US plans to fortify its embassy in Iraq have raised new suspicion about the diplomatic outpost’s purpose in the politically-gridlocked country.

The White House has reduced the number of its troops in Iraq to around 50,000 and said it would take all its forces out of the country by the next year. But Washington has also announced plans to increase the number of American security contractors, tasked with securing American diplomats and diplomatic facilities.

In an interview with Press TV, Entifadh Qanbar from the Shia parliamentary front Iraqi National Alliance (INA) referred to the nationwide misgivings fueled by the planned security buildup.

“I think having 20,000 or 10,000 security personnel on the Iraqi ground is a serious violation of the Iraqi sovereignty,” he said.

“…it will give the impression and the perception that the US embassy is acting beyond its capacity as a diplomatic embassy rather than interference in the Iraqi politics or, as some people would like to call it, acting as a shadow government…”

The contractors would be authorized to run surveillance missions in search for alleged roadside bombs, fly spy planes and man radar facilities. The number of the US-deployed aircraft, helicopters, mine-resistant vehicles and armor-plated cars will also go up to match the reinforcement.

The most infamous among contractors is private security contractor Blackwater, currently known as Xe Services, LLC. In one incident, Blackwater employees killed 17 civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square during a shooting spree in 2007.

Frank Wisner, former US ambassador to Egypt and India said, “We paid a terrible price…for what we did with our intervention and it should give us great great pause. Before the United States commits force and changes the regime, we need to take through very carefully what it takes to do that, what the follow-up is and what our responsibility is over the years to come and do a careful cost-benefit analysis. Just to go in because we have the capability is not a good idea.”

The comments came at a time of political vulnerability in Iraq resulting from the March 7 parliamentary polls that did not produce a clear winner to form a new government.

Editors Note:

The Baghdad embassy—the largest of any nation on planet earth and ten times bigger than any other US embassy—is striking evidence indicating a continued US presence in the country for many years to come. The structure cost more than $700 million and is the size of 80 football fields. It is bigger than the Vatican, six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York and is about two thirds the size of the National Mall in Washington. It has space for 1,000 employees who are guarded by scores of paramilitary mercenary forces. In other words it is the perfect structure for a nation that claims to be leaving Iraq very soon.

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]

A U.S. audit has found that the Defense Department can’t properly account for how it spent about 95 percent of $9.1 billion in Iraqi oil money earmarked for rebuilding the war-ravaged country.

The U.S. Special Investigator for Iraq Reconstruction report released Tuesday said there was shoddy record keeping and a lack of oversight of the $8.7 billion. The Pentagon cannot account at all for $2.6 billion spent between 2004 and 2007.

The money comes from the Development Fund for Iraq, set up in 2004 by the U.N. Security Council and made up of oil revenues, Iraqi assets frozen before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and surplus funds from the Saddam Hussein-era, oil-for-food program.

The audit highlights the continued problems over how the U.S. is handling Iraqi funds.

Source: NPR

Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some C.I.A. flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States.
… Continue Reading

So far, 5,000 men and women gave their lives while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there are nearly 1,000 thousand more soldiers who are coming home with devastating injuries. Amputations, skin grafts and plastic surgeries are the painful battles these wounded warriors face on the home front. Now, science has a way to re-grow body parts, turning what was once science fiction into fact.

They are forever changed by war.

“An IED went off underneath our vehicle,” Scott Blaine, who was wounded while serving in Afghanistan, recalled to Ivanhoe. “Next thing you know, we’re on fire.”

“They found me 20 feet away from the truck engulfed in flames,” Joseph Paulk, also wounded in Afghanistan, said. “My family was informed they had to come to Germany to basically come say goodbye.”

Before Afghanistan, Paulk looked like the boy next door. When he came home, he learned his battle against the mirror was only beginning.

“Forty percent burns to the face, the shoulder down to my hands, and my hip down to my ankles, then amputations to all 10 fingers because of how severe the burns were,” he said.

Soon, amputations could be a thing of the past as doctors grow new body parts.

“We obviously have the potential to create a whole human in nine months,” Steve Badylak, M.D., D.V.M., Ph.D., director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Pittsburgh, Penn., declared.
At the University of Pittsburgh, researchers are using powder made from a pig’s bladder to re-grow fingers. In soldiers with more serious injuries, the goal is to at least create fingertips.

“Stimulating the growth of 10 to 11 mm of length allows them to make change at a grocery store, turn the key in the car, hold a fork,” Dr. Badylak said.

Other researchers are working to reconstruct faces damaged by war. Joseph Vacanti, M.D., a pediatric surgeon at Mass General Hospital for Children, is engineering ears in his lab.

“Ideally, it would be indistinguishable from a normal ear,” Dr. Vacanti said.

Already successful in mice, Dr. Vacanti says he plans to implant the first ear on a human within a year.
“We can now envision that some day we can give somebody back their own face,” Dr. Vacanti said.

At Brown university, scientists are working to bring feeling back to injured bodies.

“We’re trying to help nerves that are injured grow back in a directed way,” Diane Hoffman-Kim, Ph.D., Associate Professor Medical Science and Engineering at Brown, told Ivanhoe.

Researchers pour liquid plastic over surrounding cells. The hope is to form a mold that guides severed nerves back together.

“Those live nerves will follow exactly along the tracks where the plastic is that looks just like cells,” Dr. Hoffman-Kim explained.

From growing new feeling to new faces, other doctors focus on eliminating the need for skin grafts. Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., takes a piece of skin from a soldier and cooks it in an oven-like device.

“This is basically the same conditions as our body in a box,” said Dr. Atala.

Racks stretch the skin until it covers the size of the wound.

From civilians out of options, to soldiers whose sacrifice is measured in scars, science is growing new possibilities for healing the body and the human spirit.

“You don’t want to be looked at for your loss,” Scott Blaine said. “You want to be just like any other person around.”

The Department of Defense is providing Wake Forest, the University of Pittsburgh, Rutgers University and the Cleveland Clinic $85 million over the next five years to perfect organ and tissue-growing techniques.