Gaza Game Exposes Siege Restrictions
Sep 1, 2010 Videos, war, war on terror
Tags: gaza, Gaza Game, israel, Siege Restrictions
War With Iran? Paul Craig Roberts on The Corbett Report
Jul 4, 2010 Pakistan, World News, war
Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Treasury Secretary and Wall Street Journal joins us to break down the recent US sanctions on Iran and the likelihood of a strike on Iran by the US and/or Israel.
Tags: iran, War With Iran
Iraq murder video leaked by officers
Apr 11, 2010 World News, war, war on terror
Press TV
Wikileaks Co-founder Julian Assange says the website obtained the video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by US soldiers in 2007 from American military officers.
Assange told Press TV that the footage “obviously passed through the hands of military officers.”
“When we first got this [the video], we didn’t know what we had, we thought that this was a video about Afghanistan and when we decrypted it, it was only then we started to see what was going on,” Assange said.
The shocking video that was released on Monday showed US soldiers in an Apache helicopter killed dozens of Iraqi civilians, including two Reuters’ employees, in cold blood.
The helicopter then shoots at a van arriving to take the injured away.
Following the barbarous murder of unarmed civilians, a crew member is heard saying, “Nice shooting.”
When it emerges that two children in the van have been injured, someone else says, “Serves them right for bringing their children into a battle.”
The film, in which American forces kill with the seeming detachment of video gamers, has been seen by millions on the internet since it was first aired.
Later, the Pentagon announced that there was no reason to doubt the video’s authenticity.
In a leaked document, CIA has described Wikileaks as a threat to the US army. The website has released hundreds of classified military and intelligence documents over the past two years.
After releasing the footage, activists of the website complained of harassment by police and intelligence services as they prepare to release another video showing an American attack in which 97 civilians were killed in Afghanistan.
Assange claimed that a restaurant where the group met came under surveillance in March and one of the group’s volunteers was detained for 21 hours by police.
Tags: Iraq murder, Julian Assange, video leaked, Wikileaks
Killings of Civilians in Afghanistan: US Special Forces Covered Up Massacre
Apr 9, 2010 World News, war, war on terror
by Tom Eley
Global Research
Preparations advance for assault on Kandahar
A NATO military statement issued Sunday admitted that US Special Forces commandos carried out the execution-style killings of three women and two men in a February 12 night raid in southeastern Afghanistan. Among the dead women were two pregnant mothers, with 16 children between them. The third was a teenage girl. For weeks the US-led NATO officials had denied killing the women.
After the killings US Special Forces dug their bullets out of the dead women’s bodies and treated the holes with alcohol to erase forensic evidence, an Afghanistan government investigation has reportedly determined. A United Nations official confirmed that the Afghan investigation found evidence US soldiers had tampered with the crime scene. These reports are substantiated by family members and local authorities, who say US soldiers blocked access for seven hours to the home in Gardez, the regional capital of eastern Paktia province, while they attempted to cover up the crime.
The US-led coalition, while admitting for the first time that its forces killed the women, now contends that it did not attempt a cover-up. “All regrettable,” said Rear Adm. Greg Smith, the top military spokesman in Kabul, of the deaths. “That said, there is absolutely no evidence that the forces covered anything up.” This is a bald lie. In fact, all the available evidence shows there was a cover-up, and a crude one at that.
Soon after the raid, NATO acknowledged that US Special Forces had gunned down two brothers, described as the local police chief and the district prosecutor, in their home. NATO conceded the men were civilians, but claimed, without providing evidence, that they were carrying Kalashnikov rifles.
NATO however denied that US Special Forces had killed the three women, claiming instead, fantastically, that they had been bound, gagged, and stabbed to death more than half a day earlier. Yet only a few hours before the killings the family had concluded a celebration for the birth of a new child, with 25 guests and musicians present in the home.
“In what culture in the world do you invite … people for a party and meanwhile kill three women?” a senior Afghan official asked the Times of London. “The dead bodies were just eight metres from where they were preparing the food. The Americans, they told us the women were dead for 14 hours.”
The NATO statement released Sunday abandoned this earlier statement, concluding “that the women were accidentally killed as a result of the joint force firing at the men.” It did not bother to explain why the earlier false story had been planted and now retracted.
Separately, the German government of Angela Merkel apologized for the killing of six Afghan policemen on April 2. The German military, which operates in Afghanistan’s increasingly violent north, claims that the car carrying the men was obliterated by a German tank after it failed to stop on command. Three German soldiers had died earlier in the day in a gunfight with insurgents.
The episodes reveal the real nature of the occupation of Afghanistan, which has nothing to do with “defending” the local population or the US people against the Taliban or Al Qaeda. Its purpose is to assert US and NATO control over the strategically-crucial nation, the better to pursue Washington’s interests throughout resource-rich Central Asia and block rivals such as China and Russia. This imperialist agenda inevitably requires the terrorization of the population.
The spate of civilian killings offers a glimpse of the bloody violence President Barack Obama has unleashed on the suffering country through his “surge.” This will only intensify as the US makes preparations for a major military offensive against Afghanistan’s second most populous city, Kandahar, which Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, has called “the center of gravity” for anti-insurgent operations. The attack is slated for June.
Kandahar’s local government is ostensibly loyal to the Kabul regime of Hamid Karzai. The head of its council is Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who reputedly profits from the region’s major industry, the narcotics trade. But vast sections of the city and its suburbs are under the de facto control of the Taliban.
Unlike the recent attack on the rural area of Marjah, operations in Kandahar will take place in an urban area of some 2 million people. The scale of the forthcoming violence is indicated by the recent decisions by UN and relief organizations to abandon the city for the safety of their personnel.
Prior to the full-scale military assault, efforts are being made to cajole, threaten, and bribe the local elite. The US is ordering a series of “shura” councils, at which elders from Kandahar’s various districts and neighborhoods are being told that if they fail to eject the Taliban, they will face the American military.
These efforts are following a similar pattern as the Bush administration “surge” in Iraq. The alternative to cooperating with the Americans is assassination. In preparation for the invasion, US Special Forces have reportedly carried out extra-judicial killings of close to 70 locals accused of links to the Taliban, and have arrested a similar number.
This self-styled “political” campaign faces several glaring contradictions, most notably the fact that the local Pashtun political elite are closely tied to both Karzais. Like Ahmed Karzai, their wealth and influence rests largely on the narcotics trade. Moreover, both Hamid and Ahmed Karzai owe their positions to the US invasion and the phony democracy established in its wake. It is this final contradiction that Washington finds most galling.
In a demonstration of their contempt for their own charade of democracy in Afghanistan, US officials are openly contemplating the assassination of Ahmed Karzai, who was elected to his position in a US gun-barrel vote, as a recent Washington Post news article reports. Hamid Karzai reportedly defied an ultimatum from Obama to sideline his brother by providing him with an international post.
A senior US military official told the Post of a recent conversation with Ahmed Karzai in Kandahar. “I told him, ‘I’m going to be watching every step you take,’” the official said. “If I catch you meeting an insurgent, I’m going to put you on the JPEL. That means that I can capture or kill you.” JPEL stands for Joint Prioritized Engagement List. Those whose names appear on it have been slated for execution by the US.
The Post article expressed frustration, however, that such a fate appears unlikely for Ahmed Karzai, at least in the short term. “As an elected official, Karzai cannot simply be removed from office,” the Post concluded.
The physical removal of Hamid Karzai, whose pro forma denunciations of US military violence have aggravated the Obama administration, is also under consideration.
Over the past two days, Karzai has once again become the target of a full-scale US media campaign. In the wake of the killings in Gardez, Karzai has reported to have asked US and coalition forces to cease house searches and said that he would consider joining the Taliban if western heavy-handedness continued. All of the major US newspapers quickly responded with articles Monday focusing on growing “frustration” in the Obama administration with Karzai.
This is the second media campaign against Karzai in half a year. In the recent disputed and fraud-ridden elections of last year, it was frequently hinted that Karzai might have to be eliminated. This possibility is now being openly articulated, Karzai’s main offense this time his hollow criticism of US brutality.
“To some it may seem as if President Hamid Karzai has a death wish,” a Monday comment in Time magazine notes. “The Afghan leader has lately begun sticking it to the U.S. and its Western allies—the only force protecting him from a surging Taliban, which hanged the last foreign-backed President when it reached Kabul in 1996.”
Yet Karzai must also contend with the overwhelming hatred of the US and NATO presence. “The wily President knows that the presence of foreign forces in his country is deeply unpopular, particularly when civilians are killed in the course of NATO military operations,” according to Time. “Karzai, moreover, is humiliated and shown to be powerless when his protestations over such operations are ignored by his Western patrons.”
Time points out that Karzai’s career as president has depended on the US and its calculations for the country. “It’s worth remembering that Karzai was essentially parachuted into the country in the course of the U.S. invasion, tapped to lead a new post-Taliban government” backed largely by warlords and “all manner of unsavory characters” funded by the CIA, which transported “hundreds of millions of dollars in suitcases” to Kabul.
The opposition to the US occupation is ultimately rooted in its predatory character, which has done nothing to improve the living conditions for masses of Afghan workers and peasants. This basic reality was highlighted by last week’s UN release of startling new data on social conditions in the country.
According to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), fully 36 percent of Afghanistan’s population live in “absolute poverty,” and another 37 percent live only slightly above the official poverty threshold. Only a quarter of the population have access to safe drinking water.
“Poverty is neither accidental, nor inevitable; it is both a cause and a consequence of a massive human rights deficit,” OHCHR head Norah Niland said in Kabul on March 31.
The devastating effects of Obama’s surge are also reflected in a sharp increase in US and coalition casualties. At this time last year approximately 45 U.S. soldiers and 35 other NATO troops had been killed. So far in 2010, some 90 U.S. soldiers and 57 additional coalition deaths have been reported, almost twice the rate for 2009, the bloodiest year since the 2001 invasion.
The looming attack on Kandahar is being carried out in conjunction with stepped up drone attacks on the border provinces of North and South Waziristan in Pakistan. According to a report in the New York Times, 90 people have been killed in the attacks since January 1. The drones hover constantly overhead in the border regions and their CIA operators have become far less concerned over killing civilians close to alleged militants, striking fear into the entire civilian population, the Times boasts. These attacks, and Washington’s free admission that they kill civilians, constitute war crimes and are a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty.
The drone attacks have only stirred bitter anger in the tribal regions and beyond, increasingly destabilizing the Pakistani government which consents to the killings. On Monday a series of apparently coordinated attacks killed at least 30 people in Northwest Pakistan. The most audacious was a sustained attack on the US consulate in Peshawar, during which six people were killed.
Tags: afghanistan, Kandahar, NATO military
Violence in Video Games and the Baghdad Massacre
Apr 8, 2010 World News, war, war on terror
Infowars.com
April 7, 2010
“Violence in Video Games” was produced to demonstrate the close similarities between real-world violence and simulated violence included in video games. The video juxtapositions scenes captured in the real-world and those that exist in the fantasy game world depicted in the Call of Duty series. Shooting dogs, beating children and murdering innocent civilians are dwarfed by the amount of unmitigated evil game developers are having their heroes portray.
Call of Duty is currently the most popular first-person shooter video game series on the market. The game overshadows in popularity and sales Grand Theft Auto and Halo.
Current versions of the game include torture of captured enemy combatants, burning prisoners alive with Molotov cocktails, shooting soldiers who surrender, and the terrorist slaughter of civilians in a Russian airport.
For the less gung-ho (and psychopathic), the latest version of Call of Duty allows players to opt-out of the scene depicting the murder of innocent civilians.
Video games play an important role in training U.S. soldiers as they prepare for combat. In 2008, the Army invested $50 million for the development of video games and a gaming system designed to train soldiers for combat. “With the new platform and games, Army programmers hope to offer more life-like reproductions of battlefield scenarios, offering editable terrains, a greater capacity for multi-player action and larger battlefields,” writes Switched, an AOL electronics website.
The current version of Call of Duty was not available in 2007 when soldiers massacred a Reuters cameraman and other civilians in Baghdad. However, considering the way the soldiers acted, you wouldn’t know it.
Collateral Murder
Apr 7, 2010 World News, war, war on terror
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.
Collateral Murder – Wikileaks – Iraq
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.
Tags: Collateral Murder, US Army, Wikileaks - Iraq
A Closer Look at Israel’s Role in Terrorism
This series is based on an article by Jeff Gates, who is a widely acclaimed author, attorney, merchant banker, educator and consultant to governments worldwide, who served for seven years as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance. He is the author of Guilt by Association, Democracy At Risk and The Ownership Solution. See his website http://criminalstate.com/
Jihad Jane an Online Game
Mar 12, 2010 News & Events, war
Colleen LaRose believed her looks would allow her to blend in
The blonde middle-aged woman apparently raised no concerns with her boyfriend or her neighbours on Main Street, Pennsburg, near Philadelphia.
But online she had allegedly agreed to kill in the name of holy war, believing her European looks would allow her to blend in among Swedes as she homed in on her target.
Colleen LaRose, according to a US court indictment, posted messages online under the name Jihad Jane, expressing her desire to participate in jihad, or holy war.
Arrested in October 2009, Ms LaRose had exchanged emails over 15 months to recruit fighters for “violent jihad”.
Her activities apparently came as a surprise to her boyfriend Kurt Gorman, whom she met in 2005.
Mr Gorman told Associated Press: “She was a good-hearted person. She pretty much stayed around the house.”
‘Pleasure to die for’
She looked after his father until his death in August 2009, but left their residence a day after the father’s funeral, taking Mr Gorman’s passport with her, allegedly to give to a contact in South Asia she had agreed to marry.
“I came home and she was gone. It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Having left the US in August, by the end of September, she had allegedly written online that it would be “an honour & great pleasure to die or kill for” her intended spouse, the indictment said.
“Only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!” she is accused of writing.
A Department of Justice statement said Ms LaRose and five others “recruited men on the internet to wage violent jihad in South Asia and Europe, and recruited women on the internet who had passports and the ability to travel to and around Europe in support of violent jihad”.
Ms LaRose, a US citizen born in 1963, is charged with “conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, making false statements to a government official and attempted identity theft.”
She was apparently approached by others after she posted a video on YouTube in June 2008, saying she was “desperate to do something somehow to help” ease the suffering of Muslims, the indictment said.
Web images show her wearing a Muslim headscarf, but Mr Gorman said he never saw anything like that at their home, nor did she attend any religious services.
Unknown to him, she had allegedly agreed to travel to Sweden and kill Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who had angered Muslims by drawing the Prophet Muhammad with the body of a dog.
She denies soliciting funds for terrorist groups and of being the Jihad Jane of online postings, the indictment said.
Very few women have been charged with terrorism in the US, the Justice Department said.
Tags: Colleen LaRose, Jihad Jane, Mr Gorman
