Soldiers in Chowkay Valley, Afghanistan

Three former U.S. soldiers involved in the infamous “Collateral Murder” helicopter gunship attack on Baghdad civilians in July 2007, say that attack was nothing out of the ordinary. The massacre—that killed more than a dozen Iraqis, two of them employed by Reuters—ignited a wave of international revulsion against the U.S. military in Iraq when a video of the massacre was released by WikiLeaks last April.

“What the world did not see is the months of training that led up to the incident, in which soldiers were taught to respond to threats with a barrage of fire—a “wall of steel,” in Army parlance—even if it put civilians at risk,” report Sarah Lazare and Ryan Harvey in the August 16th issue of The Nation magazine.

Former Army Specialist Josh Stieber said that newly arrived soldiers in Baghdad were asked if they would fire back at an attacker if they knew unarmed civilians might get hurt in the process. Those who did not respond affirmatively, or who hesitated, were “knocked around” until they realized what was expected of them, added former Army Specialist Ray Corcoles, who deployed with Stieber.

A third former Army specialist, Ethan McCord, said his battalion commander gave orders to shoot indiscriminately after attacks by improvised explosive devices. “Anytime someone in your line gets hit by an IED…you kill every motherfucker in the street,” McCord quotes him as saying.

Corcoles told the reporters he purposely turned his gun away from people. “You don’t even know if somebody’s shooting at you. It’s just insanity to just start shooting people.”

“From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region,” say McCord and Stieber in an open letter to the Iraqis who were injured in the July attack. Together with Corcoles, they have decided to go public about the true nature of the war.

McCord was shown in the video rushing the wounded children from a van. For this humanitarian act, he was “threatened and mocked by his commanding officer,” say The Nation reporters, and his platoon leader also yelled at him “to quit worrying about those ‘motherfucking kids’.”

McCord told the reporters of “multiple instances in which soldiers abused detainees or beat people up in their houses. In one case, he says, someone was taken from his house, beaten up and then left on the side of the road, bloodied and still handcuffed,” Lazare and Harvey write.

The veterans say they support the release of the video and otber documents by WikiLeaks because it confronts people globally “with the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile, Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, accused of leaking the video to WikiLeaks, is facing Espionage Act charges and has been transferred to Kuwait for a military trial, Lazare and Harvey note. The government is also probing where WikiLeaks got the 90,000 secret U.S. military documents from Afghanistan it released late last month. These reports, according to The Nation, detailed the role of U.S. assassination teams, widespread civilian casualties resulting from U.S. attacks and staggering Afghan government incompetence and corruption.”

The totalitarian mantle of secrecy by which the Pentagon shrouds its war crimes makes the disclosures by intelligence analyst Manning appear all the more courageous. As long as the Pentagon keeps him behind bars every American who believes in the Biblical injunction that “the truth shall make ye free” is also a prisoner of the same tyranny. And the three former Army specialists who told their story to The Nation have given us a good idea of what it is the Pentagon doesn’t want the American people to know.

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant for worthy causes who formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and worked as a columnist for several wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

[Via:BLN]

In this video Peter Dale Scott Claims Many banks survived the recent financial crisis by having access to illegal drug money

Heraldo sticks his nose into what is going on over in Afghanistan, here, troops have taken over a small region that grows opium and they all seem itching to destroy the crop, but know that the local population will be “mad” and not work with them, I dont feel they should have the right to destroy any of it, apparently these folks have been getting paid to grow opium, paid well.

The US should start paying them well instead, and use the opium sold to them for legit reasons, many people don’t realize that opium is used to produce a great many helpful pain killing medications.

Another note is that many within the population growing the opium are probably quite physically and psychologically addicted.

Source: Corbett Report

Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.

Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as “our journalists” and directing them in how to do their jobs.

Such close collaboration between local media and U.S. forces has been a headache for the Pentagon in the past: In 2005, Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group was caught paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by American soldiers, causing the United States considerable embarrassment.

In one of the WikiLeaks documents, a PRT member reports delivering “12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming” to two radio stations in the province of Ghazni in 2008, and paying one of them “$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October”:

Read Full Article Here…

A whistle-blower website has published what it says are more than 90,000 United States military and diplomatic reports about Afghanistan filed between 2004 and January of this year.

Corporal gets flack during battle in war in Afghanistan

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 WikiLeaks.org, which published the material Sunday.

“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.

Assange declined to tell CNN where he got the documents. He claims the documents reveal the “squalor” of war, uncovering how many relatively small incidents have added up to huge numbers of dead civilians.

Just In blog: What is WikiLeaks?

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.”

CNN iReport: Help crowdsource the documents

WikiLeaks publishes anonymously submitted documents, video and other sensitive materials after vetting them, it says. It claims never to have fallen for a forgery.

It has 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” whistle-blower 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 postal mail. He said WikiLeaks 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.

[Via: CNN]

A ‘pain ray’ that blasts the enemy with unbearable heat waves has been pulled out of Afghanistan by the US military.

The Active Denial System (ADS), which cost about £42 million to develop, was on the brink of being deployed to disperse members of the Taliban as they attacked US forces.

The weapon, which causes immense pain to subjects but no lasting physical damage, was pulled from the war zone last week but US army chiefs in Afghanistan have stayed silent about the reason for the U-turn.

The ADS, which has been in development for almost 20 years, works by firing a beam of high-frequency waves at the speed of light.

The beam can cover a person’s entire body, causing agonizing pain as it heats water and fat molecules beneath the skin’s surface.

The beam can hit someone up to a third of a mile away, and they are only relieved of the pain when they move out of the way.

A spokesperson from the American Department of Defense said: ‘The decision to recall the weapons back to the US was made by commanders on the ground in Afghanistan.’

[Via: Dailymail]