Journalist corroborates evidence: war log, war lies

Excerpting and editing by Carolyn Bennett

Crimes, lies, leaks, recollections from Iraq USA will not go away.

Former Washington Post bureau chief in Baghdad and Cairo, former West Africa bureau chief for The Associated Press, graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government Ellen Knickmeyer in a Monday article in The Daily Beast.

“In the dark morning hours of February 22, 2006, a group of unknown attackers detonated bombs in the northern Iraqi city of Samarra, bringing down the golden dome of a revered Shia Muslim shrine.

“A few hours later, I drove through Baghdad and watched the country descend into civil war. Then the Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post, I drove with Iraqi and American colleagues to Sadr City, the sprawling slum on the outskirts of the city. We watched hundreds of black-clad religious militiamen, waving their AK 47s in the air and calling for revenge, in what would be the start to a campaign of sectarian killing and torture.

“During visits to Baghdad’s morgue over the next two days, I saw Sunni families thronging to find the bodies of loved ones killed by the militias. The morgue’s computer registrar told the grim-faced families and me that we would have to be patient; since the Samarra bombing, the morgue had received more than 1,000 bodies and it was way behind on processing corpses.…

“Then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a news conference at the Pentagon to say that U.S. press reports of killings—such as mine that estimated 1,300 dead in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, based on what I had seen at the morgue, interviews with Sunni survivors, U.N. and Iraq health officials—were calculated ‘exaggerated reporting.’

“Iraqi security forces, he said, ‘were taking the lead in controlling the situation,’ everything, he assured his listeners, was ‘calming.’

“American journalists in Baghdad were under attack not just from Iraqi insurgents but — at least verbally — from our own country’s civilian and military commanders as well.

“Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.

“The American troops, who were risking their lives on the ground, witnessed and documented it themselves.

“The WikiLeaks documents show that the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, and U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld must have known that all along, owing to the accounts from their forces.

“Despite statements of top U.S. commanders at the time, it wasn’t the journalists in Baghdad who were lying.”

Source

“WikiLeaks Exposes Rumsfeld's Lies,” Ellen Knickmeyer in The Daily Beast, October 25, 2010, http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailybeast/20101025/ts_dailybeast/10609_wikileaksshowsrumsfeldandcaseyliedabouttheiraqwar

Also today on Democracy Now a conversation with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, October 26, 2010, http://www.democracynow.org/
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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY] Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY] Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]

Ghosts rise from U.S. - Iraq war — secrets unveiled in public interest

Re-reporting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

More documents released this weekend by Al Jazeera from whistleblower WikiLeaks show that from 2004 to 2009, U.S. soldiers in Iraq were under domestic orders, so called “Fragmentary order” or FRAGO, to let torture proceed without check. In doing so, U.S. officials have broken laws agreed to by the United States and world nations.

UN resolution 1546 does not require the U. S. under international law to investigate allegations of Iraqi-on-Iraqi detainee abuse. Apparently, Iraqis reported more than a thousand cases of abuse after June 30, 2004, when Iraq had “resumed its sovereignty.” However, the United Nations Convention against Torture (to which the U.S. is signatory) “forbids signatories from transferring detainees to countries where there are substantial grounds for believing they will be tortured.”

There were more than a thousand allegations of torture in Iraqi jails, Al Jazeera reports from the leaked documents, “many of them substantiated by medical evidence clearly seeming to constitute ‘substantial grounds’ to believe that prisoners transferred to Iraqi custody could be tortured. Yet, in recent years — including nearly 2,000 handed over to Iraqis in July of this year — “the U.S. has transferred thousands of prisoners to Iraqi custody.”

The U.S. military’s secret “significant action reports” (SIGACTs), according to Al Jazeera, “reveal how torture was rampant and how ordinary civilians bore the brunt of the conflict. The files record horrifying tales: of pregnant women being shot dead at checkpoints, of priests kidnapped and murdered, of Iraqi prison guards using electric drills to force their prisoners to confess.” Moreover, U.S. soldiers engaged in “excessive use of force that was routinely not investigated and the guilty were rarely brought to book.”

In the period January 1, 2004 - December 31, 2009, 109,000 people died of whom two thirds or 66,081 were civilians.

These latest 400,000 secret U.S. files released by WikiLeaks and obtained by Al Jazeera expose “a graphic narrative of the war — every aspect of the war in Iraq — reaching far beyond any information about the conflict ever released into the public domain.”

Al Jazeera says that before releasing the documents its staff worked for ten weeks with the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London and “analyzed tens of thousands of documents, finding facts the United States has kept hidden from public scrutiny.” The finding, says the news organization, “often contradicts the official narrative of the conflict [in Iraq]. Leaked data reveal, for example, that the U.S. has been keeping records of Iraqi deaths and injuries throughout the war — despite public statements to the contrary.”

Sources


“WikiLeaks releases secret Iraq file Al Jazeera accesses 400,000 secret US military documents, which reveal the inside story of the Iraq war” (Gregg Carlstrom), October 22, 2010, http://english.aljazeera.net/secretiraqfiles/2010/10/2010102217631317837.html


“U.S. turned blind eye to torture — Leaked documents on Iraq war contain thousands of allegations of abuse, but a Pentagon order told troops to ignore them” (Gregg Carlstrom), October 22, 2010 23:16 http://english.aljazeera.net/secretiraqfiles/2010/10/20101022161828428516.html

How many (est.) in two-theater

U.S.-led

WAR DEAD?

Casualty sites reporting October 23, 2010

(accurate totals unknown)

• Anti-war dot com Casualties in Iraq since March 19, 2003

[U.S. war dead since the Obama inauguration January 20, 2009: 198]

Wounded 32,899-100,000

U.S. veterans with brain injuries 320,000

Suicides estimated: 18 a day

Latest update on this site: October 18, 2010

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

• Iraq Body Count (civilian deaths from violence) figures:

98,585 – 107,594

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

• ICasualties figures:

IRAQ: 4,426 U.S., 4,744 Coalition

AFGHANISTAN: 1,348 U.S., 2,168 Coalition

http://icasualties.org/oif/

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Bennett's books available at New York independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; The Book Den, Ltd.: BookDenLtd@frontiernet.net [Danville, NY] Talking Leaves Books-Elmwood: talking.leaves.elmwood@gmail.com [Buffalo, NY]; Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza: http://www.bhny.com/ [Albany, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY] Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]