In Rush to Strike Syria, US Tried to Derail UN Probe

Wednesday, August 28, 2013 by Inter Press Service
by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - After initially insisting that Syria give United Nations investigators unimpeded access to the site of an alleged nerve gas attack, the administration of President Barack Obama reversed its position on Sunday and tried unsuccessfully to get the U.N. to call off its investigation.

The administration’s reversal, which came within hours of the deal reached between Syria and the U.N., was reported by the Wall Street Journal Monday and effectively confirmed by a State Department spokesperson later that day.

In his press appearance Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry, who intervened with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to call off the investigation, dismissed the U.N. investigation as coming too late to obtain valid evidence on the attack that Syrian opposition sources claimed killed as many 1,300 people.

The sudden reversal and overt hostility toward the U.N. investigation, which coincides with indications that the administration is planning a major military strike against Syria in the coming days, suggests that the administration sees the U.N. as hindering its plans for an attack.

Kerry asserted Monday that he had warned Syrian Foreign Minister Moallem last Thursday that Syria had to give the U.N. team immediate access to the site and stop the shelling there, which he said was “systematically destroying evidence”. He called the Syria-U.N. deal to allow investigators unrestricted access “too late to be credible”.

After the deal was announced on Sunday, however, Kerry pushed Ban in a phone call to call off the investigation completely.

The Wall Street Journal reported the pressure on Ban without mentioning Kerry by name. It said unnamed “U.S. officials” had told the secretary-general that it was “no longer safe for the inspectors to remain in Syria and that their mission was pointless.”

But Ban, who has generally been regarded as a pliable instrument of U.S. policy, refused to withdraw the U.N. team and instead “stood firm on principle”, the Journal reported. He was said to have ordered the U.N. inspectors to “continue their work”.

The Journal said “U.S. officials” also told the secretary-general that the United States “didn’t think the inspectors would be able to collect viable evidence due to the passage of time and damage from subsequent shelling.”

The State Department spokesperson, Marie Harf, confirmed to reporters that Kerry had spoken with Ban over the weekend. She also confirmed the gist of the U.S. position on the investigation. “We believe that it’s been too long and there’s been too much destruction of the area for the investigation to be credible,” she said.

That claim echoed a statement by an unnamed “senior official” to the Washington Post Sunday that the evidence had been “significantly corrupted” by the regime’s shelling of the area.

“[W]e don’t at this point have confidence that the U.N. can conduct a credible inquiry into what happened,” said Harf, “We are concerned that the Syrian regime will use this as a delay tactic to continue shelling and destroying evidence in the area.”

Harf did not explain, however, how the Syrian agreement to a ceasefire and unimpeded access to the area of the alleged chemical weapons attack could represent a continuation in “shelling and destroying evidence”.

Despite the U.S. effort to portray the Syrian government policy as one of “delay”, the formal request from the United Nations for access to the site did not go to the Syrian government until Angela Kane, U.N. High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, arrived in Damascus on Saturday, as Ban’s spokesman, Farhan Haq, conceded in a briefing in New York Tuesday.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem said in a press conference Tuesday that Syria had not been asked by the United Nations for access to the East Ghouta area until Kane presented it on Saturday. Syria agreed to provide access and to a ceasefire the following day.

Haq sharply disagreed with the argument made by Kerry and the State Department that it was too late to obtain evidence of the nature of the Aug. 21 incident.

“Sarin can be detected for up to months after its use,” he said.

Specialists on chemical weapons also suggested in interviews with IPS that the U.N. investigating team, under a highly regarded Swedish specialist Ake Sellstom and including several experts borrowed from the Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, should be able to either confirm or disprove the charge of an attack with nerve or another chemical weapon within a matter of days.

Ralph Trapp, a consultant on proliferation of chemical and biological weapons, said he was “reasonably confident” that the U.N. team could clarify what had happened.

“They can definitely answer the question [of] whether there was a chemical attack, and they can tell which chemical was used,” he said, by collecting samples from blood, urine and hair of victims. There was even “some chance” of finding chemical residue from ammunition pieces or craters where they landed.

Trapp said it would take “several days” to complete an analysis.

Steve Johnson, who runs a programme in chemical, biological and radiological weapons forensics at Cranfield University in the United Kingdom, said that by the end of the week the U.N. might be able to answer whether “people died of a nerve agent.”

Johnson said the team, if pushed, could produce “some kind of view” on that issue within 24 to 48 hours.

Dan Kastesza, a 20-year veteran of the U.S. Army Chemical Corps and a former adviser to the White House on chemical and biological weapons proliferation, told IPS the team will not be looking for traces of the nerve gas sarin in blood samples but rather chemicals produced when sarin degrades.

But Kastesza said that once samples arrive at laboratories, specialists could make a determination “in a day or two” about whether a nerve agent or other chemical weapons had been used.

The real reason for the Obama administration’s hostility toward the U.N. investigation appears to be the fear that the Syrian government’s decision to allow the team access to the area indicates that it knows that U.N. investigators will not find evidence of a nerve gas attack.

The administration’s effort to discredit the investigation recalls the George W. Bush administration’s rejection of the position of U.N. inspectors in 2002 and 2003 after they found no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the administration’s refusal to give inspectors more time to fully rule out the existence of an active Iraqi WMD programme.

In both cases, the administration had made up its mind to go to war and wanted no information that could contradict that policy to arise.

Twisted Illogic: Killing Civilians to Protect Civilians

August 29, 2013
The Warped Logic of the Syrian Bombing Mission 
by MARJORIE COHN and JEANNE MIRER


The drums of war are beating again. The Obama administration will reportedly launch a military strike to punish Syria’s Assad government for its alleged use of chemical weapons. A military attack would invariably kill civilians for the ostensible purpose of showing the Syrian government that killing civilians is wrong. “What we are talking about here is a potential response . . . to this specific violation of international norms,” declared White House press secretary Jay Carney. But a military intervention by the United States in Syria to punish the government would violate international law.

For the United States to threaten to and/or launch a military strike as a reprisal is a blatant violation of the United Nations Charter. The Charter requires countries to settle their international disputes peacefully. Article 2(4) makes it illegal for any country to either use force or threaten to use force against another country. Article 2(7) prohibits intervention in an internal or domestic dispute in another country. The only time military force is lawful under the Charter is when the Security Council approves it, or under Article 51, which allows a country to defend itself if attacked. “The use of chemical weapons within Syria is not an armed attack on the United States,” according to Notre Dame law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell.

The United States and the international community have failed to take constructive steps to promote peace-making efforts, which could have brought the crisis in Syria to an end. The big powers instead have waged a proxy war to give their “side” a stronger hand in future negotiations, evaluating the situation only in terms of geopolitical concerns. The result has been to once again demonstrate that military solutions to political and economic problems are no solution at all. In the meantime, the fans of enmity between religious factions have been inflamed to such a degree that the demonization of each by the other has created fertile ground for slaughter and excuses for not negotiating with anyone with “blood on their hands.”

Despite U.S. claims of “little doubt that Assad used these weapons,” there is significant doubt among the international community about which side employed chemical weapons. Many view the so-called rebels as trying to create a situation to provoke U.S. intervention against Assad. Indeed, in May, Carla del Ponte, former international prosecutor and current UN commissioner on Syria, concluded that opposition forces used sarin gas against civilians.

The use of any type of chemical weapon by any party would constitute a war crime. Chemical weapons that kill and maim people are illegal and their use violates the laws of war. The illegality of chemical and poisoned weapons was first established by the Hague regulations of 1899 and Hague Convention of 1907. It was reiterated in the Geneva Convention of 1925 and the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court specifically states that employing “poison or poisoned weapons” and “asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and all analogous liquids, materials or devices” are war crimes, under Article 8. The prohibition on the use of these weapons is an international norm regardless of whether any convention has been ratified. As these weapons do not distinguish between military combatants and civilians, they violate the principle of distinction and the ban on weapons which cause unnecessary suffering and death contained in the Hague Convention. Under the Nuremberg Principles, violations of the laws of war are war crimes.

The self-righteousness of the United States about the alleged use of chemical weapons by Assad is hypocritical. The United States used napalm and employed massive amounts of chemical weapons in the form of Agent Orange in Vietnam, which continues to affect countless people over many generations. Recently declassified CIA documents reveal U.S. complicity in Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, according to Foreign Policy: “In contrast to today’s wrenching debate over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein’s widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted.”

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States used cluster bombs, depleted uranium, and white phosphorous gas. Cluster bomb cannisters contain tiny bomblets, which can spread over a vast area. Unexploded cluster bombs are frequently picked up by children and explode, resulting in serious injury or death. Depleted uranium (DU) weapons spread high levels of radiation over vast areas of land. In Iraq, there has been a sharp increase in Leukemia and birth defects, probably due to DU. White phosphorous gas melts the skin and burns to the bone. The Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in time of War (Geneva IV) classifies “willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health” as a grave breach, which constitutes a war crime.

The use of chemical weapons, regardless of the purpose, is atrocious, no matter the feigned justification. A government’s use of such weapons against its own people is particularly reprehensible. Secretary of State John Kerry said that the purported attack by Assad’s forces “defies any code of morality” and should “shock the conscience of the world.” He went on to say that “there must be accountability for those who would use the world’s most heinous weapons against the world’s most vulnerable people.”

Yet the U.S. militarily occupied over 75% of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques for 60 years, during which time the Navy routinely practiced with, and used, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, napalm and other toxic chemicals and metals such as TNT and mercury. This occurred within a couple of miles of a civilian population that included thousands of U.S. citizens. The people of Vieques have lived under the colonial rule of the United States now for 115 years and suffer from terminal health conditions such as elevated rates of cancer, hypertension, respiratory and skin illnesses and kidney failure. While Secretary Kerry calls for accountability by the Assad government, the U.S. Navy has yet to admit, much less seek atonement, for decades of bombing and biochemical warfare on Vieques.

The U.S. government’s moral outrage at the use of these weapons falls flat as it refuses to take responsibility for its own violations.

President Barack Obama admitted, “If the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a UN mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it . . .” The Obama administration is studying the 1999 “NATO air war in Kosovo as a possible blueprint for acting without a mandate from the United Nations,” the New York Times reported. But NATO’s Kosovo bombing also violated the UN Charter as the Security Council never approved it, and it was not carried out in self-defense. The UN Charter does not permit the use of military force for “humanitarian interventions.” Humanitarian concerns do not constitute self-defense. In fact, humanitarian concerns should spur the international community to seek peace and end the suffering, not increase military attacks, which could endanger peace in the entire region.

Moreover, as Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies and David Wildman of Human Rights & Racial Justice for the Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church wrote, “Does anyone really believe that a military strike on an alleged chemical weapons factory would help the Syrian people, would save any lives, would help bring an end to this horrific civil war”?

Military strikes will likely result in the escalation of Syria’s civil war. “Let’s be clear,” Bennis and Wildman note. “Any U.S. military attack, cruise missiles or anything else, will not be to protect civilians – it will mean taking sides once again in a bloody, complicated civil war.” Anthony Cordesman, military analyst from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, asks, “Can you do damage with cruise missiles? Yes. Can you stop them from having chemical weapons capability? I would think the answer would be no.”

The United States and its allies must refrain from military intervention in Syria and take affirmative steps to promote a durable ceasefire and a political solution consistent with international law. If the U.S. government were truly interested in fomenting peace and promoting accountability, it should apologize to and compensate the victims of its own use of chemical weapons around the world.

What Isn't Being Said About Soldier Suicides

by ALYSSA ROHRICHT - CounterPunch


On March 21, 2013 at around 11 p.m., a tragedy occurred as a U.S. Marine shot and killed two co-workers at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia and then committed suicide. While this instance is a tragedy in itself, it marks an alarming trend among U.S. active-duty soldiers and veterans.

Suicides in the U.S. military have been climbing, reaching a record high in 2012 when 349 soldiers took their own lives, about one every 25 hours. By comparison, 301 U.S. soldiers died in active combat in 2012, marking the third time in four years that the number of military suicides has surpassed the number of deaths in combat of U.S. soldiers. The figures also do not include the 110 “pending” reported suicides that are still under investigation by medical examiners. In veterans, the numbers are far worse: about one veteran every 65 minutes takes his or her own life, according to a new investigation by the Department of Veterans Affairs which examined suicide data from 1999 to 2010.

Since this data has been released, a new crisis line and website have been created for veterans contemplating suicide to reach out and access information on various resources for family and friends. Additionally, President Obama signed an executive order in 2012 authorizing the VA to hire and train additional staff, and according to a press release by the VA, the Veteran Crisis Line has already saved approximately 26,000 suicidal veterans thus far. But the 1,600 new clinical staff, 300 new administrative staff, and 800 new peer-to-peer specialists to work on mental health teams that the VA has hired or is in the process of hiring will only treat the symptoms of this crisis, not the cause.

That there are 26,000 veterans that need saving from suicidal thoughts and behaviors should be evidence enough that something is wrong. The cause shouldn’t be too hard to discern either. Yet coverage in the corporate mainstream media is severely lacking. An article in Forbes detailed the rise in veteran suicide, questioning why the numbers could be so high but offering no real answers as to why.

“It’s still pretty shocking that veterans make up such a high proportion of suicides in this country. Veterans affairs experts explain this by saying that veterans fall into high-risk groups for suicide, which include being male, having access to guns, and living in a rural area, but those factors don’t seem to come close to accounting for such a high rate.”

And that’s where the author’s analysis ends. Well, the author is certainly correct about one thing. That veterans have higher risk factors associated with suicide – things like maleness, gun ownership, and living in a rural area – is NOT sufficient to explain such high rates of suicide. Yet the author completely ignores all obvious answers to her pondering.

Perhaps we could examine the incredibly long and repeated deployments by U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. During World War II, The Christian Science Monitor reports, the average infantryman in the South Pacific spent about 40 days in combat over four years. That’s compared to today when about 107,000 Army soldiers, or 20% of the active-duty force, have been deployed three or more times since 2001. Over 50,000 have done four or more tours. That’s four or more tours of watching your fellow soldiers die, four more tours of being under the constant stresses of war-time of fearing for your own life and the lives of those around you, and four more tours of having to take the lives of others because such is the game of war.

Or perhaps it is our strange and schizophrenic way of rallying behind the troops with our patriotic chants and our “Support our Troops” bumper stickers, yet when our troops come home, we leave them homeless, jobless, penniless, and without healthcare to nurse their physical wounds, and worse yet, their psychological ones. 

According to the 2012 Annual Homeless Assessment Report, an estimated 62,619 veterans were homeless on a single night in 2012. In another study by the Urban Institute, about one in ten veterans lack health insurance, that’s 1.3 million veterans without benefits. Of the lucky veterans that do get treatment by the VA, an estimated 30% have been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. In a report released by the VA in 2012, it was revealed that 247,243 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been diagnosed with the disorder. According to an article on the Daily Beast, “Troops who’ve been deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan are more than three times as likely as soldiers with no previous deployments to screen positive for PTSD and major depression, according to a 2010 study published by the American Journal for Public Health.”

Or perhaps, as we have just passed the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war, we should consider how this country has been so deeply drenched in wars throughout the world for so many years. Operation Enduring Freedom had its 11th anniversary last October, marking more than a decade of involvement in Afghanistan. It has been close to six years since the U.S. revamped its efforts to fight terror in Somalia; nine since we began our drone campaign in Pakistan. Our War on Drugs in Latin America has been waged for decades in a seemingly ever-expanding initiative and costing the United States billions upon billions of dollars. And those are just the wars most people know about. Our special operations forces work in an estimated 120 countries around the world, including throughout Central Africa, across Latin America, and in the Philippines. Our global hegemonic empire works in about 60% of the world’s nations.

With that in mind, how could anyone be surprised at our high rate of suicide among our active-duty soldiers and our veterans who are forced to fight in deployment after deployment, in wars spanning the globe meant only to increase our dominance and global sovereignty, and who come home to joblessness, homelessness, and no one to help them with their internal and external wounds. The wrong questions are being asked in this country. The question is not, how can we better help our wounded vets and soldiers combat depression and suicide? The question is: how can we cut ourselves off from our incessant need for war and conflict and global domination to stop this terrifying trend of murders and suicides. This country has an addiction to war and violence. That is the source of our problem. It is time we changed the conversation.

++++++++

And even this writer talks about ignoring the obvious then ignores the obvious: in addition to long deployments, it's what these soldiers are being ordered to do - killing civilians, women and children. If you've ever seen an interview with a veteran, they will tell you openly and honestly about how hard it is to go on living after having killed a child. Most civilian deaths are collateral damage, but don't be naive and think they aren't often ordered to kill everyone in a building, regardless if civilians are present or not. The only way to support our troops is to bring them the fuck home. Nothing good has or will ever come from these empire expanding wars. We are the bad guys and that must be a terrible thing for a brave soldier to live with once his deployment is over, and he comes home and looks himself in the mirror while the things he was ordered to do, the violent images of death, blood, body parts and dead children race through his mind. And he has to live with those images in his mind for the rest of his life. I can understand how that prospect would seem unbearable. I hear too often from uninformed people that suicide is a coward's way out, and not for one minute do I believe that any of these soldier suicides were cowards. They were suffering in such horrible ways that seemed impossible ever to heal. And that is the fault of a federal government run by sociopathic corporate oligarchs who consider profit to be more important than the lives of the soldiers carrying out their "plan." -- jef

Empire and Its Consequences

Thursday, October 11, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Robert C. Koehler

 

Ever notice the way certain basic human values quietly transform into their opposite on their way to becoming national policy?

At the human level, the immorality of murder is fundamental, and most people understand the insanity of armed hatred. Keeping these dark forces under wraps is essential to the existence of human society. So why is it, then, that at the abstract level of nationalism, those forces are honored, worshiped, saluted, extolled as glorious, and given command of an enormous budget?

Why is it that their perpetuation via increasingly sophisticated technology is equated with national security and no one talks about the completely predictable negative consequences of basing security on murder and hatred?

And why does it feel so naïve to be asking such questions?

It’s as though the arrangement was settled four or five millennia ago. Killing is wrong, but we have to kill one another, you know, in self-defense, in order to survive. And hating people is wrong — mocking them, dehumanizing them — but some people ask for it. They do it to us, so we have no choice but to do it back. Hate, dehumanize, eliminate our enemies and . . . voila, we’re safe, at least for the time being. What don’t you get about that?

Criticism of such policy is generally couched in terms that remove the alleged naïveté of the criticism, but I’m wondering if it isn’t time to stare directly at the fundamental wrongness of war. Let me put it as nakedly as I can: A policy of murder and hatred is, in itself, morally wrong as well as strategically untenable. Anything that flows from such a policy, even if it seems to be beneficial — such as regional dominance, access to oil, suppression of an enemy’s power or plain old revenge — is inherently unstable and doomed to disastrous failure. This may be the way empires act, but it’s bad policy. If it creates “collateral damage,” it’s bad policy.

I put it this way because I’m haunted by the statistic that U.S. military veterans are committing suicide at the rate of 18 per day and that the term for the condition of many, maybe most, veterans and soldiers after their deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq is moral injury, as I wrote about last week.

Their lives have been seriously damaged not just by physical and psychological injury but by something else as well — by having transgressed a fundamental spiritual threshold and severed the connection that unites us. We can’t dehumanize others without doing the same to ourselves, and waking up to the reality of such a state is sometimes unbearable.

And it’s not just the deployment — the participation in an inhumane occupation and war — that dehumanizes. The military training that precedes deployment is where it starts. The training is not simply in the craft and technology of killing, but in the dehumanizing of self and other. The U.S. military, whatever else it is, is a cult of hatred with a virtually unlimited budget. This has been born out in the testimony of numerous vets over the years, testimony that could fill volumes, e.g.:

“I joined the Army on my 18th birthday. When I joined I was told racism was gone from the military,” Mike Prysner said during the 2008 Winter Soldier hearings. “After 9/11, I (began hearing) towel head, camel jockey, sand nigger. These came from up the chain of command. The new word was hadji. A hadji is someone who takes a pilgrimage to Mecca. We took the best thing from Islam and made it the worst thing.” Prysner was part of a panel called “Racism and War: the Dehumanization of the Enemy.”

Military recruits march to cadences that celebrate killing children in the marketplace and cry “kill” before they can eat a meal. They’re told they’re animals, stripped of “sentimental” feelings, trained to kill on command with cold efficiency. In that condition they serve U.S. foreign policy.

The argument, of course, is that we have enemies out there who despise us and want what we have, and our only protection is a layer of ruthless, well-armed killers that patrol the perimeter and keep our communities and our children safe. The argument is that our foreign policy is ultimately humane, that it spreads democracy, that it targets only bad guys and protects decent people everywhere.

But this argument breaks down when you look at what we do, from Dresden and Hiroshima to My Lai and Fallujah. It breaks down when you read about the rationale of our massive bombing of Baghdad at the start of the Iraq war, as spelled out by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade in the 1996 Defense Department publication, “Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance”:

“The intent here is to impose a regime of Shock and Awe through delivery of instant, nearly incomprehensible levels of massive destruction directed at influencing society writ large, meaning its leadership and public, rather than targeting directly against military or strategic objectives. . . .

“The employment of this capability against society and its values, called ‘counter-value’ . . . (consists of) massively destructive strikes directly at the public will of the adversary to resist.”

This is the morality of empire, the morality of domination. We didn’t invent it; we just carry on the tradition, which goes back through colonialism and slavery to the Inquisition (“kill them all, let God sort them out”) to Rome (“they create a wasteland and call it peace”) and beyond, to the dawn of civilization.

I think the consequences have finally caught up with us.

“Militants”: Media Propaganda

Monday, May 28, 2012
To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone"
By Glenn Greenwald

Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.

This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of “militant” is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: “Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen”).

This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.
But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.

“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”

For the moment, leave the ethical issues to the side that arise from viewing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”; that’s nothing less than sociopathic, a term I use advisedly, but I discuss that in the separate, longer piece I’ve written. For now, consider what this means for American media outlets. Any of them which use the term “militants” to describe those killed by U.S. strikes are knowingly disseminating a false and misleading term of propaganda. By “militant,” the Obama administration literally means nothing more than: any military-age male whom we kill, even when we know nothing else about them. They have no idea whether the person killed is really a militant: if they’re male and of a certain age they just call them one in order to whitewash their behavior and propagandize the citizenry (unless conclusive evidence somehow later emerges proving their innocence).

What kind of self-respecting media outlet would be party to this practice? Here’s the New York Times documenting that this is what the term “militant” means when used by government officials. Any media outlet that continues using it while knowing this is explicitly choosing to be an instrument for state propaganda — not that that’s anything new, but this makes this clearer than it’s ever been.

Videos Show Blackwater in Iraq Running Over Woman, Firing into Traffic

It continues to become clearer and clearer that crucial endeavors traditionally operated by the government--i.e. prisons, military engagements, schools, water utilities--should not be privatized. Privatization unleashed Blackwater murder sprees on innocent civilians, crams prisons with non-violent offenders, and graduates corporately programmed student consumers who accept the fate that the corrupt corporate control mechanism imposes upon them. Blackwater is the sucking chestwound of democracy's ultimate fail--allowing corporate personhood, and thus corporate special interests control all 3 branches of the federal govt. --jef

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Thursday, April 5, 2012 by Common Dreams


Videos posted by Harper's Magazine show the private contractor formerly known as Blackwater in Iraq running over a woman with a car, smashing into Iraqis' cars to move them out of the way and firing a rifle into traffic.

The behavior by Blackwater seen in the videos adds even more fuel to evidence that the company "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."

The videos are included in a piece by Charles Glass entitled “The Warrior Class” that looks at the rise of private security contractors. Glass had been shown the videos by a former Blackwater employee.

Describing the video dated April 2006 that shows the woman being hit by a Blackwater vehicle, Glass writes:

"A woman in a black full-length burka began to cross the street. The vehicle struck the woman and knocked her unconscious body into the gutter. The cars slowed for a moment, but did not stop, nor did they even determine whether the victim was dead or alive. A voice in the car taking the video said, 'Oh, my God!' Yet no one was heard on the radio requesting help for her. Most sickeningly, the sequence had been set to an AC/DC song, whose pounding, metallic chorus declared: 'You’ve been… thunderstruck!'"

Glass writes that the tape he was shown ended with the inscription, "In support of security, peace, freedom and democracy everywhere."

* * *

Iraqi Children in U.S. Raid Shot in Head, U.N. Says

Thursday, September 1, 2011 by the McClatchy Newspapers

by Matthew Schofield 

 

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

This cell phone photo was shot by a resident of Ishaqi on March 15, 2006,
of bodies Iraqi police said were of children executed by U.S. troops
after a night raid there. A State Department cable obtained by WikiLeaks
quotes the U.N. investigator of extrajudicial killings as saying an autopsy
showed the residents of the house had been handcuffed and shot in the head,
including children under the age of 5. McClatchy obtained the
photo from a resident when the incident occurred. | 

 
The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks' website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the U.N.'s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Reached by email Wednesday, Alston said that as of 2010 — the most recent data he had — U.S. officials hadn't responded to his request for information and that Iraq's government also hadn't been forthcoming. He said the lack of response from the United States "was the case with most of the letters to the U.S. in the 2006-2007 period," when fighting in Iraq peaked.

Alston said he could provide no further information on the incident. "The tragedy," he said, "is that this elaborate system of communications is in place but the (U.N.) Human Rights Council does nothing to follow up when states ignore issues raised with them."

The Pentagon didn't respond to a request for comment. At the time, American military officials in Iraq said the accounts of townspeople who witnessed the events were highly unlikely to be true, and they later said the incident didn't warrant further investigation. Military officials also refused to reveal which units might have been involved in the incident.

Iraq was fast descending into chaos in early 2006. An explosion that ripped through the Golden Dome Mosque that February had set off an orgy of violence between rival Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and Sunni insurgents, many aligned with al Qaida in Iraq, controlled large tracts of the countryside.

Ishaqi, about 80 miles northwest of Baghdad, not far from Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, was considered so dangerous at the time that U.S. military officials had classified all roads in the area as "black," meaning they were likely to be booby-trapped with roadside bombs.

The Ishaqi incident was unusual because it was brought to the world's attention by the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit, a regional security center set up with American military assistance and staffed by U.S.-trained Iraqi police officers.

The original incident report was signed by an Iraqi police colonel and made even more noteworthy because U.S.-trained Iraqi police, including Brig. Gen. Issa al Juboori, who led the coordination center, were willing to speak about the investigation on the record even though it was critical of American forces.

Throughout the early investigation, U.S. military spokesmen said that an al Qaida in Iraq suspect had been seized from a first-floor room after a fierce fight that had left the house he was hiding in a pile of rubble.

But the diplomatic cable provides a different sequence of events and lends credence to townspeople's claims that American forces destroyed the house after its residents had been shot.

Alston initially posed his questions to the U.S. Embassy in Geneva, which passed them to Washington in the cable.

According to Alston's version of events, American troops approached a house in Ishaqi, which Alston refers to as "Al-Iss Haqi," that belonged to Faiz Harrat Al-Majma'ee, whom Alston identified as a farmer. The U.S. troops were met with gunfire, Alston said, that lasted about 25 minutes.

After the firefight ended, Alston wrote, the "troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF intervention, a U.S. air raid ensued that destroyed the house." The initials refer to the official name of the military coalition, the Multi-National Force.

Alston said "Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims (i.e. five children and four women) in the morgue of Tikrit. Autopsies carries (sic) out at the Tikrit Hospital's morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed."

The cable makes no mention any of the alleged shooting suspects being found or arrested at or near the house.

The cable closely tracks what neighbors told reporters for Knight Ridder at the time. (McClatchy purchased Knight Ridder in spring 2006.) Those neighbors said the U.S. troops had approached the house at 2:30 a.m. and a firefight ensued. In addition to exchanging gunfire with someone in the house, the American troops were supported by helicopter gunships, which fired on the house.

The cable also backs the original report from the Joint Coordination Center, which said U.S. forces entered the house while it was still standing. That first report noted: "The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men. Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals."

The report was signed by Col. Fadhil Muhammed Khalaf, who was described in the document as the assistant chief of the Joint Coordination Center.

The cable also backs up the claims of the doctor who performed the autopsies, who told Knight Ridder "that all the victims had bullet shots in the head and all bodies were handcuffed."

The cable notes that "at least 10 persons, namely Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay'ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra'a (aged 5) Aisha (aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz's mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz's sister (name unknown), Faiz's nieces Asma'a Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma'arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid."

Biggest Document Leak in History Exposes Real War

by: Rachel Oldroyd  |  The Bureau of Investigative Journalism | Report 

Thursday 21 October 2010

 

Twelve weeks ago the Bureau of Investigative Journalism was given access to the biggest leak of military documents in history.

These documents formed a database of nearly 400,000 military logs recorded over six years of the Iraq war and covering the years 2004 to 2009.

There are over 37 million words used to recount military significant actions that took place across the entire country. This material provides an unrivalled portrait of one of the most controversial wars of the modern age.

For the first time the files reveal just how much the American military detailed the escalating violence in Iraq, and how this contrasts markedly to what the politicians said in public. This is the story behind the pronouncements – the uncensored detail Washington did not want us to know.

Key findings

The data reveals how hundreds of civilians were killed by coalition forces in unreported events.

There are numerous claims of prison abuse by coalition forces even after the Abu Ghraib scandal. The files also paint a disturbing portrait of widespread torture in Iraqi detention facilities.

As the war progresses the documents record a descent into chaos and horror as the occupation sparked civil war. In case after case, the logs record thousands of bodies, many brutally tortured, dumped on the streets of Iraq.

Through these reports we see, in military snapshots, the full impact the war had on Iraqis – men, women and children. The sheer scale of the deaths, detentions and violence is laid bare for the first time.

About the logs

The files were each recorded by soldiers operating on the ground and detail significant events. They are known as “SIGACTS”.

At the time each report was classified as “Secret” but the information contained is no longer militarily sensitive. In order to protect people mentioned in the reports the Bureau has removed all names and detailed grid references from the documents published on this site.

The files, leaked to the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks, were made available to a select group of media outlets, including the Bureau, the Guardian, the New York Times, the German weekly Der Spiegel and French newspaper Le Monde.

Iraq Body Count, the agency that has been collating evidence of Iraq’s casualty numbers for many years, was also given access to the data.

Others involved include Sweden’s SVT and public interest lawyers.

The Bureau has made documentaries based on our findings for Dispatches and Al Jazeera English and Arabic.

Official response

We offered the United States Department of Defense the right to reply to our findings. They issued a statement which can be read here.

or read below...

Pentagon response to publication of logs

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism sent two letters – which listed a number of significant allegations regarding US forces and US defence policy – to the Department of Defense Press Office at the Pentagon, so as to provide an opportunity to respond in the interest of fairness.

Among the specific questions the Bureau asked the Pentagon to respond to were the following:

- We allege that the US Government handed over detainees to Iraqi authorities, knowing of concerns that torture was rife in Iraqi detention facilities.

- We have concerns that allegations of detainee abuse by Iraqi authorities reported to US forces were not properly investigated.

- On February 22 2007 a US lawyer advises Crazyhorse 18’s Command Unit that Anti-Iraqi Forces could not surrender to an aircraft and were still valid targets. However, we have found four occasions in the data when people were allowed to surrender to aircraft. What is the DoD’s response to this?

- We have found over 300 alleged cases of detainee abuse by US soldiers after Abu Ghraib in 2004.

- Contained within the files are intelligence reports alleging strong links between Syrian intelligence agents and al Qaeda. What is the DoD’s position on such reports?

The US Department of Defense’s response is as follows:

“We strongly condemn the unauthorised disclosure of classified information and will not comment on these leaked documents other than to note that ‘significant activities’ reports are initial, raw observations by tactical units. They are essentially snapshots of events, both tragic and mundane, and do not tell the whole story. That said, the period covered by these reports has been well-chronicled in news stories, books and films and the release of these field reports does not bring new understanding to Iraq’s past.

“However, it does expose secret information that could make our troops even more vulnerable to attack in the future. Just as with the leaked Afghan documents, we know our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources, and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment. This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed.”

Endless Occupations

What They are Still Doing in Our Name
By SHELDON RICHMAN

Thanks to Wikileaks and heroic leakers inside the military, we now know the U.S. government has killed many more innocent Afghan civilians than we were aware of heretofore. We also know that American military and intelligence personnel roam Afghanistan assassinating suspected bad guys. Sometimes they kill people they later acknowledge weren’t bad guys at all. “Bad guys,” like “Taliban,” is implicitly defined as anyone who resists the U.S. occupation force and the corrupt puppet government it keeps in power.

What other atrocities are our misleaders and misrepresentatives committing in our name?

Let’s get something straight: to be an enemy of American occupation, bombing, and “nation building” is not the same thing as being an enemy of America or its people. It’s time Americans understood that. When you invade another country and people there object, even forcibly, they are not aggressors. You are. To understand this, imagine our being invaded by a foreign military force. Would resistance be aggression?

The U.S. government goes to appalling lengths to deny this truth. It is about to try before a military commission a young Canadian, Omar Ahmed Khadr, who was taken into custody in Afghanistan eight years ago when he was 15 years old. The charge? War crimes, among them “murder in violation of the rules of war,” which lawyer Chase Madar calls “a newly minted war crime novel to the history of armed conflict.”

Khadr was captured after a four-hour firefight between American forces and so-called militants in the village of Ayub Kheyl near Kabul, during which the Afghans’ homes were flattened by 500-pound bombs. One American died later from wounds inflicted by a grenade. Reports conflict, but Khadr was shot several times in the chest and back, then later was found under the rubble, unconscious and seriously wounded — he lost an eye from shrapnel.

Taken to Bagram Airbase, where the U.S. government maintains a prison, Khadr received some medical treatment and was interrogated about his role that day. He was thought to have information about al-Qaeda, since his father was a jihadist and knew Osama bin Laden. Khadr says he was denied pain killers, subjected to what can only be called torture, and forced to do hard work, aggravating his wounds. It was only after this torture that he said he had helped the militants because America was at war with Islam. Despite Canada’s request, Khadr was transferred to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was again tortured and kept in solitary confinement for long spells. He claims that because of the torture he gave false confessions, including that he threw a grenade. Later he said he had no recollection of throwing a grenade and was in fact rendered unconscious by an American-caused explosion.

Unfortunately, the presiding judge has refused to exclude Khadr’s statements made under torture and other cruel treatment, such as threats of gang rape. Militarily commissions are as much the travesty of justice that candidate Obama said they were in 2008. But now he’s in charge.

Even if Khadr threw the grenade and killed an American, how can that be a war crime? At worst his actions look like self-defense but at any rate, fighters in combat aren’t typically charged with murder.

Is the American military to be permitted to go anywhere the politicians wish and expect the people of the invaded countries meekly to accept their fate and pledge allegiance to the United States? Would we receive an invader that way?

The U.S. government and its well-paid military contractors have an agenda in the Middle East and South Central Asia that has nothing to do with the welfare or safety of average Americans. On the contrary, it is bankrupting them and has made them targets of revenge. There’s a simple way to keep American military personnel safe: bring them home.

Obama has shown himself to be worse than his predecessor and the neoconservative empire enthusiasts. His promises to leave Iraq and Afghanistan are hedged so thick that we can expect the occupations to continue for many years ... all in our name. Despite Obama’s words, the death and destruction at America’s hands are not nearing an end.