Tag: Afghanistan

Posted July 30, 2010 by Youtube user AntiwarRadio (Antiwar.com/Radio/) – Scott Horton interviewed WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange:

Julian Assange, co-founder and spokesperson for WikiLeaks, discusses the 15 thousand unreleased intelligence reports from Afghanistan, efforts to get the WikiLeaks Garani massacre video ready for public release, the warning from Seymour Hersh that government officials were ready to ignore the rule of law to silence him (Assange), indications that the supposedly leaked 260,000 diplomatic cables never made it to WikiLeaks, the secret rendition program from Somalia to Kenya and how Bradley Manning’s confinement in Kuwait is essentially rendition.

Scott Horton, July 28, 2010 – transcript below

There is also an mp3 version of this interview.

An orchard in Logar Province, Afghanistan

Three U.S. troops died in blasts in Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for July to at least 63 and surpassing the previous month’s record as the deadliest for American forces in the nearly 9-year-old war.

The American deaths this month include Petty Officer 2nd Class Justin McNeley from Kingman, Arizona, and Petty Officer 3rd Class Jarod Newlove, 25, from the Seattle area. They went missing last week in Logar Province south of Kabul, and the Taliban announced they were holding one of the sailors.

A shop in Logar

McNeley’s body was recovered there Sunday, and Newlove’s body was pulled from a river Wednesday evening, Afghan officials said. Taliban. The discovery of Newlove’s body only deepened the mystery of the men’s disappearance nearly 60 miles (100 kilometers) from their base in Kabul.

An investigation is under way, but with both sailors dead, U.S. authorities remain at a loss to explain what two junior enlisted men in noncombat jobs were doing driving alone in Logar – much of which is not under government control.

Charkh, Logar, Afghanistan

Among the two or three ideas which the recent American movie “Inception” ponderously expounds is what you might call the increasing speed of consciousness of dreams within dreams.

While only a minute passes in reality,  the dreamer experiences hours in a dream, and maybe months in the dream within that dream, and so on until the most embedded dream extends forever, in one heartbeat of the sleeping body which hosts the dreams.

This is exactly the opposite order of so many nightmares within nightmares which compose the American occupation of Afghanistan.

A village which somehow endured for a thousand years is destroyed in one second by American bombers, and at the next level of reality in some miserable refugee camp, opium-addicted mothers pass their addiction along to their children, and at the next level of reality those same children appear in an even more miserable orphanage, “with no doors or windows, and no food,” and at the next level…

Then, just as winter was coming, the gov­ern­ment closed the or­phan­age. By the spring, only 160 kids re­turned. “They started working as la­bor­ers and slaves and couldn’t come back,” said Farid. “This winter the gov­ern­ment wanted to send them back to the com­mu­ni­ty, that means nowhere, then they don’t have food or some­where to stay.” One boy was dis­cov­ered in the market. He was covered in scabies, sleep­ing under the stalls, raped re­peat­ed­ly.

And while those children descended month after month and year after year through so many levels of the infinite misery of ordinary reality in Afghanistan…

Meanwhile the American public snoozed peacefully in its idiotic delusions about the Global War on Terror, and President Obama has recently re-authorized the abject Patriot Act, as if nothing had happened and as if no time had passed since September 11, 2001.  

On Sunday Julian Assange through his whisteblower site WikiLeaks released what has been described as more than 90,000 secret internal US military documentary records of US military actions in Afghanistan over the past six years, sparking anger and early attempts at political ‘damage control’ from the US government. In reality the WikiLeaks release may be the biggest leak yet of documented war crimes in US history since the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak by Daniel Ellsberg.

The documents were first published online by The Guardian, the New York Times and Germany’s Der Spiegel, and include details of 144 incidents in which US and ‘coalition’ forces have killed civilians in Afghanistan and how a secret extrajudicial black ops special forces unit hunts down targets for assassination or detention without trial.

The Obama White House’s immediate response came through US national security adviser James Jones.

“The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk and threaten our national security,” ABC News reported that Jones said in a statement, apparently not recognizing that neither he nor the White House is the United States, and that in reality the United States public is who Jones would prefer to keep from knowing what’s happening in Afghanistan.

Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman in their Monday War and Peace report hosted a roundtable discussion about the document release and its ramifications with independent British journalist Stephen Grey, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, former State Department official in Afghanistan Matthew Hoh, independent journalist Rick Rowley, and investigative historian Gareth Porter:

About 59 minutes – transcript below

Also see:

A Reading List to Put the WikiLeaks ‘War Logs’ in Context

Julian Assange On Why The World Needs WikiLeaks

‘Surge’ Smoke Follows Petraeus To Afpak

The recent revelation by Wikileaks of voluminous ugly details of America’s miserable “war” in Afghanistan will provide yet another demonstration of one of our great national illusions: that America is a peace-loving nation that attacks other countries only with the greatest reluctance and seeks peace whenever possible. I predict that the Wikileaks Afghanistan documents will have no impact whatsoever on the course of the war, and that the only political consequences will be the further harassment of whistle-blowers and more moves to criminalize free speech.

For modern Americans, the purpose of war is war. It is the extreme violence we inflict on others that is the end goal of a belligerent and angry nation. The coupling of this violence with rational goals, political, economic, or strategic, has long since vanished, and we are increasingly exposed as the world’s greatest collection of violence junkies. That is why, perversely, the more shocking and ugly the revelations about the Afghan war become, the less likely they are to end that so-called war.

Afghanistan has become a theme park of deadly high-tech force for America. Thrilling GI Combat stories from Afghanistan serve a steady supply of blood and guts to violence-hungry America, and this is well understood by Obama’s mob control technicians. It is simply inconceivable for Obama to give up this war. To do so would be to rob angry America of its last remaining outlet for large scale state-sponsored killing.

An important message from the always great Dennis Kucinich:

This was just coming in on the MSNBC site, only minutes ago:

90,000 Afghan war documents being leaked

Previously unreported civilian deaths among the disclosures by Wikileaks