US Soldier Says He Was ‘Told to Lie’ About Iraqi Killings
A picture taken at the scene of the Haditha killings shows several dead Iraqis who were killed by Marines.
Have they always taught soldiers to piss on dead people, or was it a special directive Cheney and Rumsfeld came up with? Via Al Jazeera English:
A US soldier has told a military jury in California how his commander killed five Iraqi civilians in the western al-Anbar province in 2005 and then asked him to lie about it.
At a trial stemming from one of the Iraq war’s most controversial episodes, Sergeant Sanick Dela Cruz testified on Wednesday, the third day of Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich’s court martial.
Wuterich was Dela Cruz’s squad leader, who Dela Cruz said gunned down the Iraqis after they pulled up in a car near the scene of a bombing in which a US marine had died.
In all, 24 Iraqi civilians including women and children were killed in the revenge attacks –…
The Road to the Iraq War Will Happen Again
The power of the corporate media to deceive the people is simply astonishing, but, mind you, it depends on an already distracted, ignorant, semi-passive multitude whose marching values have been carefully cultivated.
In 2003 we went into Iraq under scandalously false pretexts, guns blazing—bragging about our ability to deliver “shock and awe” with impunity (the mark of the bully) and with one goal in mind: to rob and rape that country blind of its riches. The official excuse was that Iraq and Saddam were mortal threats that had to be neutralized.
Within a matter of weeks if not days, the official line—adopted without missing a beat by the entire punditocracy—was that we had gone in “to save Iraq”, “make it a democracy,” and all the rest of the self-serving claptrap we use over and over again to justify our uber-criminal behavior. With a straight face the official voices declared that those who…
Post-American Iraq By The Numbers
As we pull our troops out following eight years in Iraq, Barack Obama earlier this week called it a “moment of success” that came at heavy cost — “nearly 4,500 Americans made the ultimate sacrifice.” The president made no mention of the cost to Iraqis, so Juan Cole has this to add:
Population of Iraq: 30 million
Percentage of Iraqis who lived in slum conditions in 2000: 17
Percentage of Iraqis who live in slum conditions in 2011: 50Number of the 30 million Iraqis living below the poverty line: 7 million.
Number of Iraqis who died of violence 2003-2011: 150,000 to 400,000.
Orphans in Iraq: 4.5 million.Orphans living in the streets: 600,000.
Number of women, mainly widows, who are primary breadwinners in family: 2 million.
Iraqi refugees displaced by the American war to Syria: 1 million
Internally displaced persons in Iraq: 1.3 million
Proportion of displaced persons who have returned home since 2008: 1/8
Rank of Iraq on Corruption Index among 182 countries: 175
Final Bill For US War In Iraq Will Be $4 Trillion
Just so you know, that’s $4,000,000,000,000. Christopher Hinton explains for Marketwatch:
The nine-year-old Iraq war came to an official end on Thursday, but paying for it will continue for decades until U.S. taxpayers have shelled out an estimated $4 trillion.
Over a 50-year period, that comes to $80 billion annually.
Although that only represents about 1% of nation’s gross domestic product, it’s more than half of the national budget deficit. It’s also roughly equal to what the U.S. spends on the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency combined each year.
Near the start of the war, the U.S. Defense Department estimated it would cost $50 billion to $80 billion. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was dismissed in 2002 after suggesting the price of invading and occupying Iraq could reach $200 billion.
“The direct costs for the war were about $800 billion, but the indirect costs, the costs you can’t easily…
The U.S. Military’s Sexual Assault and Rape Epidemic
Sarah Lazare reports in Al Jazeera:
As the war in Afghanistan passes its ten-year mark, sexual assault runs rampant within the ranks, with an estimated one in three female service members raped during their service, according to at least one peer-reviewed study. This is in a military where women comprise more 11 per cent of active duty service members deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan and more than 15 per cent of the total military, with at least 200,000 active duty women currently serving. This epidemic also affects men: 60 per cent of women serving in the National Guard and Reserve, along with 27 per cent of men, are estimated to have experienced Military Sexual Trauma (MST). Perpetrators rely on a chain of command that appears to offer virtual impunity for sexual assaults committed against lower-ranking service members.
Military reports and Congress-appointed task forces acknowledge that sexual assault within the military is widespread. While the Department…
President Obama: All U.S. Troops Out of Iraq by End of Year
Via MSNBC:
President Barack Obama announced on Friday that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year. The president made the announcement at a White House briefing following a private video conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
“As promised the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, the war in Iraq will be over,” Obama said.
More than 4,400 American military members have been killed, and another 2,000 wounded since the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.
The two countries have been negotiating over whether the United States would leave behind up to several thousand military trainers after year-end, or if all remaining troops would depart as planned by Dec. 31. The main sticking point has been legal immunity for any U.S. forces that remain.
WikiLeaks Reveals Iraqi Children Were Executed in U.S Raid on Ishaqi
U.S. officials had originally claimed that “nothing inappropriate” had occurred during a controversial incident in 2006 in the town of Ishaqi, Iraq. A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks, however, tells a different story. In this version of events, according to an autopsy of the bodies in Tikrit (along with several witness reports which were vigorously denied by U.S. officials) four women and five children (all of which were five years old or younger) were handcuffed and then shot in the head, after which an air-strike was called in to destroy the home in which the massacre had transpired. Not surprisingly, the Pentagon has thus far declined to comment. I hope you all will join me in pinching the bridge of our noses and muttering “Sweet fucking Christ”. (More on McClatchy)
Court Rules Citizens Allowed to Sue Rumsfeld for Torture
Two U.S. citizens were arrested, detained, held in captivity for months and tortured by the military after blowing the whistle on the now defunct private contractor they worked for. An Illinois court has upheld a motion to allow the pair to sue Donald Rumsfeld and other unnamed officials, but expect fierce resistance from the Obama administration. Aaron Cynic writes at Chicagoist:
The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled Monday two men can move forward with a civil lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The Tribune reports the Court upheld a decision from a federal judge allowing a lawsuit which holds Rumsfeld personally responsible for the torture of Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel, two former defense contractors in Iraq.
In 2006, while Vance and Ertel were working in Iraq for Shield Group Security, a private contractor, they began to suspect their employer of involvement in illegal arms trading, bribery, and other…
The Cost of War: 225,000 Lives, $4 Trillion
Since 9/11, U.S. wars across the globe have cost at least a quarter million people their lives and will likely reach more than $4 trillion, a new research project reports. The Cost of War by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies details the toll the wars have taken in human, economic, social and political costs.
Some of the project’s findings:
- While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall. Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified.
- At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.
- The…
Pentagon Admits $6 Billion In Cash Was Stolen In Iraq
They shouldn’t beat themselves up over it — just yesterday it took me twenty minutes to find my keys. The Los Angeles Times reports:
In the year after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration flooded the conquered country with cash to pay for reconstruction — wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.
This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash. For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting…
Blackwater Video Game Now Available For Xbox
The game designers have opted to have your gun fire automatically when it hovers long enough over an enemy target. Kotaku Australia reviews the first-person-shooter Blackwater video game, out soon for Xbox Kinect and endorsed by founder Erik Prince:
This week was the first time we heard of publisher 505 Games’ Blackwater, an FPS that would cast you in the role of Blackwater Worldwide mercenaries.
The topic seemed thorny – the mercenary company, now renamed Xe Services, has been at the center of a multiple of controversies and the subject of highly critical Congressional hearings. Blackwater has been linked to the deaths of 17 Iraqi civilians, and the alcohol-fueled fatal shooting of a security guard in the employ of the country’s vice president. According to 505, the game was designed in consultation with former mercenary agents, and with Erik Prince, the founder and former head of the hot-button security contractor.
Blackwater is an on-rails shooter…
Osama Bin Laden’s Intended War On the U.S. Economy
- Note pre-9/11 (in red) and post-9/11 (in yellow) Debt.
This viewpoint from Ezra Klein in the Washington Post is one not discussed enough by the media and its pundits in our nearly decade-long “War on Terror” (except on a few occasions). Writes Klein in WashPo:
Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t.
So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?
Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After…
Now That Bin Laden’s Dead, Where Does That Leave The War On Terror?
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
Osama Bin Laden’s death caused most of America to break out the flags and head to the local town square to pat each other on the back saying “we got him.” Regardless of how we feel about the final execution of the modern world’s most notorious villain, capturing or killing Bin Laden was the impetus for the war in Afghanistan (remember, we originally went to war against the Taliban because they were harboring him).
Even though most Americans understand that the war in Iraq was never about the war against Al-Qaida, such a momentous occasion should give us pause to ask ourselves what exactly it is we’re doing fighting two wars and several smaller conflicts across the globe, and what exactly, continuing our course of action will accomplish:
What does Bin Laden’s death really change? We’ve already heard plenty of rhetoric that Bin Laden’s death does not end the…
Did Saddam Hussein Call Parliament Member Hassan al-Allawi?
Saddam Hussein’s execution in 2006 was quickly publicized all over YouTube. Now the video sharing site has brought us a prank call that fuels the theory of Hussein still being alive. During a dinner party, Hussein supposedly called Hassan al-Allawi, a former Ba’ath Party member and member of Parliament, with a voice that was quite convincing. The entire report can be read at The New York Times. Below is a recording of the phone call along with an English translation:
Media Roots Radio: Two Active Duty Soldiers Speak Out
Via Media Roots:
This is a special Media Roots Radio interview conducted by Abby and Robbie Martin with two active duty soldiers in the army: Malcolm and Yossarian. Malcolm is a soldier enlisted in the US Army and serves as an aviation mechanic. Yossarian is an Apache helicopter pilot and military aviator in the US Army. They are both stationed abroad right now but were gracious enough to take some time out of their schedule to sit down on Skype for an interview with Media Roots. They talk about why they enlisted, how they woke up and give their perspectives on Bradley Manning, US foreign policy and 9/11 while expressing grave concerns for the future of this country.
They are also both contributing writers for Media Roots. Check out their op-ed writings in the Soldier’s Corner of the site. If you would like to directly download the podcast click the down arrow icon on the right of the soundcloud display. To hide the comments to enable easier rewind and fast forward, click on the icon on the very bottom right.
63% Of People Killed In Iraq War Were Civilians
Xinhua reports:
U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been causing huge civilian casualties with 63 percent of some 109,000 people killed in the Iraq war being civilians, according to a report on the U.S. human rights record released on Sunday.
The figures were quoted from a WikiLeaks trove by the Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010, which was released by the Information Office of China’s State Council in response to the country reports on Human Rights Practices for 2010 issued by the U.S. Department of State.
Figures from the WikiLeaks website also revealed up to 285,000 war casualties in Iraq from March 2003 through the end of 2009, according to the report.
“The U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and other regions have also brought tremendous casualties to local people,” said the report.
The report cited the notorious case on a “kill team” formed by five soldiers from the 5th Stryker Combat Brigade,…
How Two Bumbling Stoner Kids Became The Pentagon’s Favorite Arms Dealers
It sounds like the plot of a John Hughes ’80s teen comedy. Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz were a pair of underachieving kids from Miami (interests: football, “whisky”, and “chilling with the boyz”) until, as part of the privatization effort, they somehow landed a $300 million contract from the Bush administration to provide ammunition for U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Then things soured: greed pitted the friends against one another, all they could give the military were defective, Chinese-made munitions from Albania, and now Diveroli is in jail. Rolling Stone has the barely-believable saga:
Reassured by the e-mail, Packouz got into his brand-new blue Audi A4 and headed home for the evening, windows open, the stereo blasting. At 25, he wasn’t exactly used to the pressures of being an international arms dealer. Only months earlier, he had been making his living as a massage therapist; his studies at the Educating Hands School of Massage…
‘PSYWAR’: Connecting The Dots In Iraq
Jessica Lynch is awarded the Bronze Star, Prisoner of War and Purple Heart medals.
This is just a sidenote, but it’s an interesting one about the propaganda used on Americans during the illegal invasion.
We all know about the Jessica Lynch story, and how the military waited to “rescue” her and her fellow Army mechanics from their Iraqi doctors (who were portrayed at the time as “terrorists” holding them hostage, instead of medical professionals giving them proper treatment under the Geneva Conventions) until they had a camera crew in place to record it all for propaganda purposes.
But what I hadn’t put together, was the TIMING of the revelation of that operation, and how it worked in conjunction with another event.
The same day that the Pentagon revealed this “heroic story” (which Jessica Lynch herself finds embarrassing, apparently not appreciating her role as a tool of propaganda), they had blasted the Palestine Hotel with…
Iraqi Defector Comes Clean About His WMD Lies
Meet Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, CIA codename Curveball. He lied about Saddam Hussein’s having biological weapons, giving the Bush administration the ammunition they needed in their push for an invasion of Iraq. Al-Janabi says he would do it all over again if he could — the lesson being, don’t trust anyone named Curveball.
