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Brad/Chelsea Manning: Charged w/AFG file leak, Cdn angles, disposition (merged)

  • Thread starter Thread starter jollyjacktar
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Someone, please, refresh my memory or correct me.

Colonel (retired) Michel Drapeau was a logisitics officer yes? A purple person and not hard Army? Did he not also retire long before this current era of insurgent/unconventional warfare and non-linear battlefields even began?

What are the reasons that CBC is continuously quoting this retd service member as a SME in this area?

What am I missing?  ???

 
"CBC"

"CBC Comments"

"Col (Ret'd) Drapeau, LogO"





See the connection? 




No accuracy in reporting.  Conspiracy theories. 

Apparently any time in the CF will make you a SME.  We have our favourite Cpl, who has so far remained silent on this matter, unless he is coaching DP and M Drapeau.




[ ;D  To make your day, use Spell Check on "Ret'd" and tell me what the first suggestion is.]
 
I have until now resisted replying to this thread.  I must reply now, because Mr. Drapeau and Mr. Dosanjh just don't get it.  In the course of a battle, many reports are received and all are recorded. They range from the mundane ("0 this is 1.  My callsign complete is past BROKEN HAMMER.  Carrying on with task, over") to the tragic ("0 this is 2, contact, IED, multiple casualties, over").  The report in question appears to be the transcript of one operator interpreting a multitude of single-line reports from troops who were in contact.  And history is full of reports from combat that were either premature or completely wrong.  I think back to late 1941 when German media reported that the war in Russia was over.  This was due to the Germans capturing in excess of 600,000 Soviet troops and their equipment in October 1941.  Naturally, the media were wrong.  Heck, even the Russians thought it was over:

When word reached Moscow of the defeat, a great many citizens took flight, necessitating the proclamation of martial law in the capital on 19 October.
So, there is no need for an inquiry.  All that needs to be said is this: take all reports as a body of work.  Some are inaccurate, some are only partially correct, and others are just facts that have nothing to do with one another.

 
A post at Unambiguously Ambidextrous:

WikiLeaks derangement syndrome
http://unambig.com/wikileaks-derangement-syndrome/

I guess lust does overcome reason...

Leah_McLaren_107321gm-c.jpg

...

Mark
Ottawa
 
Very sad for the families of these fallen soldiers when political trash like Dosanjh and self appointed experts like Drapeau can be given air time on CBC and CTV to spew their venom and deceits

Making cheap gutter politics like Dosanjh and Layton have done with this storyis to be expected  . . .  they are cheap gutter dwelling politicians who despise the military and hate soldiers.

Why Drapeau is spouting off on a topic of which he has no knowledge is more puzzling.  Maybe he has an axe to grind with the CF . . . 
 
ArmyVern said:
Someone, please, refresh my memory or correct me.

Colonel (retired) Michel Drapeau was a logisitics officer yes? A purple person and not hard Army? Did he not also retire long before this current era of insurgent/unconventional warfare and non-linear battlefields even began?

What are the reasons that CBC is continuously quoting this retd service member as a SME in this area?

What am I missing?  ???

The CBC has a long history of engaging "SME"s that share the CBC's political bent. Drapeau is irrelevant to anyone seeking a real SME on things military and Ops... He has neither the experience, nor the current book knowledge to give even a educated guess anymore. However, the CBC loves him and his decidedly left wing bent.
 
Haletown said:
Very sad for the families of these fallen soldiers when political trash like Dosanjh and self appointed experts like Drapeau can be given air time on CBC and CTV to spew their venom and deceits

Making cheap gutter politics like Dosanjh and Layton have done with this storyis to be expected  . . .  they are cheap gutter dwelling politicians who despise the military and hate soldiers.

Why Drapeau is spouting off on a topic of which he has no knowledge is more puzzling.  Maybe he has an axe to grind with the CF . . . 

Dosanjh never misses an opportunity to put himself front and centre at someone elses expense. This person has no shame and is a political opportunist of the first degree.
 
The only comments I have left is why the CF has not just brought out the MANY MANY MANY first hand witnesses to the events members still in uniform in good standing who would take the fight right to these so called SME's and call them on their BS...

I actually in all honesty find the fact they have no a bit mind boggling, sure someone could say "Oh how do you know" but the reply could simply be "Well I was at part of the battle field when y happened while Cpl so and so was over at this part 2 hrs later when z happened unless the Americans can bend space and time with their bombs it is just impossible for this to have happened."

Maybe a current PAO who looks at these boards could shed some light on this either openly or in private.
 
Teeps74 said:
The CBC has a long history of engaging "SME"s that share the CBC's political bent. Drapeau is irrelevant to anyone seeking a real SME on things military and Ops... He has neither the experience, nor the current book knowledge to give even a educated guess anymore. However, the CBC loves him and his decidedly left wing bent.
Including my favorites "experts" Scott Taylor and Sunil Ram. There....I've just killed two kittens by mentioning those very names.
 
BulletMagnet said:
The only comments I have left is why the CF has not just brought out the MANY MANY MANY first hand witnesses to the events members still in uniform in good standing who would take the fight right to these so called SME's and call them on their BS...

I actually in all honesty find the fact they have no a bit mind boggling, sure someone could say "Oh how do you know" but the reply could simply be "Well I was at part of the battle field when y happened while Cpl so and so was over at this part 2 hrs later when z happened unless the Americans can bend space and time with their bombs it is just impossible for this to have happened."

Maybe a current PAO who looks at these boards could shed some light on this either openly or in private.
Don't count on this ever happening ,the current regime is is terrified that if they the PMO loose control of the message . The heavens will fall or something along those lines. Looking back over the past few years all  they've proven is that  they're very adept at shooting themselves in the foot.
When will the Military's political and bureaucratic masters  realize that the average trooper is probably the best advertisement and spokesman they could  find ?
 
GK .Dundas said:
Don't count on this ever happening ,the current regime is is terrified that if they the PMO loose control of the message . The heavens will fall or something along those lines. Looking back over the past few years all  they've proven is that  they're very adept at shooting themselves in the foot.
When will the Military's political and bureaucratic masters  realize that the average trooper is probably the best advertisement and spokesman they could  find ?

Well, let's be entirely realistic then.

If 'the current regime' were to send those troops who were boots on the ground during this incident out there speaking ... the Opposition would simply spin that out of control into a "This Regime is USING our troops to promote their own Tory agenda and POV of the incident; Where's the investigation??" campaign. That's how it works in politics.

This is one that the PM himself needs to step up to the plate and address (I think that's been brought up before wrt the whole of the Afghanistan Campaign) publicly and loudly. It's a political bunfight as that is what the Opposition has made it vice a soldier's bunfight. We save those for Yule Logs and Men's Christmas Dinners.
 
WikiLeaks and Mother Corpse in action/Propaganda Update (Paul, linked to, has a personal interest)
http://unambig.com/wikileaks-and-mother-corpse-in-action/

Mark
Ottawa
 
Someone contacted me and had a very good point....

If just one soldier said something along the lines of "This is retarded"  you know darn well the media will spin that into "Soldiers accuse Afghan record takes of incompetence..." or something along those lines. Those picked to give the proper version would be stuck speaking from a very tight script and even those with the proper skill to public speak would come off as wooden and clearly speaking from a script. The no deviations from the script would prompt many to say oh they are just reading this how do we even know they were there etc etc you can see how it would all play out.

Sadly I may not agree with the current way it is being handled but I see a certain point of view as to why it was handled that way. I think this is a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario and the Army PAO office saw it as such drafted a message, stuck to it and ignored everything else. Scream something loud enough and maybe just maybe you can drown out the other voices I guess.
 
ArmyVern said:
If 'the current regime' were to send those troops who were boots on the ground during this incident out there speaking ... the Opposition would simply spin that out of control into a "This Regime is USING our troops to promote their own Tory agenda and POV of the incident; Where's the investigation??" campaign. That's how it works in politics.
Very good point, looking at the other side of the political coin.
 
I just read that some US Congressman wants the leaker (US Army soldier) to be executed.
 
Jim Seggie said:
I just read that some US Congressman wants the leaker (US Army soldier) to be executed.


Which just goes to show that incredibly stupid people can be elected to the legislative assemblies on both sides of the Canada/US border.
 
E.R. Campbell said:
Which just goes to show that incredibly stupid people can be elected to the legislative assemblies on both sides of the Canada/US border.

I fully concur with this assessment.
 
Reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act.

'Capture or Kill'

Germany Gave Names to Secret Taliban Hit List


08/02/2010

LINK

The Afghanistan war logs obtained by WikiLeaks revealed the existence of Task Force 373, a secret US unit assigned with eliminating Taliban leaders. Now SPIEGEL has learned that the German government provided names to the hit list used by the unit. At least one of the men is now dead. By SPIEGEL staff.


Omid Nouripour, a member of the German parliament for the Green Party, was wearing the German national team's jersey in honor of the Germany versus Serbia match scheduled that afternoon at the World Cup in South Africa. It was 7:30 a.m. on June 18, and Nouripour and his nine colleagues were expecting the match to be the most exciting event of the day.


In Room 04/100 at the German Defense Ministry, a windowless, bugproof space nicknamed the "U-Boot" ("submarine"), representatives of the defense and foreign affairs committees of the German parliament, the Bundestag, soon discovered that the day would turn out to be much more eventful than they had anticipated.

After a brief introduction by Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, Volker Wieker, the inspector-general of the German armed forces, stood up to give his presentation. By the time Wieker had shown his first few slides, the delegates realized that they were attending a premiere. But this time they weren't being regaled with accounts of the supposed achievements of German reconstruction teams. Instead, they were being given a brief glimpse into the most secret facets of the war in Afghanistan: NATO's ominous list of enemies and "the operations of US special forces units" within the zone controlled by the German military, the Bundeswehr.

The sensitive terrain had been a no-go area for members of the German parliament until then. Until that June morning, the so-called Joint Prioritized Effects List (JPEL) for Afghanistan was mainly a source of speculation in Germany, even among elected representatives. But now Wieker was explaining to them, using simple Bundeswehr diagrams, the procedure in which the Germans "nominate" candidates for the "Capture or Kill" list. He also told them how Germany adds names to the JPEL, which ranks targets according to their relative importance and lists up to 3,000 Taliban, Al-Qaida fighters and drug dealers targeted to be eliminated, if necessary by killing them.

K for Kill

JPEL, Capture or Kill, Task Force 373. Since the whistleblower website WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 secret US documents (out of a total of almost 92,000 that it has in its possession), and since SPIEGEL, The Guardian and the New York Times reviewed and wrote about the material, the world now knows what these abbreviations and phrases mean. It also has a more detailed understanding of how the allies in the war in Afghanistan compile hit lists, which are then handed over to American elite units to process.

Thanks to the WikiLeaks revelations, war-weary Germany now knows that German officials added names to the JPEL at least 13 times. On this list, 13 names translate into 13 potential death warrants. The Germans only mark their candidates with a C for "capture," and not with a K for "kill." But in fact all International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops are authorized to shoot and kill candidates on the JPEL list if, for example, they attempt to avoid capture by fleeing. In other words, although German elite troops do not use the kill option themselves, Germany does provide its tacit approval of the killing of candidates in the zone under its control in northern Afghanistan.

The WikiLeaks story sparked a tremendous public reaction, both around the world and in Germany. Washington vacillated between studied indifference and alarmism. National Security Adviser James Jones, for example, said that the massive data leak doesn't just threaten the lives and security of US soldiers, but the security of the entire country.


Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that he wants to conduct an "aggressive" search for the sources of the leaks. The FBI has been brought in to aid in the investigation. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote that the documents illustrated how "futile -- and tragically wasteful -- it is to send more young men and women to fight and die in Afghanistan." The Spanish newspaper El País summarily declared the war in Afghanistan a "failure."

The WikiLeaks scoop also made waves in Germany. "The documents have the potential of destroying the last hope of military and political success in Afghanistan," the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote, while Die Welt called the leaks an "exposure of impotence."

'Nothing New'

The initial reaction of the German government and large segments of the political class was in sharp contrast to reactions in the media. Immediately following the leaks, a spokesman for the German Defense Ministry characterized them as "nothing new in terms of news value," as if he and the rest of the ministry had somehow managed to review the immense body of material in only a few hours.

Soon afterwards, his boss, Defense Minister Guttenberg, claimed that many journalists had known all this already, as did a number of members of parliament -- or at least those parliamentarians on the relevant Bundestag committees should have known about it, if they had paid any attention at briefings.

It was a transparent but not unsuccessful tactic. Before long, a competition of sorts erupted among provoked delegates over who had had access to what information. "But it isn't any of our business!" said Elke Hoff, a defense expert with the pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP), after she was asked whether the government should give members of parliament details about the secret assassination teams operated by Germany's allies in Afghanistan.

Doing the Dirty Work

But all attempts at appeasement do not change the fact that war in Afghanistan has acquired a new political dimension once again. It also acquired a new dimension when the German government finally managed to use the phrase "warlike conditions" in referring to the conflict in Afghanistan (previously, the German government had refrained from describing the situation as a war), and when, on Sept. 4, 2009, German Colonel Georg Klein gave the order to bomb two tanker trucks stuck in a riverbed, causing the deaths of up to 142 Afghan civilians.

And now it's acquiring yet another new dimension. It has becomes clear that, even though German elite units such as Task Force 47 were not deployed to deliberately target people, their counterpart, the American special forces unit Task Force 373, which has since been renamed Task Force 3-10, takes on the dirty work and processes the hit lists -- in the territory controlled by the Bundeswehr and on the basis of German information, no less. For most Germans, this is new information, and anyone with any common sense would argue that it is indeed their business.

The revelations raise important legal and political questions. For instance, why are elite US soldiers simply flying into the German sector to hunt down and kill people, acting in a way that contradicts the Germans' self-imposed policy of restraint? And why were the Germans involved in compiling these lists?

Putting Names on the List

To add a name to the JPEL list, the Regional Command North, which is led by a German, must first propose a candidate based on its evidence. The petition is sent to the German operations command near Potsdam outside Berlin, where it is reviewed and then sent to the Defense Ministry. If a positive decision is made, the petition is sent back to Afghanistan, where it also has to be approved by the supreme commander of the ISAF troops. It is a process that reflects the precision of German bureaucracy, and one that can have serious consequences for the people it affects in Afghanistan.

There are now six lists containing the names of targets. The JPEL list, to which the Germans contribute, is the NATO list. But Task Force 373 isn't operating on a NATO ticket. It receives its orders directly from the Pentagon. The German government would neither confirm nor deny whether the names on the Pentagon list are derived from the NATO list.

There is evidence that the German nomination has already had drastic consequences for 13 Afghans. According to a briefing given to members of parliament, this is the number of men the Bundeswehr has placed on the NATO hit list. Senior German military officials even say that the total number of names submitted lies in the "two to three-digit range." In 2007, the Bundeswehr named two Taliban commanders, who were assigned the file numbers 74 and 77, but Mullah Rustam and Qari Jabar were deleted from the list prior to 2009 due to a lack of evidence. Three others were added a year later, and two of them are now in custody. Four enemies of the Bundeswehr were captured in 2009, and another four in 2010.

The Germans have been relatively restrained compared to other NATO allies. A total of seven Taliban commanders named by the Bundeswehr are still on the JPEL for northern Afghanistan, including Maulawi Shamsuddin, the insurgents' notorious chief strategist in Kunduz, and Abdul Rahman, the head of the Taliban group that abducted the tanker trucks on Sept. 3 that were later bombed by Colonel Klein.

But the Germans aren't the only ones who nominate candidates for the hit list for Regional Command North. In June, the JPEL list also included 31 other targets added by other allies.





More at LINK
 
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