Deep Politics Forum

Wikileaks Strikes Again: Afghanistan Docs!!! {UpDated w/Vidoe's}

Submitted by jimstaro on Sun, 2010-07-25 23:08

• Afghanistan
  
• Casualties
  
• Criminal Prosecution and Accountability
  
• Evidence
  
• Military Industrial Complex
  
• Pakistan
  

This was just coming in on the MSNBC site, only minutes ago:
90,000 Afghan war documents being leaked
Previously unreported civilian deaths among the disclosures by Wikileaks

• jimstaro's blog
  

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Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

Submitted by davidswanson on Sun, 2010-07-25 23:09

• Afghanistan
  
• Evidence
  

• Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops
• Covert unit hunts leaders for 'kill or capture'
• Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato
• Read the Guardian's full war logs investigation
A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

Assange is really a 'marked man' now. But, Bravo Wikileaks. Go Wikileaks go!!! Amazing [to me] how most in US, UK, etc. tolerate these illegal, immoral and impotent (except in killing innocents, mostly) wars. Perhaps this will have some additional effect. Those in power, however, are dead-set on permanent war...it is only a matter of where at any given time.......and they'll have no problem to bring the war home - in fact they already have.

Obviously, O-Bomb-ya doesn't 'get it' either...from the White House...


The White House issued this statement from the national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, at dinnertime Sunday after the website WikiLeaks released a trove of classified documents about the Afghanistan war to The New York Times, The (British) Guardian, and Germany's Der Spiegel:


"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents – the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted. These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.


"The documents posted by Wikileaks reportedly cover a period of time from January 2004 to December 2009. On December 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years. This shift in strategy addressed challenges in Afghanistan that were the subject of an exhaustive policy review last fall. We know that serious challenges lie ahead, but if Afghanistan is permitted to slide backwards, we will again face a threat from violent extremist groups like al Qaeda who will have more space to plot and train. That is why we are now focused on breaking the Taliban’s momentum and building Afghan capacity so that the Afghan government can begin to assume responsibility for its future. The United States remains committed to a strong, stable, and prosperous Afghanistan.


"Since 2009, the United States and Pakistan have deepened our important bilateral partnership. Counter-terrorism cooperation has led to significant blows against al Qaeda’s leadership. The Pakistani military has gone on the offensive in Swat and South Waziristan, at great cost to the Pakistani military and people. The United States and Pakistan have also commenced a Strategic Dialogue, which has expanded cooperation on issues ranging from security to economic development. Pakistan and Afghanistan have also improved their bilateral ties, most recently through the completion of a Transit-Trade Agreement. Yet the Pakistani government – and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services – must continue their strategic shift against insurgent groups. The balance must shift decisively against al Qaeda and its extremist allies. U.S. support for Pakistan will continue to be focused on building Pakistani capacity to root out violent extremist groups, while supporting the aspirations of the Pakistani people."

Afghanistan war logs: Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation

• Hundreds of civilians killed by coalition troops
• Covert unit hunts leaders for 'kill or capture'
• Steep rise in Taliban bomb attacks on Nato
• Read the Guardian's full war logs investigation

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• Nick Davies and David Leigh
  
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 25 July 2010 22.03 BST
  
• Article history
  

The war logs reveal civilian killings by coalition forces, secret efforts to eliminate Taliban and al-Qaida leaders, and discuss the involvement of Iran and Pakistan in supporting insurgents. Photograph: Max Whittaker/Corbis A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.
The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.
Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama's "surge" strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.
The war logs also detail:
• How a secret "black" unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.
• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.
• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.
In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of "under-resourcing" under Obama's predecessor, saying: "It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009."
The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: "We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us."
The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed "blue on white" in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.
Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.
At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.
Bloody errors at civilians' expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.
Questionable shootings of civilians by UK troops also figure. The US compilers detail an unusual cluster of four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the death of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting, they wrote: "Investigation controlled by the British. We are not able to get [sic] complete story."
A second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008, according to the log entries. Asked by the Guardian about these allegations, the Ministry of Defence said: "We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions."
Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: "These files bring to light what's been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I've investigated in recent months where this is still not happening.
Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians." The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.
Most of the material, though classified "secret" at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, said it would redact harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its "uncensorable" servers.
Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon's criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them. Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks was not involved in the preparation of the Guardian's articles.

Wow !!

90,000 + documents takes some work to get into ANY kind of order - let alone what they've done to put it all up using wiki-text mark up and offering the files in CSV, SQL and KML formats too!!

I have some considerable insight into the work involved in collating documents for orderly presentation on exactly the same software platform as used by WikiLeaks. Those documents have been ordered into 6 categories, each with 4 - 10 sub categories and integrated with the Mediawiki Maps extension. That is one hell of a lot of work and must have involved at least 10 people working flat out for several months.

Pretty good explanation of the site hiatus since early this year I'd say. I also have to say - humble pie time - that bringing those kind of focussed resources to bear would be near to impossible to do for free.

Obushma and the DemocRATS wanted it, they got it. This is a very nice piece of news here, the White House is already freaking out and in true Bushian fashion are decrying the release of the docs as a threat to national security that will cost lives. YAWN.

We will likely witness the inevitable starting today, a huge public relations campaign to destroy the legitimacy of these documents. Savage attacks on Wikileaks, the scrambling of more shadow government assassination goons to go after Julian Assange, a huge breaking sex scandal or Natalee Holloway update (hell this one is so big that they may even float the arrest of the Jon Benet Ramsey killer) or phony video from a scumbag like Breitbart that will knock it off of the front pages altogether.

The war in Afghanistan is a lost cause, unless of course you are a drug lord or a large investment bank that launders the money from drug profits or a black ops commander who takes a cut or an arms merchant or one of those thousands of money-gobbling post 9/11 private spy shops that was in the last story that immediately went down the memory hole, Top Secret America.

The Afghanistan war is a lie based on the biggest lie of all which is what really happened on September 11, 2001 and why.

I would be wary of this week being the week that the joint US-Israel forces launch the attack on Iran. Cornered animals are the most dangerous and this may be the time to double down.

At least The Guardian and Der Spiegel got the scoop too, while we here in Der Heimat dream away, wrapped snugly in star spangled cocoons of mass ignorance and apathy the remainder of the civilized world knows the truth.

Just my two cents

EE

Ed Encho Wrote:Obushma and the DemocRATS wanted it, they got it. This is a very nice piece of news here, the White House is already freaking out and in true Bushian fashion are decrying the release of the docs as a threat to national security that will cost lives. YAWN.

We will likely witness the inevitable starting today, a huge public relations campaign to destroy the legitimacy of these documents. Savage attacks on Wikileaks, the scrambling of more shadow government assassination goons to go after Julian Assange, a huge breaking sex scandal or Natalee Holloway update (hell this one is so big that they may even float the arrest of the Jon Benet Ramsey killer) or phony video from a scumbag like Breitbart that will knock it off of the front pages altogether.

The war in Afghanistan is a lost cause, unless of course you are a drug lord or a large investment bank that launders the money from drug profits or a black ops commander who takes a cut or an arms merchant or one of those thousands of money-gobbling post 9/11 private spy shops that was in the last story that immediately went down the memory hole, Top Secret America.

The Afghanistan war is a lie based on the biggest lie of all which is what really happened on September 11, 2001 and why.

I would be wary of this week being the week that the joint US-Israel forces launch the attack on Iran. Cornered animals are the most dangerous and this may be the time to double down.

At least The Guardian and Der Spiegel got the scoop too, while we here in Der Heimat dream away, wrapped snugly in star spangled cocoons of mass ignorance and apathy the remainder of the civilized world knows the truth.

Just my two cents

EE

Too true Ed. Apparently it was offered to the NY Times but it was obviously news not fit to print. So it was to the others they went.
Edit: It seems the NY Time have covered the story but the Guardian has the whole of the logs available.

Peter Presland Wrote:Wow !!

90,000 + documents takes some work to get into ANY kind of order - let alone what they've done to put it all up using wiki-text mark up and offering the files in CSV, SQL and KML formats too!!

I have some considerable insight into the work involved in collating documents for orderly presentation on exactly the same software platform as used by WikiLeaks. Those documents have been ordered into 6 categories, each with 4 - 10 sub categories and integrated with the Mediawiki Maps extension. That is one hell of a lot of work and must have involved at least 10 people working flat out for several months.

Pretty good explanation of the site hiatus since early this year I'd say. I also have to say - humble pie time - that bringing those kind of focused resources to bear would be near to impossible to do for free.

I've had a good look at a few of the smaller files in all provided formats now and maybe I exaggerated the 'get into order' work time a bit.

In its raw format the info was already formatted digital stuff so, once it's formatting creases had been sorted, it was then just a case of running it all through various format converters etc. Still a mammoth task though - and one requiring considerable human and computing resources. Allowing just one minute for each of 92,000 entries requires 64 man days 24 hours a day just to read the stuff!

Hats off to Assange and his team for it!

And I'm with Ed E on pretty much everything in the previous post too.

I haven't been able to get on to Wikileaks all day. It's down for some reason. The files can be accessed here and there is a link to a torrent too:

Quote:WikiLeaks: Afghanistan War Logs; Massive Leak, Over 90,000 Files

July 26th, 2010 More Interesting Reading: TF 373 and OGA
TF 373 refers to Task Force 373, which is a U.S. death squad.
OGA is Other Government Agency. According to Salon, “In military lingo, OGA stands for ‘other government agency’ and denotes clandestine operations conducted independent of the military chain of command.”
—End Update—
Update: Searching for Heroin and Opium Makes for Some Interesting Reading
Some of the reports say that the stuff was destroyed, but many do not. Others say the drugs were turned over to Afghan police. Or stored on base for later disposal… (Oh sure.) Some of the quantities mentioned are huge. Then there are the people who got caught with heroin who were trying to fly to Canada:

“Kabul Prov/Kabul City Dist 10 Airport: 26 Apr07. ANP arrested (2) suspects with (1.4) kilograms of Heroin. The suspects were trying to fly to Canada.”

Look at this one:

Helmand Prov/ Kajaki Dist/ Safyan Village: 12 Jul07. Government forces conducted a search operation. Results were (08) ACF KIA, (03) ACF and (12) others unknown affiliation arrested. Items seized are (05) AK-47s, (02) RPGs, (02) heavy machine guns, (60) RPG rounds, (01) hand gun, (1.35) Kgs opium and (1,150) Kgs of heroin. NFI

1,150 kilos of heroin… No further information, indeed.
And:

UPDATE 202110D*MAY2009
FOX 30 still holds bazaar in Marjeh, investigation ongoing. Sustained enemy contact from all directions. BDA: 3 x US MIL WIA (confirmed) – reported above, 18 x INS KIA (confirmed), UNK total number EKIA/EWIA. Have found approx 15,000 kilos of black tar heroin and functioning refinement labs to include 275 gallons of acidic anhydride and 15,000 kg ammonium chloride. 15,900 lbs poppy, 24,000 kg ammonium nitrate, much more. Search of OBJ is 50% complete.

—End Update—
Update: WikiLeaks Has Not Released the Complete Archive to the Public
I’m searching random documents that appear on the New York Times site and some do not appear in the WikiLeaks file.
For example: (THREAT REPORT) IED THREAT RPT Sorobi INS MEET TO PLAN AN SVBIED ATTACK appears on the New York Times, but not in the publicly available file.
Just saw this from wardiary.wikileaks.org (which is up now):

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.

—End Update—
UPDATE: WikiLeaks: Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010
Via: WikiLeaks:
Release date July 25, 2010 Summary

25th July 2010 5:00 PM EST WikiLeaks has released a document set called the Afghan War Diary (AWD), an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.
The reports, while written by soldiers and intelligence officers mainly describing lethal military actions involving the United States military, also include intelligence information, reports of meetings with political figures, and related detail.
The document collection will shortly be available on a dedicated webpage.
The reports cover most units from the US Army with the exception of most US Special Forces’ activities. The reports do not generally cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations.
We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.
The data is provided in CSV and SQL formats, sorted by months, and also was rendered into KML mapping data.

• All entries, CSV format
  
• All entries, SQL format
  
• All entries, KML format
  
• All NATO entries, KML format
  
• Entries by month, KML format
  
• Entries with scale filter, KML format
  

—End Update—
UPDATE: TORRENT
Apparently, this is it. It’s a 15MB CSV with 7zip compression. I have it open in OpenOffice Writer.
Afghan War Diary 2010 CSV Format
http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/5716206...PB.torrent
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:458d80d75947fb1d8fc70b222c68fc1ccec98875&dn=Afghan+War+Diary+2010+CSV+Format
—End Update—
UPDATE: Standing by for Full, Uncensored Archive…
WikiLeaks is down, probably do to an offensive information warfare campaign by the United States military.
I’m noticing that the mainstream media—that has had access to the information for months, has redacted parts of it.
We’re standing by for the full, uncensored archive. My guess is that the attempts by the U.S. to stop this will fail within hours…
—End Update—
WikiLeaks announced it via Twitter.
Via: Guardian:
This series of reports on the war in Afghanistan is based on the US military’s internal logs of the conflict between January 2004 and December 2009.http://cryptogon.com/

[quote=Magda Hassan]I haven't been able to get on to Wikileaks all day. It's down for some reason. The files can be accessed here and there is a link to a torrent too:
[QUOTE]WikiLeaks: Afghanistan War Logs; Massive Leak, Over 90,000 Files

[/QUOTE]

Down for 'some reason'....ummm....let me guess....black hackers at the NSA.....or suchlike.....:hello::bootyshake:

A very good hour's coverage of this matter at today's
http://www.democracynow.org

This matter is HUGE...it seems Wikileaks has only released 1/5th of what they now have!.....this could bring the War in Afghanistan to a grinding halt in some weeks or months!......


Assange Press Conference - well worth a look at!!!! http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/wire/6812

TF 373 is key.

Quote:Afghanistan war logs: Task Force 373 – special forces hunting top Taliban

Previously hidden details of US-led unit sent to kill top insurgent targets are revealed for the first time

The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list.

In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

The United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights, Professor Philip Alston, went to Afghanistan in May 2008 to investigate rumours of extrajudicial killings. He warned that international forces were neither transparent nor accountable and that Afghans who attempted to find out who had killed their loved ones "often come away empty-handed, frustrated and bitter".

Now, for the first time, the leaked war logs reveal details of deadly missions by TF 373 and other units hunting down Jpel targets that were previously hidden behind a screen of misinformation. They raise fundamental questions about the legality of the killings and of the long-term imprisonment without trial, and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves.

On the night of Monday 11 June 2007, the leaked logs reveal, the taskforce set out with Afghan special forces to capture or kill a Taliban commander named Qarl Ur-Rahman in a valley near Jalalabad. As they approached the target in the darkness, somebody shone a torch on them. A firefight developed, and the taskforce called in an AC-130 gunship, which strafed the area with cannon fire: "The original mission was aborted and TF 373 broke contact and returned to base. Follow-up Report: 7 x ANP KIA, 4 x WIA." In plain language: they discovered that the people they had been shooting in the dark were Afghan police officers, seven of whom were now dead and four wounded.

The coalition put out a press release which referred to the firefight and the air support and then failed entirely to record that they had just killed or wounded 11 police officers. But, evidently fearing that the truth might leak, it added: "There was nothing during the firefight to indicate the opposing force was friendly. The individuals who fired on coalition forces were not in uniform." The involvement of TF 373 was not mentioned, and the story didn't get out.

However, the incident immediately rebounded into the fragile links which other elements of the coalition had been trying to build with local communities. An internal report shows that the next day Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Phillips, commander of the Provincial Reconstruction Team, took senior officers to meet the provincial governor, Gul Agha Sherzai, who accepted that this was "an unfortunate incident that occurred among friends". They agreed to pay compensation to the bereaved families, and Phillips "reiterated our support to prevent these types of events from occurring again".

Yet, later that week, on Sunday 17 June, as Sherzai hosted a "shura" council at which he attempted to reassure tribal leaders about the safety of coalition operations, TF 373 launched another mission, hundreds of miles south in Paktika province. The target was a notorious Libyan fighter, Abu Laith al-Libi. The unit was armed with a new weapon, known as Himars – High Mobility Artillery Rocket System – a pod of six missiles on the back of a small truck.

The plan was to launch five rockets at targets in the village of Nangar Khel where TF 373 believed Libi was hiding and then to send in ground troops. The result was that they failed to find Libi but killed six Taliban fighters and then, when they approached the rubble of a madrasa, they found "initial assessment of 7 x NC KIA" which translates as seven non-combatants killed in action. All of them were children. One of them was still alive in the rubble: "The Med TM immediately cleared debris from the mouth and performed CPR." After 20 minutes, the child died.

Children

The coalition made a press statement which owned up to the death of the children and claimed that troops "had surveillance on the compound all day and saw no indications there were children inside the building". That claim is consistent with the leaked log. A press release also claimed that Taliban fighters, who undoubtedly were in the compound, had used the children as a shield.

The log refers to an unnamed "elder" who is said to have "stated that the children were held against their will" but, against that, there is no suggestion that there were any Taliban in the madrasa where the children died.

The rest of the press release was certainly misleading. It suggested that coalition forces had attacked the compound because of "nefarious activity" there, when the reality was that they had gone there to kill or capture Libi.

It made no mention at all of Libi, nor of the failure of the mission (although that was revealed later by NBC News in the United States). Crucially, it failed to record that TF 373 had fired five rockets, destroying the madrasa and other buildings and killing seven children, before anybody had fired on them – that this looked like a mission to kill and not to capture. Indeed, this was clearly deliberately suppressed.

The internal report was marked not only "secret" but also "Noforn", ie not to be shared with the foreign elements of the coalition. And the source of this anxiety is explicit: "The knowledge that TF 373 conducted a HIMARS strike must be protected." And it was. This crucial fact remained secret, as did TF 373's involvement.

Again, the lethal attack caused political problems. The provincial governor arranged compensation and held a shura with local leaders when, according to an internal US report, "he pressed the Talking Points given to him and added a few of his own that followed in line with our current story". Libi remained targeted for death and was killed in Pakistan seven months later by a missile from an unmanned CIA Predator.

In spite of this tension between political and military operations, TF 373 continued to engage in highly destructive attacks. Four months later, on 4 October, they confronted Taliban fighters in a village called Laswanday, only 6 miles from the village where they had killed the seven children. The Taliban appear to have retreated by the time TF 373 called in air support to drop 500lb bombs on the house from which the fighters had been firing.

The final outcome, listed tersely at the end of the leaked log: 12 US wounded, two teenage girls and a 10-year-old boy wounded, one girl killed, one woman killed, four civilian men killed, one donkey killed, one dog killed, several chickens killed, no enemy killed, no enemy wounded, no enemy detained.

The coalition put out a statement claiming falsely to have killed several militants and making no mention of any dead civilians; and later added that "several non-combatants were found dead and several others wounded" without giving any numbers or details.

This time, the political teams tried a far less conciliatory approach with local people. In spite of discovering that the dead civilians came from one family, one of whom had been found with his hands tied behind his back, suggesting that the Taliban were unwelcome intruders in their home, senior officials travelled to the stricken village where they "stressed that the fault of the deaths of the innocent lies on the villagers who did not resist the insurgents and their anti-government activities … [and] chastised a villager who condemned the compound shooting". Nevertheless, an internal report concluded that there was "little or no protest" over the incident.

Concealment

The concealment of TF 373's role is a constant theme. There was global publicity in October 2009 when US helicopters were involved in two separate crashes in one day, but even then it was concealed that the four soldiers who died in one of the incidents were from TF 373.

The pursuit of these "high value targets" is evidently embedded deep in coalition tactics. The Jpel list assigns an individual serial number to each of those targeted for kill or capture and by October 2009 this had reached 2,058.

The process of choosing targets reaches high into the military command. According to their published US Field Manual on Counter Insurgency, No FM3-24, it is policy to choose targets "to engage as potential counter-insurgency supporters, targets to isolate from the population and targets to eliminate".

A joint targeting working group meets each week to consider Target Nomination Packets and has direct input from the Combined Forces Command and its divisional HQ, as well as from lawyers, operational command and intelligence units including the CIA.

Among those who are listed as being located and killed by TF 373 are Shah Agha, described as an intelligence officer for an IED cell, who was killed with four other men on 1 June 2009; Amir Jan Mutaki, described as a Taliban sub-commander who had organised ambushes on coalition forces, who was shot dead from the air in a TF 373 mission on 24 June 2009; and a target codenamed Ballentine, who was killed on 16 November 2009 during an attack in the village of Lewani, in which a local woman also died.

The logs include references to the tracing and killing of other targets on the Jpel list, which do not identify TF 373 as the unit responsible. It is possible that some of the other taskforce names and numbers which show up in this context are cover names for 373, or for British special forces, 500 of whom are based in southern Afghanistan and are reported to have been involved in kill/capture missions, including the shooting in July 2008 of Mullah Bismullah.

Some of these "non 373" operations involve the use of unmanned drones to fire missiles to kill the target: one codenamed Beethoven, on 20 October 2008; one named Janan on 6 November 2008; and an unnamed Jpel target who was hit with a hellfire missile near Khan Neshin on 21 August 2009 while travelling in a car with other passengers (the log records "no squirters [bodies moving about] recorded").

Other Jpel targets were traced and then bombed from the air. One, codenamed Newcastle, was located with four other men on 26 November 2007. The house they were in was then hit with 500lb bombs. "No identifiable features recovered," the log records.

Two other Jpel targets, identified only by serial numbers, were killed on 16 February 2009 when two F-15 bombers dropped four 500lb bombs on a Jpel target: "There are various and conflicting reports from multiple sources alleging civilian casualties … A large number of local nationals were on site during the investigation displaying a hostile attitude so the investigation team did not continue sorting through the site."

One of the leaked logs contains a summary of a conference call on 8 March 2008 when the then head of the Afghan National Directorate of Security, Amrullah Saleh, tells senior American officers that three named Taliban commanders in Kapisa province are "not reconcilable and must be taken out". The senior coalition officer "noted that there would be a meeting with the Kapisa NDS to determine how to approach this issue."

It is not clear whether "taken out" meant "killed" and the logs do not record any of their deaths. But one of them, Qari Baryal, who was ranked seventh in the Jpel list, had already been targeted for killing two months earlier.

On 12 January 2008, after tracking his movements for 24 hours, the coalition established that he was holding a large meeting with other men in a compound in Pashkari and sent planes which dropped six 500lb bombs and followed up with five strafing runs to shoot those fleeing the scene.

The report records that some 70 people ran to the compound and started digging into the rubble, on which there were "pools of blood", but subsequent reports suggest that Baryal survived and continued to plan rocket attacks and suicide bombings.

Numerous logs show Jpel targets being captured and transferred to a special prison, known as Btif, the Bagram Theatre Internment Facility. There is no indication of prisoners being charged or tried, and previous press reports have suggested that men have been detained there for years without any legal process in communal cages inside vast old air hangars. As each target is captured, he is assigned a serial number. By December 2009, this showed that a total of 4,288 prisoners, some aged as young as 16, had been held at Btif, with 757 still in custody.

Who are TF373?
The leaked war logs show that Task Force 373 uses at least three bases in Afghanistan, in Kabul, Kandahar and Khost. Although it works alongside special forces from Afghanistan and other coalition nations, it appears to be drawing its own troops from the 7th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and to travel on missions in Chinook and Cobra helicopters flown by 160th special operations aviation regiment, based at Hunter Army Airfield, Georgia

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul...an-taliban