Excerpting and editing by Carolyn Bennett
UPDATE By Thursday, the U.S. Defense Secretary was “[asking] the FBI to help investigate the leak of more than 90,000 classified military documents.” In a Pentagon news conference, a seemingly angry Robert Gates threatened retribution and called the WikiLeaks’ releases “‘potentially severe and dangerous.’” “Pentagon asks FBI to probe leaks,” Al Jazeera reported their time July 30, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/2010729192033991507.html
UPDATE Friday July 30: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange responds to Gates:
“[U.S. Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates could have used his time, as other nations have done, to announce a broad inquiry into these killings. …
He could have announced specific criminal investigations into the deaths we have exposed.“He did none of these things. He decided to treat these issues and the countries affected by them with contempt. Instead of explaining how he would address these issues, he decided to announce how he would suppress them.
He could have announced a panel to hear the heartfelt dissent of U.S. soldiers, who know this war from the ground.
He could have apologized to the Afghani people.…
“This behavior is unacceptable. We will not be suppressed. We will continue to expose abuses by this administration and others.” [Source and link: “Julian Assange Responds to Robert Gates Remarks,” Posted by admin on Jul 30th, 2010 and filed under North & South America, Morrison World Media Morning Post, http://morrisonworldnews.com/?p=20381; Also note: Letters to Washington program on KPFA, July 30, 2010, http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/62941]
The 90,000 secret U.S. military files released by whistleblower website WikiLeaks present a powerful indictment of the Pentagon, the Obama administration and the former Bush administration for failing to tell the truth about the war on Afghanistan. These files document U.S. and NATO troops’ killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilians.
The files reveal that the Pentagon set up what amounts to a “death squad,” a secret commando unit called Task Force 373, made up of Army and Navy Special Operatives who seek to assassinate individuals from a list of 2,000 targets.
The released documents show a grim and repeating film of previously unknown incidents where U.S. and NATO troops have shot and murdered unarmed drivers and motorcyclists.
The documents reveal another incident from 2008 in which French troops used machine guns to strafe a busload of children. A military patrol machine-gunned another bus and wounded or killed 15 civilian passengers. In a revenge attack for an earlier insurgent assault, Polish troops in 2007 rained mortar fire on an Afghan village, killing members of a wedding party among them pregnant women.
WikiLeaks’ release confirms an obvious pattern of intensifying retaliatory bomb attacks against U.S. and NATO forces.
The decision by the Obama administration to send 60,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in 2009 is exposed as nothing other than a decision to send more human beings to their death in an ongoing war … avoiding political responsibility for military setback. All U.S. policymakers use the tactic: No matter what, avoid the appearance of military defeat at the hands of an armed resistance.
The web of lies spun for months by the White House and Pentagon about the Afghan war has started to come undone.
Al Jazeera reports that the leaked U.S. military documents reveal “a worrying culture of ill-discipline and incompetence within Afghan ranks.”Afghan security forces have shot civilians, launched attacks on each other, held drug fuelled parties and stolen vehicles in mass desertions. The documents contain more than 70 records of so-called ‘Green on Green’ incidents in which Afghan security forces have not fought the Taliban but each other.
Dozens of reports in the leaked documents describe incidents suggesting the challenge in preparing Afghan forces to take the lead in the country’s security is larger than previously thought. Though Afghan president Hamid Karzai “wants his forces to take responsibility for his country’s security by 2014, the documents posted by WikiLeaks on Monday reveal a worrying culture of ill-discipline and incompetence within their ranks.”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange:
“What we see is that the U.S. Army is an enormous boat that is extremely hard to turn around, and the cover-up of those sorts of crimes begins at the bottom and moves its way to the top so it is quite hard to enact a new policy and have it filtered down to a change in practice. A new policy by [President Barack] Obama does not mean a change of practice by the U.S. military any more than a new policy by [former U.S. Army General Stanley] McChrystal meant a change in practice by U.S. forces.…
“It’s important to understand, this material doesn’t just reveal abuses. This material describes the past six years of war, every major attack that resulted in someone being detained or someone being killed. That tells you how the war is going, where this happened, in what different parts of Afghanistan, what sort of weapon systems were used, which particular military units.
“Is there a killer—is there a killer unit in the United States military? Because there’s been histories of that. You can find out using this data. You can create a simple computer program. We haven’t done it yet, but any one of your technical staff can create a simple computer program to add up the kills by unit and get—and find a top kill unit so that’s an example of something that can be immediately extracted from this.
“You can really see how the war in Afghanistan is going and then compare that to government statements and government policy. This is the raw material that ends up on the big boards on the war room.…
“This is the raw ingredients that lead to Pentagon statistics about civilian casualties; that lead to graphs about how many insurgents are killed.
“We only ever normally see those figures in aggregate, but now we have all the events that are used to create those figures, and we can understand whether those aggregate figures are in fact accurate or are they distortions.
“We can see in many cases where we know what’s in this database and we have press sourcing or Afghan government investigation; we can see the disparity between these two so we can see, in fact, the aggregate figures are based on faulty data.”
Source
“What the WikiLeaks files TRULY reveal,” ANSWER Coalition interview on breaking Wikileaks story, July 26, 2010, http://answer.pephost.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9719&news_iv_ctrl=0&abbr=ANS_
“Afghan forces’ flaws exposed” (Andrew Wander, Al Jazeera English) July 26, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/07/201072613456286509.html
Today July 27, 2010 on Democracy Now highlights from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s Monday press conference in London at the Frontline Club.
“WikiLeaks Founder Says ‘Evidence of War Crimes’ in Afghan War Logs, White House Downplays Leak, Claiming ‘No Broad New Revelations,’” http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/27/wikileaks_founder_says_afghan_war_logs
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