Call to answer “vicious intimidation campaign”

Petition at Avaaz

“The vicious intimidation campaign against WikiLeaks is a dangerous attack on freedom of expression and the press. Top U.S. politicians have branded WikiLeaks a terrorist organization, and urged corporations to shut it down. Commentators have even suggested assassinating its staff.

“Whatever we think of WikiLeaks, legal experts say it has likely broken no laws, and the group works with leading newspapers (NYT, Guardian, Spiegel) to carefully vet what it publishes - so far less than 1% of the cables leaked to it.

“We urgently need a massive public outcry to defend our basic democratic freedoms.

“Sign the petition to stop the crackdown –
Let’s reach 1 million voices this week!”

AT  http://www.avaaz.org/en/wikileaks_petition/?cl=850535438&v=7730

PETITION
To the U.S. and other governments and corporations involved in the crackdown on WikiLeaks:

We call on you to stop the crackdown on WikiLeaks and its partners immediately. We urge you to respect democratic principles and laws of freedom of expression and freedom of the press. If WikiLeaks and the journalists it works with have violated any laws, they should be pursued in the courts with due process.

They should not be subjected to an extra-judicial campaign of intimidation.

http://www.avaaz.org/en/wikileaks_petition/?cl=850535438&v=7730

Notes
“Avaaz—meaning ‘voice’ in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.… The Avaaz community campaigns in 14 languages, served by a core team on four continents and thousands of volunteers. We take action — signing petitions, funding media campaigns and direct actions, emailing, calling and lobbying governments, and organizing ‘offline’ protests and events — to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people inform the decisions that affect us all.”

AVAAZ. Org THE WORLD IN ACTION, http://www.avaaz.org/en/about.php

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/
___________________________________________

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]

High Crimes Logs

Edited news on WikiLeaks’ releases from Democracy Now by Carolyn Bennett

“In our release of these 400,000 documents about the Iraq war, the intimate detail of that war from the U.S. perspective, we hope to correct some of that attack on the truth.

“We have seen that there are approximately 15,000 never previously documented or known cases of civilians who have been killed by violence in Iraq. Iraq, as we can see, was a bloodbath on every corner of their country. The stated aims for going into that war, of improving the human rights situation, improving the rule of law, did not eventuate; and in terms of raw numbers of people arbitrarily killed, [the U.S. war] worsened the situation in Iraq.” — Online whistleblower WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

“These war logs are day-by-day and, in many cases, hour-by-hour field reports from information radioed in by small units out in the field. They really chart incidents, every single incident. And sometimes you’ll see like twenty or thirty or fifty in a single day. They have all been collated into an electronic archive, I think probably for the first time. This is probably the first—this and Afghanistan have been the first American military adventures in which this kind of archive has been collated and made available to other people in the US military, which is, of course, how it’s come to be leaked.

What it contains of significance is three different types of material, in the sense that we didn’t really know these things before. First of all, that at least 15,000 more civilians have been identifiably killed and are recorded in these logs. There are many other civilians who’ve been killed who aren’t recorded there, of course. But that increases the figures. And bodies, independent bodies like the Iraq Body Count, the London-based private group, have pinned down those 15,000 extra by wading through all these documents.

The second thing it documents is really brutal events in which the laws of war, as we commonly understood them, seem to have been overtaken by technology, air power and asymmetric warfare. The classic case in here was of a helicopter, the Apache helicopter, which later went on to shoot and kill Reuters employees. It describes how men on the ground were trying to surrender. It radioed back to base for advice, and extraordinarily, the base lawyer said, ‘You cannot surrender to an aircraft. Go ahead and kill them.’ So it went ahead and killed them.

“… The helicopter crew don’t seem to have been trigger-happy at all. They were pretty concerned. They radioed back to base: ‘These men are trying to surrender. What do we do?’ … They’re told more than once, ‘They can’t surrender. You should go ahead and kill them.’ …

“What we see is orders coming from a high level.

“… That plays into the third new aspect in these documents: they detail literally hundreds of times—I think there is more 900 incidents of what they class as detainee abuse of people being tortured.

“They are largely tortured by Iraqi security forces but with the United States forces standing by or, in some cases, turning detainees over to people they know are going to torture them. Those orders seem to come from a high level. You are not looking at individual rogue sadists in the U.S. military. You are looking at orders.” — Investigations editor at The Guardian newspaper, David Leigh, spoke today with Amy Goodman on the Democracy Now program. The Guardian was one of the media outlets given advanced copies of the ‘Iraq war logs.’ On Guardian’s website is a news feature on the documents.

Source and notes


Online whistleblower WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange whose website “released close to 400,000 classified U.S. documents on the Iraq war, the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history and the largest internal account of any war on public record, a disclosure providing a trove of new evidence on the violence, torture and suffering that’s befallen Iraq since the 2003 U.S. invasion.” Democracy Now, October 25, 2010,
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/25/wikileaks_iraq_war_logs_expose_us


IRAQ: The War Logs, The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/iraq-war-logs




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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]