Brad/Chelsea Manning: Charged w/AFG file leak, Cdn angles, disposition (merged)

[The Bread Guy]

Now, let's check the sources As It Happens used. One is a retired logistics officer while the other was in the military police. Nothing against either branch, but they are hardly authoritative sources on combat operations. Mind you, this sort of things is in the best traditions of the program. During the build up before operations began in Gulf 1, As It Happens aired a segment on how the US military was incompetent and faced crushing defeat by the Iraquis.

Oh yeah - if you get a call from a producer with "As It Happens", I get the feeling that one should be prepared to be either:
1)  the good guy sharing his/her tale of oppression/chain-pulling by someone or some institution; or
2)  the bad guy someone/institution who will get zero slack for any explanation.

 

[armyvern]

The bit I heard on the radio (about 2-3 minutes) had the former General saying, in effect, the very first reports of events tend to be truer and more correct than later ones - sort of an a "counter-Hillier" thing.

Surprised then that noone called the former General who was interviewed on this to point out to him that:

"The very first reports" (& thus the truer version of events) WERE those reports called in by the boots on the ground as it happened.

Some staff officer not directly involved making an assumption that due to an airstrike occuring on another target at roughly the same time our troops took incoming fire from the Talib in a report drafted from the confines of their lovely office elsewhere is actually the report that happened LATER. This SO's linked of two seperate and distinct incidents into one does not for good, factual, accurate or just reporting make ... but, apparently, it makes for good headlines and allows more loons to beak off with their conspiracy theories on CBC and in their comments section.

BTW Bulletmagnet, visited Frank last month while I was in PEI and left him a drink. Haven't been there since his funeral. It was a day of reflection.

 

[The Bread Guy]

Some staff officer not directly involved making an assumption that due to an airstrike occuring on another target at roughly the same time our troops took incoming fire from the Talib in a report drafted from the confines of their lovely office elsewhere is actually the report that happened LATER. This SO's linked of two seperate and distinct incidents into one does not for good, factual, accurate or just reporting make ...

It could also have been just a clerical error/mistake re:  which category of report this became.  THAT's the key question (how did it get classified as such?), not, "is Canada hiding something about this based on this one piece of paper out of millions out of AFG?"  I'm certain those who were there aren't hiding anything or making it up.

 

[McG]

The bit I heard on the radio (about 2-3 minutes) had the former General saying, in effect, the very first reports of events tend to be truer and more correct than later ones - sort of an a "counter-Hillier" thing.

I'm not sure how one could believe that the first reports, based on less complete information, could be truer.  My observations match Hillier's - As more information becomes available (from subsequent SITREPS or more detailed post-op reports, the picture of what really happened becomes more clear.  Often, new information will be incompatible with previous HQ interpretations of earlier SITREPS, lower stations will be asked to clarify and a significantly revised understanding of the events is established.

… this challenge of communication is one of the reasons it is so important to trust the soldiers on the ground without second guessing during a fight.

Giving some benefit of the doubt to BGen Karpinski, it may be that she intended to suggest that later reports are more influenced by “messaging” – where, in addition to processing the information, various HQs attempt to add a spin so that desired conclusions will be reached higher (or laterally).

However, even with the messaging, the accumulation of facts does results in progressively more accurate reports and (I suspect) each higher level of HQ is able to see through the messaging of the HQ one lower.

The erroneous blue-on-blue report is just that – erroneous.  There is no sugar-coating of such events, and if it had been a blue-on-blue we (the nation) would have know about it back in Sept ’06.  The facts are that the men were killed by the enemy.

 

[Dog Walker]

A good piece from the Ottawa Citizen

Weak leaks
By Eric Morse, Citizen Special
July 29, 2010 12:21 PM

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Opinion+Weak+leaks/3334740/story.html

For all the uproar he has managed to cause in the past few days, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange's behaviour is that of a small boy throwing stinkbombs, for which he could well receive a nasty spanking.
He seems to be aware of it. Breathless media report that Assange "has no permanent address and travels frequently -- jumping from one friend's place to the next, occasionally disappearing from public view for months at a time, only to reappear in the full glare of the cameras at packed news conferences to discuss his site's latest disclosure."
He needs to. Whatever attention he has had in the past is nothing compared to what he'll attract after the brouhaha that this week's massive dump of U.S. field-level reports has created. Some of those paying attention are not people or organizations one would wish to stir up in the normal course of events.
You could even start with the friends and relatives of four Canadian soldiers who died in battle in September 2006, whom a document in the dump wrongly identifies as killed by "friendly fire." That particular piece of paper was blasted all over Canada by a media that for 24 incredible hours seem to have taken it at face value, until it occurred to the Citizen and to the Globe's Christie Blatchford that there were plenty of eyewitnesses who could easily cross-check the story.
If one bad report does not discredit the whole pile, it at least points up that raw bulk data are never to be trusted without far better editing than this lot has received. But it is the conceit of the age that "citizen journalists" -- including the anonymous volunteers who helped "edit" the heap -- are far more trustworthy than any "mainstream" media (who have an agenda, so it is said) or, it goes without saying, than any elected government, since it is axiomatic these days that governments always lie.
Governments do sometimes lie, and the mainstream media often do have an agenda, though these days that seems mainly driven by an uncritical desperation for news that too often stifles perspective. And whistleblowers have their place. But the issue of balance remains.
That is the problem with the "information wants to be free" fetish that the Internet has spawned. So does a plague bacillus, I imagine, but organized society cannot afford either in large doses, or it rapidly ceases to be organized. The oldest social contract is freedom vs. protection, and the Internet has not altered that paradigm one bit. Who will watch the latest self-appointed custodians of freedom?
Assange claims that this information dump rivals the Pentagon Papers in importance. Apart from inconveniencing U.S.-Afghan-Pakistani relations (admittedly no minor matter), this is nonsense. The Pentagon Papers were a finished policy document, leaked by a senior analyst who had participated in drafting it and who knew exactly the worth of what he had -- as did his chosen recipient, The New York Times. Nothing in the Wikileaks dump comes close to what the Pentagon Papers said about American policy, or mendacity.
Assange has made other claims: "We have files that concern every country in the world with a population of over one million," he said this week. "Thousands of databases and files about all sorts of countries."
It's reasonable -- from his point of view -- that he should release this particular lot. It is far more sensational than, say, a similar dump of Russian Federation Security Service files on the brutal North Caucasus counterinsurgency -- if he has anything like that in the first place. He is also playing it smart -- but perhaps not smart enough.
In the past week Assange has risen from a minor irritant to a major one, and just possibly attained the coveted status of "threat" in a few capitals, not necessarily the ones that spring to mind, on the principle, "if he has that on them, what's he got on us?" He has certainly got the undivided attention of every counterintelligence agency on earth, and many of them play very rough. He will have to accelerate his nomadic existence to avoid that spanking -- which when it comes might well be tipped with any of several interesting substances.
Heaven knows I wish him no harm, but he has, wittingly or otherwise, made himself a very prominent target.
Eric Morse is a former Canadian diplomat and is now vice-chair of the Security Studies Committee at the Royal Canadian Military Institute in Toronto.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Edit: To add piece on Julian Assange from PBS News Hour on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az1iMRx6qhc&feature=player_embedded#!

 

[MarkOttawa]

Following up on Mr Morse:

AfPak WikiLeak: Biased, er, exposure?/Dead Afghans Update
http://unambig.com/afpak-wikileak-biased-er-exposure/

Mark
Ottawa

 

[The Bread Guy]

...from an eyewitness who says Wikileaks documents don't come close to telling the whole story:

.... (journalist/blogger and former embed for Wired.com Noah) Shachtman doesn't think the omissions are intentional. "I think these are really short, really fast, really compressed reports given from a junior officer to a more senior officer."

Based on the discrepancies between what he experienced and what he found in the report, he explains how he thinks readers should interpret the 92,000 documents.

"You can read them almost like interoffice memos," says Shachtman. "And we all know interoffice memos don't necessarily tell us what happens a the office."

 

[The Bread Guy]

This from UK's Channel 4 News - highlights mine:

The Taliban has issued a chilling warning to Afghans, alleged in secret US military files leaked on the internet to have worked as informers for the Nato-led coalition, telling Channel 4 News "US spies" will be hunted down and punished.

Speaking by telephone from an undisclosed location, Zabihullah Mujahid told Channel 4 News that the insurgent group will investigate the named individuals before deciding on their fate.

"We are studying the report," he said, confirming that the insurgent group already has access to the 92,000 intelligence documents and field reports. 

"We knew about the spies and people who collaborate with US forces.  We will investigate through our own secret service whether the people mentioned are really spies working for the US.  If they are US spies, then we know how to punish them." ....

(A hat tip to Joshua Foust of Registan.net for this one.)

Now, it's not impossible the Taliban is just saying this to scare people.  That said, way to help out in helping cause "collateral murder", Wikileaks - hope you're happy.

 

[OldSolduer]

In my opinion Wikileaks and its founder are aiding and abetting a terrorist organization.
The soldier who leaked these documents should be jailed FOREVER.
:2c:

 

[GeorgeD]

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/39721/20100730/taliban-warns-informers-talibans-warns-afghans.htm



I havent read any of the files, but it seems logical that this could happen.

 

[The Bread Guy]

...with her latest column here:

.... The parents all knew how their boys had been killed. They knew because when their sons’ friends were back in Canada, they sought them out, as they always do no matter how excruciating the exercise, to tell them. As Barry Mellish told the CBC, he has probably talked to between 20 and 25 witnesses to his son’s death. “They have nothing to gain by covering it up,” Mr. Mellish said. “The military has nothing to gain by covering it up.”

(....)

These were merely soldier witnesses (simple fellows after all, who might be lying or have been lied to, not like those smart reporters in the nation’s capital) and the poor parents of the dead (who as the parents of such simple fellows could be so easily tricked or misled). Plus, their versions of events lined up with how the Canadian Forces and the evil Stephen Harper government had described the four deaths at the time: The cover-up (CTV actually suggested there was a cover-up in its first, newscast-leading report) was still a possibility.

Thus, the Tuesday evening edition of CBC’s As It Happens. The hosts dutifully gave the disclaimer (yes, witnesses had come forward disputing the document on WikiLeaks; parents had spoken up; the government still insisted there had been no friendly fire), then smarmed, “However, the fact the document even exists raises questions.”

This is akin to saying, well sure, there is plenty of evidence the Holocaust occurred, and testimony from survivors, but the mere existence of Holocaust deniers raises doubts. Well, no, it doesn’t ....

 

[Dog Walker]

Media conduct questionable in WikiLeaks affair

BOGDAN KIPLING
Sat, Jul 31 - 7:27 AM

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1194648.html

If the world were saner, we would know better than to get excited over any orchestrated leak of dark secrets. We would discount Washington’s cathouse promiscuity with the "Top Secret" stamp and mutter something about patients running the insane asylum on reading the Afghanistan papers story the New York Times, the Guardian in London, or Der Spiegel in Germany published last Sunday.
The troika disclosed nothing new about the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban insurgents and Pakistan’s alleged double-dealing.
In that sense, the hot papers are like the CIA microfiche I bought at a National Press Club documents sale some yeas ago. It was an "eyes only" report informing President Eisenhower that George Diefenbaker had won the 1958 election, including the source of the information: "Canadian Press and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation."
Nothing quite so funny and so revealing has come over my transom since then — and that is a pity. Whipping up such froth is fun, and readers love it.
The Afghanistan papers story may be hollow but it is not funny. It raises questions about journalism and concerted political action and which is which. If it is the latter, why not declare it? But if newspapering is still the game, what happened to the abhorrence of being sued?
What I see here is a joke on the news side and severe damage to confidence on the part of America’s allies. Why should Canada’s secret service trust American services to keep shared secrets? And what’s true for Canada is true for all America’s allies in the world.
Why have three serious news organizations decided to lend their simultaneous media power to Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks blog? Mr. Assange is a self-described "madman of hacking." If this is a certificate of maturity, then there is no such thing as recklessness with access where life-and-death decisions are made.
Disapproving or approving of a war is everybody’s right in a free society. But it gives pause that these eminent news organizations agreed to sit on the information — such as it is — until a chap much given to self-promotion was ready to set off his big bang.
Mr. Assange says Americans and all their foreign allies must get out of Afghanistan. Many Americans agree with him — and so do Canadians, Britons, Germans, Poles and others in the vast military alliance fighting al Qaida and the Taliban.
That people in Afghanistan and Pakistan want to see the end of the war is so obvious it is embarrassing to mention it. They are at the receiving end of missiles, bombs, grenades and bullets. They want the shooting to be somewhere else even when they see the war as their own liberation.
Mr. Assange would talk to the Taliban to end the war. He sees the Americans as aggressors and condemns their killing of civilians. He is less outspoken about the murders of innocent people that the Taliban al Qaida commit, but then, the activist crowd regularly hates only one villain.
Seeing as I am talking about a mad world where anything can happen, maybe Mr. Assange is promoting peace with the Taliban for Big Gas and its pipelines.
Ahmed Rashid’s definitive book "Taliban — Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia," put the seed of this idea in my head. The author says his book "has been 21 years in the writing — about as long as I have covered Afghanistan as a reporter."
Washington, he writes, has "strongly backed" Unocal, an American energy company, "to build a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan across Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
He says when the Taliban captured Kabul in September 1996, Unocal executive Chris Taggert "told wire agencies that the pipeline project would be easier to implement" now that the Taliban are in the saddle.
Mr. Rashid reminds us that the State Department announced "within hours" of Kabul’s capture by the Taliban, that the United States would establish diplomatic relations with the new rulers.
Their crimes against Afghan women caused some delays, but diplomacy had to move on — and it did. The Taliban foreign minister talked pipelines in the State Department while President Clinton pounded Osama bin Laden’s camps in his country.
In a mad world, it is easy to imagine that Mr. Assange works for Big Gas and its pipelines and coddles the Taliban as the chaps you can do business with.
Bogdan Kipling is a Canadian journalist in Washington.

 

[George Wallace]

Short of outright branding Julian Assange as a Fifth Columnist:


Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.


WikiLeaks morally guilty in classified documents case: Gates

By Phil Stewart, Reuters
August 1, 2010 10:02 AM

LINK


WASHINGTON, Aug 1 (Reuters) - WikiLeaks is at least morally guilty over the release of classified U.S. documents on the Afghan war, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said on Sunday, as investigators broaden their probe of the leak.

The whistle-blowing website published tens of thousands of war records a week ago, a move the Pentagon has said could cost lives and damage the trust of allies by exposing U.S. intelligence gathering methods and names of Afghan contacts.

Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, the top U.S. military officer, appeared on television talk shows renewing those concerns amid fears WikiLeaks may publish more documents.

"My attitude on this is that there are two areas of culpability. One is legal culpability. And that’s up to the Justice Department and others — that’s not my arena," Gates told the ABC News show "This Week with Christiane Amanpour."

"But there’s also a moral culpability. And that’s where I think the verdict is ’guilty’ on WikiLeaks. They have put this out without any regard whatsoever for the consequences."

The release of the classified documents has fanned doubts about President Barack Obama’s strategy to turn the tide in the unpopular war. July was the deadliest month for U.S. forces since the conflict started in 2001.

Mullen, speaking on NBC’s "Meet the Press," called the leak "unprecedented" in its scope and volume.

The U.S. investigation is focusing on Bradley Manning, who worked as an Army intelligence analyst in Iraq, U.S. officials say. Manning is already under arrest and charged with leaking a classified video showing a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists.

Adrian Lamo, who reported Manning to authorities this year after receiving what appeared to be incriminating messages from him, told Reuters he believed U.S. investigators were also looking at people close to Manning with ties to WikiLeaks.

Lamo said in a telephone interview he told investigators he believed Manning would have needed outside help.

"I didn’t believe he had the technological ... expertise to pull this off by himself," Lamo said.

U.S. officials declined to comment on the investigation. Gates said last week he had brought in the FBI so the probe could go "wherever it needs to go."

Manning, being held at a detention facility at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, has not been officially named as a suspect in the latest leak.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has said his group held back 15,000 papers to protect innocent people from harm and was reviewing them at the rate of about 1,000 a day. In an interview with the BBC last week, he did not say if and when they would be published.

The group’s stated aim is to expose government and corporate corruption. Assange has accused Gates of attacking WikiLeaks to distract attention from civilian killings and other bloodshed in the Afghan conflict.

WHAT’S THE WAR STRATEGY?

Gates voiced frustration at critics who say the United States lacks a plan to win the war, despite Obama’s lengthy review last year which ended with a December decision to deploy an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

"I think that the president’s strategy is really quite clear," Gates said. "I hear all the stories that say what’s the strategy, what’s the goal here?"

The objective, Gates said, was to reverse the momentum of Taliban insurgents, deny them access to towns and cities and ramp up Afghan security forces so they can defend themselves and prevent al Qaeda from returning to the country.

Mullen, chairman of the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the release of the documents had not caused any revelations that would affect the war strategy. U.S. officials have portrayed them as a collection of outdated, ground-level reports that lack analysis or perspective.

One of the documents released by WikiLeaks raised concerns the Taliban might have surface-to-air Stinger missiles to shoot down U.S. aircraft.

Asked whether the Taliban had any Stinger missiles, Gates said: "I don’t think so."

The leaked documents also threw an uncomfortable spotlight on links between Pakistan’s spy agency and insurgents who oppose U.S. troops in neighboring Afghanistan.

Gates said links to insurgents was a concern but he and Mullen voiced support for recent moves by Islamabad and Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency.

"What I see is a change in the strategic calculus in Pakistan," Gates said.

(Editing by John O’Callaghan)

© Copyright (c) Reuters


Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/WikiLeaks+morally+guilty+classified+documents+case+Gates/3348805/story.html#ixzz0vMq1j836

 

[George Wallace]

Yet another view on the TREACHERY involved in these acts.

Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.


Peter Worthington: Treachery of the leakers

National Post  July 29, 2010 – 8:47 am

LINK


The most damaging thing about the leaking of some 92,000 documents on the Afghanistan war, seems not to be their content so much as who did the leaking.

It’s always newsworthy and titillating when confidential documents are leaked – witness the Pentagon Papers in the Vietnam war, and more recent leaks about Canadian soldiers turning over Taliban prisoners to Afghan authorities who might mistreat them.
This “scandal,” as claimed by WikiLeaks which specializes in revealing secrets and protecting whistle-blowers, so far doesn’t seem particularly damaging. Embarrassing, maybe, but not damaging. The revelation that the Afghan leadership tends towards corruption, is hardly news. “Exposing” this seems simply a declaration of the obvious.

Of course, one would never expect U.S. President Barack Obama or Canadian PM Stephen Harper to speak openly about Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai being corrupt, but you can bet your last toonie that both of them are quite aware that the guy is probably a crook by any rational standards.

So what? A lot of world leaders got there by means that were criminal and treacherous – until they won power. As the old saying goes: “Treason doth never prosper, for if it prospers, none dare call it treason.”

Name one mid-east regime that isn’t corrupt.

Corruption in Afghanistan is only an issue because it’s a losing war. It was never a concern when Canada followed the Americans into that country and were winning. Documents now available on WikiLeaks.com seem mostly to be old and, if not exactly outdated, events have moved on to other phases.

As in the Cold War days of international spies and Smersh and poisoned umbrella tips and mysterious assassinations, espionage revelations really are mostly fodder for sensation, rather than damaging to national interests.

All governments relish varying degrees of secrecy, probably because it gives them a feeling of power to know stuff that’s not accessible to others. It contributes to egos. “Openness” and “transparency” are ideals that people in positions of power like to cite as goals, but are ever-unwilling to practice if they can be avoided.

Our own access to information laws are used to hide as much as they reveal.

WikiLeaks now has publicized aspects of Afghanistan that were already known. It’s difficult to see how any of the so-called disclosures further endanger troops fighting there.

Of course there is embarrassment – especially for Canadians if, indeed, soldiers supposedly killed by enemy action were, in fact, killed by friendly fire. That shouldn’t make a difference, but it does – bringing added anguish to families of the fallen who feel more caution might have saved their lives. They still died honorably for their country.

WikiLeaks also “reveals” (my quotations are meant to imply irony) that Taliban have infiltrated Pakistan’s Intelligence Service and have alarming support in that country.

So what else is new? That’s been written about and commented on so often that you’d think it hardly worth mentioning. Sure, it’s important, and unless the Pakistani government regains full control of its country, the war against the Taliban cannot be won.

And the Taliban protect al-Qaeda.

So what damage has been done by WikiLeaks’ exposes? The real danger lies in individuals who squeal and steal stuff in order to leak it. They are a menace who violate their oaths and/or betray trust while often posing as people motivated by a concern for truth and principles – all of which camouflages their treachery.

National Post

Peter Worthington is the founding editor of the Toronto Sun and a regular contributor to FrumForum.com, where this originally appeared.



Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/07/29/peter-worthington-treachery-of-the-leakers/#ixzz0vMsUPZth

 

[The Bread Guy]

WTF-blood pressure alert, folks....

WikiLeaks founder accuses US army of failing to protect Afghan informers
Julian Assange defends the whistleblowers' website after its publication of 75,000 leaked files of US army secrets
Carole Cadwalladr and Paul Harris
The Observer, Sunday 1 August 2010

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has hit out at the US military, saying that it bears the ultimate responsibility for any deaths of Afghan informers in the wake of the publication by his organisation of 75,000 leaked files of American army secrets.

Assange and WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website that publishes leaked documents from around the world, have come under increasing fire amid accusations that publishing the files put people's lives at risk. But in an interview with the Observer, Assange said the blame for any deaths lay squarely with US military authorities.

"We are appalled that the US military was so lackadaisical with its Afghan sources. Just appalled. We are a source protection organisation that specialises in protecting sources and have a perfect record from our activities," he said.

WikiLeaks has been accused of disclosing the names of Afghan collaborators who may now be subject to reprisals. Critics also say that the information it published is unchecked and some of it may be of dubious provenance. But Assange responded to those claims by saying: "This material was available to every soldier and contractor in Afghanistan… It's the US military that deserves the blame for not giving due diligence to its informers."

Assange insisted there was no evidence that anyone had been put at risk and that WikiLeaks had held sensitive information back and taken great care not to put people at risk. "Well, anything might happen, but nothing has happened. And we are not about to leave the field of doing good simply because harm might happen… In our four-year publishing history no one has ever come to physical harm that we are aware of or that anyone has alleged" ....

More, if you can stomach it, here. 

What an a**hole..... :rage:

 

[George Wallace]

What an a**hole..... :rage:

He is so full of himself and the shyte that he is spewing that he has lost his grasp of reality.................Unbelievable that such people manage to dupe the majority of the population and be so successful.  Then again, Harris sits in Parliament.  :

 

[R933ex]

I'm not one to get angry on these boards, but for the first time I feel the need to vent. Im watching good friends of different views discussing this, and you know I am absolutely fed up. For one moment I'am going to try to forget the treason in wartime arguments, forget the bringing forward allagations of warcrimes and doing the greater good (as stated by wikileaks) forgetting the comparisons to the pentagon papers. But I cant get it out of this very thick skull that these guys published the names of people whose only crime may have been to talk to a NATO mbr. and tell them that they were about to be blown up or maybe that the community was scared OR WHAT EVER.

Why in Gods name did they allow these documents to go out??? What has the fu$#$ farmer in the middle of no where got to do with Wikilleaks agenda..

Anyways just a vent

 

[George Wallace]

Good vent.  That loser Assange is the one who released the names, not the US.  How he feels he is not to blame, nor does he feel any harm is done, escapes all of my logic. 

What also escapes my logic is all the twits who worship him.

 

[GK .Dundas]

Good vent.  That loser Assange is the one who released the names, not the US.  How he feels he is not to blame, nor does he feel any harm is done, escapes all of my logic. 

What also escapes my logic is all the twits who worship him.

George ,this guy really does believe that  he is morally superior to us all . Therefore above any  responsibility He is answering  to a "higher calling". Although in the last couple of of days I've noticed that he's trying to shift responsibility from himself to the victims  or future victims in case those Afghans named in the leaked documents a bit like any other rapist.

 

[Old Sweat]

The following story from today's Hill Times is reproduced under the Fair Comment provisions of the Copyright Act.

Feds should push U.S. to investigate military log in secret military Afghan doc leaks
Canada should ask the U.S. government to conduct its own investigation into report at odds with the Canadian version of deaths.

By TIM NAUMETZ

Published August 2, 2010 
   

The Canadian government has a duty to ask the U.S. to investigate and reveal the origins of a military log that reopened wounds from the 2006 combat deaths of four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan with its claim they were killed by a U.S. bomb instead of enemy fire, says a Liberal MP and a former Canadian army officer.

Retired Col. Michel Drapeau and Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh (Vancouver South, B.C.) told The Hill Times that despite an internal inquiry at the time by the Canadian Forces, which included a review of Canada's own combat reports on the deaths and the subsequent investigation by Military Police, Canada should ask the U.S. government to conduct its own investigation and explain how it is the U.S. forces in Afghanistan produced a combat report that was completely at odds with the Canadian version of the Sept. 3, 2006, battle in which the Canadians died.

They said that would be the only way to ease the anguish that was caused last week, to the families of the four soldiers who were killed, after the CBC and other media reported the U.S. log was among more than 90,000 U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan war that were sent anonymously to Wikileaks.

Mr. Drapeau also criticized the way in which the Canadian Forces reacted to the leaked document last Monday, with an initial statement only from a spokesman for Defence Minister Peter MacKay (Central Nova, N.S.) denying that the U.S. military log was an accurate account of what transpired during the battle—Canada's first large-scale engagement with Taliban insurgents—and at least a day's delay releasing further information.
In another tragic and odd twist to the story, a Canadian soldier was confirmed killed by friendly fire on Sept. 4 when a U.S. aircraft mistakenly strafed the same company of troops who had lost the four soldiers the previous day. The new suggestion that the four were killed by a U.S. bomb was eerily reminiscent of friendly-fire death in Afghanistan in 2002, when the Liberal government of the day ended Canada's initial combat participation in the war soon after a U.S. pilot killed four Canadian soldiers when he mistook them for enemy forces during a nighttime bombing mission.

Mr. Drapeau said the Canadian government must ask Washington to investigate the friendly-fire report and explain its origin, followed by a Canadian report to the families involved and the public.
"As long as the department, particularly the leaders of the department, either the political or military leaders of the department, as long as they themselves don't seem to act in a very public way and a very reassuring way and look the camera straight in the eye and make those statements, a doubt will persist in the minds of some people," Mr. Drapeau said.

Mr. Dosanjh agreed that, as painful a reminder the leaked document has become for the families of the four soldiers, the government has an obligation to uncover all the facts.

"If the Canadian Forces have determined their own version is correct, I think the Canadian governments has to ask the American government what conclusions they have reached [about the U.S. report], that would clear the air," Mr. Dosanjh said.

Initially, a spokesman for the Canadian Forces said Canada would not ask the U.S. to investigate the origin of its casualty report, a dry but detailed account of the bomb one of its high-altitude aircraft dropped that day in support of the Canadian troops.

"The fact is there is no doubt the Wikileaks log is wrong," Lt.-Col. Norbert Cyr said when The Hill Times first asked him about the report. "How they made that mistake, how the U.S. made that mistake, who logged it, we have no idea and we're not asking them, we don't care, the fact is it does not reflect what actually happened."

But on Thursday, Lt.-Col. Cyr told The Hill Times Canada would ask Washington for an explanation as part of a wider joint review of the material given to Wikileaks. He also confirmed the Canadian troops had called in U.S. air bombing support after the infantry company had been ambushed and pinned down by Taliban soldiers, but said one of the two bombs the Americans dropped in response did not explode and the other did not injure or kill Canadians.

Lt.-Col. Cyr said the reports and investigation results produced internally by the Canadian military in the wake of the casualties would not be made public.

"There are reports on that day," he said. "Unfortunately, they are all classified because there are lessons learned, and there are after-action reports that are classified. They detail tactics and procedures, and they review them. And I can tell you in this case, there were a lot of lessons learned, because it was a bad situation, a classic ambush. I'm not suggesting they made a mistake, but they wandered into a textbook scenario. There's a lot of stuff in there that cannot be made public, and we've never made public any after-action reports of any incident or death in Afghanistan."

Even stories of the deaths from comrades who were in the battle differ in accounts that were based on their statements.

Author Christie Blatchford, who covered Canadian troops in Afghanistan and interviewed members of the same company for her account, quoted an officer as saying one of the men who was killed, Sgt. Shane Stachnik, was walking when the enemy soldiers opened fire. Another account by Legion Magazine writer Adam Day says Mr. Stachnik was standing in an armoured vehicle's sentry hatch.

The accounts, including the Canadian Forces account based on witness statements, say Sgt. Stachnik and Warrant Officer Richard Nolan were killed when the shooting began soon after the company, along with hundreds of other troops in the Canadian battle group, crossed a river toward their target village early in the morning that day. The accounts say the other two who died, Pte. William Cushley and Warrant Officer Frank Mellish, were killed later in the battle, after they sought cover with other soldiers at an armoured bulldozer the Canadians had brought along to breach Taliban defences. The Canadians had been ordered to withdraw, the accounts say, but Pte. Cushley and Warrant Officer Mellish were pinned down with others after their armoured vehicle crashed into a ditch.

Pte. Cushley and Warrant Officer Mellish were killed when the bulldozer was struck by an armour-piercing shell from a shoulder-fired 82-millimetre recoilless rifle, according to soldier accounts of the battle.

The Russian-made weapon reportedly became a favourite of Taliban and other Afghan forces as they fought the Soviet Union occupation of the country in the 1980s.

"We are 100 per cent sure that the events unfolded as they were reported at the time, and not as suggested in the Wikileaks log, which says that the cause of death, or the injuries, were caused by the dropping of a bomb," said Lt.-Col. Cyr.

"What we do know about bombs at this particular engagement is two bombs were dropped," he added. "These are all danger-close bombs, in other words, they're being dropped at the minimum safe distance. The first bomb went down, it went thump, and did not detonate. They then had a second bomb released and it did detonate, and that was hitting the intended target. I believe it was a building. The intended target was struck and there were no, and I underline none, no injuries or deaths related to the release or firing of that second bomb. As they were trying to disengage from that firefight and break contact, they had that bomb dropped so they could move safely without being under fire."

The U.S. log, coded "blue-on-blue" to signify an attack against "friendly" forces, uses military shorthand to describe how troops were receiving small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades from a "sawtooth building." The log says one guided bomb dropped.

"Sawtooth building is hit," the log says. "No activity observed. Casualties 4x CDN KIA. 4x CDN WIA." Four Canadians killed, four wounded. It includes a following sentence, apparently amended, to say seven Canadians were wounded along with an Afghan interpreter. The log was later updated and reviewed, apparently in 2007.

Only four Canadian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan that day, and Lt.-Col. Cyr says the Canadian Forces simply "don't know" where the U.S. unit that prepared the log obtained the information behind it. "They are the ones who generated the input into that database. Below them, we don't know, or where did they get that from, we don't know."
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