source: Raw Story
by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Videos suggest detainees were routinely subjected to emotional assaults

A former US soldier in Iraq has come forward with video of his fellow soldiers subjecting Iraqi detainees to what he describes as “mental, emotional, degrading” abuse.

US Army Specialist Ethan McCord was a member of Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry, the same unit that was involved in a 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad shown in a leaked video released last April by WikiLeaks.

“I started to ‘acquire’ these videos and some pictures once I realized that what we are doing in Iraq is wrong,” McCord wrote on Wednesday in a blog entry at MichaelMoore.com. “These videos are of detainee abuse. Not the type of abuse that’s physical, but the mental, emotional, degrading type.”

In the three brief clips, soldiers are shown harassing a handcuffed and blindfolded detainee in a variety of ways. In one, a soldier repeatedly orders a detainee to hold his hands up and then put them down again — a sequence which McCord says went on for 45 minutes.

Another shows a soldier asking a terrified detainee, “Are you militia” and telling him he is “going to go to prison for that,” until being ordered to “stop talking to the detainees.” In the third, a soldier sings loudly and mockingly into the ear of a man who was detained for having an AK-47 in his home.

The use of deliberate humiliation as a means of softening up detainees prior to questioning became particularly notorious in connection with the Abu Ghraib scandal and was examined in detail in Errol Morris’s critically-acclaimed 2008 documentary Standard Operating Procedure.

“The MPs speak frankly, if not always lucidly, about conditions at the prison and the vague orders from higher-ups that allowed them to believe what they were doing was somehow OK,” Slate’s Dana Stevens wrote of the film. “They saw themselves as ‘softening up’ detainees for the real questioning that would take place later behind closed doors.”

“My two cents worth of opinion,” Morris told an interviewer, “is that this is not just a war of humiliation but a war of sexual humiliation at its core, and the entire foreign policy. I wouldn’t even think it’s fair to say that America has a foreign policy in the years since 9/11, but if it has had a foreign policy, the foreign policy is, show them whose [sic] boss, humiliate them like they have humiliated us.”

Although the harassment shown in McCord’s clips does not rise to the same level of sexual abuse as was present at Abu Ghraib, it appears to be similarly designed to “show them who’s boss” and break down the detainees’ will to resist.

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source: Democracy Now

AMY GOODMAN: Daniel Ellsberg, I want to thank you for being with us, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, and Glenn Greenwald.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yeah, one last thing. He’s in danger of more than arrest. Arrest is probably the major thing, even though it’s not clear what he would be arrested on. But he—I have to say that as of now, under this president, he’s under danger of kidnapping, rendition, enhanced interrogation, even death. The fact is that this president is the first in our history, in any Western country that I know of, who has claimed the right to send military forces not just to apprehend, but to kill suspected, even American citizens. Bradley Manning is probably more safe now being in custody than he would have been if he himself were eluding arrest. Assange, I would say, is in some danger. And even if it’s very small, it should be zero. It’s outrageous and humiliating to me as an American citizen to have to acknowledge that someone like that is in danger from our own government right now, as President Obama has actually announced through his chief of intelligence then, Dennis Blair. That should be investigated.

Pentagon investigators are reportedly still searching for Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange, who helped release a classified US military video showing a US helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians. The US military recently arrested Army Specialist Bradley Manning, who may have passed on the video to Wikileaks. Manning’s arrest and the hunt for Assange have put the spotlight on the Obama administration’s campaign against whistleblowers and leakers of classified information. We speak to Daniel Ellsberg, who’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers has made him perhaps the nation’s most famous whistleblower; Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic Parliament who has collaborated with Wikileaks and drafted a new Icelandic law protecting investigative journalists; and Glenn Greenwald, political and legal blogger for Salon.com. [includes rush transcript]

JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin today’s show looking at the Obama administration’s recent crackdown on whistleblowers and leakers of classified information. Pentagon investigators are reportedly still searching for Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks. Earlier this month it was revealed the website might be in possession of hundreds of thousands of classified State Department cables, as well as video of massacres committed last year by US forces in Afghanistan. Wikileaks made international headlines in April when it released a classified US military video showing a US helicopter gunship indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians, killing twelve people, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.

The US military recently arrested Army Specialist Bradley Manning, who may have been responsible for leaking the classified video. Manning has claimed he sent Wikileaks the video along with 260,000 classified US government records. Manning, who was based in Iraq, reportedly had special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East. During an internet conversation prior to his arrest, Manning explained his actions by writing, quote, “I want people to see the truth, regardless of who they are. Because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” Manning is now being held in pretrial confinement in Kuwait.

The whereabouts of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is unknown. We reached Julian by email last night, but he declined to come on the program.

The arrest of Bradley Manning and the hunt for Assange has put the spotlight on the Obama administration’s campaign against whistleblowers and leakers of classified information. The Government Accountability Project, a leading whistleblower advocacy organization, has accused President Obama of criminalizing whistleblowing to a greater extent than any other US president.

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source: The Nation
via: Australia.to News

by Sherwood Ross

An army sergeant who had received 22 honors including a Combat Action Badge prior to being wounded in Iraq by a mortar shell was told he was faking his medical symptoms and subjected to abusive treatment until he agreed to a “personality disorder”(PD) discharge.

After a doctor with the First Cavalry division wrote he was out for “secondary gain,” Chuck Luther was imprisoned in a six- by eight-foot  isolation chamber, ridiculed by the guards, denied regular meals and showers and kept awake by perpetual lights and blasting heavy metal music—abuses similar to the punishments inflicted on terrorist suspects by the CIA.

“They told me I wasn’t a real soldier, that I was a piece of crap. All I wanted was to be treated for my injuries,” 12-year veteran Luther told reporter Joshua Kors of “The Nation” magazine (April 26th). “Now suddenly I’m not a soldier. I’m a prisoner, by my own people. I felt like a caged animal in that room. That’s when I started to lose it.” The article is called “Disposable Soldiers: How the Pentagon is Cheating Wounded Vets.”

Luther had been seven months into his deployment at Camp Taji, 20 miles north of Baghdad, when a mortal shell exploded at the base of his guard tower that knocked him down, slamming his head into the concrete. “I remember laying there in a daze, looking around, trying to figure out where I was at,” he said. Luther suffered permanent hearing loss in his right ear, tinnitus, agonizing headaches behind his right eye, severe nosebleeds, and shoulder pain.

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source: WikiLeaks
via: Collateral Murder

McChrystal: “We’ve shot an amazing number of people … none has proven to have been a real threat to the force”

5th April 2010 10:44 EST WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.

Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.

The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own “Rules of Engagement”.

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.

WikiLeaks has released both the original 38 minutes video and a shorter version with an initial analysis. Subtitles have been added to both versions from the radio transmissions.

WikiLeaks obtained this video as well as supporting documents from a number of military whistleblowers. WikiLeaks goes to great lengths to verify the authenticity of the information it receives. We have analyzed the information about this incident from a variety of source material. We have spoken to witnesses and journalists directly involved in the incident.

WikiLeaks wants to ensure that all the leaked information it receives gets the attention it deserves. In this particular case, some of the people killed were journalists that were simply doing their jobs: putting their lives at risk in order to report on war. Iraq is a very dangerous place for journalists: from 2003- 2009, 139 journalists were killed while doing their work.

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source: McClatchy

by Nancy A. Youssef

WASHNGTON — Days after his boss said that there was no new intelligence on the whereabouts of al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan told Congress Tuesday that killing or capturing bin Laden is critical to defeating the terrorist organization.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top Afghanistan commander, said, however, that he could not promise that his new military strategy would lead to bin Laden’s capture because when the al Qaida leader moves outside of Afghanistan, chasing after him “is outside my mandate.”

McChrystal’s comments underscored a key contradiction in President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy: While it dedicates thousands of additional troops to combating the Taliban in Afghanistan, it adds few resources aimed at the policy’s stated goal: “disrupting, dismantling and defeating” al Qaida.

“I believe he is an iconic figure at this point whose survival emboldens al Qaida as a franchise organization across the world,” McChrystal told the Senate Armed Services committee. “I don’t think we can defeat him until he is captured or killed.”

In the last week top administration officials have offered conflicting statements about what the United States knows about bin Laden’s whereabouts. While McChrystal suggested Tuesday that bin Laden is in neighboring Pakistan, retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, Obama’s national security advisor, said Sunday that bin Laden sometimes crosses the Afghan-Pakistan border.

And over the weekend, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told ABC’s “This Week” that the United States had not had strong intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts for years.

Bin Laden has eluded U.S. capture since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, most notably at the battle of Tora Bora in Afghanistan in late 2001. The special operations task force assigned exclusively to find bin Laden was disbanded by 2005.

“If, as we suspect, he is in North Waziristan, it is an area that the Pakistani government has not had a presence in, in quite some time,” Gates told ABC.

McChrystal and Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. envoy in Afghanistan, appeared before the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on Tuesday to answer questions about the Obama administration’s new Afghanistan strategy, which calls for the deployment of between 30,000-35,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan by next summer. Most of those troops are to be assigned to southern Afghanistan, where the Taliban controls large swaths of the county.

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source: Raw Story

by Agence France-Presse

The United States will launch a new effort to track down Osama bin Laden who is believed to be hiding in the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistan border, a senior US official said on Sunday.

Intelligence reports suggest the Al-Qaeda chief “is somewhere inside north Waziristan, sometimes on the Pakistani side of the border, sometimes on the Afghan side of the border,” said national security adviser James Jones.

Asked if President Barack Obama’s administration planned a fresh attempt to go after Al-Qaeda’s leader, Jones said: “I think so.”

Bin Laden was a “very important symbol of what Al-Qaeda stands for” and it was crucial to make sure he was on the run or captured, Jones, a retired Marine general, told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

His comment that Bin Laden sometimes crossed to the Afghan side of the mountainous border contrasted with previous accounts from US officials that suggested the Al-Qaeda chief was hiding in Pakistan.

Despite the vow to track down Bin Laden, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Sunday that intelligence agencies did not know where the Al-Qaeda leader was and had lacked reliable information on his whereabouts for years.

“We don’t know for a fact where Osama bin Laden is. If we did, we’d go get him,” Gates, a former CIA director, told ABC News’ “This Week.”

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source: Agence France-Presse
via: Raw Story

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Osama bin Laden was “within the grasp” of US forces in late 2001 but escaped because then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld rejected calls for reinforcements, a hard-hitting US Senate report says.

The report, set for release Monday, is intended to help learn the lessons of the past as President Barack Obama prepares to announce a major escalation of the conflict, now in its ninth year, with up to 35,000 more US troops.

It points the finger directly at Rumsfeld for turning down requests for reinforcements as Bin Laden was trapped in December 2001 in caves and tunnels in a mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan known as Tora Bora.

“The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the marine corps and the army, was kept on the sidelines,” the report says.

“Instead, the US command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack Bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes.”

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source: Raw Story

by Muriel Kane

According to human rights lawyer John Sifton, the CIA tortured some of its detainees in the War on Terror so severely that it had to take measures to keep them alive so they could continue being tortured.

Sifton, who the executive director of One World Research, told an interviewer for Russia Today that there was both a CIA detention program and a military detention program and that “The CIA program was by far the most secretive. … That’s the one that only had a few dozen detainees at any given time — but it’s the one that saw the biggest abuses, the most serious forms of torture.”

“In the military, there was actually a larger number of deaths than with the CIA,” Sifton continued. “The CIA engaged in some horrendous abuses, but they appear to have taken precautions to have actually prevented people from dying — which might sound humanitarian, but in fact was kind of sickening.”

“The military wasn’t so careful,” Sifton added. “The military subjected a lot of people to the same techniques, but without the precautions, and as a result a large number of detainees in military custody died. … While they didn’t use the worst forms of torture, like waterboarding, they often used sleep deprivation, forced standing, stress positions. … When you combine these techniques … they cause excruciating pain … and the military used them on thousands and thousands of detainees.”

Sifton commented that what he found most shocking was “the cold, clinical fashion in which they went about designing the program. They didn’t want to commit outright physical torture … so they went to psychologists and lawyers and they tried to design a program which was, in their minds, legal. … They tried to make it legal and safe, but they just made it even more grotesque.”

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source: Editor & Publisher

dateline: October 14, 2009 1:37 PM ET

by Daryl Lang

NEW YORK The U.S. military in eastern Afghanistan recently changed its media embed rules to ban pictures of troops killed in the war.

“Media will not be allowed to photograph or record video of U.S. personnel killed in action,” says a ground rules document issued Sept. 15 by Regional Command East at Bagram Air Field.

This language is new. A version of the same document dated July 23 says, “Media will not be prohibited from covering casualties” as long as a series of conditions are met.

Pictures of American military deaths are rare, but until now they have not been officially banned during either of the ongoing wars.

The new language was added in early September, according to a military spokesperson, Master Sgt. Tom Clementson of Regional Command East Public Affairs. Clementson described it as “a clarification rather than a new rule.”
“The clarification was added to ensure that service members’ privacy and propriety are maintained in situations where media have unique and intimate access as embedded reporters,” Clementson wrote by e-mail in response to questions. “While RC East does everything possible to accommodate an embedded reporters’ ability to cover the war in this region, there is also a command responsibility to account for the best interests of its service members.”
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source: The Washington Post

The deployment moves troop totals quickly towards 68,000 – more than double the number in the country when Bush left office

by Ann Scott Tyson

President Obama announced in March that he would be sending 21,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. But in an unannounced move, the White House has also authorized — and the Pentagon is deploying — at least 13,000 troops beyond that number, according to defense officials.

The additional troops are primarily support forces, including engineers, medical personnel, intelligence experts and military police. Their deployment has received little mention by officials at the Pentagon and the White House, who have spoken more publicly about the combat troops who have been sent to Afghanistan.

The deployment of the support troops to Afghanistan brings the total increase approved by Obama to 34,000. The buildup has raised the number of U.S. troops deployed to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan above the peak during the Iraq “surge” that President George W. Bush ordered, officials said.

The deployment does not change the maximum number of service members expected to soon be in Afghanistan: 68,000, more than double the number there when Bush left office. Still, it suggests that a significant number of support troops, in addition to combat forces, would be needed to meet commanders’ demands. It also underscores the growing strain on U.S. ground troops, raising practical questions about how the Army and Marine Corps would meet a request from Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.

Defense experts said the military usually requires that thousands of support troops deploy for each combat brigade of about 4,000. That, in turn, exacerbates the strain on the force, in part because support troops are some of the most heavily demanded in the military and are still needed in large numbers in Iraq.

“There are admittedly some challenges over the next 10 to 12 months as we are downsizing in Iraq, and therefore any schedule for increasing in Afghanistan might have to be more gradual,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Pentagon and White House officials have not publicized significant deployments of support troops. For example, when Bush announced the Iraq surge, he spoke only of 20,000 combat troops and did not mention the approximately 8,000 support troops that would accompany them. When Gen. David H. Petraeus announced that the surge would end, he spoke only of the withdrawal of the combat units because he needed to retain many of the support troops in Iraq.

On Afghanistan, White House and Pentagon spokesmen differed over exactly what the president has approved.

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