Tag Archives: Afghanistan
Disturbing Video Shows U.S. Defense Contractors Allegedly Drunk and on Drugs in Afghanistan
The two employees, Melson and Kenny Smith, worked as armed security officers in Kabul as part of a $47 million government contract with the Arlington, Virginia-based defense company, which led efforts to train the Afghan National Police in counter-insurgency tactics, according to ABC. They have now filed a lawsuit against Jorge Scientific, alleging widespread misconduct and fraud under the False Claims Act.
Read more: newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/18/disturbing-video-shows-u-s-defense-contractors-drunk-and-on-drugs-in-afghanistan/#ixzz2A3ZOPaxc
(Read more)
Canada’s $1.5BN Afghanistan Aid Effort: “All the projects have failed. None of them have been successful”
Hampered by an increasingly hostile work environment and a bureaucratic culture that discouraged innovation, Canada’s aid blitz in Afghanistan seemed at times “divorced from reality” in the war-ravaged country, concludes a previously secret review of the $1.5-billion program. (Read more)
Drone-Tracking App Gets No Traction From Apple
Cellphones have ushered in an age of interruption, with apps that notify you when you’re mentioned on Facebook or Twitter, or even if your favorite ball team scores a run.
But Apple is the ultimate arbiter of what kinds of notifications iPhone users can receive — and some apps just don’t pass muster with the tech giant.
Take Josh Begley’s idea, for example. Begley created an app that sends a push notification — or beep — to an iPhone whenever there is a U.S. drone strike anywhere in the world.
Apple blocked it from its App Store.
“They said the app has excessively objectionable or crude content,” Begley says. “Which I found somewhat curious, because it is literally just a republishing of news — just tracking when strikes happen.”
The app contains no gory pictures or classified information. (Read more)
Perfect example of cowardly, sycophantic, on-message journalism
Sharp Decline in Terror Attacks After Bin Laden Death
The number of worldwide terror attacks fell to 10,283 last year, down from 11,641 in 2010 and the lowest since 2005, the State Department reported today.
What’s made the difference? The State Department cites the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda members killed last year including Atiyah Abd al-Rahman and Anwar al-Awlaki, who was the head of Yemen’s Al Qaeda affiliate and had ties to the underwear bomber plot in 2010.
“The loss of bin Laden and these other key operatives puts the network on a path of decline that will be difficult to reverse,” the report stated. (Read more)
US Boycotted 1980 Olympics b/c Soviets Occupied Afghanistan
The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit
A federal investigation alleged Enrique Prado’s involvement in seven murders, yet he was in charge when America outsourced covert killing to a private company.
It was one of the biggest secrets of the post-9/11 era: soon after the attacks, President Bush gave the CIA permission to create a top secret assassination unit to find and kill Al Qaeda operatives. The program was kept from Congress for seven years. And when Leon Panetta told legislators about it in 2009, he revealed that the CIA had hired the private security firm Blackwater to help run it. “The move was historic,” says Evan Wright, the two-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist who wrote Generation Kill. “It seems to have marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise.”
The quote is from his e-book How to Get Away With Murder in America, which goes on to note that “in the past, the CIA was subject to oversight, however tenuous, from the president and Congress,” but that “President Bush’s 2001 executive order severed this line by transferring to the CIA his unique authority to approve assassinations. By removing himself from the decision-making cycle, the president shielded himself — and all elected authority — from responsibility should a mission go wrong or be found illegal. When the CIA transferred the assassination unit to Blackwater, it continued the trend. CIA officers would no longer participate in the agency’s most violent operations, or witness them. If it practiced any oversight at all, the CIA would rely on Blackwater’s self-reporting about missions it conducted. Running operations through Blackwater gave the CIA the power to have people abducted, or killed, with no one in the government being exactly responsible.” None of this is new information, though I imagine that many people reading this item are hearing about it for the first time.
Isn’t that bizarre?
The bulk of Wright’s e-book (full disclosure: I help edit the website of Byliner, publisher of the e-book) tells the story of Enrique Prado, a high-ranking CIA-officer-turned-Blackwater-employee who oversaw assassination units for both the CIA and the contractor. To whom was this awesome responsibility entrusted? According to Wright’s investigation, a federal organized crime squad run out of the Miami-Dade Police Department produced an investigation allegedly tying Prado to seven murders carried out while he worked as a bodyguard for a narco crime boss. At the time, the CIA declared him unavailable for questioning; the investigation was shut down before he was arrested or tried.
There’s a lot more to the story — Wright’s e-book is almost 50 pages long — but this bit is of particular note:
The reporting on Prado’s activities at Blackwater produced no evidence that the firm’s employees had ever killed anyone on behalf of the CIA. But I spoke to Blackwater employees who insisted that they had. Two Blackwater contractors told me that their firm began conducting assassinations in Afghanistan as early as 2008. They claimed to have participated in such operations — one in a support role, the other as a “trigger puller.” The contractors, to whom I spoke in 2009 and 2010, were both ex-Special Forces soldiers who were not particularly bothered by assassination work, although they did question the legality of Blackwater’s involvement in it.
According to the “trigger puller,” he and a partner were selected for one such operation because they were Mexican Americans, whose darker skin enabled them to blend in as Afghan civilians. The first mission he described took place in 2008. He and his partner spent three weeks training outside Kabul, becoming accustomed to walking barefoot like Afghans while toting weapons underneath their jackets. Their mission centered on walking into a market and killing the occupant of a pickup truck, whose identity a CIA case worker had provided to them. They succeeded in their mission, he told me, and moved on to another. This contractor’s story didn’t completely fit with other accounts about Prado’s unit at Blackwater. The e-mail written by Prado and later obtained by the Times seemed to indicate that the unit wouldn’t use Americans to carry out actual assassinations. Moreover, two CIA sources insisted that the contractors I spoke to were lying. As one put it, “These guys are security guards who want to look like Rambo.”
When I asked Ed O’Connell, a former Air Force colonel and RAND analyst with robust intelligence experience in Afghanistan, to evaluate these contractors’ claims, he first told me they were almost certainly a “fantastical crock of shit.” But a year later, in 2011, after a research trip in Afghanistan for his firm Alternative Strategies Institute, O’Connell had changed his assessment. He told me, “Your sources seem to have been correct. Private contractors are whacking people like crazy over in Afghanistan for the CIA.”
Newsweek Covers
Congressman Ron Paul Urges Afghanistan Withdrawal July 18 2012
“What About The Hundreds Of Innocent People WE Are Killing With OUR Drone Strikes In Pakistan!”
This guy is such a tool.
Leaked Memo: Afghan ‘Burn Pit’ Could Wreck Troops’ Hearts, Lungs
well, shit.
For years, U.S. government agencies have told the public, veterans and Congress that they couldn’t draw any connections between the so-called “burn pits” disposing of trash at the military’s biggest bases and veterans’ respiratory or cardiopulmonary problems. But a 2011 Army memo obtained by Danger Room flat-out stated that the burn pit at one of Afghanistan’s largest bases poses “long-term adverse health conditions” to troops breathing the air there.
The unclassified memo (.jpg), dated April 15, 2011, stated that high concentrations of dust and burned waste present at Bagram Airfield for most of the war are likely to impact veterans’ health for the rest of their lives. “The long term health risk” from breathing in Bagram’s particulate-rich air include “reduced lung function or exacerbated chronic bronchitis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, atherosclerosis, or other cardiopulmonary diseases.” Service members may not necessarily “acquire adverse long term pulmonary or heart conditions,” but “the risk for such is increased.” (Read more)
Afghans thwarting ‘insider’ plots to kill NATO forces, says top U.S. commander John Allen
How badly are things going in Afghanistan? The top U.S. and NATO commander, Gen. John Allen, told reporters it was “good news” that Afghan authorities had arrested 160 people in the last few months for plotting so-called “green-on-blue” attacks by Afghan security forces on their NATO-led international partners.
Update, Tuesday May 22, 11:42 a.m.: A NATO International Security Assistance Force spokesman says Allen was talking about thwarted insurgent plots, not insider attacks.
Allen was describing how the alliance and the government in Kabul have responded to a spate of deadly insider attacks. He cited “an eight-step vetting process” to screen new members of the Afghan armed forces. (Read more)
Pakistan seeks $5,000 transit fee for each NATO container
Pakistani negotiators have proposed a fee of about $5,000 for each NATO shipping container and tanker that transits its territory by land into and out of Afghanistan.
The amount is a key sticking point in discussions about the terms of a deal that would allow the traffic to resume, about six months after Pakistan closed its border crossings, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials. (Read more)
Afghan-led forces beat back brazen Taliban attack
A brazen, 18-hour Taliban attack on the Afghan capital ended early Monday when insurgents who had holed up overnight in two buildings were overcome by heavy gunfire from Afghan-led forces and pre-dawn air assaults from U.S.-led coalition helicopters.
Kabul residents awoke Monday to a second day of loud explosions and the crackle of gunfire. As darkness turned to dawn, Afghan-led forces fired one rocket-propelled grenade after another into a building in the center of the city where insurgents began their attack Sunday. (Read more)
Child witnesses to Afghan massacre say Robert Bales was not alone
Here are two versions of what happened the night of March 11, when 17 Afghan villagers were shot to death.
First, the Army version: Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, troubled by marriage woes, drunkenly left Camp Belambai, 12 miles from Kandahar, with a pistol and an automatic rifle and killed six people as they slept. Bales then returned to the base and left again for another village, this time killing 11. He acted alone and he admitted to the killings, according to the Army.
Then there is the account that child witnesses provided Yalda Hakim, a journalist for SBS Dateline in Australia. Hakim, who was born in Afghanistan and immigrated to Australia as a child, is the first international journalist to interview the surviving witnesses. She said American investigators tried to prevent her from interviewing the children, saying her questions could traumatize them. She said she appealed to village leaders, who arranged for her to interview the witnesses.
In the video, the children told Hakim that other Americans were present during the rampage, holding flashlights in the yard.
Noorbinak, 8, told Hakim that the shooter first shot her father’s dog. Then, Noorbinak said in the video, he shot her father in the foot and dragged her mother by the hair. When her father started screaming, he shot her father, the child says. Then he turned the gun on Noorbinak and shot her in the leg. (Read more)