OpEdNews - Article: Media Mutes General's Afghan Admission

OpEdNews - Article: Media Mutes General's Afghan Admission

President Obama's sneak visit to Afghanistan this weekend, although shrouded in secrecy, still received lots of prime press coverage.

At the same time, an astonishing open admission of possible US war crimes by Obama's man on the ground in Kabul, senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan General Stanley A. McChrystal, was reported by Richard A. Oppel Jr. in the New York Times" and then promptly ignored by the rest of the mainstream media.

"We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat," McChrystal said during a recent video-conference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.

According to the military's own figures, American and NATO troops firing from passing convoys and military checkpoints have killed 30 Afghans and wounded 80 others since last summer, but as McChrystal noted, none of the victims proved to be a danger to the troops.

Despite new rules put in place by McChrystal, aimed at reducing the killing of innocents, such shootings have not dropped off. Although fewer in number than deaths from air strikes or Special Forces operations, their continuance, as the Times noted, "has led to growing resentment among Afghans fearful of Western troops and angry at what they see as the impunity with which the troops operate -- a friction that has turned villages firmly against the occupation." ...

OpEdNews - Article: US military covering up civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan

OpEdNews - Article: US military covering up civilian killings in Iraq and Afghanistan

For OpEdNews: Stephen Soldz - Writer

The recent news brought news of two incidents in two countries where US troops killed civilians and then lied to cover up the evidence. These are but the latest of a steady stream of lies from military and Pentagon sources about the killing of civilians. Afghanistan: Killing Pregnant Women and Government Officials In Afghanistan, the military has finally admitted that Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February raid in which Afghan government officials were also killed, according to excellent reporting by Jerome Starkey of The Times of London. They have, however, failed so far to account for their falsehoods spanning several months. Previously the military had insisted that they killed "terrorists," and claimed that the women were killed by knife wounds administered several hours before the raid. But now it appears that the knife wounds may have been inflicted by the Special Forces troops excavating their bullets from the dead or dying women's bodies. As The Times' Starkey reported Monday:

US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened, Afghan investigators have told The Times.

Military spokespersons went further in attempting to cover up the killing by attacking Starkey, the reporter who challenged the official story. As Starkey explained:

[T]hey [US military] have... tried hard to discredit me, personally, for bringing this to the world's attention. In an unprecedented response to my original story about the Gardez night raid they named me individually, twice, in their denial of the cover up. They claimed to have a recording of my conversation which contradicted my shorthand record. When I asked to hear it, they ignored me. When I pressed them, they said there had been a misunderstanding. When they said recording, they meant someone had taken notes. The tapes, they said, do not exist.

In this case, as in so many, one can only assume that there was a deliberate attempt to cover up US involvement in the killing. Otherwise, officials would long ago have admitted their error and, one hopes, taken action against those responsible for the combat errors and the lies that followed. One wonders, for example, who told military officials about the knife wounds? If those wounds were, in fact inflicted by Special Forces troops trying to cover their mistake, then someone is responsible for relaying this false information. Or was the information known all along to be false by those relaying this claim to the press? Were the officials just hoping that the press would tire of exploring the incident, allowing their falsehoods to stand? Iraq: Shooting Photographers From the Air The news also brings evidence of another civilian massacre, this time from a July 27, 2007 incident near Baghdad in Iraq. Wikileaks released a video apparently showing a US helicopter crew firing upon a group of Iraqis hanging out on a street corner, and on a van that stopped to carry the wounded to the hospital. Over a dozen people, including two Reuters reporters, were killed and two children in the van were wounded. As in the Afghan incident, the military initially denied that any error had taken place. The New York Times article on the incident was entitled 2 Iraqi Journalists Killed as U.S. Forces Clash With Militias, relaying the military's false account in the headline. ...

How Americans Are Propagandized About Afghanistan | CommonDreams.org

How Americans Are Propagandized About Afghanistan | CommonDreams.org
by Glenn Greenwald

On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded. The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead were all "insurgents" or terrorists, (b) the bodies of three women had been found bound and gagged inside the home (including two pregnant women, one a mother of 10 children and the other a mother of six children, and a teenage girl), and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of "honor killings" by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.

Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon's version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon's version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:

After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.

One NATO official said that there was likely an effort to cover-up what happened by U.S. troops via evidence tampering on the scene (though other NATO officials deny this claim). The Times of London actually reported yesterday that, at least according to Afghan investigators, "US special forces soldiers dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath of a botched night raid, then washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened."

What is clear -- yet again -- is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly "reports" on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact. Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was "reported" by CNN on February 12: ....

Collateral Murder

Collateral Murder

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. ...