Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Video: Winning Hearts and Minds in Iraq

This video was released by Wikileaks.org a non-profit organization that has drawn the ire of the military/intelligence complex because it has made public classified information concerning the US war effort in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2008 the Army Counterintelligence Center said Wikileaks was a security threat.  During the incident in which mostly unarmed Iraqis were blasted by the crew of an orbiting Apache helicopter, a Reuters reporter and his driver were killed. This event took place in 2007. US soldiers on the ground driving Humvees in the area were directed to the killing zone by the crew after the "bastards" were lying prostrate, dead or dying*. Notice that even after the reporter was clearly wounded and unable to escape their fire, the Apache crew shot up the reporter and his rescuer in a van. The US military has admitted the authenticity of the video which was decrypted by Wikileaks. If you can spot the man with an RPG launcher give US Person an email with the digital time frame and you will receive virtual credit at Persona Non Grata.



*And in Afghanistan, the Special Forces, the elite of America's military establishment, have been forced to admit that two pregnant Afghan women were killed in a raid. Alexander Cockburn reports:  "[T]he US military has finally admitted that Special Forces troops killed two pregnant Afghan women and a girl in a February raid in which two Afghan government officials also died. Brilliant reporting by Jerome Starkey of the Times has blown apart the US military's cover-up story that the women were killed by knife wounds administered several hours before the raid.  It now appears that the knife wounds may have been inflicted by the Special Forces troops retrieving their bullets from the dead or dying women's bodies. Starkey reported that Afghan investigators had determined that American forces not only killed the women but had also "dug bullets out of their victims' bodies in the bloody aftermath" and then “"washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened".