http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/28/wikileaks_founder_julian_assange_transparent_government Wikileaks founder Juliian Assange dismantles attacks against his work on Democracy Now!
by: Paul RosenbergWed Jul 28, 2010 at 17:00
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The Most Important RevelationsIt's not the individual facts, so much as it is the broad panaroma of them all, which in turn enables us to grasp the individual facts much more realistically by understanding the broader context in which they occur:
AMY GOODMAN (Introducing a pre-recorded clip): I began by asking Julian Assange what he thought of the most important revelations in the 91,000 documents he published on Sunday, the biggest leak in US history.
JULIAN ASSANGE: So, everyone's asking for a specific revelation that is the most important-you know, a massacre of 500 people at one point in time. But, to me, what is most important is the vast sweep of abuses that have occurred during the past six years, the vast sweep of sort of the everyday squalor and carnage of war. If we add all that up, we see that in fact most civilian casualties occur in incidences where one, two, ten or twenty people are killed. And they really numerically dominate the list of events, so it's, of course, hard for us to imagine that. It's so much material. But that is the way to really understand this war, is by seeing that there is one sort of kill after another every day going on and on and on in all sorts of different circumstances.
War Crimes
There is evidence that warrants investigation. This should be taken very seriously:
AMY GOODMAN: You have said you feel there is evidence of war crimes here. Can you talk about that? And specifically, what are the examples that you feel are the most important?
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah. Yeah, well, these reports can be quite terse, so I wouldn't want to prejudge the issue and say for sure that a war crime has committed-been committed. But some are deeply suspicious, and there are examples which have been not mentioned in the Western press but, as we've discovered, have been mentioned elsewhere that are almost surely war crimes.
As an example, in the material, there's a Polish My Lai. Polish troops were hit by an IED and the next day went to the closest village, which I guess they felt had supported the IED attack, and shelled the village. Similarly, we see something like Task Force 373, a special forces assassination squad so secretive that it changes its military code name every six months, working its way down the JPEL, Joint Priority Effects List, kill or capture list, usually a kill list. And we have seen events where it has performed secret missile strikes on a house, from within close proximity, and ended up killing at least seven children, and a number of other incidences. The report itself about that says at the beginning that the information about 373 being involved in that event, together with the use of the HIMARS missile system, this ground-to-ground missile attack, is to be kept secret even from other people in the coalition of forces which equal ISAF, I-S-A-F.
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AMY GOODMAN: Julian Assange, I'd like you to respond quickly to the responses of the administration, of the Obama administration: one, that this is old news, that it goes until December '09, exactly when the Obama administration changed its policy with the surge.
JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, so, this is a bit of rhetorical trickery by the White House. The material goes to December 31, '09, so it's valid up to the beginning of 2010, for a six-year period. So it does cover a sweep of the war which hasn't yet turned around. Now, Obama's policy change came in on the 1st of December, so there is, in fact, an overlap. We can see some of what happens. But looking back through the data at successive policy changes-for example, the policy changes introduced by McChrystal-what we don't see is a real change to how things happen on the ground. So a policy change is just words, but what actually happens on the ground, well, we can see it from this data. Very little happens. The US military and the soldiers in Afghanistan are a very, very big ship to turn around. Their interaction with that environment and with the Taliban and with the local population has its own dynamic that is independent to the policies that are tried-that people try and push down from on high. We can see that, as an example, when McChrystal tried to introduce more metrics, more measurements, of how civilian casualties were occurring. Fields pop up in the database around that time. But we see that troops that are causing civilian casualties simply don't fill out that field, or they lie about whether the casualties have occurred, or they misrepresent whether it was a civilian casualty versus an insurgent casualty. That sort of-that culture and interaction between Taliban and US forces and other elements operating in Afghanistan is very difficult to change. And so, we don't expect that the situation, as it stands now, some seven months after this data stopped being collected, would be that different to the previous six years, which we can see in the material that has been released.
MORE:
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/28/wikileaks_founder_julian_assange_transparent_government"WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange:
'Transparent Government Tends to Produce Just Government.'"
Indeed. What could be simpler? Or more truly American?
http://openleft.com/diary/19611/wikileaks-founder-juliian-assange-dismantles-attacks-against-his-work-on-democracy-now
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