Death By Videogame

Conditions: Foggy.


Going Too Far

For quite a while I've criticized the tactic of flying armed-drones over the middle east and firing on people the remote operators think are terrorists. And so it goes on with the latest reports of a strike on a funeral of all things, that adds up to a massacre, carried out by remote-control.

At least 45 people have died in a missile strike by a US drone aircraft in Pakistan, officials there have said.

The people killed in South Waziristan region had been attending a funeral for others killed in a US drone strike earlier on Tuesday.

Intelligence officials said at least 45 people had been killed and dozens more injured in the later strike, when two missiles were fired.

But a local official told BBC News the death toll was more than 50.

- truthout.org/

Fifty people? In one airstrike, on a funeral? You know, unless there was one of the most astonishing coincidences in the history of funeral-attendings, I'm going to take a wild guess here and say most of those slaughtered by the drone were not actually terrorists. But some I suppose must have been. So, who'd they get?

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A United States drone strike on a funeral in Pakistan’s tribal areas missed the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, by hours on Tuesday, a Pakistani security official said Wednesday.

Mr. Mehsud was not present at the time of the attack, but had gone to pay his respects to a Taliban commander killed in another American drone strike earlier the same day, the official said.

Though the strike on the funeral appeared to have included only two midlevel Taliban leaders among the scores killed, it presented a clear blow to Mr. Mehsud’s operation, showing the deadly proximity of the drone attacks to his areas and even the possibility that he was a target.

- nytimes.com/

Oh. So. 50 dead for the purpose of getting two mid level Taliban leaders. That's... That's freaking ridiculous. It's also a war crime, but apparently only in my opinion.

But lo, is there the possibility of light on the far horizon?

The new US commander in Afghanistan is expected to issue new orders limiting the use of air strikes to reduce civilian casualties, officials say.

Gen Stanley McChrystal is due to tell troops to break off from fire fights with the Taliban rather than call in air strikes that might kill civilians.

The changes come amid increasing tension between Kabul and Washington over the number of civilian casualties.

The deadliest recent US air raid was in western Farah province in May.

The US has admitted that at least 26 people were killed but the Afghan government and human rights groups say the toll was more than 100.

A US military report blamed the civilian deaths on a failure by US forces to follow procedures in air strikes.

The UN says US, Nato and Afghan forces killed 829 civilians while fighting Taliban insurgents last year.

A "failure by US forces to follow procedures in air strikes"?, like the procedure where you ensure you're only going to explode what you intend to explode? Yes, I think one could argue there'd been a breakdown in that general area.

The outgoing US commander in Afghanistan, Gen David McKiernan, issued orders late last year for commanders to set conditions "to minimise the need to resort to deadly force".

But Gen McChrystal's orders are more precise and have stronger language ordering forces to break off from fire fights, Rear Adm Smith said.

The new US commander is on record as saying his measure of effectiveness in Afghanistan will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence not the number of militants killed.

- news.bbc.co.uk/

Wow. That's quite a statement. But we've been burned before. So let's treat that as a hopeful intention for a better future, and stay huddled in our bunkers in the meantime.



Bagram Comes Out Of The Closet

I think I've written about this before, but the detainees at Bagram in Afghanistan were also tortured and even murdered. And the full horror is starting to leak out of the dark hole it's been consigned to.

A new report documenting the torture of more than two-dozen former prisoners held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 comes several months after a bipartisan Congressional committee linked the murder of two detainees held at the same prison facility to policies enacted by George W. Bush and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The April report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee on the treatment of prisoners held in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded that a combination of various torture techniques coupled with a series of brutal beatings administered by military interrogators caused the deaths of the two prisoners in December 2002.

One of the detainees, identified in the report as Dilawar, was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side."

According to the Armed Services Committee report, another detainee identified as Habibullah was killed two days after Rumsfeld authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan. Dilawar was murdered six days after Habibullah was killed. The report labeled their deaths homicides.

According to a detailed account in 2005 in The New York Times, Dilawar, a taxi driver, was apprehended December 5 by US forces and taken to Bagram and interrogated about a rocket attack on an American base.

Dilawar was chained by his wrists to the ceiling of his cell for four days and brutally beaten by Army interrogators on his legs for hours on end to the point where he could no longer bend them. He died on December 10, 2002.

Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, an Air Force medical examiner who performed an autopsy on Dilawar, said Dilawar's leg was pummeled so badly that the "tissue was falling apart and had basically been pulpified."

"Had Dilawar lived," Rouse told Army investigators in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation. I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus."

In fact, as The New York Times reported in May 2005, when Dilawar was murdered, "most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time."

The US military never produced any evidence to prove that either Habibullah or Dilawar had connections to the Taliban or al-Qaeda. The detainees interviewed by the BBC during a two-month investigation said they were also apprehended and indefinitely imprisoned at Bagram on suspicion of being members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda.

The details of the murders of Dilawar and Habibullah at the hands of military interrogators have been previously reported. But the Senate report included new information about the behind-the-scenes meetings that took place between high-level Pentagon officials in the months before their deaths where "enhanced interrogation" policies implemented at Bagram were discussed.
[...]

The report says, "The use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment at the hands of Bagram personnel, caused or were direct contributing factors in the two homicides."

The report makes clear it was Rumsfeld's interrogation directives and a February 7, 2002, action memorandum signed by Bush suspending the Geneva Conventions for al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners that "opened the door" to the systematic abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.

- truthout.org/

So again here we stand, with evidence pointing directly at the great men of power. What's the next step? Is there even a next step? There isn't, is there. Let's be honest. There never is.



- Peace out