Military

Port Study 2002

I found this gigantic PDF file, “Port Study 2002,” on a US military site several months ago. I downloaded it because infrastructure information often gets pulled offline during info-purges. I can no longer find this file, so I’m posting it.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FILE [PDF | 132 meg | 2858 pp]
(Hosted at the Internet Archive)

It looks as though someone merged a whole bunch of separate studies by the military into one insanely huge file - 2,858 pages of detailed information on major seaports in the US (including California, Washington, Alaska, New York/New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana), Panama, the Middle East, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, and elsewhere. Photos, maps, charts, graphs - you name it - with the focus on each port’s ability to handle a US military operation.

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Philadelphia

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Pentagon documents on embedded media

On a subpage of their Freedom of Info Act website, the Defense Department today has posted 127 pages of documents concerning embedded media. The file may be downloaded here:

DOD FOIA Reading Room [PDF | 3.3 meg | 127 pp]

Memory Hole mirror

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[exclusive] “Prisoner Boxes” in Iraq

First Published Photographs of Wooden Imprisonment Crates

>>> In Iraq, some prisoners/detainees are kept in wooden crates known as “prisoner boxes,” so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Central Command asking for the following:

“Vanity Fair (Feb 2005 issue) has reported the existence of wood “prisoner boxes” being used by the US military in facilities in and around Baghdad. They are used to hold individual prisoners and detainees.

“I hereby request all photographs of these boxes, including empty boxes as well as boxes holding prisoners and detainees.”

Around nine and a half months later, CentCom responded by sending the three photographs on this page.

You are seeing the photos exactly as they were sent to me - as black and white printouts on standard printer paper, with creases from being folded into thirds. Two of the photos are extremely blurry and pixelated.

Considering that the average summer temperature in Baghdad is 111 F, and that temps can easily go above 120 F [source], it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be inside these boxes.

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Technical note: These photographs were released as black and white print-outs by the US Central Command on 10 Nov 2005 in fulfillment of FOIA request #2005-085, filed by Russ Kick on 27 Jan 2005.

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Zip file containing high-resolution scans of all three photo print-outs [12 meg]

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Pentagon docs: expenditures in Iraq & elsewhere

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Today in its Freedom of Information Act reading room, the Pentagon has posted 202 pages of documents related to its Iraqi Freedom Fund transfers/expenditures from 2002 to 2006:

DOD reading room [PDF | 9 megs]

Memory Hole mirror

The Government Accountability Office explains the Iraqi Freedom Fund:

“The Iraqi Freedom Fund is a special account providing funds for additional expenses for ongoing military operations in Iraq, and those operations authorized by P.L. 107-40 (Sept. 13,2001), Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other operations and related activities in support of the global war on terrorism.”

Some sample pages from the Pentagon’s FOIA release:

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Gitmo interrogation video released

For the first time, video of an interrogation at Guantanamo Bay is available to the public. In it, we see 16-year-old Omar Khadr being interrogated in late February 2003. Khadr is a Canadian citizen, and a court in that country ordered the 7-1/2 hours of the video interrrogation released after Khadr’s attorneys filed a motion. DVDs containing the footage had been turned over to Khadr’s defense team by the Pentagon.

Today, the law firm released a 10-minute compilation culled from the entire footage. Several versions are available on YouTube and other sites, but most are truncated. The video below is the entire thing (9:54 long).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7b90ecYJVY

The full 10-minute version is also available as a Windows Media file at the CBC’s website here [WMV]

Fourteen pages of documents were also released, and were posted to the CBC website here [PDF]

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Further reading:

‘You don’t care about me,’ Khadr sobs in interview tapes [CBC]

The Unending Torture of Omar Khadr [Rolling Stone, 2006]

The Case of Omar Ahmer Khadr, Canada [Human Rights First]

Pentagon page on military commission proceedings against Khadr [Defense Dept]

{Added July 19:}

How did Omar Khadr end up in Guantánamo? [Guardian of London]

Book: Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr

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Proposed Tillman-Lynch report released by Oversight Committee

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From the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

Committee Releases Proposed Tillman Report

A proposed Committee report on the investigations into the death of Corporal Patrick Tillman and the capture of Private Jessica Lynch discloses important new details about the incidents, but could not resolve “the key issue of what senior officials knew” because “the investigation was frustrated by a near universal lack of recall.” The full Committee will meet on Thursday to approve the report.

Documents and Links

Report: Misleading Information from the Battlefield: The Tillman and Lynch Episodes (383 KB)

The Memory Hole has posted an HTML version (automatically generated using DreamWeaver).

Flashback: US Brass Ordered Civilian Massacres During the Korean War

The Associated Press has a major investigative story about the Korean War.:

In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions [of political prisoners] by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.

Extensive archival research by The Associated Press has found no indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified “secret” and filed away.

This reminded me of an early Memory Hole article, which I’ve now updated with archival links and document images:

Civilian Massacres During the Korean War: US Military Documents Show Brass Ordered Slaughters

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Chem-bio conference proceedings, 2000

From the DTIC archives comes this 635-page “Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Point Detection for Chemical and Biological Defense (1st) Held in Williamsburg, Virginia on October 23-27, 2000.” (Click on the link “Handle / proxy Url” to download the whole PDF doc.)

Chinese torture techniques used at Gitmo: chart

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From the New York Times:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. …

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

The chart from the 1957 article on communist torture:

Full article “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From the Air Force Prisoners of War” [PDF @ NYT]

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Future directions for non-lethal weapons

In early June, the military’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate posted a presolicitation for contractors that lays out the exact directions that nonlethal weapons research will be taking. (Also available here.)

General applied research focus areas in their relative priority of interest to the JNLWD include:

A. Non-lethal vessel stopping at extended range

B. Clear a space without entry

C. Non-lethally divert an aircraft in the air or stop and/or disable an aircraft on the ground

D. Individual and crowd behavior in environments where less than lethal force is an option

E. Human effects/effectiveness and safety thresholds of selected NL stimuli

F. Stimulating academic institutions, both civilian and DoD Academies, in the research and development of NLW concepts. This includes supporting short-term academic challenges and competitions related to NLW development.

G. Advanced materials and NL payloads

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