War/War crimes

June 6, 2015

SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines

Mark Mazzetti, Nicholas Kulish, Christopher Drew, Serge F. Kovaleski, Sean D. Naylor and John Ismay, SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines. The New York Times, 6 June 2015. “They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks. Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture.Those operations are part of the hidden history of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, one of the nation’s most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinized military organizations. Once a small group reserved for specialized but rare missions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine. That role reflects America’s new way of war, in which conflict is distinguished not by battlefield wins and losses, but by the relentless killing of suspected militants.”

Winner of the 2015 George Polk Award for Military Reporting.

May 4, 2015

Ghosts of Iguala. Mexico: How 43 Students Disappeared in the Night

Ryan Devereaux, Ghosts of Iguala. Mexico: How 43 Students Disappeared in the Night. The Intercept, 4 May 2015. A two-part investigation by Ryan Devereaux and a photo essay by Keith Dannemiller. “The nightmare began just after sundown. At a dimly lit intersection in Iguala, police with automatic weapons surrounded three buses loaded with college students. The police opened fire. Screaming that they were unarmed, the students fled down darkened alleys, pounding on doors, desperate for shelter. Gunmen put the city on lockdown, stalking the streets in a drizzling rain.

By the time the gunfire finally stopped, two dozen people were wounded and six were dead at three locations, the youngest only 15 years old. One student was shot in the head, leaving him brain dead. A bullet ripped through the mouth of another. Two young men bled to death in the streets, left for hours without medical help. First light brought fresh horrors when the mutilated body of one of the students was discovered in the dirt.

Worse was yet to come. During the chaos, 43 students had been taken captive.

The crimes that began in Iguala on September 26, 2014 had reverberations throughout Mexico. Massive protests have roiled the country. Government buildings have been torched. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto was forced to launch what his administration called the largest investigation in recent memory.”

Update: Ryan Devereaux, Independent Investigators Leave Mexico Without Solving the Case of 43 Disappeared Students. The Intercept, 25 April 2016. “The…first report [of the international panel of experts] was published in September of last year. The 560-page document meticulously deconstructed the [Mexican] government’s account and presented the events that night for what they were: a hyper-violent, coordinated, multi-pronged ambush of unarmed civilians at multiple locations resulting in at least six people dead, 40 injured, and 43 disappeared, carried out with full knowledge, if not outright participation, of security forces at all levels, including federal police and the military.

The experts had come to Mexico at the government’s invitation. With the authority to conduct an independent investigation and promises that the state would aid in making the necessary evidence and witnesses available, their presence offered a glimmer of hope that the most shocking crime in recent Mexican history might actually get solved. That hope soon crumbled though.

Following their first report [in September 2015], the experts’ relationship to the government turned cold, according to an account members of the panel provided to the New York Times. The government refused to make key interviews possible, including interviews with members of the military potentially present on the night of the students’ disappearance. Meanwhile, the experts themselves were attacked in media outlets close to the state, and an individual who appointed them became the target of a dubious criminal inquiry. Despite a sense that their job was not done, the experts were not offered an extension of their mandate. They are expected to leave Mexico in the coming days [late April 2016].”

Update: Kirk Semple and Elisabeth Malkin, Inquiry Challenges Mexico’s Account of How 43 Students Vanished. The New York Times, 24 April 2016.

See also: Francisco Goldman’s series in The New Yorker on the missing students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in the state of Guerrero in Mexico.

November 24, 2014

The Unblinking Stare: The drone war in Pakistan

Steve Coll, The Unblinking Stare: The drone war in Pakistan. The New Yorker, 24 November 2014. “At the Pearl Continental Hotel, in Peshawar, a concrete tower enveloped by flowering gardens, the management has adopted security precautions that have become common in Pakistan’s upscale hospitality industry: razor wire, vehicle barricades, and police crouching in bunkers, fingering machine guns. In June, on a hot weekday morning, Noor Behram arrived at the gate carrying a white plastic shopping bag full of photographs. He had a four-inch black beard and wore a blue shalwar kameez and a flat Chitrali hat. He met me in the lobby. We sat down, and Behram spilled his photos onto a table. Some of the prints were curled and faded. For the past seven years, he said, he has driven around North Waziristan on a small red Honda motorcycle, visiting the sites of American drone missile strikes as soon after an attack as possible…. He has been documenting the drone attacks for the Foundation for Fundamental Rights, a Pakistani nonprofit that is seeking redress for civilian casualties…. [H]e has photographed about a hundred…sites in North Waziristan, creating a partial record of the dead, the wounded, and their detritus. Many of the faces before us were young. Behram said he learned from conversations with editors and other journalists that if a drone missile killed an innocent adult male civilian, such as a vegetable vender or a fruit seller, the victim’s long hair and beard would be enough to stereotype him as a militant. So he decided to focus on children.”

November 18, 2014

Firestone and the Warlord: The untold story of Firestone, Charles Taylor and the tragedy of Liberia

T. Christian Miller and Jonathan Jones, Firestone and the Warlord: The untold story of Firestone, Charles Taylor and the tragedy of Liberia. ProPublica in collaboration with FRONTLINE, 18 November 2014. From FRONTLINE, Firestone and the Warlord: “Firestone wanted Liberia for its rubber. Taylor wanted Firestone to help his rise to power. At a pivotal meeting in Liberia’s jungles in July 1991, the company agreed to do business with the warlord. In the first detailed examination of the relationship between Firestone and Taylor, an investigation by ProPublica and FRONTLINE lays bare the role of a global corporation in a brutal African conflict.” [Read more…]

November 18, 2014 Filed Under: Corporations, Ethics, War/War crimes Tagged With: charles taylor, donald ensminger, ellen johnson sirleaf, firestone company, foreign corrupt practices act, harbel liberia, john toussaint richardson, liberia's truth and reconciliation commission, operation octopus, samuel doe, small boys unit, united steelworkers of america

October 14, 2014

The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons

C. J. Chivers, The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons. The New York Times, 14 October 2014. Key Points: “During the Iraq war, at least 17 American service members and seven Iraqi police officers were exposed to aging chemical weapons abandoned years earlier. These weapons were not part of an active arsenal. They were remnants from Iraq’s arms program in the 1980s during the Iran-Iraq war. Many troops who were exposed received inadequate care. None of the veterans were enrolled in long-term health monitoring. Munitions are unaccounted for in areas of Iraq now under control of ISIS. In response to this investigation, the Pentagon acknowledged that more than 600 troops reported chemical exposure, but it failed to recognize the scope or offer adequate treatment.”

August 8, 2014

The War Photo No One [in the US] Would Publish

Torie Rose DeGhett, Photos by Kenneth Jarecke/Contact Press Images. The War Photo No One Would Publish. The Atlantic, 8 August 2014. “When Kenneth Jarecke photographed an Iraqi man burned alive, he thought it would change the way Americans saw the Gulf War [1991]. But the media [in the US] wouldn’t run the picture.”

April 10, 2014

VA [Veterans Affairs] in crisis: The Arizona Republic investigation

Dennis Wagner, Deaths at Phoenix VA hospital may be tied to delayed care. The Arizona Republic, 10 April 2014. Winner of the 2014 IRE [Investigative Reporters & Editors] Award for Print/Online–Meduim. “IRE Judges’ comments: While the story of poor care for veterans has been told well by media outlets across the country, reporting by the Arizona Republic propelled this story into a national scandal with sweeping results. The team’s stories revealed that veterans were dying while waiting for basic health care services at the Phoenix VA. Meanwhile, officials were manipulating records to hide the long wait times. Writing more than 100 stories during the year [2014], the reporters told the stories of individual veterans whose pleas for treatment were ignored until it was too late. This skillfully reported series helped lead to national reform, investigations and resignations, including U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki. The project demonstrates the benefits of solid beat reporting and not letting go of a story once the national media jumps in.”

November 6, 2013

The A-Team Killings

Matthieu Aikins, The A-Team Killings. Rolling Stone, 6 November 2013. “Last spring [2013], the remains of 10 missing Afghan villagers were dug up outside a U.S. Special Forces base–was it a war crime or just another episode in a very dirty war?”

December 17, 2012

Operation Delirium: a secret Cold War chemical weapons testing program conducted by the US Army during the 1950s and ’60s

Raffi Khatchadourian, Operation Delirium. The New Yorker, 17 December 2012. “Military doctors who helped conduct the [psychochemical] experiments [during the 1950s and ’60s] have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects—in all, nearly five thousand of them—are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive. Within the Army, and in the world of medical research, the secret clinical trials are a faint memory. But for some of the surviving test subjects, and for the doctors who tested them, what happened at Edgewood remains deeply unresolved. Were the human experiments there a Dachau-like horror, or were they sound and necessary science?” Companion piece to Operation Delirium: High Anxiety: LSD in the Cold War by Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 16 December 2012. “For decades, the U.S. Army conducted secret clinical experiments with psychochemicals at Edgewood Arsenal. In the nineteen-sixties, Army Intelligence expanded the arsenal’s work on LSD, testing the drug as an enhanced-interrogation [torture] technique in Europe and Asia. This companion piece to “Operation Delirium”…documents the people who were involved and what they did.” Primary Sources : Operation Delirium, The New Yorker, 26 December 2012.

May 25, 2012

Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala

Sebastian Rotella and Ana Arana, Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala. ProPublica and Fundación MEPI, 25 May 2012. “In 1982 amid Guatemala’s brutal civil war, 20 army commandos invaded the jungle hamlet of Dos Erres disguised as rebels. The squad members, called Kaibiles, cut their way through the town, killing more than 250 people. Only a handful survived. One, a 3-year-old boy, was abducted by a Kaibil officer and raised by his family. It took 30 years for Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda to learn the truth.”