an apparent effort to cover up the killings and that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal had agreed with the team's conclusions.

Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, head of the criminal investigation department in the ministry, told IPS in an interview Wednesday that the ministry's investigation had found "evidence of tampering at the scene by the patrol members", which had "confused" NATO investigators about the incident.

"We accepted the claim of the family members [of victims] that NATO soldiers had dug the bullets out of the bodies," said Yarmand, "but we could not confirm it, because we were not able to do an autopsy on the bodies." The family members, like most Afghans, had not allowed the autopsies on the victims, he explained.

...In an e-mail response to a question from IPS about how it was possible that the U.S. SOF personnel had killed the women but believed they had been killed before the raid, Breasseale suggested that the joint force had not discovered the bodies for some extended period of time after beginning their search of the compound.

"Your question assumes that the ground force went directly into the room where the women were," he wrote. "I can tell you that there were other members of the extended friends and family of the owners of the compound present as well as various other rooms and buildings in the compound."

Family members have told reporters a very different story, however. A male relative of the victims of the raid who watched them bleed to death told CNN in an interview published Tuesday that the attacking force "did not allow him to take the wounded to the hospital".

A similar account was given by family members to a United Nations investigating team, as reported by Starkey in the Times Mar. 16. The family members said the police commissioner and the 18-year old girl who were killed, died hours later and might have survived had they been taken to a hospital immediately.

U.S. and Afghan forces had refused to get them to a hospital immediately, according to their account.


And an excellent article at IslamWeb discussing the Media's role in being propagandist for the Pentagon . They know that in the past the governments and Presidents and the Intelligenc Community don't exactly tell the truth
WMDS , Iraq's a cake walk Mission Accomplished , Saddam , the Dead Enders , torture , war profiteering How Americans are propagandized about Afghanistan from Islamweb April,2010

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded. The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead were all "insurgents" or "terrorists", (b) the bodies of three women had been found bound and gagged inside the home (including two pregnant women, one a mother of 10 children and the other a mother of six children, and a teenage girl), and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of "honor killings" by the Taliban fighters killed in the attack.

Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon's version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon's version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

and CNN , Fox News etc. took the Pentagon at its word but never attempted to interview local people :

One NATO official said that there was likely an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim). The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, "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."
What is clear -- yet again -- is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly "reports" on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact. Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was "reported" by CNN on February 12:

Note how the headline states as fact that the women were dead as the result of an "honor killing." The entire CNN article does nothing but repeat what an "unnamed senior military official said" about the incident, and it even helpfully explained:
An honor killing is a murder carried out by a family or community member against someone thought to have brought dishonor onto them.

At the Nieman Watchdog Foundation, Jeremy Starkey, the Afghanistan war reporter for The Times of London, has a crucial, must-read piece on all of this. Amazingly, his piece was written three weeks ago, and recounted in detail: (a) how clearly the U.S.-led forces had lied about what happened in Paktia; and (b) the reasons why the U.S. media continuously spews false government propaganda about the war. Starkey wrote under this headline:

In this mid-March piece, Starkey explained how he had discovered that NATO's claims about the Haktia incident were false (he recounted his evidence in gruesome detail in the Times on March 13), and more importantly, highlighted why the U.S. media so frequently disseminates false NATO claims with no questioning:

The only way I found out NATO had lied -- deliberately or otherwise -- was because I went to the scene of the raid, in Paktia province, and spent three days interviewing the survivors. In Afghanistan that is quite unusual.
NATO is rarely called to account. Their version of events, usually originating from the soldiers involved, is rarely seriously challenged. . . .

It's not the first time I've found NATO lying, but this is perhaps the most harrowing instance, and every time I go through the same gamut of emotions. I am shocked and appalled that brave men in uniform misrepresent events. Then I feel naïve.

There are a handful of truly fearless reporters in Afghanistan constantly trying to break the military's monopoly on access to the front. But far too many of our colleagues accept the spin-laden press releases churned out of the Kabul headquarters. "Suicide" bombers are "cowards," NATO attacks on civilians are "tragic accidents," intelligence is foolproof and only "militants" get arrested.


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Pentagon declares Wikileaks & other Disloyal Journalists Enemies of the state who dare to report the truth .
Massacre Caught on Tape Part 4 - 4-06-2010 Democracy NOW!
Glenn Greenwald calls massacre Standard Operating Orders



and so it goes,
GORD.

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