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Whistleblowing Wednesday: Unclassified Memo Shows That The Army Knew Burn Pits Causes Illnesses

Since returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, an untold number of soldiers have come down with puzzling health problems. Chronic bronchitis. Neurological defects. Even cancer. Many of them are pointing the finger at a single culprit: The open-air “burn pits” that incinerated trash — from human waste to computer parts — on military bases overseas.

Pentagon officials have consistently reassured personnel that there was no “specific evidence” connecting the two. But now, only days after Danger Room uncovered a memo suggesting that Army officials knew how dangerous the pits were, an animal study is offering up new scientific evidence that links burn pits to depleted immune systems.

“The dust doesn’t only appear to cause lung inflammation,” says Dr. Anthony Szema, an assistant professor at Stony Brook School of Medicine who specializes in pulmonology and allergies, and the researcher who led this latest study. “It also destroys the body’s own T-cells.” Those cells are at the core of the body’s immune system, “like a bulletproof vest against illnesses,” Szema tells Danger Room. When they’re depleted, an individual is much more prone to myriad conditions.

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.”

Accordingly, the health risks were not limited to troops serving at Bagram in 2011, the memo states. The health hazards are an assessment of “air samples taken over approximately the last eight years” at the base.

The U.S. Military Will Spy On Afghanistan Decades After The War Is Over

America is supposed to wind down its war in Afghanistan by 2014. But U.S. forces may continue to track Afghans for years after the conflict is officially done. Palm-sized sensors, developed for the American military, will remain littered across the Afghan countryside — detecting anyone who moves nearby and reporting their locations back to a remote headquarters.

Some of these surveillance tools could be buried in the ground, all-but-unnoticeable by passersby. Others might be disguised as rocks, with wafer-sized, solar-rechargeable batteries that could enable the sensors’ operation for perhaps as long as two decades, if their makers are to be believed.

“Were going to leave behind a lot of special operators in Afghanistan. And they need the kind of capability that’s easy to put out so they can monitor a village without a lot of overt U.S.-made material on pathways and roadways,” says Matt Plyburn, an executive at Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.

And they won’t just be used overseas. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol today employs more than 7,500 UGSs on the Mexican border to spot illegal migrants. Defense contractors believe one of the biggest markets for the next generation of the sensors will be here at home.

NATO Air Strike Kills 8 Afghan Civilians Including 6 Children

A NATO air strike killed a family of eight, including six children, when it hit their home in eastern Afghanistan, local officials said on Sunday.

Saturday night’s incident in Paktia province threatens to further sour already shaky ties between President Hamid Karzai and his Western backers and will likely enrage Afghan civilians weary of years of bloodshed.

“Eight people, a man, his wife and six of their children, are dead,” local government spokesman Rohullah Samoon told AFP.

“It was an air strike conducted by NATO. This man had no connection to the Taliban or any other terrorist group.”

A senior security official in Kabul confirmed the strike and deaths.

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More Afghan Civilians Died In 2011 Than NATO Troops In The Last Decade

Last year’s 3,021 civilian deaths marked the fifth straight year that the toll has risen, UN figures show, while 3,007 NATO soldiers have died since the 2001 US-led invasion, according to icasualties.org.

Meanwhile the number of internal refugees last year hit nearly half a million, the highest for about a decade, part of what Amnesty International has called “a largely hidden but horrific humanitarian and human rights crisis”.

And more than 30,000 Afghans sought asylum abroad last year — another 10-year high. Thousands of others make their way abroad illegally.

Two USA Today Journalist Hit By A Smear Campaign After Reporting On Pentagon Propaganda

Two USA Today journalists investigating private security companies engaging in foreign propaganda wars on behalf of the Pentagon appear to have been subjected themselves to a dirty tricks campaign, the newspaper has revealed.

Reporter Tom Vanden Brook and editor Ray Locker became the subject of a sustained internet campaign to discredit their work just days after they began publishing the results of their investigation into a multi-million dollar Pentagon-funded propaganda mission in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the course of the smear campaign, fake websites, Twitter feeds and Facebook accounts were set up under the journalists’ names in which they were accused of being backed by the Taliban.

The source of the smear campaign has not been identified, and the Pentagon itself told USA Today that it was unaware of any such activities, which it stressed it would find unacceptable. But the timing of the shady attempts to drag their names into the journalistic mud is certainly suggestive.

On February 29 USA Today published the results of the two journalists’ investigations which suggested that the Pentagon had handed millions of dollars to private contractors to carry out dark arts, for very little measurable return. Indeed, the paper reported that one of the main contractors had fallen $4m behind in paying their taxes.

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NATO spends $2 billion a week on the Afghanistan War while half the planet lives on less than $2 a day.

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—	Andy Thayer

Whistleblowing Wednesday: Marines Take Photos With Corpses And Body Parts…Again

An American soldier says he released the photos to the Los Angeles Times to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline. The Army has started a criminal investigation.

The paratroopers had their assignment: Check out reports that Afghan police had recovered the mangled remains of an insurgent suicide bomber. Try to get iris scans and fingerprints for identification.

The 82nd Airborne Division soldiers arrived at the police station in Afghanistan’s Zabol province in February 2010. They inspected the body parts. Then the mission turned macabre: The paratroopers posed for photos next to Afghan police, grinning while some held — and others squatted beside — the corpse’s severed legs.

A few months later, the same platoon was dispatched to investigate the remains of three insurgents who Afghan police said had accidentally blown themselves up. After obtaining a few fingerprints, they posed next to the remains, again grinning and mugging for photographs.

Two soldiers posed holding a dead man’s hand with the middle finger raised. A soldier leaned over the bearded corpse while clutching the man’s hand. Someone placed an unofficial platoon patch reading “Zombie Hunter” next to other remains and took a picture.

The Army launched a criminal investigation after the Los Angeles Times showed officials copies of the photos, which recently were given to the paper by a soldier from the division.

Australia To Withdraw Troops From Afghanistan Early

Australia said Tuesday it will bring its troops home from Afghanistan a year earlier than planned with most soldiers withdrawn in 2013 after significant security gains over the past 18 months.

Canberra, a key coalition ally of the United States, has repeatedly said it intends to remain in the war-wracked nation until 2014 but Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Afghans would now be ready to take responsibility earlier.

She will take her pull-out timetable to a NATO summit in Chicago next month with her announcement coming a day ahead of NATO foreign and defence ministers meeting in Brussels to fine-tune their own troop withdrawals.

“I’m now confident that Chicago will recognise mid-2013 as a key milestone in the international strategy,” she said in a keynote speech shortly after a wave of coordinated Taliban attacks in Afghanistan left 51 people dead.

“A crucial point when the international forces will be able to move to a supporting role across all of Afghanistan.”

Australia has some 1,550 troops stationed in the strife-torn country and has so far lost 32 soldiers in the conflict.

Poll: A Majority Of Republicans Believe The War In Afghanistan Is Not Worth Fighting

A majority of Republicans say for the first time that the war in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll that comes as the continuing U.S. presence in that country is emerging as a key point of contention in the presidential race.

The poll findings are likely to present a challenge for Republican front-runner Mitt Romney, who has said that the goal in Afghanistan should be to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield.

President Obama stepped back from that goal during his 2009 strategy review and has set the end of 2014 as the departure date for all U.S. combat forces.

Overall, the Post-ABC News poll reflects a country bone-weary of war after more than a decade of fighting in Afghanistan and, until late last year, an almost nine-year engagement in Iraq.

Public support for the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan has fallen to an all-time low, with only 30 percent of respondents saying it has been worth fighting.

Whistleblowing Wednesday: U.S. Creates Giant Spy Blimps To Monitor Entire Afghan Villages

It’s a story so convoluted, only Washington could serve it up. Eighteen months ago, the Pentagon’s chief ordered the Air Force to start building a king-sized blimp that could spy on whole Afghan villages at once. That blimp is almost ready for flight testing. But the Air Force doesn’t want to deploy the thing, for reasons both sensible and not. So now a pair of influential senators are demanding that the Air Force send the blimp to the skies above the warzone.

“We believe it would be a significant failure to stop work and not deploy this much needed platform to Afghanistan,” Senators Thad Cochran and Daniel Ionuye complain in a Feb. 14 letter to Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter (.pdf), obtained by Danger Room.

Just two small problems. These senators, though powerful, are pretty famous on Capitol Hill for backing some rather wacky and useless projects. Oh, and there’s a second giant spy blimp that is also scheduled for a flight test soon, and also promised to the generals in Afghanistan.

The airship that’s attracted the senators’ attention is known as Blue Devil Block 2. At 370 feet long and 1.4 million cubic feet fat, it is one of the largest blimps built in this country since World War II. All that size allows it to stay in the air for days at a time at 20,000 feet. And it enables the airship to carry an enormous array of cameras and eavesdropping gear — enough to keep tabs on at least four square kilometers at a time. No other singular eye in the sky could track insurgents for so far around.

No wonder then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates noted in a Nov. 17, 2010 memo (.pdf), obtained by Danger Room, that “the Blue Devil Air Ship initiative [is] urgently needed to eliminate combat capability deficiencies that have resulted in combat fatalities.”

A $211 million crash program was begun almost immediately, with the goal of sending the Blue Devil to Afghanistan before the end of 2011. The contract to lead the development was given to Mav6, a tiny but influential shop drawn from veterans of the Blackwater mercenary firm. David Deptula, the general in charge of Air Force intelligence was so excited about the project, he became the company’s CEO right after his retirement from the military.

“It brings to bear a completely different concept for ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance]: multiple sensors on one platform integrated with on-board processing and storage,” Deptula told Danger Room in January of 2011. “We’ve got the world’s largest ISR payload — and ‘real estate’ to host it, and nearly a supercomputer on board to process what they find.”

Tony Perkins: Pride Flag In Afghanistan Camp Threatens ‘Military Security’

The simple raising of a gay pride flag in the U.S. military base in Afghanistan has the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins panicking for the troops’ safety. Erroneously claiming that “few of the troops support” the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Perkins went so far as to suggest that displaying this symbol of inclusion is “nearly as incendiary” as Quran burning and it puts the base at risk:

PERKINS: Where is the concern now for angering Afghan Muslims, who vehemently oppose homosexuality? The issue is as much an issue of military security as it is of religious morality. After February’s accident with the Korans, American lives were lost. What price will we pay because some want to use the military to show their gay pride?

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Support in U.S. for Afghan War Drops Sharply, Poll Finds

After a series of violent episodes and setbacks, support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped sharply among both Republicans and Democrats, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

The survey found that more than two-thirds of those polled — 69 percent — thought that the United States should not be at war in Afghanistan. Just four months ago, 53 percent said that Americans should no longer be fighting in the conflict, more than a decade old.

The increased disillusionment was even more pronounced when respondents were asked their impressions of how the war was going. The poll found that 68 percent thought the fighting was going “somewhat badly” or “very badly,” compared with 42 percent who had those impressions in November.

The latest poll was conducted by telephone from March 21 to 25 with 986 adults nationwide. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

The Times/CBS News poll was consistent with other surveys this month that showed a drop in support for the war. In a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 60 percent of respondents said the war in Afghanistan had not been worth the fighting, while 57 percent in a Pew Research Center poll said that the United States should bring home American troops as soon as possible. In a Gallup/USA Today poll, 50 percent of respondents said the United States should speed up the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

inothernews:

SWITCH A former Taliban fighter participated in a ceremony in Herat province on Monday, after joining Afghan government forces. Twelve fighters left the Taliban to join government forces in western Afghanistan. (Photo: Aref Karimi / AFP-Getty via the Wall Street Journal)

Afghanistan Bagram Air Base Qur’an Burning Protest Photos February 2012

Up To 20 U.S. Troops Responsible For Afghan Massacre

An Afghan parliamentary investigation team has implicated up to 20 US troops in the massacre of 16 civilians in Kandahar early on Sunday morning. It contradicts NATO’s account that insists one rogue soldier was behind the slaughter.

The team of Afghan lawmakers has spent two days collating reports from witnesses, survivors and inhabitants of the villages where the tragedy took place.

“We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups,” investigator Hamizai Lali told Afghan News.

Lali also said their investigations led to them to believe 15 to 20 US soldiers had been involved in the killings.

The head of the Afghan parliamentary investigation, Sayed Ishaq Gillani, told the BBC that witnesses report seeing helicopters dropping chaff during the attack, a measure used to hide targets from ground attack.

Gillani added that locals suspect the massacre was revenge for attacks carried out last week on US forces that left several injured.

Meanwhile the US military has detained one soldier in connection with the massacre and transferred him to Kuwait amid outcry for a public trial in Afghanistan.

US authorities are currently conducting an investigation into the motives behind the attack, but maintain that the soldier’s trial must be dealt with by the US legal system.

It is believed that the soldier may have had alcohol problems and been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

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