tagged w/ Collateral Murder
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A new report from a team of British and Pakistani journalists finds one U.S. drone strike occurs every four days in Pakistan. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed as many as 775 civilians, including 168 children, since 2004. The report also challenges a recent claim by President Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, that no civilians have been killed in the drone attacks for nearly a year. According to the Bureau’s researchers, at least 45 civilians were killed in 10 U.S. attacks during the last year. We speak with Chris Woods, an award-winning reporter who leads the drones investigation team for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London.A new report from a team of British and Pakistani journalists finds one U.S. drone... more
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by admin was published on March 4th, 2011
"Wikileaks is a symptom of a much larger change, an age when information can be moved into the public arena by all kinds of people," says Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum. Bradley Manning, the accused leaker of the "Collateral Murder" video aired on WikiLeaks, faces 22 new charges from the government, including "Aiding the Enemy." But which enemy is he aiding, Micah asks? Is it us?
Micah is the author of a new book from OR Books (the publisher of At The Tea Party), WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency, and he joins Laura in studio for a conversation about the way transparency and freedom of information are changing our world, from military policy at home to revolution abroad.by admin was published on March 4th, 2011
"Wikileaks is a symptom of a much... more
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The dirty war in Colombia continues to claim innocent victims. "War is a trick, and the trickier you are, the faster you win it", said a demobilized guerrilla from FARC who murdered civilians and military personnel with landmines. "We will not continue to shed tears over spilled milk, " says the former armed forces commander, General Freddy Padilla de León, about the hundreds of civilians killed by the Colombian army in the last five years.The dirty war in Colombia continues to claim innocent victims. "War is a trick,... more
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Is Julian Assange a Transparency Activist Par Excellence or an Anarchist “Minister of Chaos”?
Read the full article here: http://bit.ly/gAOpqT
"WikiLeaks is really one of the very few, if not the only group, effectively putting fear into the hearts of the world’s most powerful and corrupt people, and that’s why they deserve, I think, enthusiastic support from anyone who truly believes in transparency, notwithstanding what might be valid, though relatively trivial, criticisms…" – Glenn Greenwald
Love him or hate him, Julian Assange has become the (rather handsome, if a bit pasty) face of the global movement for government and corporate transparency. Through WikiLeaks, Assange has, arguably, helped release more classified information than the rest of the entire world press combined. Assange says this reveals the "perilous state of the rest of the media" and rightly asks how a team as small as his could accomplish such a feat in just four years of existence. WikiLeaks has hit all the bases – the media, governments, and corporations are all scrambling to address the consequences of the leaks. Beyond the damage control and the dirty tricks, a radical and fundamental shift in the balance of power is underway. Let’s just say that folks aren’t calling Assange an anarchist for nothing. But what is the rationale behind WikiLeaks, its methods, its goals? Don’t expect an answer from the media. The reasons behind the project have long been overlooked by the mainstream press, captivated as it is with its own sensationalistic ‘hit pieces’ on Assange month after month and its alarmist or just plain misguided attempts to explain how and why WikiLeaks presumes to “open governments” as only it can.
The Empire has no clothes
From WikiLeaks, we have learned the truth about who's dropping whose bombs, the Afghan Vice President who ripped off $52 million dollars from Allah knows where (see the leaked cable for yourself), the US military’s helicopter attack on civilians and journalists, government-backed torture, the uncounted murders of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan people, and even what every country secretly wants for Christmas. We have it on video, on paper, and it’s all over the all-mighty Internet. Thanks to WikiLeaks and fellow whistleblowers, we don’t just have the truth about these horrors, we now have the proof of them.
WikiLeaks is the outcome of much theorizing on the part of Assange and his colleagues and is one of the boldest experiments in opening governments and creating transparency in the world, ever. It’s also one of the most anarchic and prescient. Assange himself has described a cohesive framework for understanding the purpose of WikiLeaks. And while you might want to grab a cup of coffee before diving into reading his essays, his writing doesn’t demand that you also grab a dictionary, or a wiktionary, to decipher it.
Assange begins his essay “State and Terrorist Conspiracies” by defining the efforts of authoritarian regimes to conceal their plans as conspiratorial. He argues: “Authoritarian regimes give rise to forces which oppose them by pushing against the individual and collective will to freedom, truth and self realization. Plans which assist authoritarian rule, once discovered, induce resistance. Hence these plans are concealed by successful authoritarian powers. This is enough to define their behavior as conspiratorial.” And who are the conspirators in these conspiratorial regimes? They are the government officials, bureaucrats, agents, and employees who regularly keep their decision-making processes and plans from the public. They often rely on secrecy to ensure the smooth functioning of their departments, offices, and agencies and to maintain their positions of power and influence.
You won’t find a list of specific regimes that Assange deems conspiratorial in his essay. It is enough for him to describe their patterns and to develop frameworks that further our understanding. Whether we think that it is justified or not, states like the US rely on secrecy in order to function, a characteristic shared with authoritarian regimes. Assange theorizes that the way to effectively undermine conspiratorial behavior is to prevent or impede the ability of a regime’s personnel to communicate, to conspire, with one another. If a government cannot communicate internally, it cannot longer function normally.
Article continues at link: http://bit.ly/gAOpqTIs Julian Assange a Transparency Activist Par Excellence or an Anarchist... more
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http://www.bradleymanning.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/San-Diego-Days-of-Action-poster-194x300.jpg
Rallies, demonstrations, “Collateral Murder” film screenings, whistle-blowing parties and forums will be held around the world between the 16th and 19th of September 2010 as vital expressions of international solidarity with Bradley Manning.
Accused of leaking a classified US military combat video showing the gunning down of Iraqi civilians (released to the world by WikiLeaks as “Collateral Murder”), Pfc Bradley Manning has been held in isolation since May 2010 and faces 52 years imprisonment.
With concerns high for this young man’s fate, events held as part of the International Days of Action will call for the withdrawal of charges laid against Bradley Manning and his immediate release. Rallying to the slogan “Exposing war crimes is not a crime,” supporters maintain that a young man’s life should not be destroyed for a courageous act of conscience.
As Israel and the US ready themselves to attack Iran — endangering the world with an insane escalation of hostilities in the Persian Gulf — the relevance of the issues for which Bradley Manning has become an icon are acutely intensified.
When US soldier Ethan McCord said “we do this every day” of the civilian slaughter he walked into after the “Collateral Murder” attack, he was stating an established fact. The reality of his statement has been corroborated by many, including UN President of the General Assembly D’Escoto Brockmann, and is irrefutably substantiated by the recently leaked Afghan War Diaries with their endless entries of civilian deaths resulting from authorized US military operations.
Soldiers who try to raise issues of war crimes in the field with their superiors are systematically and sometimes brutally silenced, while those who cannot remain silent by the nature of their conscience are persecuted severely if discovered. Pfc. Bradley Manning, acclaimed as a hero by Daniel Ellsberg (the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War), is a perfect example.
This is, at its heart, an issue of truth in public media.http://www.bradleymanning.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/San-Diego-Days-of-Action-poste... more
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I interview Ethan McCord, who was in the "Collateral Murder" video released to Wikileaks by Bradley Manning.
I ask him about a few things: The war in Iraq, his favourite colour, if he liked the movie Avatar, and more.I interview Ethan McCord, who was in the "Collateral Murder" video released... more
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As Bradley Manning, accused of spilling the Afghan war logs to WikiLeaks, hires a lawyer and prepares to fight government charges, Philip Shenon shares new details about his predicament—including an expected $100,000 legal bill.
Bradley Manning, the alleged WikiLeaks leaker, is about to come out fighting.
A spokesman for Manning’s legal defense fund tells The Daily Beast that the 22-year-old Army intelligence specialist has finally chosen a civilian lawyer to represent him against charges he illegally provided a huge library of classified military documents and videos to WikiLeaks earlier this year.
After weeks of public silence, the spokesman said, Manning is determined to fight criminal charges that could send him to prison for decades.
“My understanding is that Manning’s appointed military defense attorneys were trying to pressure him into taking a deal, but he wasn’t interested,” said Jeff Paterson, project director of Courage to Resist, a California-based war-resisters group that has been working with WikiLeaks to raise money for Manning’s defense.
“Our expectation is that he’s going to fight the charges,” Paterson said.
A Defense Department spokesman had no immediate comment Monday on Manning’s defense plans. Manning’s military lawyers in Iraq have declined repeated requests for interviews.
Courage to Resist, which is being actively supported by the filmmaker Michael Moore in organizing the legal defense fund, says that it has raised about $50,000 for Manning, an amount that it expects WikiLeaks roughly to match.
Paterson confirmed a report in the Associated Press((http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gnn4wgF9VWmECeiuNLaW7spvS32wD9HU0E8G1) that the civilian defense lawyer is David Coombs of Providence, Rhode Island. Coombs is best known for defending Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar, charged in a deadly 2003 attack on fellow U.S. military members in Kuwait. Akbar is awaiting execution for murdering two officers.
Paterson said Coombs had already talked with Manning by telephone, and that the lawyer will oversee a defense team that will also include uniformed military counsel.
Paterson said that Manning has also begun to receive visitors, including a close friend from Boston who met with the young soldier last weekend at the brig at the Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, where Manning has been held for the last several weeks. According to Paterson, the friend found Manning in reasonably good spirits.
“We got a sense that he was actually in pretty good physical and mental condition, considering the fact that he’s facing decades in prison,” Paterson said.
Manning’s state of mind and his plans for defending himself against the criminal charges have been a mystery since his arrest in June in Iraq on suspicion of leaking the material to WikiLeaks. He was held for several weeks in Kuwait before his transfer late last month to Quantico.
Paterson said that his group expected Manning’s total legal bill to come to about $100,000 and that his group was continuing to raise money through its website on his behalf (since Manning will be brought to trial in a military court, the Pentagon will cover many of the costs of his case). The initial $50,000 was raised from more than 800 donors, most of them first-time contributors to Courage to Resist. The site is also selling a range of “Free Bradley Manning” paraphernalia(http://www.bradleymanning.org/), from T-shirts to buttons to posters.
The move by Courage to Resist to find a lawyer for Manning followed initial fruitless efforts by WikiLeaks to provide the suspect with civilian counsel.
Still, Paterson said, Manning should be able to mount a strong defense.
“It’s one thing to say that a 22-year-old Army private first class could do all this, and it’s another thing to prove it—and to prove that it really did any damage,” Paterson said. “I think there are going to be details about this case that are going to surprise people. It’s not going to be the open-and-shut case that the government has portrayed it to be.”As Bradley Manning, accused of spilling the Afghan war logs to WikiLeaks, hires a... more
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By Chris Vallance
BBC News
Whistleblower website Wikileaks has made contact with the US government over claims that an American serviceman is one of its sources.
Soldier Bradley Manning has been held for three weeks without formal charge.
The US is investigating claims that he passed confidential information to Wikileaks.
Site editor Julian Assange told BBC News that, so far, the US authorities have not yet been in touch with him.
He said that lawyers representing Wikileaks have been in touch with the US administration but that neither the Department of State nor the Department of Defense had made any attempt to approach the site.
In spite of the silence from the US, Mr Assange said he felt it was "important to have a channel open in these matters".
No conversations could take place which might reveal the identity of any source, he added.
Mr Manning was identified as an alleged Wikileaks source after former hacker Adrian Lamo, in whom he had confided, contacted the authorities. ....By Chris Vallance
BBC News
Whistleblower website Wikileaks has made contact with... more
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Activists behind a website dedicated to revealing secret documents are complaining of harassment by police and intelligence services as they prepare to release a video showing an American attack in which up to 147 civilians were killed in Afghanistan.Activists behind a website dedicated to revealing secret documents are complaining of... more
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For Iraqis, Friday, April 9th marked the seventh anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of their country. Members of Iraq's freedom conference gathered in Tahrir square in central Baghdad to mark the war anniversary, chanted anti-U.S. slogans and called April 9th 2003 a day of occupation, not liberation.For Iraqis, Friday, April 9th marked the seventh anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion... more
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Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the so-called “Collateral Murder” Company, says that the acts of brutality caught on film and recently released via Wikileaks are not isolated instances, but were commonplace during his tour of duty.Josh Stieber, who is a former soldier of the so-called “Collateral Murder”... more
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Journalist advocacy groups are calling for the reopening of an investigation into the killing of a Reuters photographer and his driver after the website WikiLeaks released classified video footage of a 2007 helicopter attack in Baghdad in 2007 which killed 12 people.Journalist advocacy groups are calling for the reopening of an investigation into the... more
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After much debate and talk, WikiLeaks has released the apache gun sight video of the slaying of 12 innocent people, including 2 Reuters journalists, in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. Reuters has been trying to obtain the footage since the attack, under the freedom of information act, but without success. So wikileaks "obtained" and released it.After much debate and talk, WikiLeaks has released the apache gun sight video of the... more
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US Apache Helicopters Unprovoked Massacre Of Reuters Employee and His Rescuers…GRAPHIC WARNING!!!
Collateral Murder Overview
Wikileaks
5th April 2010
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.
SHOCKING IRAQ VIDEO: US Apache Helicopters Unprovoked Massacre Of Reuters Employee and His Rescuers…Collateral Murder!!!....http://ctpatriot1970.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/shocking-iraq-video-us-apache-helicopters-unprovoked-massacre-of-reuters-employee-and-his-rescuers-collateral-murder/
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.US Apache Helicopters Unprovoked Massacre Of Reuters Employee and His... more
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Calling it a case of "collateral murder," the WikiLeaks Web site today released harrowing until-now secret video of a U.S. Army Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007 repeatedly opening fire on a group of men that included a Reuters photographer and his driver -- and then on a van that stopped to rescue one of the wounded men.
None of the members of the group were taking hostile action, contrary to the Pentagon's initial cover story; they were milling about on a street corner. One man was evidently carrying a gun, though that was and is hardly an uncommon occurrence in Baghdad.
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van was a good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
In the video, which Reuters has been asking to see since 2007, crew members can be heard celebrating their kills.
In addition to the now exposed Army cover up of this story this morning, the New York Times also confirmed a gruesome cover-up by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Officials who had repeatedly denied reports by Jerome Starkey in the Times of London have now confirmed that American Special Operations soldiers slaughtered three women in a nighttime raid in February -- and actually dug bullets out of the bodies of the women as part of a cover-up. Starkey says U.S. and NATO forces are rarely held to account for the atrocities they commit.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/05/wikileaks-exposes-video-o_n_525569.htmlCalling it a case of "collateral murder," the WikiLeaks Web site today... more
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