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Remember,
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This Wikileaks footage shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Elden and her driver
Saeed Chmagh being shot at by the Apache. The attack occurred in a public square
in Baghdad and they were assumed to be militants. After the initial shooting, a
minivan full of adults and children drove into the square and were fired upon as
well. The US military listed the adults as militants and claimed they did not
know how the deaths occurred.
The most consequential news item of
the week will obviously be -- or at
least should be -- the massive new
leak by WikiLeaks of
90,000 pages of classified material
chronicling the truth about the war
in Afghanistan from 2004 through
2009. Those documents provide
what
The New York Times calls "an
unvarnished, ground-level picture of
the war in Afghanistan that is in
many respects more grim than
the official portrayal."
The Guardian describes the
documents as "a devastating
portrait of the failing war in
Afghanistan, revealing how coalition
forces have killed hundreds of
civilians in unreported incidents,
Taliban attacks have soared and Nato
commanders fear neighbouring
Pakistan and Iran are fueling the
insurgency."
In
addition to those two newspapers,
WikiLeaks also weeks ago
provided these materials to
Der Spiegel, on the
condition that all three wait until
today to write about them. These
outlets were presumably chosen by
WikiLeaks with the intent to ensure
maximum exposure among the American
and Western Europeans citizenries
which continue to pay for this war
and whose governments have been less
than forthcoming about what is
taking place [a
CIA document prepared in March, 2010
-- and previously leaked by
WikiLeaks -- plotted how to prevent
public opinion in Western Europe
from turning further against the war
and thus forcing their Governments
to withdraw; the CIA's conclusion:
the most valuable asset in putting a
pretty face on the war for Western
Europeans is Barack Obama's
popularity with those populations].
The White House has
swiftly vowed to continue the war
and predictably condemned WikiLeaks
rather harshly. It will be most
interesting to see how many
Democrats -- who claim to find
Daniel Ellsberg heroic and the
Pentagon Papers leak to be
unambiguously justified -- follow
the White House's lead in that
regard. Ellsberg's leak -- though
primarily exposing the amoral
duplicity of a Democratic
administration -- occurred when
there was a Republican in the White
House. This latest leak, by
contrast, indicts a war which a
Democratic President has embraced as
his own, and documents similar
manipulation of public opinion and
suppression of the truth well into
2009. It's not difficult to
foresee,
as Atrios predicted, that media
"coverage of [the] latest [leak]
will be about whether or not it
should have been published," rather
than about what these documents
reveal about the war effort and the
government and military leaders
prosecuting it. What position
Democratic officials and
administration supporters take in
the inevitable debate over WikiLeaks
remains to be seen (by shrewdly
leaked these materials to 3 major
newspapers, which themselves then
published many of the most
incriminating documents, WikiLeaks
provided itself with some cover).
Note how obviously lame is the White
House's prime tactic thus far for
dismissing the importance of the
leak: that the documents only go
through December, 2009, the month
when Obama ordered his "surge," as
though that timeline leaves these
documents without any current
relevance. The Pentagon Papers only
went up through 1968 and were not
released until 3 years later (in
1971), yet having the public behold
the dishonesty about the war had a
significant effect on public
opinion, as well as their
willingness to trust future
government pronouncements. At the
very least, it's difficult to
imagine this leak not having the
same effect. Then again, since --
unlike Vietnam -- only a tiny
portion of war supporters actually
bears any direct burden from the war
(themselves or close family members
fighting it), it's possible that the
public will remain largely apathetic
even knowing what they will now
know. It's relatively easy to
support or even acquiesce to a war
when neither you nor your loved ones
are risking their lives to fight it.
It's hardly a shock that the war in
Afghanistan is going far worse than
political officials have been
publicly claiming. Aside from the
fact that lying about war is what
war leaders do almost intrinsically
-- that's part of what makes war so
degrading to democratic values --
there have been numerous official
documents
that have recently emerged or
leaked out that explicitly state
that the war is going worse than
ever and is all but unwinnable.
A French General was
formally punished earlier this month
for revealing that the NATO war
situation "has never been worse,"
while
French officials now openly plot
how to set new
"intermediate" benchmarks to ensure
-- in their words -- that "public
opinion doesn't get the impression
of a useless effort." Anyone paying
even mild attention knows that our
war effort there has entailed
countless incidents of civilian
slaughter
followed by
official lies about it,
"hit lists" compiled with no due
process, and feel-good
pronouncements from the Government
that have little relationship to the
realities in that country (other
highlights
here). This leak is not unlike
the Washington Post series
from the last week: the broad
strokes were already well-known, but
the sheer scope and magnitude of the
disclosures may force more public
attention on these matters than had
occurred previously.
Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has
yet again proven itself to be one of
the most valuable and important
organizations in the world. Just as
was true for the video of the Apache
helicopter attack in Baghdad, there
is no valid justification for having
kept most of these documents a
secret. But that's what our
National Security State does
reflexively: it hides itself behind
an essentially absolute wall of
secrecy to ensure that the citizenry
remains largely ignorant of what it
is really doing. WikiLeaks is one
of the few entities successfully
blowing holes in at least parts of
that wall, enabling modest glimpses
into what The Washington Post
spent last week describing as Top
Secret America. The
war on WikiLeaks -- which
was already in full swing,
including, strangely, from some
who claim a commitment to
transparency -- will only
intensify now. Anyone who believes
that the Government abuses its
secrecy powers in order to keep the
citizenry in the dark and manipulate
public opinion -- and who, at this
point, doesn't believe that? --
should be squarely on the side of
the greater transparency which
Wikileaks and its sources, sometimes
single-handedly, are providing.
Wikileaks shows UK
killing of civilians
Mon, 26 Jul 2010
PressTV
The
British military's involvement in
the killing of Afghan civilians has
been further revealed by the
publication of secret US military
files.
The secret files, leaked out by the
Wikileaks website, contain records
confirming that the UK troops have
been involved in at least 21
incidents of civilians being killed
by foreign troops in Afghanistan.
Wikileaks showed the documents to
The Guardian, The New York
Times and Der Spiegel,
before all four news outlets
published them simultaneously on
Sunday night.
The documents, which cover a time
span between January 2004 and
December 2009, indicate that in one
case British troops killed the son
of an Afghan general by a "warning
shot" on the day of his brother's
wedding in November 2007.
The documents also show that Royal
Marines fired warning shots at a
civilian vehicle in November 2008
that left a child dead.
According to the documents, British
military's Gurkhas ordered an air
raid in May 2009 that killed at
least eight Afghan civilians.
Other bloody errors at civilians'
expense, as recorded in the logs,
include the day French troops
strafed a bus full of children in
2008, wounding eight.
In 2007, Polish troops mortared a
village, killing guests at a wedding
party, including a pregnant woman,
in an apparent revenge attack.
Rachel Reid, of campaign group Human
Rights Watch, said, "What it amounts
to is a lot of civilians being
killed and a lack of honesty and
accountability."
A spokesman for the Stop the War
Coalition said the leaks showed
"conclusively that the war in
Afghanistan is pointless and
unwinnable and the warmongers have
lied to us continually".
Afghanistan says it's 'shocked' by
leaked U.S. documents
(CNN) --
The Afghan government
said Monday it was "shocked" as it
sifted through tens of thousands of
leaked U.S. military and diplomatic
reports on the war in Afghanistan
that a whistleblower website posted
a day earlier.
"The Afghan government is shocked
with the report that has opened the
reality of the Afghan war," said
Siamak Herawi, a government
spokesman.
WikiLeaks.org -- a whistleblower
website -- published on Sunday what
it says are more than 90,000 United
States military and diplomatic
reports about Afghanistan filed
between 2004 and January of this
year.
The first-hand accounts are the
military's own raw data on the war,
including numbers killed,
casualties, threat reports and the
like, according to Julian Assange,
the founder of the website.
"It is the total history of the
Afghan war from 2004 to 2010, with
some important exceptions -- U.S.
Special Forces, CIA activity, and
most of the activity of other non-U.S.
groups," Assange said.
CNN has not independently confirmed
the authenticity of the documents.
The Department of Defense will not
comment on them until the Pentagon
has had a chance to look at them, a
Defense official told CNN.
"What you have here is you have a
variety of reports of different
types," said New York Times reporter
Chris Chivers. "Many of them are
simple incident reports. The
military describing ... on the
ground what happened. Incident by
incident."
The New York Times reported Sunday
that military field documents
included in the release suggest that
Pakistan, an ally of the United
States in the war against terror,
has been running something of a
"double game," allowing
"representatives of its spy service
to meet directly with the Taliban in
secret strategy sessions to organize
networks of militant groups that
fight against American soldiers in
Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to
assassinate Afghan leaders."
Herawi charged that Washington
needed to deal with Pakistani
intelligence, known as the ISI.
"There should be serious action
taken against the ISI, who has a
direct connection with the
terrorists," he said. "These reports
show that the U.S. was already aware
of the ISI connection with the al
Qaeda terrorist network. The United
States is overdue on the ISI issue
and now the United States should
answer."
But Gen. Hamid Gul, the former head
of Pakistan's intelligence service
and who is mentioned numerous times
in the Wikileaks reports, called the
accusations lies.
"These reports are absolutely and
utterly false," Gul said Monday. "I
think they [United States] are
failing and they're looking for
scapegoats."
Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's
ambassador to the United States,
issued a statement Sunday saying the
reports "do not reflect the current
onground realities."
Rather, they "reflect nothing more
than single source comments and
rumors, which abound on both sides
of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border
and are often proved wrong after
deeper examination," Haqqani's
statement said.
"Pakistan's government under the
democratically elected leadership of
President [Asif Ali] Zardari and
Prime Minister [Yousuf Raza] Gilani
is following a clearly laid out
strategy of fighting and
marginalizing terrorists and our
military and intelligence services
are effectively executing that
policy," the statement said.
National Security Adviser Gen. James
Jones issued a statement Sunday
calling the documents' release
"irresponsible."
"The United States strongly condemns
the disclosure of classified
information by individuals and
organizations which could put the
lives of Americans and our partners
at risk, and threaten our national
security," the statement said.
"These irresponsible leaks will not
impact our ongoing commitment to
deepen our partnerships with
Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat
our common enemies; and to support
the aspirations of the Afghan and
Pakistani people," the statement
said.
Assange declined to tell CNN where
he got the documents. Jones'
statement said the website made "no
effort" to contact the Obama
administration about the documents.
"The United States government
learned from news organizations that
these documents would be posted,"
Jones' statement said.
Assange claims the documents reveal
the "squalor" of war, uncovering how
many relatively small incidents have
added up to huge numbers of dead
civilians.
The significance lies in "all of
these people being killed in the
small events that we haven't heard
about that numerically eclipse the
big casualty events. It's the boy
killed by a shell that missed a
target," he told CNN.
"What we haven't seen previously is
all those individual deaths," he
said. "We've seen just the number
and, like Stalin said, 'One man's
death is a tragedy, a million dead
is a statistic.' So, we've seen the
statistic."
WikiLeaks publishes anonymously
submitted documents, video and other
sensitive materials after vetting
them, it says. It claims never to
have fallen for a forgery.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman John Kerry,
D-Massachusetts, said in a statement
Sunday that the documents --
regardless of how they came to light
-- "raise serious questions about
the reality of America's policy
toward Pakistan and Afghanistan."
Wikileaks has previously made
headlines for posting controversial
videos of combat in Iraq.
The site gained international
attention in April when it posted a
2007 video said to show a U.S.
helicopter attack in Iraq killing a
dozen civilians, including two
unarmed Reuters journalists.
At
the time, Maj. Shawn Turner, a U.S.
military spokesman, said that "all
evidence available supported the
conclusion by those forces that they
were engaging armed insurgents and
not civilians."
Pfc. Bradley Manning, 22, suspected
of leaking a classified 2007 video,
has been charged by the U.S.
military with eight violations of
the U.S. Criminal Code for
transferring classified data,
according to a charge sheet released
by the military earlier this month.
Attempts to reach Manning's military
defense attorney, Capt. Paul
Bouchard, were unsuccessful Sunday.
However, U.S. Army spokesman Col.
Tom Collins has said Bouchard would
not speak to the media about the
charges.
Assange says WikiLeaks has attempted
to put together a legal team to
defend Manning, something it will do
for any "alleged" whistleblower that
runs into legal trouble because of
WikiLeaks.
Assange -- a former teen hacker who
launched the site in 2007 -- denies
that WikiLeaks has put troops in
danger.
"There certainly have been people
who have lost elections as a result
of material being on WikiLeaks," he
said.
"There have been prosecutions
because of material being on
WikiLeaks. There have been
legislative reforms because of
material being on WikiLeaks," he
said. "What has not happened is
anyone being physically harmed as a
result."
The website held back about 15,000
documents from Afghanistan to
protect individuals who informed on
the Taliban, he said.
But he said he hoped his website
would be "very dangerous" to "people
who want to conduct wars in an
abusive way."
"This material doesn't just reveal
occasional abuse by the U.S.
military," he said. "Of course it
has U.S. military reporting on all
sort of abuses by the Taliban. ...
So it does describe the abuses by
both sides in this war and that's
how people can understand what's
really going on and if they choose
to support it or not."
Assange said the organization gets
material from whistle-blowers in a
variety of ways -- including via
postal mail -- vets it, releases it
to the public and then defends
itself against "the regular
political or legal attack."
He said the
organization rarely knows the
identity of the source of the leak.
"If we find out at some stage, we
destroy that information as soon as
possible," he said.
CIA’s Most Wanted | Man
on the Run, Julian Assange
By Matthew Bell|Indendant.co.uk
Julian Assange tells
Matthew Bell why governments fear
Wikileaks:
There are not
many journalists who, when you
ask them if they are being
followed by the CIA, say “We
have surveillance events from
time to time.” Actually it’s not
a question I’ve ever asked
before, and Julian Assange does
not call himself a
journalist But the answer is
typical of this 41-year-old
former computer-hacker: cryptic,
dispassionate, and faintly
self-important.
As
the founder of Wikileaks – a website
that publishes millions of documents,
from military intelligence to internal
company memos and has, in four years,
exposed more secrets than many
newspapers have in a century – Assange
has become the pin-up of web-age
investigative journalists. The US has
wanted him for questioning since March,
after he posed a video showing an
American helicopter attack that left
several Iraqi civilians and two
Reuters journalists dead.
Understandably, he now avoids the US,
and keeps his movements secret, though
it’s thought he operates out of
Sweden
and is spending time in Iceland, where a
change in the law is creating a
libel-free haven for journalists. But if
the CIA spooks wanted him that badly,
couldn’t they have turned up, as a
hundred adoring student journalists did,
to hear him talk at the Centre for
Investigative Journalism 10 days ago?
Perhaps it’s just as well they didn’t,
as Assange is not a natural public
speaker. He is more at home trawling
data or decrypting the codes that mask
it. His philosophy is that the more a
government wants to keep something
secret, the more reason to expose it. No
journalist could argue with his
essential belief in shining a light on
malpractice, but shouldn’t governments
be entitled to keep some secrets?
“Sure,” he says when we speak after his
talk, “That doesn’t mean we and other
press organisations should suffer under
coercion.”
What
if publishing a document would threaten
national security? “This phrase is so
abused.
Dick Cheney justified
torture with it. Give me an example.”
What about the movement of
US troops? Would he publish
a document that jeopardised their
safety? “We’d have to think about it.”
So that’s a yes? “It’s not a yes. If
that fit into our editorial criteria –
which it might, if it was an extremely
good movement – then we’d have to look
at whether that needed a harm
minimisation procedure. We’d be totally
happy to consider jeopardising the
initiation of a war, or the action of
war. Absolutely.”
He
may speak like a robot, and have a
politician’s knack at ducking straight
answers, but in the flesh he could be a
forgotten member of Crowded House, all
ripped jeans and crumpled jacket, his
distinguished white hair framing a
youthful face. His grungy look ties in
with his outsider status: he has a
deep-rooted mistrust of authority. It
has been speculated this comes from a
youthful brush with the family courts
after he divorced the mother of his son,
though little is really known about his
early life.
His
obsession with secrecy, both in others
and maintaining his own, lends him the
air of a conspiracy theorist. Is he one?
“I believe in facts about conspiracies,”
he says, choosing his words slowly. “Any
time people with power plan in secret,
they are conducting a conspiracy. So
there are conspiracies everywhere. There
are also crazed conspiracy theories.
It’s important not to confuse these two.
Generally, when there’s enough facts
about a conspiracy we simply call this
news.” What about 9/11? “I’m constantly
annoyed that people are distracted by
false conspiracies such as 9/11, when
all around we provide evidence of real
conspiracies, for war or mass financial
fraud.” What about the
Bilderberg conference?
“That is vaguely conspiratorial, in a
networking sense. We have published
their meeting notes.”
Assange
likes to see Wikileaks as a neutral
platform for distributing information,
and fends off criticism by saying it
always follows its openly stated
policies. But no news organisation is
free from personal input, as he reveals
when talking of Bilderberg, a shadowy
annual conference of the influential. “I
understand the philosophical rationale
for having
Chatham House rules
among people in power, but the
corrupting nature, in the case of
Bilderberg, probably outweighs the
benefits. When powerful people meet
together in secret, it tends to
corrupt.”
Spending time with Assange, it’s hard
not to start believing that dark forces
are at work. According to him,
everyone’s emails are being read. For
that reason, he encourages anyone
planning to leak a document to post it
the old fashioned way, to his PO Box.
It’s ironic that an organisation bent on
blowing secrets is itself so secretive,
but Wikileaks couldn’t operate without
reliable sources. Except that,
amazingly, Wikileaks does not verify
them. “We don’t verify our sources, we
verify the documents. As long as they
are bona fide it doesn’t matter where
they come from. We would rather not
know.”
After
we talk, he is off to a safe house for
the night and after that, who knows? He
never stays in one place more than two
nights. Is that because the CIA wants to
kill him? “Is it in the CIA’s interest
to assassinate me? Maybe. But who would
do it?” Isn’t he brave to appear in
public? “Courage is an intellectual
mastery of fear,” he says. “It’s not
that you don’t have fear, you just
manage your risks intelligently.
The U.S. Army charged Bradley
Manning with multiple counts of
mishandling and leaking classified data
and putting national security at risk.
Manning is suspected of leaking a
classified video that shows a group of
men walking down the street in Iraq
before being repeatedly shot by Apache
helicopters.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange hired lawyers to represent the Army intel
analyst accused of leaking State Dept. secrets. But the Pentagon sent them away.
Philip Shenon reports on WikiLeaks concerns about Bradley Manning's treatment in
custody.
IS WIKILEAKS
REALLY THE
WHITE HOUSE
(CIA) or just
another
Soros sock
puppet?
They are a
partner with
the
Open Society
Institute.
OSI was
founded by
George
Soros, who
was the
prime mover
(kingmaker)
who got
Obama
selected,
and no doubt
helped pick
his all the
players in
the
administration.
John Young
was the co
founder of
Wiki Leaks
and the
founder of
Cryptome.org
which HAS
been
attacked by
the web
police. He
is a major
critic of
Wiki leaks
now because
of these
nefarious
financial
connections.
(Great
interview by
our friend
Declan
McCullagh –
which you
can read
here
Then there
is the
matter of
Julian
Assange. He
is supposed
to be enemy
# 1 of the
establishment,
and the
Military
Industrial
Complex.
YET, he
stays alive
and pretty
much out in
the open
(despite the
007 persona
he has
perpetuated)
Assange is
also very
negative on
911 truth,
saying in at
least one
interview
that it
“Annoys” him
( read
here)
All I am
saying that
we need to
be
suspicious
of all these
connections,
and what
looks like
subterfuge.
I will be
writing up
an article
soon and
posting that
exclusive
here on
deadlinelive.info
/and
covering on
my radio
show.
If
you have
further info
please post
it HERE!
~ Jack Blood
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The
British military's involvement in
the killing of Afghan civilians has
been further revealed by the
publication of secret US military
files. 
