Wikileaks accuses US of cover-up

Press TV, Mon, 26 Jul 2010, 12:36:48 GMT

The founder of whistle-blower website Wikileaks accuses the US military of a cover-up of great magnitude regarding the civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

Julian Assange defended releasing of more than 90,000 secret military files related to the US-led war in Afghanistan and said that the messenger is always criticized.

"We're familiar with groups whose abuse we expose attempting to criticize the messenger," Assange told the Press Club in central London on Monday.

"We don't see any difference in the White House response to this case," added he referring to the White House fury over the leaks.

Assange urged on greater transparency and said there was no reason to doubt the reliability of the documents.

"Just like any dealing with any source, you should exercise some common sense -- that doesn't mean that you should close your eyes," Assange said.

"We have no reason to doubt the reliability of these documents".

The Australian-born behind WikiLeaks had said earlier in June that he would release some videos of a secret Pentagon deadly airstrike on children in Afghanistan.

The whistle-blowing website also revealed a video showing the killing of two journalists and over a dozen civilians in a strike conducted by a US military Apache helicopter in Baghdad in 2007.

RB/MMN

Wikileaks shows UK killing of civilians

Press TV, Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:35:32 GMT

The British military's involvement in the killing of Afghan civilians has been further revealed by the publication of secret US military files.

The secret files, leaked out by the Wikileaks website, contain records confirming that the UK troops have been involved in at least 21 incidents of civilians being killed by foreign troops in Afghanistan.

Wikileaks showed the documents to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel, before all four news outlets published them simultaneously on Sunday night.

The documents, which cover a time span between January 2004 and December 2009, indicate that in one case British troops killed the son of an Afghan general by a "warning shot" on the day of his brother's wedding in November 2007.

The documents also show that Royal Marines fired warning shots at a civilian vehicle in November 2008 that left a child dead.

According to the documents, British military's Gurkhas ordered an air raid in May 2009 that killed at least eight Afghan civilians.

Other bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight.

In 2007, Polish troops mortared a village, killing guests at a wedding party, including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

Rachel Reid, of campaign group Human Rights Watch, said, "What it amounts to is a lot of civilians being killed and a lack of honesty and accountability."

A spokesman for the Stop the War Coalition said the leaks showed "conclusively that the war in Afghanistan is pointless and unwinnable and the warmongers have lied to us continually".

ML/AKM

War papers leak shock Afghanistan, upset Pakistan

By Deb Riechmann, Associated Press Writer –

July 26, 2010

KABUL, Afghanistan –

The Afghan government said Monday it is "shocked" that 91,000 U.S. military documents on the war were leaked, especially those about civilian casualties and the role of Pakistan's intelligence service in destabilizing activities inside Afghanistan.

In Islamabad, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency lashed out against the trove of leaked papers that alleged close connections between it and the Taliban militants who are fighting U.S., Afghan and NATO troops in Afghanistan. The ISI called the allegations, which have been repeated for years, unsubstantiated.

The documents, which were released by the online whistle-blower Wikileaks, raised new questions about whether the U.S. can persuade Pakistan to sever its historical links to the Taliban and deny them sanctuary along the Afghan border — actions that many analysts believe are critical for success in Afghanistan.

"The war on terrorism will not succeed unless we address the root causes ... the role forces behind the borders of Afghanistan play in destabilizing activity here in Afghanistan," Waheed Omar, the spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, told reporters.

In a clear reference to Pakistan, Omar said the Afghan government has repeatedly told its international partners over the years: "We will not be able to defeat terrorism in the villages of Afghanistan unless we pay attention to the places where terrorism has been nurtured — where terrorists are kept, where they are given sanctuary, where they are given ideal motives to carry out their attacks in Afghanistan."

The U.S. has given Pakistan billions in military aid since 2001 to enlist its cooperation. But the leaked reports, which cover a period from January 2004 to December 2009, suggest current and former ISI officials have met directly with the Taliban to coordinate attacks in Afghanistan.

A senior ISI official denied the allegations, saying they were from raw intelligence reports that had not been verified and were meant to impugn the reputation of the spy agency. He spoke on condition of anonymity in line with the agency's policy.

In one report from March 2008, the ISI is alleged to have ordered Siraj Haqqani, a prominent militant based in northwestern Pakistan, to kill workers from archenemy India who are building roads in Afghanistan. In another from March 2007, the ISI is alleged to have given Jalaluddin Haqqani, Siraj's father, 1,000 motorcycles to carry out suicide attacks in Afghanistan. The Haqqanis run a military network based in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area that is believed to have close ties with the ISI.

Other reports mention former ISI officials, including Hamid Gul, who headed the agency in the late 1980s when Pakistan and the U.S. were supporting Islamist militants in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In one report, Gul, who has been an outspoken supporter of the Taliban, is alleged to have dispatched three men in December 2006 to carry out attacks in Afghanistan's capital.

"Reportedly Gul's final comment to the three individuals was to make the snow warm in Kabul, basically telling them to set Kabul aflame," said the report.

Gul, who appeared multiple times throughout the reports, denied allegations that he was working with the Taliban, saying "these leaked documents against me are fiction and nothing else."

Wikileaks released the documents, which include classified cables and assessments between military officers and diplomats, on its website Sunday. The New York Times, London's Guardian newspaper and the German weekly Der Spiegel were given early access to the documents.

The Guardian expressed skepticism about the allegations in the documents, saying "they fail to provide a convincing smoking gun" for complicity between the ISI and the Taliban. It said more than 180 intelligence files accuse the ISI of supplying, arming and training the insurgency since at least 2004. One of the reports even implicates the ISI in a plot to assassinate Karzai, said the newspaper.

The Afghan presidential spokesman said that while the Afghan government was "shocked" that such a large number of documents were leaked, Karzai's immediate reaction was that "most of this is not new," Omar said. The issue of civilian casualties has been repeatedly raised with coalition forces, he said.

"Luckily we have had over the past one and half years a reduction in the civilian casualties," he said. "Certain procedure were put in effect that helped reduce civilian casualties." He said the issue of civilians killed in fighting "is something we will continue to press hard on."

Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., also noted that many of the documents were dated and did not "reflect the current on-ground realities."

The United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan are "jointly endeavoring to defeat al-Qaida and its Taliban allies militarily and politically," he said.

But the U.S. has had little success convincing Pakistan to target Afghan Taliban militants holed up in the country, especially members of the Haqqani network, which the U.S. military considers the most dangerous militant group in Afghanistan.

Pakistan helped the Taliban seize power in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Although the government renounced the group in 2001 under U.S. pressure, many analysts believe Pakistan refuses to sever links with the Taliban because it believes they could be useful allies in Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw.

White House national security adviser Gen. Jim Jones defended the partnership between the U.S. and Pakistan in a statement Sunday, saying "counterterrorism cooperation has led to significant blows against al-Qaida's leadership." Still, he called on Pakistan to continue its "strategic shift against insurgent groups."

____

Associated Press Writers Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Munir Ahmed and Sebastian Abbot in Islamabad contributed to this report.

Leaked files lay bare war in Afghanistan

By Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung

Washington Post Staff Writers

Monday, July 26, 2010

Tens of thousands of classified documents related to the Afghan war released without authorization by the group Wikileaks.org reveal in often excruciating detail the struggles U.S. troops have faced in battling an increasingly potent Taliban force and in working with Pakistani allies who also appear to be helping the Afghan insurgency.

The more than 91,000 classified documents -- most of which consist of low-level field reports -- represent one of the largest single disclosures of such information in U.S. history. Wikileaks gave the material to the New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel several weeks ago on the condition that they not be published before Sunday night, when the group released them publicly.

Covering the period from January 2004 through December 2009, when the Obama administration began to deploy more than 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan and announced a new strategy, the documents provide new insights into a period in which the Taliban was gaining strength, Afghan civilians were growing increasingly disillusioned with their government, and U.S. troops in the field often expressed frustration at having to fight a war without sufficient resources.

The documents disclose for the first time that Taliban insurgents appear to have used portable, heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles to shoot down U.S. helicopters. Heat-seeking missiles, which the United States provided to the anti-Soviet Afghan fighters known as mujaheddin in the 1980s, helped inflict heavy losses on the Soviet Union until it withdrew its forces from Afghanistan in 1989.

One report from the spring of 2007 refers to witnesses who saw what appeared to be a heat-seeking missile destroy a CH-47 transport helicopter. The Times first unearthed the document in its review of the files. The Chinook crash killed five Americans, a British citizen and a Canadian. Even though the initial U.S. report stated that the helicopter was "engaged and struck with a missile," a NATO spokesman suggested that small-arms fire was responsible for bringing down the helicopter.

Although the use of such weapons by the Taliban appears to be very limited, the disclosure that relatively low-tech insurgents had acquired such arms would have fostered the impression that the Afghan war effort was faltering at a time when U.S. fatalities in Iraq were at record levels and the Bush administration was struggling to maintain support for the Iraq war even among its Republican base.

The Obama administration criticized Wikileaks for disclosing the classified documents. "Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents," national security adviser James Jones said in a statement. "The United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted."

Senior administration officials acknowledged they had been anxiously awaiting the documents' release but sought to diminish their significance. "There is not a lot new here for those who have been following developments closely," one U.S. official said.

Many of the documents posted by Wikileaks suggest that Pakistan's spy service might be helping Afghan insurgents plan and carry out attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan and their Afghan government allies. A few reports also describe cooperation between Pakistani intelligence and fighters aligned with al-Qaeda.

U.S. intelligence concluded a number of years ago that Pakistan retained its ties with Taliban groups, intelligence officials said. Late last year, President Obama warned in a letter to Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari that the United States would no longer put up with the contacts.

But the documents appear to suggest that Pakistan's spy agency, known as the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate or ISI, might have assisted insurgents in planning some attacks, at least in the past.

The Pakistani government denied the allegations in the classified intelligence documents. "These reports reflect nothing more than single-source comments and rumors, which abound on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and are often proved wrong after deeper examination," said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador to the United States.

The documents detail multiple reports of cooperation between retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, who ran ISI in the late 1980s, and Afghan insurgents battling U.S. forces in the mountainous eastern region of the country. In the latter years of the anti-Soviet insurgency, Gul worked closely with several major mujaheddin fighters who currently are battling U.S. troops and trying to topple the Afghan government. The documents also include reports that Gul was trying to reestablish contacts with insurgent leaders such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, whose fighters have been responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks on U.S. forces.

Over the past decade, U.S. intelligence has collected evidence of direct contacts between ISI and Jalaluddin Haqqani, Hekmatyar and Taliban leader Mohammed Omar. That evidence includes both human intelligence and intercepted communications, officials said.

As the new Afghan war strategy was being formulated late last year, Obama stepped up private pressure on the Pakistanis to sever ties with the Taliban, suggesting that if there wasn't improvement, the United States would begin to take matters into its own hands.

"The key thing to bear in mind is that the administration is not naive about Pakistan," an Obama administration official said. "The problem with the Pakistanis is that the more you threaten them, the more they become entrenched and don't see a path forward with you."

Most of the voluminous store of classified reports reflects the daily grind of life in Afghanistan as covered in news reports for the past several years. In them, junior officers complain about poorly equipped Afghan forces, corrupt Afghan government officials and a U.S. war effort that at times seemed to be seriously wanting for resources.

In one document, a team of civil affairs soldiers reports donating money for an orphanage that is supposed to help about 100 fatherless children and finding later that only about 30 boys and girls were being helped. Also missing were the stores of rice, grain and cooking oil that the troops had provided. "We found very few orphans living there and could not find most of the HA [humanitarian assistance] we had given them," the report states.

Other reports give accounts of police chiefs skimming the pay of their patrol officers or placing nonexistent "ghost" troops on their rolls so that they could pocket the additional salaries.

Another report that chronicles a massive Taliban attack on Combat Outpost Keating in eastern Afghanistan quotes frantic radio calls from an overwhelmed U.S. lieutenant seeking air support to hold off the much larger Taliban force. The attack on the base was chronicled in a Washington Post report this year, based on interviews with the officer and his troops.

At times the U.S. troops show a lack of knowledge about Afghanistan, botching the names of cities and the relationships between senior Afghan officials.

The reports highlight how civilian casualties resulting from mistakes on the battlefield have alienated Afghans. Over the past year, civilian casualties in Afghanistan have dropped significantly. But many of the problems referred to in the memo -- a resilient Taliban, porous borders with Pakistani safe havens and largely ineffectual Afghan government -- remain.