Torture, killing, children shot – and how the US tried to keep it all quiet

[marmar]

from the Independent UK:



So now we begin to know the full extent of what Tony Blair called the blood price.

A detainee tortured with live electrical wires here, children shot by US troops at a checkpoint there, insurgents using children to carry out suicide bombings somewhere else; on and on, through 391,832 documents. At the Pentagon, these messages were the day-to-day commonplaces of staff inboxes; for Iraqis, they detail, in the emotionless jargon of the US military, nothing less than the hacking open of a nation's veins.

Today, seven and a half years on from the order to invade, the largest leak in history has shown, far more than has been hitherto known, just what was unleashed by that declaration of war. The Iraqi security services tortured hundreds, and the US military watched, noted and emailed, but rarely intervened. A US helicopter gunship crew were ordered to shoot insurgents trying to surrender. A doctor sold al-Qa'ida a list of female patients with learning difficulties so they could be duped into being suicide bombers. A private US company, which made millions of dollars from the outsourcing of security duties, killed civilians. And the Americans, who have always claimed never to count civilian deaths, were in fact secretly logging them. At a conservative estimate, the new documents add at least 15,000 to the war's death toll.

It was yesterday morning when WikiLeaks, the crowd-funded website which achieved worldwide fame for releasing Afghanistan material earlier this year, uploaded nearly 400,000 US military documents. Covering the 2004-09 period, they consist of messages passed from low-level or medium-level operational troops to their superiors and ultimate bosses in the Pentagon. They are marked "Secret", by no means the highest of security classifications. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/torture-killing-children-shot-ndash-and-how-the-us-tried-to-keep-it-all-quiet-2115112.html

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

1. And, our government chases the whistleblower instead of the war criminals. K&R

[Vincardog]

3. +1 the shit doesn't fall far from the bat

[azul]

2. Why are most of these stories coming out in the UK

and not US papers? Fearless media waiting for the military reaction to Wikileaks' stuff? Or project censored?

[WinkyDink]

5. Not owned like ours are. Not craven.

[leftstreet]

4. K&R