This is what happens when the world’s only super-power, with client state support (hello Australia) engage in a war with no end with partners who loathe your presence:
Former Pakistani spy agency chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul denied that he has any links to al Qaeda or Taliban insurgents and said he is willing to go to America to face any charges.
“Report of my physical involvement with al Qaeda or Taliban in planning attacks on American forces is completely baseless,” the former Inter-Services Intelligence chief said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I am not against America, but I am opposed to what the American forces are doing in Afghanistan.”
Most of the reports catalog counterinsurgency’s basics — weapons caches found, gun battles fought, village elders chatted up. But buried in the tens of thousands of U.S. military logs dropped Sunday night by WikiLeaks are incidents that are anything but routine: a suspected chemical weapon attack by the Taliban; rumors of Al Qaeda poisoning the U.S. military food supply; a tip about Osama Bin Laden’s status.
WikiLeaks’ massive trove of field reports from Afghanistan documents many things. One is that the fog of war can lead troops down some awfully strange paths. Especially when RUMINT (mil-speak for “rumor intelligence”) becomes the guide.
Shortly after 10:30am on Valentine’s Day, 2009, a special operations unit was on a mine-clearing patrol when they were ambushed. Insurgents detonated a bomb, fired at the troops, and then fled. For five hours, the spec ops forces pursed. Finally, they called in air support. A pair of French Mirage fighter jets dropped a pair of guided bombs. The troops “engaged and destroyed” two insurgent spotters.
The commandos found a second improvised explosive, destroyed it, and continued north. They discovered a third bomb. And when they set it off, “a yellow cloud was emitted and personnel began feeling nauseous. FF [friendly forces] collected dust samples and returned to base. Currently conducting SSE [sensitive site exploitation] of clothing and equipment while awaiting decon [decontamination] teams to confirm or deny chemical attack. A total of 7x US MIL, 1x Interpreter and 1x K-9 dog reporting symptoms,” read the report from the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force. “Will inform if chemical attack is confirmed.”
Six hours later came a second report. “CJSOTF unit has returned to base for treatment and analysis. Initial Medical assessment is that none of the personnel are currently experiencing symptoms… CJSOTF surgeon assessed no need to MEDEVAC [medical evacuate] any personnel. The individuals have been placed on 24 hour stand down. SSE Team from KAF [Kandahar Air Field] will fly to FB Cobra on 15FEB09 to conduct testing for any residual chemicals or materials on personnel and equipment. The results of this testing will confirm or deny this event as a CBRN [chemical biological radiological nuclear] attack.”
There are no indications in the WikiLeaks database that this was confirmed as a chemical attack; I suspect it wasn’t. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen accounts fearing that al-Qaeda or the Taliban experimented with chemical weapons.
And a modern dilemma for hyper-connected media companies, so used to being on the drip feed of the establishment:
The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’s Guardian.
The editors couldn’t verify the source of the reports — as they would have done if their own staffers had obtained them — and they couldn’t stop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not.
So they were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to Der Spiegel on the motivations of doing what most journalists do not:
We are clear about what we will publish and what we will not. We do not have adhoc editorial decisions. We always release the full primary sources to our articles. What other press organization has such exacting standards? Everyone should try to follow our lead.
…
We all only live once. So we are obligated to make good use of the time that we have and to do something that is meaningful and satisfying. This is something that I find meaningful and satisfying. That is my temperament. I enjoy creating systems on a grand scale, and I enjoy helping people who are vulnerable. And I enjoy crushing bastards. So it is enjoyable work.
Max Blumenthal on an IDF that appears now willing to acknowledge that the Goldstone Report may have been pretty right after all:
A report quietly submitted by IDF Military Advocate General Avichai Mandelblit to the United Nations two weeks ago regarding Israel’s conduct during Operation Cast Lead confirms the key findings of the Goldstone Report. The report (full version here), which documents 150 ongoing investigations, has outraged the Israeli Army. “It looks as though they were frightened by Goldstone,” remarked an IDF officer. Another military official expressed anger that after a previous IDF report asserting the legality of shelling civilian areas with white phosphorous, a chemical weapon, the Mandelblit report has issued recommendations limiting the munition’s use. “It looks like tying your own hands behind your back. Why should a weapon with which there is no problem be limited?” the official asked.
Mandelblit’s confirmation of the IDF’s use of white phosphorous in Gaza against a UN compound is one of his report’s most remarkable admissions. He has directly contradicted a lie told over and over again to the Israeli public in the immediate aftermath of Cast Lead, and repeated in an April 2009 IDF report, that “no phosphorous munitions were used on built-up areas.”
Releasing sensitive information in the age of the web is a marvel of new technology. Here the New York Times explains its reasoning behind publication.
The job of journalists and bloggers now is to sift through the hundreds of thousands of reports and never believe a single word spoken by a government official again.
We have been sold a bogus war in Afghanistan since 2001. Why are we there? Who are we fighting? What are we actually achieving? Wikileaks provides some devastating answers.
The power of the internet to prick the most powerful government in the world, its corrupt war, its shameful allies (including Australia) and blow wide open the nature of the Afghan engagement:
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.
Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama’s “surge” strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.
• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.
• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
Washington is upset and rightly so; the entire basis of the war is shown to be a shambles:
The White House late Sunday condemned the leaking of what appear to be about 90,000 U.S. military records, as a handful of international media organizations that received access to the documents began to disclose their account of the war in Afghanistan.
In a statement, President Obama’s national security advisor, Marine Gen. James L. Jones, deplored the “disclosure of classified information” that he said could put the lives of Americans and U.S. partners at risk and threaten the nation’s security.
The website WikiLeaks, which posted the documents late Sunday, provided them ahead of time to the New York Times, the Guardian newspaper in London and the German magazine Der Spiegel, and journalists from those organizations asked the White House for comment. The Los Angeles Times and other Tribune newspapers have not thoroughly reviewed the documents.
According to the New York Times, the documents, which it received several weeks ago, refer to previously unreported incidents of Afghan civilian deaths in the NATO military operations.
The documents also appear to include classified cables and other communications among military leaders, and describe in detail long-reported U.S. fears that some intelligence officials in Pakistan were actually helping the Taliban in Afghanistan, even as the U.S. poured foreign aid into both countries.
According to the New York Times, the documents as a whole suggest that Pakistan has let representatives of its intelligence agency strategize with the Taliban and even plot to assassinate Afghan leaders.
Of particular note is that the documents reportedly say the Taliban has acquired surface-to-air missiles. If true, that could help explain recent crashes of NATO and U.S. helicopters in Afghanistan and could have a significant effect on ground operations.
The documents posted by WikiLeaks reportedly cover the period from January 2004 to December 2009, shortly before Obama announced a strategy of focusing on Al Qaeda and Taliban havens in the semiautonomous region of Pakistan along the Afghan border.
“Some of the disconcerting things reported are exactly why the president ordered a three-month policy review and a change in strategy,” said one administration official, who couldn’t confirm that the documents were authentic but said that at least some accounts align with information given Obama and his staff last summer.
This is a documentary that is finally finished and soon to be screened in Australia and globally. I was interviewed a number of years ago and remain pleased it’ll see the light of see.
The Palestinian story told in the first person:
‘Return To Gaza’ is a personal insight into the Middle East Conflict through the eyes of a Palestinian Australian, born on a refugee camp in Jordan, who wants to return to Gaza with his family.
This 53 minute documentary covers the difficult journey of Fetah Sabawi, a successful Melbourne musician whose dreams of peace takes him from Australia to Gaza through Egypt, Israel & the West Bank.
With his wife, Ola and their two children, Sabawi plans to move to Gaza to head-up a project, funded by UN, to teach music to children. A new life for a rock star going into a war zone.
Sabawi’s amazing journey coincides with the first Palestinian elections since the beginning of Gaza and the West Bank’s occupation and the subsequent election of Hamas. In this film, we discover with our protagonist the Israeli invasion of Gaza and the response from the West.
His journey and fate are punctuated by the dramatic events of the Middle East and the involvement of world’s leaders as we see statements from Palestinian President Abbas, US Vice President Biden and US Secretary of State Clinton.
Including interviews with the former Ambassador to Egypt, Monzer Eldajani, the elected Hamas member Dr Yusuf al-Shrafi, the acclaimed Australian author Antony Loewenstein and Israeli Peace activists, the film provides a revealing insight into the political minefield of the Palestinian — Israeli conflict and it’s effect on their daily lives amongst the huge walls, check-points and constant military presence.
‘Return to Gaza’ is a poignant story of personal discovery, about a determined westerner and musician facing unbearable issues, with the hope of living in peace one day in his ancestral home in Gaza.
This is how demonised Iran has become in the global media.
Tehran announces a small development and tiny outlay ($8 million is change) and it’s lead story in the Jerusalem Post (with its URL under “Iranian Threat”):
Iran’s nuclear agency began studies Saturday to build an experimental nuclear fusion reactor, something that has yet to be achieved by any nation.
Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who also heads the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, told a conference on the new research program that his agency has set an initial budget of $8 million to conduct “serious” research in the area of nuclear fusion.
Asghar Sediqzadeh, the head of the new fusion research center said Iran will take two years to complete these studies and then another decade to design and build a reactor.
“The scientific phase of the project effectively began today. We have already hired 50 experts for this purpose,” he told state TV.
Iran is not known to have carried out anything but basic fusion research, but does have a nuclear fission program that the US and its allies believe is a front to build weapons which Teheran denies.
The United States, the European Union, China, India, Russia, Japan and South Korea signed an accord in 2006 to build a $12.8 billion experimental fusion reactor at Cadarache, southern France, aimed at revolutionizing global energy use for future generations.
A friend sends on this wonderful piece by the anti-Apartheid South African journo Allister Sparks that rebukes his country’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, over the latter’s strongly expressed criticism of Constitutional Court member Richard Goldstone as well as Goldstone’s role in heading the UN’s fact-finding mission for Gaza:
Sparks starts by noting that three of the major IDF war crimes reported by the Goldstone commission in Gaza were in fact recently confirmed to have been such by a military investigation undertaken by the IDF high command itself.
He comments, “the real importance of this military investigation is that it vindicates the Goldstone commission,” adding:
“For Judge Richard Goldstone, particularly, this is a personal vindication, for he was excoriated by leading members of the local Jewish community for chairing the commission. He was told his commission’s findings were lies; that he was naive and gullible for accepting the version of events given by terrorists; and that, since he is a Jew, he was a traitor to his people. “His critics were given support by Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for “doing great damage to the state of Israel”. He should have recused himself instead, Goldstein said, and taken no part in the investigating mission.
He then issues this important reproach to Goldstein:
“We secularists need to know what a religious leader in our community means when he seeks to impose such an ethical dictum on a prominent member of his faith — someone who was a founding father of our Constitutional Court and an interpreter of our infinitely important national constitution in this new democracy.
“I am reminded here of the conflict between the Dutch Reformed Church and Beyers Naude over the issue of apartheid.
“I attended the Dutch Reformed Church service in Linden, Johannesburg, at which Naude had to respond to the church leaders’ demand that he choose between the church’s doctrine of support for apartheid and his commitment to the nonracial Christian Institute he had founded.
“In other words, Naude was forced to choose between his moral principles and his loyalty to his own people and their church.
“I heard Naude announce his decision that memorable day before the glitterati of Afrikaner nationalism in the packed pews before him. Smilingly, boldly, he told them simply: “I choose God before man.”
“In other words, principles, truth and justice before ethnic or group loyalty. It was the defining moment of that great man’s life.
“So I ask the chief rabbi that same question today: what is your choice? Then, at the level of plain human decency, don’t you think, Chief Rabbi Goldstein and those members of the Orthodox Jewish community and the South African Zionist Federation whom you lead, that you owe Judge Goldstone an apology? A public, abject apology.
“Leaders of the federation went to the extremes of cruelty when they took their religious war against Judge Goldstone (dare I call it a fatwa?) into the heart of his family by trying to ban him from his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Eventually, but it seemed to me somewhat reluctantly, negotiations enabled the family to celebrate this important event together.
“But I’m sorry, that wasn’t enough. In this land of ubuntu, this land of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, you must stand up, Chief Rabbi Goldstein, and on behalf of the co-religionists you supported in this calumny, bow your head, apologise and, like the man of God I’m sure you are, beg forgiveness of Judge Richard Goldstone.”
