WARNING: Graphic Content RATING: NSFPWRLTWIAAHINE (Not Safe For People Who Really Like The War In Afghanistan And Hope It Never Ends) REUTERS: The Marine Corps said on Wednesday it would investigate a video showing what appear to be American forces in Afghanistan urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters. The video could aggravate anti-American sentiment in Afghanistan after a decade of a war that has seen other cases of abuse. The Marine video release comes at a sensitive moment, with Washington trying to promote Afghan reconciliation as U.S. troops gradually withdraw from the country. The video, which was posted […]
90% Of Captured “Taliban” Turned Out To Be Innocent
IPS: But it turns out that more than 80 percent of those called captured Taliban fighters were released within days of having been picked up, because they were found to have been innocent civilians, according to official U.S. military data. Even more were later released from the main U.S. detention facility at Bagram airbase called the Detention Facility in Parwan after having their files reviewed by a panel of military officers. The timing of Petraeus’s claim of Taliban fighters captured or killed, moreover, indicates that he knew that four out of five of those he was claiming as “captured Taliban […]
Taliban Suicide Bomber Kills Eight CIA Agents
LOS ANGELES TIMES: Reporting from Kabul — A bomber slipped into a U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday and detonated a suicide vest, killing eight CIA officers in one of the deadliest days in the agency’s history, current and former U.S. officials said. The attack took place at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khowst province, an area near the border with Pakistan that is a hotbed of insurgent activity. An undisclosed number of civilians were wounded, the officials said. No military personnel with the U.S. or North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces were killed or injured, they said. A U.S. […]
THE AMERICAN GULAG: McClatchy Publishes Hard-Hitting Overview Of Gitmo, Who’s There, How They Got There, And Why Most Shouldn’t Be
BY TOM LASSETER OF MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens and perhaps hundreds of men whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments. McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees along with a number of local officials, primarily in Afghanistan, and reviewed available U.S. military tribunal documents and other records. Most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals, the McClatchy investigation found. At least seven […]
RAW FOOTAGE: Our Man In Afghanistan
KABUL (AFP) — Afghanistan was Monday investigating how militants could get within 500 metres of President Hamid Karzai and other top leaders to carry out a brazen attack that left three Afghans dead. The insurgent Taliban movement said it launched Sunday’s attack to show it had the power to strike even the nation’s biggest annual military parade.The event, which was supposed to showcase the Afghan army’s growing strength after getting new training and equipment, mainly from the United States, had been weeks in the making with stepped-up patrols and roadblocks around Kabul. MORE