One unintended consequence of toppling the Gaddafi regime is that the CIA’s close relationship with Libyan intelligence has now been revealed, including details about our rendition program from 2003-2007. It’s just more evidence of Bush-era crimes. It seems like we can’t keep any secrets anymore. Wikileaks’ Julian Assange went ahead and published his full cache of State Department cables in completely unredacted form. It will probably land him in prison, possibly for the rest of his life. But it has also exposed a bunch of sensitive sources, undermining our ability to collect intelligence, but also exposing many highly embarrassing and even scandalous facts.
Iraq’s government will reopen an investigation into a 2006 raid in which U.S. forces killed at least 11 Iraqi civilians, including women and children, a spokesman for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Friday.
The new probe comes after a diplomatic cable surfaced in a WikiLeaks cache that raised fresh doubts about the Pentagon’s version of events, which cleared the U.S. military of any wrongdoing.
Someone ask Dick Cheney about this while he’s still on his Book Tour.
Iraqis in the town of Ishaqi have long claimed that U.S. military forces executed at least 11 people there — including women and children — and then hid the crime by directing an airstrike to the area, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
A Pentagon spokesman dismissed the claims on Friday, saying that, from the U.S. military’s viewpoint, nothing had changed.
In the document released by WikiLeaks, Philip Alston, a human rights official for the United Nations, appears to support the Iraqi claims. He cabled the State Department about two weeks after the incident to describe how U.S. forces approached a house in the early hours of March 15, 2006, and found a family inside, then “handcuffed all the residents and executed all of them.”
Among the dead were a 28-year-old Iraqi man, Faiz Harrat al-Majmaee, and his extended family, including five children younger than 5, the U.N. report said. Autopsies done later in the hospital in Tikrit showed that “all the corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed,” Alston noted.
U.S. coalition spokesmen said at the time that there was no wrongdoing and that the commander “properly followed the rules of engagement as he necessarily escalated the use of force until the threat was eliminated.”
Our country needs to be able to have a confidential communications network for our diplomatic corp, but we also need to have accountability for crimes against humanity committed under George W. Bush’s command. If Bush thought his crimes could remain hidden from history, he’s learning otherwise this week.
