Tag: Civilian Casualties

From Guardian UK, “How To Read Afghanistan War Logs” from wikileaks

The Guardian UK, a British publication, says that they asked to see the 90,000+  wikileaks documents of whistleblower Julian Assange on the Afghanistan War, and has created its own stories on them, and has not paid for this. They say they’ve “crawled through it so you can make sense of it,”  which means that they must have had it for a while.  

As the U.S. Senate strips out $20 billion of domestic funding resources that would have paid for schools, teachers, and college students,  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…


A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., wouldn’t comment on whether the House will simply approve the Senate measure and send it on to Obama for his signature.

But the pressure to do so is intense, especially after Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned lawmakers this week that unless the measure is enacted into law before Congress leaves for its August recess, the Pentagon could have to furlough thousands of employees.

….     out of yet another war “supplemental” bill above the regular military funding, and is poised to influx another massive amount of deficit cash into yet another surge into a country we’ve now occupied for 9 years, the timing could not be better.


Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: “These files bring to light what’s been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I’ve investigated in recent months where this is still not happening.  

Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians.” The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

Most of the material, though classified “secret” at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…

The Guardian’s war logs homepage of links is here:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…

AfPak Airstrikes And Selling A Rebranded War On Terror

Still another US air strike killing dozens of civilians in Afghanistan, still another promise by the Pentagon to “investigate”, while in Washington President Obama hosts the AfPak summit with “Af” Hamid Karzai” and “Pak” Ali Zardari.

Obama’s surge in Afghanistan will ensure a steady supply of “collateral damage”, even though sane military voices condemn “democracy at gunpoint” and Taliban “tacticians” mock Gen. David Petraeus’ counterinsurgency tactics.

The Bush “war on terror” has been rebranded as “overseas contingency operations” (OCO) by the Obama administration.

Pepe Escobar argues everything remains the same, but with a new twist: Washington selling OCO in AfPak to US public opinion not as an American war – but as a Pakistani war.



Real News Network – May 08, 2009

Killing them softly with air strikes

Pepe Escobar on how the rebranded “war on terror” is being sold as a PAKISTANI war

More Than 1 in 3 The Stunning Reality of The Iraq War

This is a compilation of information contained in my previous Iraq diaries, updated whenever possible.

The most difficult number to validate is the real population of Iraq on March 19, 2003. Population figures have been an educated guess, in part determined by the amount of food purchased and historic birth rates, trying to take into account the 500,000 or more who died each year because of the embargo. From the various sources, the UN and international aid agencies the population is estimated between 22 and 25 million. The number most frequently quoted is 24 million on the eve of the war, this is the figure I will use.

The information contained here is gathered from UNICEF, the United Nations, WHO, various medical journals, relief organizations, governments of Syria and Jordan and eye witness reports. Whenever possible they have been verified with muiltiple sources.

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