Iraq War Logs from Wikileaks were made public yesterday and document 109,000 deaths, including 66,000 civilian deaths, of which 15,000 were previously unknown. The more than 390,000 field reports from US military reveal the truth about the Iraq War from 2004 to 2009, which Wikileaks’ Julian Assange hopes will correct attacks “on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which [have] continued on since the war officially concluded.”

The New York Times tells how a U.S. soldier intervened to stop the torture of an Iraqi prisoner by Iraqi police. Except that never happened, and the New York Times own document proves it. Why does the Times feel it has to lighten this tragic tale? Because the truth is so awful: the U.S. countenanced wide-scale torture by its puppet government, and still does.

On September 22, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge Reggie B. Walton denied the habeas corpus petition of Tawfiq al-Bihani, consigning him to indefinite detention in Guantánamo, on an apparently legal basis, despite the fact that there is no evidence that he ever took up arms against anyone, or had any contact with anyone involved in preparing, facilitating or supporting acts of international terrorism. Judge Walton also ignored that despite being, at most, a lowly foot soldier, al-Bihani was held in a variety of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan before his transfer to Guantánamo, where he was subjected to torture.

A new report by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations corroborates earlier news stories on torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners by the U.S. forces at a secret prison within the Bagram complex near Kabul, Afghanistan. While the vast majority of the press have ignored it, one of the report’s “main findings” was that the abuse of prisoners is linked to use of the Army Field Manual’s Appendix M.

Just days after a new report (pdf) was released, providing further evidence that torture of detainees in Afghanistan continues at the “secret” site at Bagram Air Base, Reuters informs us that a detainee in NATO custody has been “found dead” in his cell.

Originally posted at PoliZeros.

I went to a protest in Philadelphia this past Saturday, and it was more disheartening than anything else. It was against the wars and various other injustices, with a special focus on he recent FBI raids of peace activists and Pennsylvania Homeland Security spying on innocent civilians and activists.

By the end of it, I kind of just felt like going up to the megaphone and asking, “How much moral outrage can one person muster? There are more people handing out fliers here than not, and with this country committing so many disgusting, outrageous acts, I don’t blame you.” I won’t lie, I handed a few out myself. Yet the contrast between the righteous causes featured in the speeches and on the signs and on the fliers and the, as a fellow protester said to me, “complete lack of solidarity” was striking.

massgreennews: GRP Endorses Indy dem Socialist Engel for Congress; Jill Stein Will Rock (Opera) UMass — by NormanB (“Deviations from the Norm”)

A new article at Truthout describes how Paul Wolfowitz issued a military directive in March 2002 that loosened rules against human experimentation and protections for subjects of such research that had been in place since the early 1970s. According to sources within the Department of Defense, the Wolfowitz Directive, “Protection of Human Subjects and Adherence to Ethical Standards in DoD-Supported Research”, was used to support a top-secret Special Access Program at Guantanamo funded through the Defense Department’s black budget involving “deception detection”, interrogation, and other research upon detainees.

On Wednesday, to the surprise of some spectators in the courtroom, a U.S. federal judge did the right thing: he followed the law.

Post-9/11; insight into the federal procecution of suspected terrorists