US Intell planned to destroy Wikileaks

[Paul Rigby]

...if Wikileaks is a US intelligence operation (or Mossad), there is something very elaborate going on here...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/apr...raq-attack

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

By Chris McGreal

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.

Shades of Vietnam, when the US financial establishment decided enough was enough, and used the CIA to rein in the Pentagon, most notably over striking north (into China).

[Jan Klimkowski]

I watched the 17-minute version before it was taken down.

The US air crew joke and laugh like it's a turkey shoot in a computer game: except the deaths and injuries of the Iraqis on the street, including the journalists and children, are real, not virtual.

The game cannot be reloaded.

The flow of time cannot be stopped and erased.

And the broader picture?

The video and accompanying soundtrack may have been leaked for geopolitical purposes.

Alternately, this may be a leak from a genuine whistleblower, outraged at the war crimes depicted.

Ultimately, regardless of deeper agendas, Truth is served by wikileaks making this material available online.

[Ed Jewett]

I haven't had the time to watch. Hopefully someone downloaded and copied them immediately and, on that basis or the fact that the originals are intact, it will go viral. That was the lesson of the recent Cryptome business and similar lesser ventures in journalistic exposure of legitimized miscreance. Some would even pay a reasonable fee to have a copy.

[Magda Hassan]

I'd be interested to know the rationale of Wikileaks in their use of a separate site to host this video. I know they have been having financial issues and the main web site has not really been functioning all this year and the last few weeks of the end of last year. I wonder if it is some sort of decentralization, though WL itself is fairly decentralised. Or perhaps some sort of limited liability defense. Domain is registered for 10 years in a privacy proxy name. It wouldn't be difficult for some one to get behind that though. Dynadot is a LLC in San Mateo, CA but i don't know if they have anything to do with WL in particular as they look look an ordinary proxy domain name owner.

Here is the WHO IS for it:
Domain Name: collateralmurder.com
Registered at http://www.dynadot.com

Registrant:
John Shipton c/o Dynadot Privacy
PO Box 701
San Mateo, CA 94401
United States

Administrative Contact:
John Shipton c/o Dynadot Privacy
PO Box 701
San Mateo, CA 94401
United States

1-650-585-1961

Technical Contact:
John Shipton c/o Dynadot Privacy
PO Box 701
San Mateo, CA 94401
United States

1-650-585-1961

Record expires on 2020/03/27 UTC
Record created on 2010/03/27 UTC

Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.dynadot.com
ns2.dynadot.com

[Ed Jewett]

I have just watched the 17-minute version via Cryptogon; they and others have archived the pair of videos, an action I am sure is happening in many, many locations. At some point, later, I will watch the bigger video. Right now, I am going to watch the reactions.

[Ed Jewett]

Story (and extensive comments) here:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/.../#comments

[Peter Lemkin]

I was quite surprised that it was featured on the BBC World Service's hour-long World Have Your Say program and that is probably the biggest publicity it has had so far. The BBC also has the video on its webpage. There was a Wikileak's spokesperson and an American Army Officer - the discussion between them was what one might imagine. The call-in guests covered every possible position, but mostly were sympathetic to Wikileaks and horrified at the killing of non-combatants. The officer tried hard to justify it (sic), but few bought it......it must still be up on the BBC World Service for a listen to....

[Ed Jewett]

Wolf Blitzer and CNN covered it as a "this just in to the Situation Room" story 24 hours after it was released. Some of the comments at one web site via Redditt appear to have been scrubbed off (at Project for an Old American Century), and it is getting some "play" at some web sites, and at others many active in 'discussion' appear to be unaware, or simply won't mention it. Some yawn, some are appalled, some are disinterested. Life in America in 2010. We have been saturated with ab-normalcy, and our collective outrage button has been disabled.

[Magda Hassan]

There is also an active organised Hasbara type campaign about this video as well. You can see in some of the comments sections where it is posted many pointing out oh, but two of them had guns and under section xyz of the abc sub paragraph 3xi military rules of engagement they were within their rights to respond as they did, it is 'unfortunate' that children were hurt but they shouldn't have been there with guns blah, blah etc and other such mindless, heartless responses attempting to justify the unjustifiable. tupido:

[Ed Jewett]

Iraq Slaughter Not An Aberration

By Glenn Greenwald

April 06, 2010 "Salon" -- I was just on Democracy Now along with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange discussing the Iraq video they released yesterday, and there's one vital point I want to emphasize. Shining light on what our government and military do is so critical precisely because it forces people to see what is really being done and prevents myth and propaganda from distorting those realities. That's why the administration fights so hard to keep torture photos suppressed, why the military fought so hard here to keep this video concealed (and why they did the same with regard to the Afghan massacre), and why whistle-blowers, real journalists, and sites like WikiLeaks are the declared enemy of the government. The discussions many people are having today -- about the brutal reality of what the U.S. does when it engages in war, invasions and occupation -- is exactly the discussion which they most want to avoid.But there's a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn't. It's the opposite: it's par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that's rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we're seeing it on video not because it's rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed, and (b) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. But what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety -- as though there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.
A major reason there are hundreds of thousands of dead innocent civilians in Iraq, and thousands more in Afghanistan, is because this is what we do. This is why so many of those civilians are dead. What one sees on that video is how we conduct our wars. That's why it's repulsive to watch people -- including some "liberals" -- attack WikiLeaks for slandering The Troops, or complain that objections to these actions unfairly disparage the military because "our guys are the good guys" and they act differently "99.99999999% of the time." That is blatantly false. Just as was true of the deceitful attempt to depict the Abu Ghraib abusers as rogue "bad apples" once their conduct was exposed with photographs (when the reality was they were acting in complete consistency with authorized government policy), the claim that what was shown on that video is some sort of outrageous departure from U.S. policy is demonstrably false. In a perverse way, the typical morally depraved neocons who are justifying these killings are actually being more honest than those trying to pretend this is some sort of rare and unusual event: those who support having the U.S. invade and wage war on other countries are endorsing precisely this behavior.
As the video demonstrates, the soldiers in the Apache did not take a single step -- including killing those unarmed men who tried to rescue the wounded -- without first receiving formal permission from their superiors. Beyond that, the Pentagon yesterday -- once the video was released -- suddenly embraced the wisdom of transparency by posting online the reports of the so-called "investigations" it undertook into this incident (as a result of pressure from Reuters). Those formal investigations not only found that every action taken by those soldiers was completely justified -- including the firing on the unarmed civilian rescuers -- but also found that there's no need for any remedial steps to be taken to prevent future re-occurence. What we see on that video is what the U.S. does on a constant and regular basis in these countries, and it's what we've been doing for years. It's obviously consistent with our policies and practices for how we fight in these countries, which is exactly what those investigative reports concluded.
The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved -- at least not primarily. Of course those who aren't accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they're taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indicment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues.
All of this is usually kept from us. Unlike those in the Muslim world, who are shown these realities quite frequently by their free press, we don't usually see what is done by us. We stay blissfully insulated from it, so that in those rare instances when we're graphically exposed to it, we can tell ourselves that it's all very unusual and rare. That's how we collectively dismissed the Abu Ghraib photos, and it's why the Obama administration took such extraordinary steps to suppress all the rest of the torture photos: because further disclosure would have revealed that behavior to be standard and common, not at all unusual or extraordinary.
Precisely the same dynamic applies to the Pentagon's admission yesterday that its original claims about the brutal February killing of five civilians in Eastern Afghanistan were totally false. What happened there -- the slaughter of unthreatening civilians, official lies told about the incident, the dissemination of those lies by an uncritical U.S. media -- is what happens constantly (the same deceitful cover-up behavior took place with the Iraq video). The lies about the Afghan killings were exposed in this instance not because they're rare, but because one very intrepid, relentless reporter happened to be able to travel to the remote province and speak to witnesses and investigate the event, forcing the Pentagon to acknowledge the truth.
The value of the Wikileaks/Iraq video and the Afghanistan revelation is not that they exposed unusually horrific events. The value is in realizing that these event are anything but unusual.
* * * * * *
Here's the Democracy Now segment I did this morning with Assange. The bulk of the discussion, appropriately, is devoted to hearing from him about the videotape, and it's very worth watching; my participation begins at roughly 35:30:





[Democracy Now! interview videos embedded]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info...e25150.htm