Source: Antiwar.com
Credits: Robert Koehler
Dated: 2010-10-29

Defying a Superpower

WikiLeaks has given us another cold bath in reality:

"As the vehicle approached Post 7, the Marines on post used hand and arm signals but the vehicle did not yield. The Marine at Post 7 employed a pop-up flare when the approaching vehicle was 200m S of the post and the vehicle continued.

"The Marine on post then engaged the vehicle with (30) rounds of 7.62mm when the vehicle broke the plane of the ‘no penetration line’ 50m south of Post 7. The vehicle traveled an additional 15m toward post 7 before coming to a stop…

"The Marine that engaged from Post 7 was unable to determine the occupants of the vehicle due to the reflection of the sun coming off the windshield. The EOF resulted in (1) NKIA and (4) NWIA. All casualties were in the vehicle. The (1) NKIA was an adult IZ female (mother). The (4) NWIA consisted of: (1) NWIA adult IZ male, urgent (father), (1) NWIA adult IZ female, routine (daughter), and (2) NWIA children IZ females, routine (daughters). There was an additional IZ child (daughter) in the vehicle that was not injured. The (4) NWIA were medevaced to Fallujah surgical. I 3/8 escorted and turned over the female IZ KIA to the imam of the Al Subiahat."

EOF: escalation of force. NKIA: national (i.e., native Iraqi) killed in action. NWIA: national wounded in action. IZ: International (i.e., Green) Zone.

Last week the superpower-defying website, in collusion with unknown U.S. military personnel, posted 391,832 field reports from Iraq – SIGACTs, in military-speak, or significant actions in the war — including the checkpoint incident above. They’re all rendered in the same style, with the sensitivity of ledger notes at a meat-processing plant.

This extraordinary leak is itself a SIGACT — a direct penetration of military secrecy and public display of war in the raw, free of spin and propaganda. This is why, from the military point of view, it is such an outrage. No war-making enterprise can sustain itself without serious information control and the home-front dominance of its inviolate core message: We are good and our enemies are evil.

From what I can tell, the primary significance of the leak is the act itself: the sheer comeuppance of it. Last summer, after WikiLeaks released a similar cache of field reports from Afghanistan, the Pentagon struck a note of stern moral gravity to vilify the website. "The truth," said Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "is that they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family" — this, from War Crime Central, the bloodiest perps on the planet. Damage control begins by professing a reverence for "the troops" and all other innocents, otherwise known as the fodder of our wars of choice and aggression.

The field reports, written between May 2004 and March 2009, itemize a total of 109,032 deaths in the Iraq war: 66,081 are listed as civilians; 23,984 are insurgents; 15,196, Iraqi government forces; and 3,771, coalition forces.

Among the starker revelations: Some 1,300 incidents of torture of detainees, including rape and murder, at the hands of Iraqi security forces, were reported by U.S. soldiers up the chain of command, but were never investigated; and 832 Iraqis were killed at checkpoints, of whom 681 were civilians, including 30 children.

Blood on our hands!

"The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis," Sabrina Tavernise and Andrew W. Lehren wrote in the New York Times last week, subtly downplaying American responsibility for the horror that Iraq has gone through over the past seven-plus years. The article does look at some of the U.S.-generated carnage described in the field reports, including what it calls "misunderstandings" at checkpoints, but it misses — as all of the mainstream U.S. media continually miss — what might be called the "Nuremberg significance" of the WikiLeaks disclosures.

Robert Parry, the former AP reporter who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s, put it this way a few days ago in Consortium News:

"Assessing the barbarity unleashed by the Nazis, the Nuremberg Tribunal identified ‘war of aggression’ as ‘the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’

"What those judges meant was that every evil that comes with war — the slaughter of civilians, the brutality faced by soldiers, the depredations of hunger and disease, the destruction of homes and businesses, the temptation to torture, and all other war crimes — can all be traced back to the original crime of invasion."

We started this war and, in so doing, shattered the nation of Iraq. We bear responsibility for "the accumulated evil of the whole" — which is far greater than the stats and unvarnished details of the WikiLeaks disclosures. American soldiers weren’t writing field reports about environmental damage, escalating rates of cancer and birth defects or their own PTSD, but these hellish consequences also stem from the crime we launched, with near-universal mainstream media support, at the beginning of the last decade.

I applaud WikiLeaks for daring to rip the frock of respectability off the criminals in high places in the U.S. government.

Source: RawStory.com
Credits: Daniel Tencer
Dated: 2010-10-23

[ Emilie says : According to the conventions of international law, the US, as an occupying power, is directly responsible for the crimes of its paid sock-puppets, a description that surely fits the Iraqi police and security forces. ]

UN calls for probe into US inaction on torture

'Fragmentary order 242' allowed US forces to ignore torture allegations: report

The United Nations' point man on torture is calling on the Obama administration to open a full investigation into newly-released documents that suggest the US may have turned a blind eye to torture in Iraq.

Manfred Nowak, the UN's special rapporteur on torture, told the BBC Saturday that the US has an "obligation" to look into reports of torture within the nearly 400,000 war documents released by WikiLeaks on Friday.

The documents chronicle numerous allegations of torture by Iraqi forces against their own citizens, as well as what appears to have been a standing order in the US military to ignore the allegations -- potentially a violation of international conventions on torture.

"There is an obligation to investigate whenever there are credible allegations torture has happened – and these allegations are more than credible – and then it is up to the courts," Nowak, an Austrian human rights lawyer, said, as quoted at the Telegraph.

"It is then up to the courts on the one hand to bring the perpetrators to justice and also on the other hand to provide the victims with adequate reparation for the harm they have suffered."

"Nowak said that UN human rights agreements obliged states to criminalize every form of torture, whether directly or indirectly, and to investigate any allegations of abuse," adds theGuardian.

In a separate article, the Guardian reports on "Frago 242," an order to ignore reports of Iraqi-on-Iraqi torture:

A frago is a "fragmentary order" which summarizes a complex requirement. This one, issued in June 2004, about a year after the invasion of Iraq, orders coalition troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, "only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ".

Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands. In effect, it means that the regime has been forced to change its political constitution but allowed to retain its use of torture.

The systematic viciousness of the old dictatorship when Saddam Hussein's security agencies enforced order without any regard for law continues, reinforced by the chaotic savagery of the new criminal, political and sectarian groups which have emerged since the invasion in 2003 and which have infiltrated some police and army units, using Iraq's detention cells for their private vendettas.

Other documents in the WikiLeaks release may tie US forces more directly to potential war crimes. In one incident, an Apache helicopter is reported to have fired on two Iraqis who had earlier fired mortars at US troops but had surrendered.

"An additional protocol to the Geneva Conventions on the protection of victims of international armed conflicts states that a person who 'clearly expresses an intention to surrender' is 'hors de combat' and therefore 'shall not be made the object of attack,'" Der Spiegel notes. "That raises the question of whether the pilots involved in the ... incident might have committed a war crime."

The documents may also have legal repercussions inside Iraq. The Christian Science Monitorreports that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said the documents could show up in Iraqi courtrooms -- presumably either in criminal trials or in lawsuits.

"For ordinary Iraqis, it didn't appear to have sunk in that the 400,000 documents, released Friday by the WikiLeaks website, contained details of the deaths of thousands of people that could finally provide answers and even evidence for some of the tragedies of the war," CSMreported.

CHEMICAL WEAPONS FOUND

Noah Shachtman at Wired reports that the war documents show there were chemical weapons in Iraq after all -- though nothing on the scale of the WMD program Saddam Hussein was alleged to have by those backing the invasion.

[For years after the invasion] US troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

'VERY SKILLED' HACK ATTACK ON WIKILEAKS

Wikileaks was the target of "very skilled" hackers who managed to shut down the organization's private instant messaging network was hacked and disabled days before the document leak on Friday, reports Andy Greenberg at his Forbes blog.

A Wikileaks source who asks to remain anonymous now says that the organization’s XMPP server in Amsterdam, used to host its encrypted instant messaging communications, was compromised earlier this week by an unknown attacker, and the chat service had to be relocated to another server in Germany. “The server got attacked, hacked, and the private keys got out,” says the source. “We needed new private keys. Now it’s back online and secure.”

The source added that the attack represented the first breach in Wikileaks’ history, and that “the people who are behind it are very skilled,” declining to comment further on the details of the hack.