You Can Run But You Cannot Hide

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On one side it proclaims: “You can run but you cannot hide” etched above a golden image of Seal Team 6 – the kill squad who finally brought the elusive cat down. On the other side it reads: “Justice has been done” next to three iconic engravings of the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and Flight 93.

The intellectual cowardice of Bradley Manning’s critics

Those wanting the Army Private imprisoned are afraid to condemn the virtually identical acts of Daniel Ellsberg
Glenn Greenwald
Saturday, Dec 24, 2011
http://www.salon.com/2011/12/24/the_intellectual_cowardice_of_bradley_mannings_critics

After imprisoning Private First Class Bradley Manning for eighteen months, the U.S. Army last week finally began the preliminary stage of his court-martial proceeding, and that initial process ended on Thursday. Manning faces over 30 charges; the most serious — “aiding the enemy” — carries a death sentence (though prosecutors are requesting “only” life in prison for the 24-year-old soldier). The technical purpose of this week’s hearing was to determine if there is sufficient evidence to warrant a full court-martial proceeding; the finding (that there is such evidence) is a virtual inevitability. Manning’s counsel, Lt. Col. David Coombs, spent the week challenging the Army’s evidence, suggesting that his client may have suffered “diminished capacity” by virtue of his gender struggles and emotional instability, and finally, forcefully arguing that the leaks were an act of political conscience and that the Army has severely “overcharged” Manning in an attempt to coerce incriminating statements against WikiLeaks (Kevin Gosztola and The Guardian were at the hearing and have recaps of what happened over the last week; my general view of Manning was set forth in an Op-Ed in The Guardian last week, and my specific view of the gender defense is here).

For the moment, I want to make one narrow point about Bradley Manning. I’ve made it before but it was really underscored for me by a debate I had on an Al Jazeera program Thursday night regarding Manning with Daniel Ellsberg and the neocon activist Cliff May, who vigorously defended the Obama administration’s treatment of Manning:

Ever since Manning was accused of being the source for the WikiLeaks disclosures, those condemning these leaks have sought to distinguish them from Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers. With virtual unanimity, Manning’s harshest critics have contended that while Ellsberg’s leak was justifiable and noble, Manning’s alleged leaks were not; that’s because, they claim, Ellsberg’s leak was narrowly focused and devoted to exposing specific government lies, while Manning’s was indiscriminate and a far more serious breach of secrecy. When President Obama declared Manning guilty, he made the same claim: “No it wasn’t the same thing. Ellsberg’s material wasn’t classified in the same way.”

One problem for those wishing to make this claim is that Ellsberg himself has been one of Manning’s most vocal defenders, repeatedly insisting that the two leaks are largely indistinguishable. But the bigger problem for this claim is how blatantly irrational it is. As Ellsberg clearly details in this Al Jazeera debate, he — Ellsberg — dumped 7,000 pages of Top Secret documents: the highest known level of classification; by contrast, not a single page of what Manning is alleged to have leaked was Top Secret, but rather all bore a much lower-level secrecy designation. In that sense, Obama was right: “Ellsberg’s material wasn’t classified in the same way” — the secrets Ellsberg leaked were classified as being far more sensitive.

To the extent one wants to distinguish the two leaks, Ellsberg’s was the far more serious breach of secrecy. The U.S. Government’s own pre-leak assessment of the sensitivities of these documents proves that. How can someone — in the name of government secrecy and national security — praise the release of thousands of pages of Top Secret documents while vehemently condemning the release of documents bearing a much lower secrecy classification?

Nor is there any way to distinguish the substance of the two leaks. While the Pentagon Papers exposed the lies from American leaders regarding the Vietnam War, the WikiLeaks disclosures have done exactly the same with regard to the Iraq War, the war in Afghanistan, and a whole litany of other critical events. Here is what Ellen Knickmeyer, the Baghdad Bureau Chief for The Washington Post during the Iraq War, documented about the Iraq War logs Manning is accused of releasing:

Thanks to WikiLeaks, though, I now know the extent to which top American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world, as the Iraq mission exploded.

Is that not exactly what makes so many people view the Pentagon Papers leak as noble and just? Even some of Manning’s fellow soldiers in Iraq have hailed the WikiLeaks leaker as a hero. Beyond that, the diplomatic cables and war logs released by WikiLeaks revealed falsehoods and improprieties from the U.S. government (and other governments around the world) in a wide range of areas: its involvement in the covert war in Yemen; lies told by the U.S. Government regarding horrific, civilian-slaughtering incidents in Iraq; and, in general, numerous acts of abuses, deceit and illegality regarding much of what was done under the War on Terror rubric: exactly as the Pentagon Papers did.

Nor, if the U.S. Government’s evidence is to be believed, can there be any doubt about the similarity in motives between the two leakers. Just as Ellsberg repeatedly explained that he could not in good conscience stand by and have the world remain ignorant of the government lies he discovered about the Vietnam War (a war he once supported and helped plan), so, too, did Manning repeatedly state that these leaks were vital for informing the world about the depths of brutality, corruption and deceit driving these wars (including one war to which he was deployed as a soldier) — all with the goal of triggering what he called “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.” In the purported chats he had, Manning described how the intense worldwide reaction to the video of an Apache helicopter shooting unarmed civilians and a Reuters journalist in Baghdad “gave me immense hope”; that’s because: “i want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” That is as pure an expression as possible of exactly what motivated Ellsberg as well.

Just as Ellsberg came to realize the evil of the war of which he was a part and felt compelled to act to expose it even at the risk of his own liberty, so, too, did Manning (in the chat logs Manning purportedly said: “im not so much scared of getting caught and facing consequences at this point… as i am of being misunderstood”). The Army Private also explained in the chat logs that he began to realize how heinous the Iraq War was when he discovered that “insurgents” being rounded up and imprisoned by the U.S. Army were doing nothing more than issuing “scholarly critiques” of the Malaki government’s corruption — only to find that his Army superiors ignored his discovery when he brought it to their attention. Both Ellsberg and (allegedly) Manning then did the same thing: turned over the information they discovered to a third party to select the parts that should be published to the world (The New York Times for Ellsberg and WikiLeaks for Manning).

What’s really going on here in this Manning v. Ellsberg comparison is pure intellectual cowardice. At this point — four decades after it happened — most people are unwilling to stand up and publicly condemn the Pentagon Papers leak. In progressive circles, it has long been entrenched dogma that Ellsberg’s leak was just and noble and that the Nixon administration’s efforts to prosecute Ellsberg were ignoble. Ellsberg has hero status, and deservedly so: he risked his life, literally, to expose to the world just how systematic and deliberate was the U.S. Government’s deceit about the Vietnam War and how heinous was the war itself.

As a result, very few people are willing to condemn what he did (even the neocon May, in this Al Jazeera debate, was afraid to say that what Ellsberg did was wrong). So in order to condemn Manning — and, as importantly, if not more so, to defend the Obama administration — it’s necessary for Manning’s critics to contrive distinctions between the Pentagon Papers leak and the WikiLeaks disclosure: of course I approve of what Ellsberg did — all Decent People do — but what Manning is accused of doing is radically different and just awful: he must be punished.

The clear reality, though, is that those who condemn Manning now and want to see him imprisoned for decades are the direct heirs of those who, in the early 1970s, wanted to see Dan Ellsberg imprisoned for life. Those who now condemn both Ellsberg and Manning — like those who support the executive power abuses and secrecy of both the Bush and Obama administrations — are authoritarians to be sure, but at least they’re sincere and consistent in their views; it’s those who support one but condemn the other who are incoherent at best.

As Ellsberg himself makes clear, everything that is being said now to condemn Manning — everything – was widely said about Ellsberg at the time of his leak. Back then, Ellsberg was repeatedly accused of being a traitor, of violating his oath, of endangering America’s national security, of aiding its enemies, of taking the law into his own hands; he was smeared and had his sanity continuously called into question. Had it not been for the Nixon administration’s overzealous attempts to destroy him by breaking into the office of his psychiatrist — the primary act that caused the charges against Ellsberg to be dismissed on the grounds of government misconduct — there is a real possibility that Ellsberg would still be in a federal prison today. He’s viewed as a hero now only because the passage of time has proven the nobility of his act: it’s much easier to defend those who challenge and subvert political power retrospectively than it is to do so at the time.

As the Walkely Foundation recognized last month when awarding WikiLeaks and Julian Assange Australia’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize: “the secret cables [] create[d] more scoops in a year than most journalists could imagine in a lifetime.” Those who want to see Manning punished and imprisoned for decades are driven by exactly the same mentality as those who wanted to see Ellsberg in prison back then: a belief that the U.S. Government has the right to use secrecy to hide its acts of deceit and illegality, and that those who expose such acts to the world are the real criminals. Just as the Obama administration’s obsessive persecution of whistleblowers has its roots in the secrecy-worshipping mentality of the Nixon administration — in her New Yorker article on the war on whistleblowers, Jane Mayer quotes Gabriel Schoenfeld as saying: “Obama has presided over the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history—even more so than Nixon” — those demanding Manning’s punishment are, in every sense, the Nixonians of today. Manning’s critics are made from the same authoritarian cloth as those demanding Dan Ellsberg’s scalp in 1971. They should at least be honest enough to admit that, and stop contriving blatantly false distinctions between the two cases.

Over 700,000 New Vets Seek Health Care, Half with Mental Problems

Mark Benjamin Monday, October 3, 2011
http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2011/10/03/over-700000-new-vets-seek-health-care-half-with-mental-problems/

Nearly three-quarters of a million veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan who are now out of the military have sought medical care from the government, and more than half of those service members suffer from a mental health condition, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

These are among the stunning numbers in a new report compiled by Veterans for Common Sense, a veterans' advocacy organization. VCS shared the new report with TIME prior to public release scheduled for this week. The group culled the information from government data mostly obtained through a raft of Freedom of Information Act requests submitted to the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The bullet-point report portrays the sweeping impact of a decade of war on U.S. troops, including the fact that over 2.2 million service members have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and 42 percent of those troops have deployed to war two times or more.

The study reports the 6,211 deaths and 45,889 troops wounded in action so far, but it also sheds light on a dirty little secret about how the Pentagon has long minimized the number of reported casualties by excluding the number of injuries that are not the direct result of the bullets and bombs of the enemy. Another 56,874 service members have been medically evacuated from Iraq or Afghanistan because of accidents and other injuries. That brings the total number of casualties to 108,974.

The Pentagon says those 56,874 troops mostly are not casualties, but troops evacuated for medical problems unrelated to service. Go visit Walter Reed and chat with the troops banged up in Humvee wrecks and other incidents and tell them that. Also, the Pentagon's own dictionary (yes, they have one) defines a casualty as, “Any person who is lost to the organization by having been declared dead, duty status - whereabouts unknown, missing, ill, or injured.”

The precise number of service members back from war, out of the military, and seeking treatment from the VA is 711,986, according to VCS. More that half of those troops, 367,749, suffers from a mental health condition.

A typical veteran is in his early twenties. The U.S. will be caring for hundreds of thousands of these vets for decades.

Austerity For Everyone, Except The DOD

07.13.2011
http://www.diatribemedia.com/2011/07/13/austerity-for-everyone-except-the-dod

While Congress and the President fight it out over the debt ceiling and all of America quietly shudders over whether our economy will completely default on itself, at least one industry still hums along without a care in the world. Amidst a fiscal crisis of apparently apocalyptic proportions, where the GOP demands dollar for dollar spending cuts from the budget in order to raise our debt limit, the Pentagon asked Congress for $264 million to cover part of a $771 million overrun on the F-35 program. The Hill reports Republican Senator John McCain let the news slip via Twitter, saying “Congress notified that first F-35 jets have cost overruns of $771M. Outrageous! Pentagon asking for $264M down payment now. Disgraceful.”

Leaders of the program Lockheed Martin spat back on Twitter, contending “The F-35 team is focused on reducing costs of the jets and is showing significant improvement in key areas,” to which the ranking Senate Armed Services Committee member McCain said “taxpayers deserve better.”

So while Democrats and Republicans fight over who to blame for our economy once again heading towards the brink of destruction, the machinations of war continue to roll. As I pointed out back when the GOP first released their suggested budget cuts: the Pentagon spends nearly $122 million per plane building the F-35 fighter jet. The 2011 budget calls for more than $11 billion for the planes, none of which have been delivered since development and production began ten years ago. By 2016, the military wants 2,443 F-35s at an estimated cost of close to $329 billion. In other words, by scrapping just one percent of that order, a number that wouldn’t even dent our 20 to one lead in planes over the Chinese military, we would save most of the aforementioned social programs.

Of course, the Defense Department and its pet contractors believe any kind of spending cuts, even on a program to build a plane that has no mission, would be catastrophic. Top defense trade organization Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) President Marion Blakey argued in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner “understand the unique national security threats posed by skyrocketing debt, but we believe those threats will only be compounded if funding for the Department of Defense is cut precipitously during this critical stage of budget reduction negotiations.” Blakey went on to say “Any cuts to defense must be generated in a careful and thoughtful manner, guided by our military leaders.” In other words, if we stop spending mountains of money on pet defense projects, we’ll tank the economy, which will threaten our national security. If Congress really needs to perform a song and dance to show that everyone is pitching in, even the Pentagon, they need to let the wolves guard the hen house.

All of the bluster, talk of “tough decisions” and suggestions of sacrifice surrounding our continually sinking economy come with one big fat exemption – defense spending. If we’re truly nearing an economic apocalypse, why is one third of the budget still off the cutting board?

All the crimes Richard Nixon committed against me are now legal

Answering today's OFF-SET questions is Daniel Ellsberg, author, defense analyst and prominent whistleblower.
Jay Kernis - Senior Producer
June 7th, 2011
http://inthearena.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/07/daniel-ellsberg-all-the-crimes-richard-nixon-committed-against-me-are-now-legal

He is the subject of a documentary about his life, "The Most Dangerous Man in America," nominated for a 2010 Academy Award, which took its title from the words former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger used to describe Ellsberg in 1971.

In the 1960s, Ellsberg was a high-level Pentagon official, a former Marine commander who believed the American government was always on the right side. But while working for the administration of Lyndon Johnson, Ellsberg had access to a top-secret document that revealed senior American leaders, including several presidents, knew that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire.

Officially titled "United States-Viet Nam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense,"–the Pentagon Papers, as they became known–also showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In, 1971, Ellsberg leaked all 7,000 pages to The Washington Post, and 18 other newspapers, including The New York Times, which published them.

Not long after, he surrendered to authorities and confessed to being the leaker. Ellsberg was charged as a spy. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed on grounds of governmental misconduct against him. In April 1973, the court learned that Nixon had ordered his so-called "Plumbers Unit" to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to steal documents they hoped might make the whistle-blower appear crazy. In May, more evidence of government illegal wiretapping was revealed. The charges against Ellsberg were dropped. This led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

The federal government has now declassified the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon Presidential Library & Museum will release the documents on June 13, forty years to the day that leaked portions of the report were published on the front page of The New York Times.

In this interview, Ellsberg says, "Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, would feel vindicated that all the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal. " (Thanks to the Patriot Act and other laws passed in recent years.) And he says all presidents since Nixon have violated the constitution, most recently President Obama, with the bombing of Libya.


Until now, the public has been able to read only the small portions of the report that you leaked. What do you think the impact of releasing all 7,000 pages might be?

The "declassification" of the Pentagon Papers–exactly forty years late–is basically a non-event. The notion that "only small portions" of the report were released forty years ago is pure hype by the Nixon Library. Nearly all of the study–except for the negotiations volumes, which were mostly declassified over twenty years ago– became available in 1971, between the redacted (censored) Government Printing Office edition and the Senator Gravel edition put out by Beacon Press.

It would be helpful if the publishers indicated, by brackets or different type, what was withheld earlier. But that would be very embarrassing to the Library and the government; I'll be surprised if they do it. Most of the omissions in the GPO edition "for security"–a ridiculous claim, since their substance was nearly all available to the world in the simultaneous Gravel/Beacon Press edition–will appear arbitrary and unjustified.

I'd really like to see someone–a journalist or an anti-secrecy NGO– compare this version in detail with the redacted white space in the 1971 GPO edition, for a measure of what the government has regarded as necessarily classified for the last forty years. And then ask: just why was most of what was released by the GPO, covering 1945 to1968, kept secret as late as 1971? Hint: it wasn't for "national security."

What that comparison would newly reveal is the blatant violation of the spirit and letter of the FOIA declassification process by successive administrations (including the present one), in rejecting frequent requests by historians and journalists for complete declassification of the Papers over the years.

But if the hype around this belated release got a new generation to read the Pentagon Papers or at least the summaries to the various volumes (my highest hope, pretty unlikely), they'd get from them as good an understanding as they could find anywhere today of our war in Afghanistan.


The Pentagon Papers didn't explicitly present that last alternative, but their release contributed to that result, eventually. Is it too much to hope that their re-release could do the same?

Yes, it is. But fortunately there are a few Congresspersons, like Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee, Walter Jones and Ron Paul who got that message the first time, even if the Republican and Democratic leadership hasn't, yet.


On June 23, 1971, in an interview with CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, you said, "I think the lesson is that the people of this country can’t afford to let the President run the country by himself, even foreign affairs, without the help of Congress, without the help of the public. I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions." How concerned are you that elected officials haven't learned those lessons?

I still stand by my cited conclusions, both for 1971 and for every single year since, including this one. But I never expected elected officials in the Executive branch (of which there are exactly two in each administration) or their myriad subordinates to "learn those lessons" or to accept them as warnings.

Leaders in the Executive branch–in every country– know what they're doing, and why they're doing it, and they always want to stay in office and keep on running things with as little interference from Congress, the public and the courts as possible: which means, with as much secrecy as they can manage. So I'm not exactly concerned that they're still at it (which is why I'm still at what I do), since that is so predictable, in every government, tyrannical or "democratic."

Our Founders sought to prevent this. Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, for the first time in constitutional history,put the decision to go to war (beyond repelling sudden attacks) exclusively in the hands of Congress, not the president. But every president since Harry Truman in Korea–as the Pentagon Papers demonstrated up through LBJ, but beyond them to George W. Bush and Barack Obama–has violated the spirit and even the letter of that section of the Constitution (along with some others) they each swore to preserve, protect and defend.

However, as has been pointed out repeatedly by Glenn Greenwald, and Bruce Ackerman , David Swanson and others, no president has so blatantly violated the constitutional division of war powers as President Obama in his ongoing attack on Libya, without a nod even to the statutory War Powers Act, that post-Pentagon Papers effort by Congress to recapture something of the role assigned exclusively to it by the Constitution.

This open disregard of a ruling statute (regardless of his supposed feelings about its constitutionality, which Obama has not even bothered to express) is clearly an impeachable offense, though it will certainly not lead to impeachment–given the current complicity of the leaders of both parties–any more than President George W. Bush's misleading Congress into his crime against the peace, aggression, in Iraq, or President Johnson's lies to obtain the Tonkin Gulf Resolution.

Yet the most important point, as I see it, is not the secrecy and the lying, or even the blatant disregard of the Constitution, the Presidential oath and the rule of law.

As the Pentagon Papers documented for the much of the Vietnam era (we still lack, and we still need, the corresponding Papers for the Nixon policy-making, that added over twenty thousand names unnecessarily to the Vietnam Memorial and over a million deaths in Vietnam) and the last decade confirms: the point is that the Founders had it right the first time.

As Abraham Lincoln explained their intention (in defending to his former law partner William Herndon his opposition to President Polk's deliberately provoked Mexican War): "The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."

As Lincoln put it, the alternative approach (which we have actually followed in the last sixty years) "places our President where kings have always stood." And the upshot of that undue, unquestioning trust in the president and his Executive branch is: smart people get us into stupid (and wrongful) wars, and their equally smart successors won't get us out of them.

Either we the people will press elected officials in Congress–on pain of losing their jobs–to take up their Constitutional responsibilities once again and to end by defunding our illegal, unjustifiable (and now, financially insupportable) military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and air attacks on Pakistan, Libya and Yemen: or those bloody stalemates will continue indefinitely.


In March–at the age of 79–you were arrested in front of the White House–and then again outside of Quantico military prison–while protesting in support of Army private Bradley Manning, accused of being the Wikileaks leaker. Manning, charged with 34 counts including "aiding the enemy," faces life in prison and possibly, execution. Have you been able to communicate with Bradley?

It was then almost impossible to communicate with Bradley Manning, and I have so far done so only through his few visitors. In front of the White House and at Quantico, I was attempting to communicate with those holding him prisoner, to protest the abusive and illegal conditions of his detention, amounting not only to punishment of someone not tried, convicted or sentenced but to torture forbidden by domestic and international law and the Constitution even as punishment.


Do you believe what Bradley did was necessary and heroic?

Yes.


Do you still have all 7000 pages of the Pentagon Papers?

I don't really know. Hundreds of boxes of files have gone from storage into my basement, and my old copies of the Papers may or may not be somewhere in there. I'm not going to go searching among them for the still-classified eleven words.


These days, when you find yourself thinking about Richard Nixon, what comes to mind?

Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life. (And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.)

He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal.

That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst's office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to "incapacitate me totally" (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama,with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama's executive orders. they have all become legal.

There is no further need for present or future presidents to commit obstructions of justice (like Nixon's bribes to potential witnesses) to conceal such acts. Under the new laws, Nixon would have stayed in office, and the Vietnam War would have continued at least several more years.

Likewise, where Nixon was the first president in history to use the 54-year-old Espionage Act to indict an American (me) for unauthorized disclosures to the American people (it had previously been used, as intended, exclusively against spies), he would be impressed to see that President Obama has now brought five such indictments against leaks, almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together (three).

He could only admire Obama's boldness in using the same Espionage Act provisions used against me–almost surely unconstitutional used against disclosures to the American press and public in my day, less surely under the current Supreme Court–to indict Thomas Drake, a classic whistleblower who exposed illegality and waste in the NSA.

Drake's trial begins on June 13, the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. If Nixon were alive, he might well choose to attend.

* * *

*MORE BIO: After graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in Economics, he studied for a year at King’s College, Cambridge University, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Between 1954 and 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander.

From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision. His research leading up to this dissertation—in particular his work on what has become known as the “Ellsberg Paradox,” first published in an article entitled "Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms"—is widely considered a landmark in decision theory and behavioral economics.

In 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. In 1961 he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

Ellsberg joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) John McNaughton, working on the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification in the field.

On his return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, Ellsberg worked on the top secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Ellsberg is the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006 he was awarded the 2006 Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden, “. . for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.”

Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing.

He is a Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

Harry Belafonte Explodes the Presidential "Make Me Do It" Myth

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Tue, 05/17/2011
http://blackagendareport.com/content/harry-belafonte-explodes-presidential-make-me-do-it-myth

Does President Obama really want us to “make him do it,” to organize and agitate and create the conditions that will let him end the wars, cut the military budget, create jobs and address the hyper-incarceration of black and brown youth? Or is the “make me do it” president an urban legend who lives only inside our heads? A recent presidential encounter with Harry Belafonte tells more than some of us may want to know.

There is a popular myth which explains President Barack Obama's reluctance to stand up to Pentagon militarists, Wall Street banksters and corporate greedheads. This myth excuses the president for ignoring massive black unemployment and not providing his promised path to citizenship for the undocumented, for not using presidential authority to halt the foreclosure epidemic, or curbing the hyper-incarceration of black and brown youth. The myth of course, is that President Barack Obama really does want to do all these things and more, but if they haven't happened it's because we the people have abandoned our responsibility to somehow “make him do it.”

The myth stems from the apocryphal story of a meeting between African American labor leader A. Philip Randolph and President Franklin Roosevelt back in the 1940s. Randolph laid out black America's list of demands for economic and social justice. In response, Roosevelt said he wanted to do all of it, but that Randolph and the movement of that time would still have to “make him” do these things.

Applied to the Obama presidency however, “make me do it” is a popular myth. It's popular because the president and his lackeys repeat it endlessly. It's a myth because it's not true. Longtime activist Harry Belafonte, who played a key role in the Freedom Movement of the fifties and sixties, exploded the myth in a Democracy Now interview broadcast on May 16.

Belafonte was asked by host Amy Goodman whether he'd used his occasional access to directly share his many critical and valuable public policy insights with the White House. Belafonte replied that his only access to the president has been for a few seconds at a time, not long enough for any substantive discussion. But, he said, at one such event President Obama approached him to inquire when Belafonte and Cornel West were going “to cut me some slack.”

“What makes you think we haven't?” Belafonte replied to the president? At this point the brief encounter was over.

Let's pause to think about that. When President Obama cusses out Cornel West and personally demands that historic stalwarts of the movement for peace and justice “cut him some slack” on black unemployment, on foreclosures and the prison state, on torture and the military budget, on unjust wars and corporate welfare, on fulfilling the just demands of those who elected him, our first black president is revealing his real self. Far from saying “make me do it,” President Obama is saying how dare you pressure me to do what you elected me to do.

Harry Belafonte has done a great public service in helping us distinguish the imaginary Barack Obama of “make me do it” from the real Barack Obama, who demands our support, but expects us to “cut him some slack.” Rather than agitating and organizing in our communities to “make him do it” all the real President Obama wants of movement activists is for us to sit down and shut up, until it's time to help chase everybody out to vote for him in 2012.

By then, there will be fewer chasers, and somewhat less chasing than in 2008. But this will be something that President Obama made us do, not the other way around. For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and is based in Marietta GA, where he is on the state committee of the Georgia Green Party.

Americans Are Living In 1984

Paul Craig Roberts
May 10, 2011

The White House’s “death of bin Laden” story has come apart at the seams. Will it make any difference that before 48 hours had passed the story had changed so much that it no longer bore any resemblance to President Obama’s Sunday evening broadcast and has lost all credibility?

So far it has made no difference to the once-fabled news organization, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), which on March 9, eight days later, is still repeating the propaganda that the SEALs killed bin Laden in his Pakistani compound, where bin Laden lived next door to the Pakistani Military Academy surrounded by the Pakistani army.

Not even the president of Pakistan finds the story implausible. The BBC reports that the president is launching a full-scale investigation of how bin Laden managed to live for years in an army garrison town without being noticed.

For most Americans the story began and ended with four words: “we got bin Laden.” The celebrations, the sweet taste of revenge, of triumph and victory over “the most dangerous man on the planet” are akin to the thrill experienced by sports fans when their football team defeats the unspeakable rival or their baseball team wins the World Series. No fan wants to hear the next day that it is not so, that it is all a mistake. If these Americans years from now come across a story that the killing of bin Laden was an orchestrated news event to boost other agendas, they will dismiss the report as the ravings of a pinko-liberal-commie.

Everyone knows we killed bin Laden. How could it be otherwise? We–the indispensable people, the virtuous nation, the world’s only superpower, the white hats–were destined to prevail. No other outcome was possible.

No one will notice that those who fabricated the story forgot to show the kidney dialysis machine that, somehow, kept bin Laden alive for a decade. No doctors were on the premises.

No one will remember that Fox News reported in December, 2001, that Osama bin Laden had passed away from his illnesses.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,41576,00.html

If bin Laden beat all odds and managed to live another decade to await, unarmed and undefended, the arrival of the Navy SEALS last week, how it is possible that the “terror mastermind,” who defeated not merely the CIA and FBI, but all 16 US intelligence agencies along with those of America’s European allies and Israel, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, NORAD, Air Traffic Control, airport security four times on the same morning, etc. etc., never enjoyed another success, not even a little, very minor one? What was the “terror mastermind” doing for a decade after 9/11?

The “death of bin Laden” serves too many agendas that cover the political spectrum for the obvious falsity of the story to be recognized by very many. Patriots are euphoric that America won over bin Laden. Progressives have seized on the story to excoriate the United States for extra-judicial murder that brutalizes us all. Some on the left-wing bought into the 9/11 story because of the emotional satisfaction they received from oppressed Arabs striking back at their imperialist oppressors. These left-wingers are delighted that it took the incompetent Americans an entire decade to find bin Laden, who was hiding in plain view. The American incompetence in finding bin Laden simply, in their minds, proves the incompetence of the US government, which failed to protect Americans against the 9/11 attack.

Those who ordered, and those who wrote, totally incompetent legal memos that torture was permissible under US and international law, thereby setting up George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for the possibility of prosecution, are riding the euphoria of bin Laden’s death by declaring that it was torture that led the American assassins to bin Laden. All of a sudden, torture, which had fallen back into the disrepute in which it had been for centuries, is again in the clear. Anything that leads to the elimination of bin Laden is
a valid instrument.

Those, who want to increase the pressure on Pakistan to shut up about Americans murdering Pakistani citizens in Pakistan from the air and from troops on the ground, have gained a new club with which to beat the Pakistani government into submission: “you hid bin Laden from us.”

Those who want to continue to fatten the profits of the military/security complex and the powers of Homeland Security, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, use bin Laden’s second, or ninth, death as proof that America is being successful in its war on terror and that the war must continue on such a successful path until all enemies are slain.

Most ominous of all was the statement by the CIA director that bin Laden’s death would lead to new attacks on America and new 9/11s from al Qaeda seeking revenge. This warning, issued within a few hours of President Obama’s Sunday evening address, telegraphed the inevitable “al Qaeda” Internet posting that America would suffer a new 9/11s for killing their leader.

If the Taliban knew in December 2001 that bin Laden was dead, does anyone think that al Qaeda didn’t know it? Indeed, no member of the public has any way of knowing if al Qaeda is anything more than a bogyman organization created by the CIA which issues “al Qaeda” announcements. The evidence that al Qaeda’s announcements are issued by the CIA is very strong. The various videos of bin Laden for the last nine years have been shown by experts to be fakes. Why would bin Laden issue a fake video? Why did bin Laden cease issuing videos and only issue audios? A person running a world-wide terrorist organization should be able to produce videos. He would also be surrounded by better protectors than a couple of women. Where was al Qaeda, which according to former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, consists of “the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth.” Had these most dangerous men alive abandoned their leader?

The CIA director’s warning of future terrorist attacks, followed by a suspect “al Qaeda” threat of the same, suggests that if the American public continues to lose its enthusiasm for the governments open-ended wars, which are conducted at the expense of the US budget deficit, the dollar’s exchange value, inflation, Social Security, Medicare, income support programs, jobs, recovery, and so forth, “al Qaeda” will again outwit all 16 US intelligence agencies, those of our allies, NORAD, airport security, Air Traffic Control, etc. etc., and inflict the world’s only superpower with another humiliating defeat that will invigorate American support for “the war on terror.”

I believe that “al Qaeda” could blow up the White House or Congress or both and that the majority of Americans would fall for the story, just as the Germans, a better educated and more intelligent population, fell for the Reichstag Fire–as did a number of historians.

The reason I say this is that Americans have succumbed to propaganda that has conditioned them to believe that they are under attack by practically omnipotent adversaries. Proof of this is broadcast every day. For example, on March 9, I heard over National Public Radio in Atlanta that Emory University, a private university of some distinction, treated its 3,500 graduating class to a commencement address by Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security.

This is the agency that has goons feeling the genitals of young children and adults and which has announced that it intends to expand this practice from air travelers to shopping malls, bus and train stations. That a serious university invited such a low-lifer, who clearly has no respect for American civil liberty and is devoid of any sort of sense of what is appropriate, to address a graduating class of southern elite is a clear indication that the Ministry of Truth has prevailed. Americans are living in George Orwell’s 1984.

For those who haven’t read Orwell’s classic prediction of our time, Big Brother, the government, could tell the “citizens” any lie and it was accepted unquestioningly. As a perceptive reader pointed out to me, we Americans, with our “free press,” are at this point today: “What is really alarming is the increasingly arrogant sloppiness of these lies, as though the government has become so profoundly confident of its ability to deceive people that they make virtually no effort to even appear credible.”

A people as gullible as Americans have no future.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously an editor for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.

Bigger than Bin Laden – America’s New Public Enemy No.1

Gerald Celente
TrendsResearch.com

KINGSTON, NY, 4 May 2011— From the fans at Citi Field in Flushing to the mobs at the White House gates, “USA, USA,” was the chant heard across the nation. Jubilant Americans celebrated the breaking news that Public Enemy No.1, terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden was dead.

Ten years have passed since the Twin Towers toppled and the Pentagon was whacked. After two failing wars and billions of dollars spent on the global manhunt to bring in Bin Laden “Dead or Alive,” America has now claimed victory. “This is bigger than the moon landing, this is huge,” exclaimed Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera.

“Justice has been done,” intoned President Barack Obama announcing Bin Laden’s death. He not only called it “a good day for America,” but also declared that “The world is safer. It is a better place because of the death of Osama Bin Laden."

While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed the sentiment that “justice has been served,” she evidently took issue with the Presidential vision of a “safer” world, warning that terror “won’t stop with the death of Bin Laden, we must redouble our efforts.”

If it’s a “safer” world, why the need to “redouble our efforts”? These were but two of the contradictions coming from the White House in the early hours of the breaking story, and many discrepancies would follow. Some of them would be noted and debated, but totally absent from the 24/7 news coverage, political “high-fives” and patriotic triumphalism was the simple question: Why did Osama Bin Laden, former mujahedin ally of the United States, turn against it to become Public Enemy No.1?

Was it that he and his Al Qaeda fighters suddenly decided to hate America’s “freedom and liberties” as George W. Bush maintained? Or was it remotely possible that the attacks were motivated by US foreign policy – with its unconditional support of Israel and concomitant support of the same Middle East monarchs, autocrats and dictators now being toppled in the wave of revolution?

Also absent from America’s non-stop exultation and self-congratulation, absent from the acres of newsprint and the countless hours of air time, was any discussion of the practical consequences of the death of Bin Laden who, before making it back into the headlines, had been both a fading memory and a non-issue.

Osama Bin Who?

So irrelevant had Bin Laden and his jihad rhetoric become that, in the months preceding his assassination, every one of the uprisings occurring throughout the Middle East and North Africa was secular and in direct opposition to Bin Laden’s militant pan-Islamic vision.

In a sentence: There were no practical consequences whatsoever attending the death of Osama Bin Laden. It would do nothing to:

Help America win losing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Lower the unemployment rate.
Stop the US or European nations from sinking deeper into recessions and depression.
Revive failing real estate markets or solve the debt and deficit crises.
Lower oil and food prices.
Reverse the damage or stop the radioactive fallout from Fukushima.

What Osama’s death did do was boost the President’s sagging poll numbers and deflect public attention from the news that really mattered.

On Wednesday, April 27th, just four days before Bin Laden was killed, a new Public Enemy No.1 held his organization’s first ever press conference. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the world that the United States would continue its low interest rate polices and, in effect, continue to flood the world with cheap money.

The global equity markets immediately responded to the predictably destructive consequences. Before Bernanke ended the press conference, gold prices shot up $20 an ounce, silver $2, and the dollar fell to a 3 year low against a trade-weighted basket of currencies. Despite the Chairman’s claims to the contrary, the US dollar would continue to devalue and subsequently dollar based commodity prices would soar.

Needing neither a mountain lair nor sequestration behind closed Fed doors, the new Public Enemy No.1, “Osama” Ben Bernanke committed, in broad daylight, an act of financial terrorism that would have far reaching and long lasting implications for the American public. As the value of the dollar went down, the cost of nearly everything would go up…excepting the cost of “risk.”

This meant that financiers could continue to speculate and exploit the equity markets, with the profits going only to the 10 percent of Americans that owned 90 percent of the stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Moreover, the Fed reasoned the cheap dollar would also give a competitive edge to big US exporters. But as exports rose, so did the price of imports, putting further strains on average consumers whose real wages fell ever further behind the pace of inflation.

Bombs Away

What Osama Bin Laden’s death also did was to deflect attention from the US/NATO “humanitarian” mission in Libya, which, just two days earlier, had delivered several humanitarian bombs upon the home of Muammar Qaddafi’s son, killing him and three of his children.

The bungled attempt to assassinate Qaddafi (who had been visiting his son) was condemned by Russia, brought recriminations against NATO from other UN members for overstepping the UN mandate, and called into question the legality of the air strike. With a groundswell of public sympathy building around the world for Qaddafi’s murdered grandchildren, the very purpose and future of the entire mission was being called into question.

Trend Forecast: With the death of Osama Bin Laden, the restored, rebuilt, new and improved terror bandwagon rolls again…and it will keep rolling until Election Day 2012. Whether a real terror attack happens or not, Barack Obama, as he has done before, will take a page from the G.W. Bush playbook and keep the American public in a state of fear and hysteria.

And should terror strike the US, UK, France or other NATO ally, their governments, media “presstitutes,” pundits, and the public at large will debate and deplore the “cowardly act” and demand “swift justice.” They will blame Bin Laden sympathizers, Al Qaeda cells, Muammar Qaddafi, radical Islamists…but never will they blame themselves. They will refuse to acknowledge that what they called “terror” was nothing more than “revenge”; reprisal for foreign meddling in the domestic affairs of other nations, or retaliation for military invasions launched by the US, UK, France or other NATO ally upon a sovereign nation.

Meanwhile, back in DC, the Chairman of the Fed, Public Enemy No.1, “Osama” Ben Bernanke, will mastermind the destruction of the American dollar, the US economy and the purchasing power of the American people.

As we have been forecasting for years, gold, despite its recent pull back, is on-trend to reach $2000 per ounce (and possibly higher). And while Ben Bernanke claims that inflation is merely “transitory,” considering his penchant for printing trillions of digital dollars not worth the paper it’s not printed on, we see inflation as both entrenched and rising.

Osama bin Laden’s Second Death

Paul Craig Roberts
May 3, 2011

If today were April 1 and not May 2, we could dismiss as an April fool’s joke this morning’s headline that Osama bin Laden was killed in a firefight in Pakistan and quickly buried at sea. As it is, we must take it as more evidence that the US government has unlimited belief in the gullibility of Americans.

Making it official. The first post Osama press conference builds the foundation for the official fairy tale.

Think about it. What are the chances that a person allegedly suffering from kidney disease and requiring dialysis and, in addition, afflicted with diabetes and low blood pressure, survived in mountain hideaways for a decade? If bin Laden was able to acquire dialysis equipment and medical care that his condition required, would not the shipment of dialysis equipment point to his location? Why did it take ten years to find him?

Consider also the claims, repeated by a triumphalist US media celebrating bin Laden’s death, that “bin Laden used his millions to bankroll terrorist training camps in Sudan, the Philippines, and Afghanistan, sending ‘holy warriors’ to foment revolution and fight with fundamentalist Muslim forces across North Africa, in Chechnya, Tajikistan and Bosnia.” That’s a lot of activity for mere millions to bankroll (perhaps the US should have put him in charge of the Pentagon), but the main question is: how was bin Laden able to move his money about? What banking system was helping him? The US government succeeds in seizing the assets of people and of entire countries, Libya being the most recent. Why not bin Laden’s? Was he carrying around with him $100 million dollars in gold coins and sending emissaries to distribute payments to his far-flung operations?

This morning’s headline has the odor of a staged event. The smell reeks from the triumphalist news reports loaded with exaggerations, from celebrants waving flags and chanting “USA USA.” Could something else be going on?

No doubt President Obama is in desperate need of a victory. He committed the fool’s error of restarting the war in Afghanistan, and now after a decade of fighting the US faces stalemate, if not defeat. The wars of the Bush/Obama regimes have bankrupted the US, leaving huge deficits and a declining dollar in their wake. And re-election time is approaching.

The various lies and deceptions, such as “weapons of mass destruction,” of the last several administrations had terrible consequences for the US and the world. But not all deceptions are the same. Remember, the entire reason for invading Afghanistan in the first place was to get bin Laden. Now that President Obama has declared bin Laden to have been shot in the head by US special forces operating in an independent country and buried at sea, there is no reason for continuing the war.

Perhaps the precipitous decline in the US dollar in foreign exchange markets has forced some real budget reductions, which can only come from stopping the open-ended wars. Until the decline of the dollar reached the breaking point, Osama bin Laden, who many experts believe to have been dead for years, was a useful bogeyman to use to feed the profits of the US military/security complex.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously an editor for the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.

Pentagon Gives Dennis Kucinich Runaround

From FireDogLake.com:
Last we heard of Dennis Kucinich’s request to visit Bradley Manning, the Pentagon had spent a full month referring his request from one official to another rather than respond to his request.

On February 4, Dennis Kucinich asked DOD to allow him to visit Bradley Manning so he could assess his conditions of confinement. On February 8, Robert Gates wrote Kucinich a short note telling him we was referring his request to Secretary of the Army, John McHugh. In a letter dated February 24–but apparently not received in Kucinich’s office until March 1–McHugh told Kucinich he was referring his request to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs.

In short, a full month after the date when a member of Congress requested a visit with Manning, DOD is still stalling on a real response with bureaucratic buck-passing...

DOD Continues to Stall on Kucinich’s Request to Visit Bradley Manning
emptywheel
Monday March 14, 2011
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2011/03/14/dod-continues-to-stall-on-kucinichs-request-to-visit-bradley-manning/

This shameful abuse of Bradley Manning

The WikiLeaks suspect's mistreatment amounts to torture. Either President Obama knows this or he should make it his business
Daniel Ellsberg
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 March 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/11/bradley-manning-wikileaks

President Obama tells us that he's asked the Pentagon whether the conditions of confinement of Bradley Manning, the soldier charged with leaking state secrets, "are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards. They assure me that they are."

If Obama believes that, he'll believe anything. I would hope he would know better than to ask the perpetrators whether they've been behaving appropriately. I can just hear President Nixon saying to a press conference the same thing: "I was assured by the the White House Plumbers that their burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg's doctor in Los Angeles was appropriate and met basic standards."

When that criminal behaviour ordered from the Oval Office came out, Nixon faced impeachment and had to resign. Well, times have changed. But if President Obama really doesn't yet know the actual conditions of Manning's detention – if he really believes, as he's said, that "some of this [nudity, isolation, harassment, sleep-deprivation] has to do with Private Manning's wellbeing", despite the contrary judgments of the prison psychologist – then he's being lied to, and he needs to get a grip on his administration.

If he does know, and agrees that it's appropriate or even legal, that doesn't speak well for his memory of the courses he taught on constitutional law.

The president refused to comment on PJ Crowley's statement that the treatment of Manning is "ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid". Those words are true enough as far as they go – which is probably about as far as a state department spokesperson can allow himself to go in condemning actions of the defence department. But at least two other words are called for: abusive and illegal.

Crowley was responding to a question about the "torturing" of an American citizen, and, creditably, he didn't rebut that description. Prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, nudity – that's right out of the manual of the CIA for "enhanced interrogation". We've seen it applied in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. It's what the CIA calls "no-touch torture", and its purpose there, as in this case, is very clear: to demoralise someone to the point of offering a desired confession. That's what they are after, I suspect, with Manning. They don't care if the confession is true or false, so long as it implicates WikiLeaks in a way that will help them prosecute Julian Assange.

That's just my guess, as to their motives. But it does not affect the illegality of the behaviour. If I'm right, it's likely that such harsh treatment wasn't ordered at the level of a warrant officer or the brig commander. The fact that they have continued to inflict such suffering on the prisoner despite weeks of complaint from his defence counsel, harsh publicity and condemnation from organisations such as Amnesty International, suggests to me that it might have come from high levels of the defence department or the justice department, if not from the White House itself.

It's no coincidence that it's someone from the state department who has gone off-message to speak out about this. When a branch of the US government makes a mockery of our pretensions to honour the rule of law, specifically our obligation not to use torture, the state department bears the brunt of that, as it affects our standing in the world.

The fact that Manning's abusive mistreatment is going on at Quantico – where I spent nine months as a Marine officer in basic school – and that Marines are lying about it, makes me feel ashamed for the Corps. Just three years as an infantry officer was more than enough time for me to know that what is going on there is illegal behaviour that must be stopped and disciplined.

Obama’s FY 2012 Budget Is A Tool Of Class War

Paul Craig Roberts
Friday, February 18, 2011

Obama’s new budget is a continuation of Wall Street’s class war against the poor and middle class. Wall Street wasn’t through with us when the banksters sold their fraudulent derivatives into our pension funds, wrecked Americans’ job prospects and retirement plans, secured a $700 billion bailout at taxpayers’ expense while foreclosing on the homes of millions of Americans, and loaded up the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet with several trillion dollars of junk financial paper in exchange for newly created money to shore up the banks’ balance sheets. The effect of the Federal Reserve’s “quantitative easing” on inflation, interest rates, and the dollar’s foreign exchange value are yet to hit. When they do, Americans will get a lesson in poverty.

Now the ruling oligarchies have struck again, this time through the federal budget. The U.S. government has a huge military/security budget. It is as large as the budgets of the rest of the world combined. The Pentagon, CIA, and Homeland Security budgets account for the $1.1 trillion federal deficit that the Obama administration forecasts for fiscal year 2012. This massive deficit spending serves only one purpose–the enrichment of the private companies that serve the military/security complex. These companies, along with those on Wall Street, are who elect the U.S. government.

The U.S. has no enemies except those that the U.S. creates by bombing and invading other countries and by overthrowing foreign leaders and installing American puppets in their place.

China does not conduct naval exercises off the California coast, but the U.S. conducts war games in the China Sea off China’s coast. Russia does not mass troops on Europe’s borders, but the U.S. places missiles on Russia’s borders. The U.S. is determined to create as many enemies as possible in order to continue its bleeding of the American population to feed the ravenous military/security complex.

The U.S. government actually spends $56 billion a year, that is, $56,000 million, in order that American air travelers can be porno-scanned and sexually groped so that firms represented by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff can make large profits selling the scanning equipment.

With a perpetual budget deficit driven by the military/security complex’s desire for profits, the real cause of America’s enormous budget deficit is off-limits for discussion.

The U.S. Secretary of War-Mongering, Robert Gates, declared: “We shrink from our global security responsibilities at our peril.” The military brass warns of cutting any of the billions of aid to Israel and Egypt, two functionaries for its Middle East “policy.”

But what are “our” global security responsibilities? Where did they come from? Why would America be at peril if America stopped bombing and invading other countries and interfering in their internal affairs? The perils America faces are all self-created.

The answer to this question used to be that otherwise we would be murdered in our beds by “the worldwide communist conspiracy.” Today the answer is that we will be murdered in our airplanes, train stations, and shopping centers by “Muslim terrorists” and by a newly created imaginary threat–“domestic extremists,” that is, war protesters and environmentalists.

The U.S. military/security complex is capable of creating any number of false flag events in order to make these threats seem real to a public whose intelligence is limited to TV, shopping mall experiences, and football games.

So Americans are stuck with enormous budget deficits that the Federal Reserve must finance by printing new money, money that sooner or later will destroy the purchasing power of the dollar and its role as world reserve currency. When the dollar goes, American power goes.

For the ruling oligarchies, the question is: how to save their power.

Their answer is: make the people pay.

And that is what their latest puppet, President Obama, is doing.

With the U.S. in the worst recession since the Great Depression, a great recession that John Williams and Gerald Celente, along with myself, have said is deepening, the “Obama budget” takes aim at support programs for the poor and out-of-work. The American elites are transforming themselves into idiots as they seek to replicate in America the conditions that have led to the overthrows of similarly corrupt elites in Tunisia and Egypt and mounting challenges to U.S. puppet governments elsewhere.

All we need is a few million more Americans with nothing to lose in order to bring the disturbances in the Middle East home to America.

With the U.S. military bogged down in wars abroad, an American revolution would have the best chance of success.

American politicians have to fund Israel as the money returns in campaign contributions.

The U.S. government must fund the Egyptian military if there is to be any hope of turning the next Egyptian government into another American puppet that will serve Israel by continuing the blockade of the Palestinians herded into the Gaza ghetto.

These goals are far more important to the American elite than Pell Grants that enable poor Americans to obtain an education, or clean water, or community block grants, or the low income energy assistance program (cut by the amount that U.S. taxpayers are forced to give to Israel).

There are also $7,700 million of cuts in Medicaid and other health programs over the next five years.

Given the magnitude of the U.S. budget deficit, these sums are a pittance. The cuts will have no effect on U.S. Treasury financing needs. They will put no brakes on the Federal Reserve’s need to print money in order to keep the U.S. government in operation.

These cuts serve one purpose: to further the Republican Party’s myth that America is in economic trouble because of the poor: The poor are shiftless. They won’t work. The only reason unemployment is high is that the poor had rather be on welfare.

A new addition to the welfare myth is that recent middle class college graduates won’t take the jobs offered them, because their parents have too much money, and the kids like living at home without having to do anything. A spoiled generation, they come out of university refusing any job that doesn’t start out as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The reason that engineering graduates do not get job interviews is that they do not want them.

What all this leads to is an assault on “entitlements”, which means Social Security and Medicare. The elites have programmed, through their control of the media, a large part of the population, especially those who think of themselves as conservatives, to conflate “entitlements” with welfare. America is going to hell not because of foreign wars that serve no American purpose, but because people, who have paid 15% of their payroll all their lives for old age pensions and medical care, want “handouts” in their retirement years. Why do these selfish people think that working Americans should be forced through payroll taxes to pay for the pensions and medical care of the retirees? Why didn’t the retirees consume less and prepare for their own retirement?

The elite’s line, and that of their hired spokespersons in “think tanks” and universities, is that America is in trouble because of its retirees.

Too many Americans have been brainwashed to believe that America is in trouble because of its poor and its retirees. America is not in trouble because it coerces a dwindling number of taxpayers to support the military/security complex’s enormous profits, American puppet governments abroad, and Israel.

The American elite’s solution for America’s problems is not merely to foreclose on the homes of Americans whose jobs were sent offshore, but to add to the numbers of distressed Americans with nothing to lose the sick and the dispossessed retirees, and the university graduates who cannot find jobs that have been sent to China and India.

Of all the countries in the world, none need a revolution as bad as the United States, country ruled by a handful of selfish oligarchs who have more income and wealth than can be spent in a lifetime.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand.

Great Quotes: Daniel Ellsberg

"EVERY attack now made on Assange and Wikileaks was made against me and release of Pentagon Papers."

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks

Iraq war logs: secret files show how US ignored torture
• Massive leak reveals serial detainee abuse
• 15,000 unknown civilian deaths in war
Nick Davies, Jonathan Steele and David Leigh
guardian.co.uk, Friday 22 October 2010

A grim picture of the US and Britain's legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes.

Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

The new logs detail how:

• US authorities failed to investigate hundreds of reports of abuse, torture, rape and even murder by Iraqi police and soldiers whose conduct appears to be systematic and normally unpunished.

• A US helicopter gunship involved in a notorious Baghdad incident had previously killed Iraqi insurgents after they tried to surrender.

• More than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents. US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities.

The numerous reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles, and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks. Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death.

As recently as December the Americans were passed a video apparently showing Iraqi army officers executing a prisoner in Tal Afar, northern Iraq. The log states: "The footage shows approximately 12 Iraqi army soldiers. Ten IA soldiers were talking to one another while two soldiers held the detainee. The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the IA soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him and shooting him."

The report named at least one perpetrator and was passed to coalition forces. But the logs reveal that the coalition has a formal policy of ignoring such allegations. They record "no investigation is necessary" and simply pass reports to the same Iraqi units implicated in the violence. By contrast all allegations involving coalition forces are subject to formal inquiries. Some cases of alleged abuse by UK and US troops are also detailed in the logs.

In two Iraqi cases postmortems revealed evidence of death by torture. On 27 August 2009 a US medical officer found "bruises and burns as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs and neck" on the body of one man claimed by police to have killed himself. On 3 December 2008 another detainee, said by police to have died of "bad kidneys", was found to have "evidence of some type of unknown surgical procedure on [his] abdomen".

A Pentagon spokesman told the New York Times this week that under its procedure, when reports of Iraqi abuse were received the US military "notifies the responsible government of Iraq agency or ministry for investigation and follow-up".

The logs also illustrate the readiness of US forces to unleash lethal force. In one chilling incident they detail how an Apache helicopter gunship gunned down two men in February 2007.

The suspected insurgents had been trying to surrender but a lawyer back at base told the pilots: "You cannot surrender to an aircraft." The Apache, callsign Crazyhorse 18, was the same unit and helicopter based at Camp Taji outside Baghdad that later that year, in July, mistakenly killed two Reuters employees and wounded two children in the streets of Baghdad.

Iraq Body Count, the London-based group that monitors civilian casualties, says it has identified around 15,000 previously unknown civilian deaths from the data contained in the leaked war logs.

Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces wounded and killed in action. They give a total of more than 109,000 violent deaths from all causes between 2004 and the end of 2009.

This includes 66,081 civilians, 23,984 people classed as "enemy" and 15,196 members of the Iraqi security forces. Another 3,771 dead US and allied soldiers complete the body count.

No fewer than 31,780 of these deaths are attributed to improvised roadside bombs (IEDs) planted by insurgents. The other major recorded tally is of 34,814 victims of sectarian killings, recorded as murders in the logs.

However, the US figures appear to be unreliable in respect of civilian deaths caused by their own military activities. For example, in Falluja, the site of two major urban battles in 2004, no civilian deaths are recorded. Yet Iraq Body Count monitors identified more than 1,200 civilians who died during the fighting.

Phil Shiner, human rights specialist at Public Interest Lawyers, plans to use material from the logs in court to try to force the UK to hold a public inquiry into the unlawful killing of Iraqi civilians.

He also plans to sue the British government over its failure to stop the abuse and torture of detainees by Iraqi forces. The coalition's formal policy of not investigating such allegations is "simply not permissible", he says.

Shiner is already pursuing a series of legal actions for former detainees allegedly killed or tortured by British forces in Iraq.

WikiLeaks says it is posting online the entire set of 400,000 Iraq field reports – in defiance of the Pentagon.

The whistleblowing activists say they have deleted all names from the documents that might result in reprisals. They were accused by the US military of possibly having "blood on their hands" over the previous Afghan release by redacting too few names. But the military recently conceded that no harm had been identified.

Condemning this fresh leak, however, the Pentagon said: "This security breach could very well get our troops and those they are fighting with killed. Our enemies will mine this information looking for insights into how we operate, cultivate sources and react in combat situations, even the capability of our equipment."

Judge says 'don't ask, don't tell' must end now

http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2010-10-13-military13_ST_N.htm

Judge says 'don't ask, don't tell' must end now
Mimi Hall, USA TODAY
10-13-10

WASHINGTON — A federal judge Tuesday ordered an immediate end to enforcement of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" ban on lesbians and gay men serving openly in the armed forces.

The court ruling is a "historic and courageous step in the right direction," says Alexander Nicholson of Servicemembers United, the nation's largest group of gay and lesbian troops and veterans.

What happens next, however, is unclear. Neither the Pentagon nor the Justice Department, which has 60 days to appeal, would comment.

Although President Obama says he opposes the 1993 law that set the military's policy on gays, he has ordered the Pentagon to study the effect a repeal would have on the armed forces, and the results of that study aren't due until December. The White House also says that Congress, not the courts, needs to repeal the law, but Senate Republicans have blocked those efforts.
The law forbids gay servicemembers from revealing their sexual orientation, and it requires their superiors not to ask unless they believe the law is being broken. Last year, according to Bloomberg News, the military discharged 259 men and 169 women under the law. Nicholson's group says 14,000 servicemembers have been discharged under the policy since it took effect.

"The president will continue to work ... to change the law that he believes is fundamentally unfair," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

Yale law professor William Eskridge said that with her ruling, U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips "is stepping in to break a deadlock that the political process was unable to resolve. The ball is in the Department of Justice's court now."

Phillips, in Riverside, Calif., ruled that enforcement of the law she had previously declared unconstitutional must be halted immediately because it "irreparably injures servicemembers by infringing their fundamental rights." She said the policy violates a host of rights: due process, freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress.

Phillips was nominated to the bench by President Clinton in 1999.

Conservative groups denounced the ruling. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, accused Phillips of "using the military to advance a liberal social agenda."

At the Justice Department, spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler declined to comment because officials are reviewing the ruling. Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia O. Smith also declined to comment because the ruling had just been issued.

The case was brought in 2004 by the gay-rights group Log Cabin Republicans. Dan Woods, a lawyer for the group, said Phillips' ruling "reaffirms the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians in the military who are fighting and dying for our country."

The Obama administration should let the judge's ruling stand and "stop enforcing this unconstitutional, unconscionable law that forces brave lesbian and gay Americans to serve in silence," said Joe Solmonese, of the Human Rights Campaign, which promotes gay rights.

In June 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a challenge to the policy brought by former Army Capt. James Pietrangelo, who was dismissed under the rule. A federal appeals court in Boston earlier threw out a lawsuit filed by Pietrangelo and 11 other veterans.

Contributing: Kevin Johnson, Jim Michaels, David Jackson; Associated Press

Pentagon’s Shape-Shifting Bot Folds Into Boat, Plane

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/video-pentagon-shape-shifter-folds-itself-into-boat-plane/

Pentagon’s Shape-Shifting Bot Folds Into Boat, Plane
Noah Shachtman
June 29, 2010
Categories: Science!

Even for the Pentagon’s science-fiction division, it seemed like a stretch. But in 2007, Darpa really did launch an effort to build programmable matter that could reconfigure itself on command. Then, two years later, Harvard and MIT researchers really did make progress building “self-folding origami” that just might be able to twist themselves into different shapes. Yesterday, Darpa-backed electrical engineers at the two schools released the stunning results: a shape-shifting sheet of rigid tiles and elastomer joints that can fold itself into a little plane or a boat on demand.

It’s “a first step towards making everyday objects whose mechanical properties can be programmed,” Harvard’s Robert Wood says in a statement.

The sheet, less than a half-millimeter thick, “is studded with thin foil actuators and flexible electronics. The demonstration material contains 25 total actuators, divided into five groupings. A shape is produced by triggering the proper actuator groups in sequence,” the statement explains.

The shape-shifter takes a four-step approach to figures out how to rearrange itself. Step one: Take a 3-D model of a completed origami shape, and then reverse-engineer it to see what kind of “folding paths” are needed to get there. Step two: Take that information to “produc[e] a discrete folding plan” for each tile group, Wood and his fellow researchers note in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The third algorithm receives each of the individual plans [and] assembles them onto one sheet…. Finally, the fourth algorithm chooses the optimum arrangement [to] minimize either the number of actuators or number of actuator groups.”

From there, the thin little machine gets to transforming itself.

In Darpa’s dreams, this work will eventually lead to everything from morphing aircraft to self-styling uniforms to a “universal spare part.”

But in the meantime, a piece of robotic origami that can fold itself into a boat or a plane is wild enough.

Following exposure of military massacre in Iraq

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/apr2010/wiki-a08.shtml

Following exposure of military massacre in Iraq
The New York Times fingers whistleblower WikiLeaks
By David Walsh
8 April 2010

The release of video footage Monday showing cold-blooded murder committed by US military forces on the streets of eastern Baghdad in July 2007 has evoked widespread outrage and horror. The video has been viewed more than 4 million times since its posting, offering a worldwide audience a first-hand glimpse of the real character of the US occupation of Iraq.

It has also provoked the liberal newspaper of record in the US, the New York Times, to zero in on WikiLeaks, the web site that exposed the crime, as a dangerous source of opposition that should, if things worked out to the Times’ liking, be put out of business.

The chilling July 2007 video, made available to and posted on WikiLeaks, records an attack by US helicopter gunships on a crowd of a dozen or so men, including, as it would become known, two Reuters news agency employees, Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh. The two Iraqi journalists were among 10 to 15 Iraqis killed in the massacre, which is no doubt typical of innumerable such incidents. (See “Leaked video shows US military killing of two Iraqi journalists”)

The video footage posted by WikiLeaks reveals that—without making any attempt to determine the identities of the individuals—the helicopter gunners receive permission to kill everyone in the group and set about their murderous work with enthusiasm. When a local man stops to aid the wounded, his van is fired on, wounding two children. The helicopter pilots gloat about the carnage.

One or two of the Iraqis in the group appear to be carrying weapons. Civilians are permitted to own firearms in Iraq, and many do. Neither the gunship nor any other US forces are in danger at any point.

According to reporters present nearby, the American forces were firing on everything that moved that day. This is the nature of a colonial war. The occupiers, confronted with a hostile population, come to view everyone as the enemy. In the present conflict, the extraordinary firepower available to US forces increases the likelihood of fatalities. As many as one million Iraqis have died as the result of the illegal US-led invasion launched in March 2003. The video in question makes the immense death toll somewhat easier to comprehend.

The Pentagon attempted to prevent Reuters from obtaining the video of the 2007 murders and covered them up. All the troops involved in the killings were exonerated, and the army declared that the incident was conducted according to its rules of engagement. Various experts have demonstrated that this is false, even on the military’s own terms.

The New Yorker posted a piece April 5 by Raffi Khatchadourian which points out that the operation contravened the army’s rules of engagement on at least four grounds: proportionality; positive identification of the targets as combatants; “command culture” (the helicopter crew falsified the situation on the ground, exaggerating or inventing threats, and their commander accepted their claims without question); and the firing on the wounded.

All this may be very well, but the New York Times has other concerns. Its article is headlined, rather ominously, “Iraq Video Brings Notice to a Web Site.” It might be entitled, “New York Times Fingers a Web Site.”

The piece begins by identifying WikiLeaks as a web site “that posts classified and sensitive documents.” It notes that “Somehow—it will not say how—WikiLeaks found the necessary computer time to decrypt” the video in question. All in all, the article suggests, this was clearly a dubious or illegitimate undertaking.

The Times reporters note that “the site has become a thorn in the side of authorities in the United States and abroad. With the Iraq attack video, the clearinghouse for sensitive documents is edging closer toward a form of investigative journalism and to advocacy.” As opposed to the Times, of course, which practices nothing but objective journalism.

The Times is particularly concerned about other potential exposures of the crimes of the US military, writing, “WikiLeaks claimed to have another encrypted video, said to show an American airstrike in Afghanistan that killed 97 civilians last year, and used the opportunity to ask for donations.”

The article refers several times to the regrettable fact that WikiLeaks is difficult to shut down. It notes, for example, “Where judges and plaintiffs could once stop or delay publication with a court order, WikiLeaks exists in a digital sphere in which information becomes instantly available.” The Times adds: “By being everywhere, yet in no exact place, WikiLeaks is, in effect, beyond the reach of any institution or government that hopes to silence it.”

Once more: “WikiLeaks has grown increasingly controversial as it has published more material. (The United States Army called it a threat to its operations in a report last month.) Many have tried to silence the site; in Britain, WikiLeaks has been used a number of times to evade injunctions on publication by courts that ruled that the material would violate the privacy of the people involved. The courts reversed themselves when they discovered how ineffectual their rulings were.”

The Times mentions the Pentagon’s claim without a comment. In 2008 a US army counterintelligence officer wrote a report alleging that WikiLeaks represented a “potential … threat to the US Army.” The report recommended efforts to “damage or destroy” the web site.

The WikiLeaks site alleges that its staff has been targeted for surveillance and harassment by the US State Department and possibly the CIA. In a blog post, the group’s co-founder, Julian Assange, asserts that the US government activity “includes attempted covert following, photographing, filming and the overt detention & questioning of a WikiLeaks’ volunteer in Iceland.” There is no reason to doubt these claims.

The Times, however, like much of the US media, identifies the main threat, not in the murderous actions of the American military or the repressive operations of the US intelligence apparatus, but in the efforts by honest journalists to expose the crimes of imperialism.

The Christian Science Monitor, in that same spirit, headlines one of its articles, “Video of Iraqi journalists’ killings: Is WikiLeaks a security threat?” The article begins: “The US military has been warily watching for several years the group that released on Monday a graphic video showing a US helicopter apparently killing two Iraqi journalists from Reuters in a Baghdad suburb in 2007.”

Significantly, neither the Times nor the Christian Science Monitor questions the authenticity of the video, or seriously disputes that it exposes an atrocity. Rather, they tacitly acknowledge, along with the military, that the revelation of the truth about the Iraq war represents a risk.

The liberal media in the US and liberal circles, more generally, have accommodated themselves in recent years to the crimes of American imperialism. A massive campaign of lies by the White House, an illegal invasion of a foreign country, brutal treatment of prisoners of war, CIA and military torture sites—all of this has been accepted with barely a protest.

Incidents that would have drawn outraged comments from the Times and other publications as recently as the Vietnam War era, along with demands for Congressional investigations and the laying of criminal charges, are met with a shrug of the shoulder, if not an approving wink. One might say that elements in the liberal establishment have acquired a taste for such operations. In any event, they now identify fully with the US military and the CIA, and recognize those as among the chief defenders of their wealth and privileges.

The Times’ targeting of WikiLeaks also expresses a persistent theme in the establishment media about the danger represented by the Internet and alternative news outlets.

Times executive editor Bill Keller, in an October 2006 speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, warned about the weakening of the “establishment press” in the face of growing competition from new sources of news and opinion on the Internet.

He might have been predicting his paper’s present anxiety about the WikiLeaks revelations, when he noted that “Legions of Internet journalists include at least a few who would feel no compunction about disclosing life-threatening information.” Keller noted with approval that “we have not yet fallen into information anarchy” and praised news outlets such as his own “that still take their responsibilities seriously,” i.e., that control and vet the flow of information to the public.

Along similar lines, in an interview several years before his retirement in 2004, former NBC news anchorman Tom Brokaw asserted that cyberspace should be managed for younger audiences, in particular.

“We can’t let that generation and a whole segment of the population just slide away out to the Internet and retrieve what information it wants without being in on it,” Brokaw declared. “I also believe strongly that the Internet works best when there are gatekeepers. When there are people making determinations and judgments about what information is relevant and factual and useful. Otherwise, it’s like going to the rainforest and just seeing a green maze.”

The entire US establishment is currently considering the means by which it might suppress oppositional voices on the Internet, which do indeed represent a “threat” to the present social order.

'Collateral Murder'

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/04/05-6
Monday, April 5, 2010 by The Guardian/UK
'Collateral Murder': Wikileaks Reveals Video Showing US Air Crew Shooting Down Iraqi Civilians
Footage of July 2007 attack made public as Pentagon identifies website as threat to national security
Chris McGreal in Washington

A secret video showing US air crew falsely claiming to have encountered a firefight in Baghdad and then laughing at the dead after launching an air strike that killed a dozen people, including two Iraqis working for Reuters news agency, was revealed by Wikileaks today.

The footage of the July 2007 attack was made public in a move that will further anger the Pentagon, which has drawn up a report identifying the whistleblower website as a threat to national security. The US defence department was embarrassed when that confidential report appeared on the Wikileaks site last month alongside a slew of military documents.

The release of the video from Baghdad also comes shortly after the US military admitted that its special forces attempted to cover up the killings of three Afghan women in a raid in February by digging the bullets out of their bodies.

The newly-released video of the Baghdad attacks was recorded on one of two Apache helicopters hunting for insurgents on 12 July 2007. Among the dead were a 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40. The Pentagon blocked an attempt by Reuters to obtain the video through a freedom of information request. Wikileaks director Julian Assange said his organisation had to break through encryption by the military to view it.

In the recording, the helicopter crews can be heard discussing the scene on the street below. One American claims to have spotted six people with AK-47s and one with a rocket-propelled grenade. It is unclear if some of the men are armed but Noor-Eldeen can be seen with a camera. Chmagh is talking on his mobile phone.

One of the helicopter crew is then heard saying that one of the group is shooting. But the video shows there is no shooting or even pointing of weapons. The men are standing around, apparently unperturbed.

The lead helicopter, using the moniker Crazyhorse, opens fire. "Hahaha. I hit 'em," shouts one of the American crew. Another responds a little later: "Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards."

One of the men on the ground, believed to be Chmagh, is seen wounded and trying to crawl to safety. One of the helicopter crew is heard wishing for the man to reach for a gun, even though there is none visible nearby, so he has the pretext for opening fire: "All you gotta do is pick up a weapon." A van draws up next to the wounded man and Iraqis climb out. They are unarmed and start to carry the victim to the vehicle in what would appear to be an attempt to get him to hospital. One of the helicopters opens fire with armour-piercing shells. "Look at that. Right through the windshield," says one of the crew. Another responds with a laugh.

Sitting behind the windscreen were two children who were wounded.

After ground forces arrive and the children are discovered, the American air crew blame the Iraqis. "Well it's their fault for bringing kids in to a battle," says one. "That's right," says another.

Initially the US military said that all the dead were insurgents. Then it claimed the helicopters reacted to an active firefight. Assange said that the video demonstrated that neither claim was true.

"Why would anyone be so relaxed with two Apaches if someone was carrying an RPG and that person was an enemy of the United States?" he said. "The behaviour of the pilots is like a computer game. When Saeed is crawling, clearly unable to do anything, their response is: come on buddy, we want to kill you, just pick up a weapon ... It appears to be a desire to get a higher score, or a higher number of kills."

Wikileaks says it will shortly release a second secret US military video showing the deaths of civilians in an attack in Afghanistan. The Pentagon has been seeking ways to prevent classified material appearing on Wikileaks, including through "criminal sanctions". Wikileaks has made public classified US army reports on weapons, military units and battle strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon report, reflecting the depth of paranoia about where Wikileaks is obtaining its material, speculates that the CIA may be responsible. But perhaps most embarrassing leak for the US defence department was that of the 2008 report itself which appeared on the Wikileaks site last month.

To watch the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0