Even for the humble among us who try to avoid jingoistic outbursts, some national achievements are so grand that they merit a moment of pride and celebration: US presence in Afghanistan as long as Soviet slog (Read more from salon.com)

The trial of Omar Khadr has been called a travesty of justice, a violation of the rule of law, a kangaroo court and lots of other things beside. But what it really was, was a show trial.

On the main charge, “murder in violation of the laws of war” (a crime that doesn’t appear to even exist in international law, given that combatants who kill other soldiers in combat are not violating the laws of war), the chief evidence against the then-15-year-old child soldier was his own confession. And that confession, made years ago and long since recanted, was obtained under conditions that any normal human being would describe as torture.

Omar Khadr was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan. He was the only survivor after a firefight and an air strike on an al-Qaeda position. He had been wounded in his shoulder and in both eyes, shot twice in the back and was near death. It was alleged that, just before he was shot, he had thrown a grenade at attacking American troops, killing one of them. As already noted, he was 15 years old.

He then spent several months in the hellhole that was Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, where he claims — credibly, given all that we know about what went on at Bagram — that he was subjected to sleep deprivation, the chaining of his hands above his head for hours, that he was hooded and threatened by dogs, and sometimes forced to urinate on himself because he was not unshackled to go to the bathroom.

His chief interrogator at Bagram admitted to telling the teenage boy that unless he co-operated, he would be sent to a U.S. prison, where a group of black men would gang rape him to death. Ponder that for a moment.

He was interviewed about 25 times by this interrogator, Joshua Claus. Claus was also the interrogator for an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was chained to the ceiling and beaten to death in Bagram in 2002; Claus pled guilty to his involvement in the affair and received a five month sentence. In a lovely Orwellian touch, the U.S. government insisted that reporters covering Khadr’s trial not name Claus, but instead refer to him as “Interrogator 1.”

In Bagram, Khadr confessed that he had thrown the grenade that killed an American soldier. No one saw him do this, so his confession is really the only evidence of the act. Last summer, U.S. military judge Colonel Patrick Parrish ruled that the confession, despite the obviously coercive circumstances under which it was made, had been freely given, and could be used against Khadr in court.

This week, Omar Khadr was offered the following choice: plead guilty, or face two different routes to life in prison. He could go to trial, and thanks to a confession that would be laughed out of any real court of law, he’d probably be convicted. But even if the court somehow found him not guilty, the U.S. reserved the right to detain him indefinitely as an enemy combatant. The only sure way to get out of jail early was to tell his interrogators what they wanted to hear.

On Monday, Khadr was even forced to cop to other crimes, including the killing of two Afghan soldiers, something he wasn’t even charged with, and for which the prosecution appears to have had no evidence. And, in a nice touch that Stalin would have appreciated, Khadr appears to have also been forced to sign away his right to sue his jailors for the various forms of deprivation and abuse that he was subject to. In court on Monday, Col. Patrick Parrish repeatedly asked Khadr to confirm that he was agreeing to these terms willingly, that he really, truly, sincerely wanted to plead guilty all of his own accord. Khadr said yes. They could have told him to confess that he had simultaneously piloted all four hijacked planes on 9/11, and he would have done it.

And so the Bush administration project of ridding the world of terrorism by means of torture comes full circle. The U.S. military and CIA, ordered to use force to extract information from detainees, something that violated not just U.S. military tradition but U.S. military law, had to come up with new interrogation techniques, and quickly. They turned to history, including copying communist coercion-based interrogation models, such as those that captured American troops had been subjected to during the Korean War.

The original communist torture techniques, which for a time inspired the standard operating procedures at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Guantanamo and the secret black sites, were not designed to elicit truth. They were designed to produce false confessions: That was the whole point. (Read more from nationalpost.com)

As usual, when something important happens that might reflect poorly on the government, our media does what it does best: it lies.

Here’s the latest example. The original, widely published story was this:

A U.S.-led military rescue operation ended in failure Friday when a Taliban militant set off explosives that killed a British aid worker kidnapped two weeks ago in eastern Afghanistan, Western officials said Saturday.

. . . .

During the rescue, Western officials said, one of the captors detonated explosives near Norgrove, killing himself and the aid worker, who was spearheading a development project run by Development Alternatives Inc., an international consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.

It’s become a little harder to find the original. I excerpted the above from this McClatchy Newspaper.

Only later, after the shock, and false-reality sets in, after our interest wanders elsewhere, do we get the actual story:

A grenade thrown by U.S. forces may have killed a kidnapped British aid worker in Afghanistan, British Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday, as the U.S. military announced an investigation into the failed rescue attempt.

(source)

. . . but, but, but, the original was so convincing. I mean I could almost see it. Just like in the movies: selfless rescuers coming to the aid of an attractive woman, while evil terrorists stand ready to blow up her (and themselves) in the name of evil fanaticism.

Looking back at the original report, it seems the military anticipated, i.e. “prepped the battlefield” for the apology they’d eventually be making:

“There was no choice,” said a senior official with the U.S-led military coalition in Afghanistan who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to officially discuss the incident. “There was good information that this needed to be done because there were concerns that her life was in imminent danger.”

I’m going to go out on a limb and presume the “Western officials” were well versed in the 25 disinformation techniques and knew from the start their duty was to bullshit. I mean, look at the level of detail in the original misinformation:

Two Western officials said the captor used a suicide vest.

Some might even call it . . . . L-Y-I-N-G.

I intend no disrespect to the fallen or to the soldiers. I myself served in Kunar province where the incident took place, and know some of its valleys as well as I know the back of my hand. I’ve enjoyed great friendships with my fellow soldiers, Afghans and aid workers.

R.I.P. to all the fallen.

I make this critique because I’m soooooooo sick of all the fucking lying.

In war, truth is the first casualty. ~Aeschylus (525 BC – 456 BC)

See also:

Troubling. These wars need to end.

I’m torn about posting this, but I think we need to tear down the holy righteous image of the U.S. occupations.

Army ‘Kill Team’ Leader Wanted a Necklace of Fingers

Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs didn’t just stock up on bootleg DVDs and mess-hall snacks, like a typical deployed soldier. During his deployment to Kandahar, Gibbs kept a water bottle with two wads of cloth wedged into it. Wrapped in the cloth were fingers that he chopped off two corpses. One of his fellow soldiers said Gibbs wanted enough for a necklace.

That’s according to Army investigation documents leaked to the Washington Post. Gibbs, 25, is the alleged ringleader of the “Kill Team,” a rogue execution unit from the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division that’s on trial for the murder of three Afghan civilians and may have killed a fourth. His fellow Kill Team members say that Gibbs’ impunity didn’t just extend to Afghans: he threatened to murder the mother of a soldier who didn’t keep his mouth shut.

Even though the team didn’t mind documenting its kills — some kept photographs — the documents suggest that Gibbs took it much further, possessing a certain comfort with mutilation. Investigators found bone fragments the water bottle where he kept his severed fingers, and he also kept teeth. Evidently, he thought little of removing parts of dead bodies: Gibbs told soldiers that it would be funny to include them in care packages, just to mess with people. He got away with that and more in Iraq, he told his friends, and the tattoos of skulls and pistols on his calf were testaments to the body count he racked up. (The Post reports that the Army is now also investigating Gibbs’ earlier Iraq tour.)

(Read more from wired.com)

Tapes describe U.S. servicemen killing for sport in Afghanistan

Tapes obtained by CNN of interrogations of a group of U.S. servicemen charged with unprovoked killings of Afghan civilians describe gruesome scenes of cold-blooded murder.

“So we met this guy by his compound, so Gibbs walked him out, set him in place, was like standing here,” says Cpl. Jeremy Morlock, detailing how, on patrol earlier this year and under the command of his sergeant, Calvin R. Gibbs, he and others took an Afghan man from his home and killed him.

“So, he was fully cooperating?” the military investigator asks on the tapes in a May 2010 interview.

“Yeah,” Morlock responds.

Investigator: “Was he armed?”

Morlock: “No, not that we were aware of.”

(Read more from edition.cnn.com)

The CNN site has a video. It mentions that the Pentagon has ordered all attorneys in the case to return all photos which soldiers took of dead people.

Defense Department officials are negotiating to buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of an Afghan war memoir they say contains intelligence secrets, according to two people familiar with the dispute.

The publication of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has divided military security reviewers and highlighted the uncertainty about what information poses a genuine threat to security. . . .

By the time the D.I.A. objected, however, several dozen copies of the unexpurgated 299-page book had already been sent out to potential reviewers, and some copies found their way to online booksellers. The New York Times was able to buy a copy online late last week.

The dispute arises as the Obama administration is cracking down on disclosures of classified information to the news media, pursuing three such prosecutions to date, the first since 1985. Separately, the military has charged an Army private with giving tens of thousands of classified documents to the organization WikiLeaks. . . .

Colonel Shaffer, his lawyer, Mark S. Zaid, and lawyers for the publisher are near an agreement with the Pentagon over what will be taken out of a new edition to be published Sept. 24, with the allegedly classified passages blacked out. But the two sides are still discussing whether the Pentagon will buy the first printing, currently in the publisher’s Virginia warehouse, and at what price. . . .

The agency studied the possibility of buying the first printing, Mr. Wise said, but the publisher of Random House, Bennett Cerf, told the agency he would be glad to sell all the copies to the agency — and then print more.

“Their clumsy efforts to suppress the book only made it a bestseller,” Mr. Wise said. (Read more from nytimes.com)

This incompetence is funny, until you realize they’re buying these books with our money.

The cover of the new issue of Time — with its photograph of a young woman whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban, accompanied by headline “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan” — is disgraceful on several levels. (The image is here, and no, it’s not pretty; the cover story is here.)

Atrios (here and here) and Greg Mitchell (here) have made the obvious point: um, this happened while we were in Afghanistan. So the proof of how necessary it is for us to protect young women from brutal attacks of this kind is the fact that we couldn’t protect this young woman?

And does anyone at Time know the story of Zahida Parveen? She suffered a similar attack, yet even more brutal: her husband, believing she was having an affair, not only cut off her nose and earlobes but blinded her and beat her while hanging her upside down. Oh, but that took place in Pakistan in 1998. Following Time’s logic, I suppose the U.S. should have invaded and occupied Pakistan to prevent this from happening. (Read more from blogs.alternet.org)

This is so fucking dishonest, and an example of why I find it hard to not hate the mainstream media. They would just as quickly sensationalize the Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja if they could blame it on terrorists.

The US has condemned as “irresponsible” the leak of 90,000 classified military records, saying their publication could threaten national security.

The documents released by the Wikileaks website include details of killings of Afghan civilians unreported until now.

The records also show Nato concerns that Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency is helping the Taliban in Afghanistan, an accusation Islamabad has denied.

The Pentagon said it might take weeks to ascertain what damage had been done. (Read more from www.bbc.co.uk)

The United States may still be in the Afghanistan and Iraq region for another ten years, according to Gen. George Casey.

“The types of conflict that we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think are likely to be fighting here for a decade or so, are focused on the people,” Casey, the army’s Chief of Staff, said Friday night at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival.

“We are not going to succeed in either place by military means alone. You are only going to succeed when the people perceive there is a government represented by their interests, when there is an economy that can give them a job to support their families, when there are educational systems that can educate their family. All those things are essential to the long term success of the military operation.” (Read more from politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com)

I think the dollar will collapse before then.

US lawmakers have voted to cut almost $4bn (£2.7bn) in aid to the government of Afghanistan, after allegations of corruption. (Read more from news.bbc.co.uk)

The State Department has awarded a part of what was formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide a contract worth more than $120 million for providing security services in Afghanistan. . . .

The Justice Department’s case or Blackwater’s expulsion from Iraq didn’t block U.S. Training Center from bidding on the multi-million dollar contract, the State Department spokeswoman said. (Read more from cbsnews.com)

A couple months ago this viral video showing some very trigger happy helicopter pilots in Iraq caused quite a stir. It was released through Wikileaks.

The army has since detained the soldier who leaked the video.

Wikileaks has made more headlines recently:

Wikileaks founder in hiding, fearful of arrest
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has gone into hiding, fearful of arrest by U.S. authorities, an Icelandic parliamentarian confirmed Friday. . . .

Authorities are interested in locating Assange following reports that an Army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, recently transferred a huge volume of classified files to Wikileaks. Manning is now in military custody. . . .

Jonsdottir also added to widespread speculation in recent days that Wikileaks was about to release a new video, this once showing an alleged “massacre” of Afghan civilians in a U.S. airstrike.

She called it “worse than the Iraqi one,” referencing the video Wikileaks previously released showing a U.S. helicopter attack on Iraqi citizens that caused an international uproar. . . .
(Read more from blog.washingtonpost.com)

The strange and consequential case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks
Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter of Wired reported that a 22-year-old U.S. Army Private in Iraq, Bradley Manning, had been detained after he “boasted” in an Internet chat — with convicted computer hacker Adrian Lamo — of leaking to WikiLeaks the now famous Apache Helicopter attack video, a yet-to-be-published video of a civilian-killing air attack in Afghanistan, and “hundreds of thousands of classified State Department records.” . . .

This is a very comprehensive article about Wikileaks’ recent controversies. The Government attitude toward Wikileaks caught my eye:

In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a classified report (ironically leaked to and published by WikiLeaks) which — as the NYT put it — placed WikiLeaks on “the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States.” That Report discussed ways to destroy WikiLeaks’ reputation and efficacy, and emphasized creating the impression that leaking to it is unsafe.

In other words, exactly what the U.S. Government wanted to happen in order to destroy WikiLeaks has happened here: news reports that a key WikiLeaks source has been identified and arrested, followed by announcements from anonymous government officials that there is now a worldwide “manhunt” for its Editor-in-Chief.
(Read more from salon.com)

Iceland Passes WikiLeaks Law
The Icelandic parliament has approved a package of broad protections for journalists, making the island nation perhaps the safest place in the world to afflict the comfortable and speak truth to power.

Icelandic leaders wanted to create a haven for journalists and whistle-blowers and sought assistance from WikiLeaks, the website that recently released video of U.S. forces gunning down civilians and journalists in Iraq.
(Read more from truthdig.com)