Entering a URL into a status update on Facebook usually renders a link, but in the case of www.collateralmurder.org this is not the case. Many of our readers have expressed concern that given the nature of the material at that web address it would seem apparent that an attempt to censor or restrict the user’s right to disseminate the address is being carried out by Facebook.

It would be very unfortunate for Facebook – whose profile page carries the motto “Giving people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”  – if this turned out to be anything other than unintentional filtering or scripting glitch. We asked Facebook about this apparent restriction of free speech, and they quickly responded, advising:

“To protect our users, we have automated systems in place that block the dissemination of links to known malicious websites, including phishing and malware sites.  On rare occasions, these systems wrongly identify a legitimate link as malicious.  We have reinstated this one and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

It should be noted that  the URL www.collateralmurder.com was not restricted and that the .org address is posting into notes.

(Update:  oops, I forgot to link to the source of that image, my bad: click here )

Wikileaks has just released video it has obtained showing the killing of fifteen unarmed civilians without provocation by two U.S. Apache helicopters in Iraq in 2007.  Wikileaks further claims this exposes a military cover-up that painted the incident as a battle with armed insurgents in which civilians were killed.

The film was taken by the crew of an Apache helicopter on July 12, 2007 over New Baghdad. Two Reuters News Agency employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, were out in the area, and as the film starts you can see Eldeen carrying his camera. Both were amongst the fifteen or so civilians killed, and, it seems, were the unwitting cause of the attack. More info and the film after the jump. Facebook readers, click here to see the article and the video.

The air crew misinterpret the camera as an AK47 and then further misinterpret something else carried by a different civilian – it is not clear what – as an RPG. Despite the fact that no fire was received by either of the attack helicopters – as no one was actually carrying a weapon – permission to engage was asked for and received. The two craft then proceed to deal with the perceived threat with 30mm fire. 

Saeed survives and as he tries to crawl away the air crews are heard urging him to pick up a weapon so that they can open fire on him again. As they wait, a civilian minivan arrives to pick him up – again, with no evidence of arms or threat to the aircraft – and the crew curse impatiently as they ask for permission to open fire on the van.  They eventually receive the permission.

There were two children in the van.

As ground troops arrive and take the wounded children away, the air crew are heard to remark that is “it’s their fault for bringing kids into a battle”. This was not a battle.  At no time were any shots fired at the two aircraft, nor were any weapons in play.  Throughout the film, the crews are heard to be casual and almost pissed off that permission to fire is taking so long. One is heard to laugh when an armored vehicle drives over one of the dead civilians.

There is a certain amount of leeway to be granted by the “fog of war”. You can understand the perceived threat of a crowd of people in a street where two seem to carry something that, from a helicopter,  could look like a weapon. But aren’t you supposed to have absolute certainty, or actually be fired upon before firing back?

The U.S. military initially stated that the victims died during a battle between military and enemy insurgents, and that there was “no question that coalition forces were engaged in a battle against a hostile force”. Reuters spent three years demanding the release of the film to try and verify these claims, but the U.S. military refused its release. Only now, with a leak, is it in the public domain.   The U.S. Military did eventually carry out an investigation and ruled that all was in accordance with the rules of engagement.

It takes you to a place where a very disturbing thought becomes apparent: had there not been two internationally respected journalists involved, and had Reuters not pushed for the truth, and had these just been Iraqi civilians, the “no question” statement – clearly a lie – would have never been exposed (or rather, would never even have been required). It is very easy for the troops on the ground to make mistakes and errors of judgement, and for this there is a certain amount of forgiveness. What is egregious here is how far the miltary then go to keep that quiet, and maybe just how often it happens.

Think carefully before viewing these films: you are watching a moment when, for many innocent people and the families they left behind, life simply stopped.

You can read the Wikileaks article for more information here.

UPDATE 6/4/2010:  it is now reported that an official response to the Wikileaks release and article is being planned, in light of this story being picked up by just about everybody and the mainstream media.

Facebook readers click here for the video.

Controversy has surrounded the case of Binyam Mohamed, 31, who since his return to the UK earlier this year has accused his captors of carrying out acts of torture including beatings, threats, the ever controversial “waterboarding”, and having his genitals cut with razorblades. A UK citizen since 1994, Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of terrorism, and under the guise of the U.S. “rendition” programme was  ferried to Morocco, then Afghanistan and then finally Guantanamo Bay. He was released without charge earlier this year. Mohamed alleges that MI5 personnel provided key background informaton to his captors, advised of specific questions to be asked, and that at some points were also involved in the questioning and torture. 

Originally, Milliband reluctantly ruled that previously classified CIA documents relating to the case against Mohamed and his treatment whilst “in the care” of the U.S. government could be released to the public – but with seven key paragraphs relating to matters unkown redacted on grounds of “national security interests”. It was feared that releasing sensitive information that has passed between the UK and the U.S. intelligence services would cause irreparable harm to the intelligence relationship they share, and make the U.S. less keen to share furutre intelligence with the UK for fear it would be made public.   

Mohamed, backed by legal counsel and supported by human rights organisations, demanded that these paragraphs be made public also, as it would be more in the public interest to know if the Government was complicit and aware of acts of torture carried out on British subjects with the full knowledge of both them and British intelligence agencies. Many people felt at the time that the desire to “black out” these paragraphs supported these claims, and that the Government was putting the “special relationship” with its allies ahead of the protection and rights of its citizens.

In today’s landmark judgement at the High Court Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones ruled that the paragraphs should be released for public consumption as this material and similar claims had already been released in a separate legal action in the United States, and verified as true by a U.S. Judge. It was ruled that, as the information was no longer unavailable to the public, its release could no longer be considered a threat to national security. The Government immeduately appealed the ruling.   Milliband stated:

‘At the heart of this case was the principle that if a country shares intelligence with another, that country must agree before its intelligence is released. ‘This ‘control principle’ is essential to the intelligence relationship between Britain and the US. The Government fought the case to preserve this principle, and today’s judgment upholds it.

‘It agreed that the control principle is integral to intelligence sharing. The court has today ordered the publication of the seven paragraphs because in its view their substance had been put into the public domain by a decision of a U.S. court in another case. Without that disclosure, it is clear that the Court of Appeal would have overturned the Divisional Court’s decision to publish the material.

‘The Government has made sustained and successful efforts to ensure Mr Mohamed’s legal counsel had full access to the material in question. We remain determined to uphold our very strong commitment against mistreatment of any kind.’

Interestingly, the Court they also came to a similar decision last year, but this was kept secret to allow the foreign secretary leave of appeal.

When questioned directly about the issue of collusion and torture, Milliband replied:

“Although it is not necessary for us to categorise the treatment reported, it could be readily contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of Binyan Mohamed by the United States authorities.”

He also stated to Jon Snow of Channel 4 News that it what was done to Mohamed may not necessarily be defined as torture because torture needs to be something carried out regularly. Personally, if you hack my man-parts around even once with a razorblade to extract information from me then I am pretty much 100% certain that constitutes torture.

Finally, and somewhat irnocally, despite Milliband’s assertion that “Mr Mohamed’s legal counsel had full access to the material in question”, it was soon after revealed that  a senior lawyer acting for the foreign secretary wrote to the Court of Appeal criticising some key phrases in the draft judgement without making Mohamed’s counsel aware at all. Jonathan Sumption QC suggested that certain points in the draft gave the impression that the ”Security Service does not in fact operate a culture that respects human rights or abjures participation in coercive interrogation techniques” and requested they be removed.

This is a legal right – for all parties to be allowed to make recommendations on the draft of the judgement before it is finalised. However, it has become clear that  although Sumption passed this request to the Court, he did not pass it to the team working for Mohamed – which is illegal. Any recommendations made must be disclosed to all parties in the proceedings simultaneously. The Government is not permitted to have secret dialogues with the High Court, who are independent of the Government. The letter stated that it had been cc’ed to Mohamed’s barristers, when it was in fact only passed to them the next day. On the assumption that Mohamed’s counsel was aware and had raised no counter-recommendation, the Judges redacted their comments.

With the whole affair a complete shambles, the foreign secretary reduced to scrabbling over paltry arguments about “what constitutes torutre”  and fielding accusations of “nobbling the Judges”, and with MI5 and Security services coming out looking like they were aware of and participated in illegal torture of a UK citizen, it has been announced in a hilarious comedy move that MI5 are now being investigated by the police. There are also now demands for a full public inquiry into the affair. Human rights organisations are now also investigating if allegations of war crimes against both the U.S and UK governments and intelligence services should be considered.

It wouldn’t be so bad if Milliband didn’t look like the nerdy kid next door that stayed in playing D&D and practising twirly-wirly writing all day. Prat.

So, the first and most important rule of any super-secret science team working to create Godawful aberrations of nature for who-knows-what purpose is pretty self-evident: shut the fuck up and say nothing. So it’s both amusing and disheartening to hear that the fount of all super-secret military industrial complex conspiracy theories – DARPA – announced right in it’s annual budget – it’s annual fucking budget, I shit you not – that it is working on synthetic organisms that will live for ever and, should they turn out to be harmful, contain a genetic kill-switch. WTF? More info after the jump.

Wired magazine’s DARPAwatch section revealed this scary fact. Seems that the Pentagon is fed up with the “ randomness of natural evolutionary advancement” and has directed DARPA to work on creating fully synthetic organisms that will be immortal, but that will, should the highly predictable shit-hitting-the-fan outcome that we can all see coming a fucking mile away like a train with a massive headlight all the way down at the other end of the tunnel come to pass, include a biological kill-switch – allowing the organisms to be stopped dead in their tracks.

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch: “Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism”.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Now, forgive us here for sounding a little thick, but it seems to me that there can’t be that many practical, non-weaponizeable, non-evil-plan-formed-in-a-secret-volcano-base things you can do with a synthetic organism. After all, they are not talking about building something that can do the shopping, mow your lawn, or look after grandma whilst you are out to make sure she doesn’t drop another hip or something. And quite what they mean by the “intended biological effect” we are not sure. But, after doing a lot of SCIENCE! in our brains, we are pretty sure that something that is living and breathing isn’t going to be a cure for penile warts or halitosis.

And it stands to reason that if the genetic loyalty built into this organism is intended to avoid  nefarious enemy subjugation of the organism itself, then we are talking about something here that you would be designing to use against such an enemy.

So, one one hand, we have to applaud the openness of DARPA for telling everyone exactly what mysterious secret government projects they are working on. If only the guys with capture UFO tech in Area 51 could be so forthcoming, there would be a whole lot less tin-foil hat loonies about.

On the other hand…isn’t it about time they stopped screwing around with microbes and finally got on with making laser-toting dinosaurs and nuclear dolphins and all that shit? Man, they are taking, like, for ever. You may have the greatest minds in there, DARPA, but the internets have been ahead of you for years. Just hire 300 web-literate man-children and you will have weapons that would give any military  leader a pants-tent like a flagpole. Then again, thinking about it, whilst this would give rise to armored space-jellyfish and power-armor wearing kangaroos, a weaponized Pedobear would be somewhat less awesome. Just stay away from the chans, is all we’re saying.  

Read the full article here.

Wikileaks has not revealed the source of the intercepts, but claims that the context in which the data was sent to them a few weeks ago along with other information confirms their validity.

The messages were broadcast “live” online on the wikileaks site and also Twitter between 25th and 26th November, with each message posted at the same time it was originally sent. More details after the jump.

Messages released range from the almost mundane everyday chatter of civilians enquiring about lunch to haunting automatic alarm messages issued to engineers and maintenance companies from servers and systems in the World Trade Center buildings. Although they help to provide an often jarring look at people’s thoughts on that day, the real meat is in what appear to be the more “official” messages, which can be grouped together into coherenet streams from the sender/receiver ID number: :

2001-09-11 12:26:59 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA vze2j729@verizon.net|I’m At Home With Classified|Ray, I am waiting for the traffic to subside. Then I will take classified to Naval Secu
2001-09-11 12:27:01 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA rity Station or some other installation. Bryan (36

2001-09-11 14:27:44 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA vmaq1vmaq4ecmo@hotmail.com|I’m okay|Ray, I wasn’t not at the pentagon this morning as had previously planned to be for the PE JWCA. Any news on the rest of our guys?????????? CAll me at home if you can. If
2001-09-11 14:27:46 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA not PLEASE email me at my be

2001-09-11 15:42:44 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA vze2j729@verizon.net|Talked to Sgt Fisher and SSgt Webster|He OK’d me to stand fast until traffic subsides. Then
2001-09-11 15:42:46 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA I am to try the old Naval Security Station for an SSO or return to HQMC if traffic is open to it. (40

2001-09-11 15:54:59 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA david.whitney@verizon.net|Ray, Please Call me at home 780-3123, Dave|Also, need to give your muster to Mark Silver. Not sure where he is but = work is 614-4317 (41

2001-09-11 16:49:44 Skytel [005206261] B ALPHA vze2j729@verizon.net|Classified Material|Ray, I turned the classified material over to Sgt Fisher. Mission accomplished. (43

Still other messages suggest either confused Chinese whispers in action or events that were not made public:

2001-09-11 09:52:02 Metrocall {1175659} 1 2400 Frm: MSN Txt: Kavitha Sunand Nair: bomb was diffused at the heliport at pentagon. white house and pentagon being emptied…..

All very interesting stuff. Whether this illustrates perfectly the “fog of war”, or adds grist to the mill for those who do not believe the offical story of events, who knows? As Wikileaks describes the event:

Text pagers are usualy carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the archive range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center.

The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.

Go have a read for yourself  here, and see what you think. As ever, I am remaining respectfully mute on the subject.

I’m pretty sure the real motiovation behind these trailers is Microsoft saying “look, see how utterly fucking awesome a Halo movie would be? Huh? Huh?”

And you know what? I utterly agree. If this is what a mere ad agency can pull off – this and the Believe campaign being even slightly better than the Neil Blomkamp/Peter Jackson shorts – then imagine what a movie studio could do.

Anyway, watch and be awed. That’s a lot of story, action and emotion in just one and a half minutes.

Facebook readers – as ever, click here for the video.

Posted in cool stuff, halo, movies, sci-fi, TV, video games, war Tagged: advertising, bungie, halo, Halo 3 ODST, live-action, microsoft, ODST, video games, videogames, We Are ODST, Xbox 360 ]]> http://blog.dogsounds.com/2009/09/06/we-are-odst/feed/ 1 dogsounds http://blog.dogsounds.com/2009/08/26/dogsounds-reviews-fallout-3-again-after-200-hours-of-play/ http://blog.dogsounds.com/2009/08/26/dogsounds-reviews-fallout-3-again-after-200-hours-of-play/#comments Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:04:38 +0000 dogsounds http://dogsounds.wordpress.com/?p=1723 ]]> Yup. Still awesome.