Seven Taliban insurgents including suicide bombers attacked the main airport in the Afghan capital, Kabul, early on Monday, with explosions and gunfire heard near an area that also houses major foreign military bases.

Al Jazeera:

A coordinated suicide and grenade attack on the Kabul airport has ended with all seven attackers being killed, the Afghan interior ministry has said.

The Taliban earlier claimed responsibility for the pre-dawn attack on Monday, telling Al Jazeera that the target was the military airport.

"There were seven assailants...two (suicide bombers) died detonating themselves and five others were killed in fighting," Mohammad Ayoub Salangi, chief of Kabul police, said.

"There have not been any casualties to the security forces, and we have not received any report of civilian casualties so far," he said.

Loud explosions and bursts of small-arms fire were heard during the attack, with the US embassy sounding its "duck and cover" alarm and its loudspeakers warning that the alarm was not a drill.

Kabul international airport was reopened, although two of the hangars were damaged in the attack.

The attack follows other recent assaults on the International Organization for Migration in Kabul and the International Committee of the Red Cross in the eastern city of Jalalabad that killed four people.

By Cora Currier, ProPublica

In his first year in office, President Barack Obama pledged to "collect the facts" on the death of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war at the hands of U.S.-allied Afghan forces in late 2001.

Almost four years later, there's no sign of progress.

When asked by ProPublica about the state of the investigation, the White House says it is still "looking into" the apparent massacre. Yet no facts have been released and it's far from clear what, if any, facts have been collected.

Human rights researchers who originally uncovered the case say they've seen no evidence of an active investigation.

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Jeremy Scahill's film "Dirty Wars," is opening in Los Angeles on Friday, June 7, and many other cities nationwide.

Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the heart of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

The film won the Cinematography Prize at the Sundance Film Festival this year. Variety says it is "astonishingly hard-hitting" and adds: "This jaw-dropping, persuasively researched pic has the power to pry open government lockboxes."

From the LA Times:

"Though the film tackles complex matters of national security policy, its approach is decidedly personal. In a series of gripping and sobering scenes, Scahill and Rowley bring us face to face with the family of an Afghan police commander whose home in the city of Gardez was erroneously attacked with lethal force by Americans; with Nasser al-Awlaki, an academic and former Fulbright scholar whose American-born son, a radical imam, and 16-year-old grandson were killed in U.S. drone strikes in Yemen; with Somali warlords who have become Washington's proxies in the murky fight against Al Qaeda in Africa.

Scahill goes a step beyond that, foregoing the standard role of detached journalist guide. Instead, he narrates "Dirty Wars" in first person, revealing himself as a character wrung out by his own journey in a moral no man's land. Acknowledging what many war correspondents feel but rarely include in their dispatches, he shares an inner monologue of doubts and dilemmas, both as a reporter and simply as an American.

"When I first visited Gardez, I had no idea where the story would lead," he says in a voice-over. "I didn't know just how much the world had changed, or how much the journey would change me."'

Jeremy is an amazing investigative reporter, and I can't wait to see his first documentary. Hopefully it will be the first of many.

A UK Gitmo? British Defense Secretary Philip Hammond confirmed that between 80 to 90 Afghans have been held for at least 14 months at an army base in Afghanistan -- without being charged. Hammond defended the detentions at Camp Bastion, saying the detainees are considered too dangerous to be released and “exceptional circumstances” allows them to be held. Afghan President Hamid Karzai called for the prisoners to be released into Afghanistan’s custody, but Britain has not handed over any prisoners since allegations last November that detainees were being abused.

BBC:

"The families of two of the men who appear to have been held the longest said they were arrested in the spring last year and interrogated in the following weeks.

But legal papers state their interrogation ended "many months ago".

The families only established where the men were being held with the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

One, a teenager, has been held for 14 months, while the other, a 20-year-old father, has been held for 12 months.

In legal papers seen by the BBC, Dan Squires, a barrister for the 20-year-old, told the High Court: "He has not been granted access to lawyer nor brought before a court.

"He does not know how long he is to remain detained or for what purpose. He has asked whether he will be transferred to Afghan authorities but had been told they do not consider that he has committed any criminal offence and so do not want to receive him."

Mr Shiner said Mr Hammond had until last week refused to allow the detainees access to legal representation but had now granted lawyers an hour-long telephone call with two of the Afghans on Wednesday."

Nato guidelines on detention:

British forces operate in Afghanistan as part of the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf).

They are allowed to hold suspects for up to 96 hours before they are released or transferred to Afghan authorities

This can be extended in "exceptional circumstances" where it is necessary to gather intelligence from the detainee to protect British soldiers and local people.

But there has been a bar on detainees being transferred to Afghan authorities since last November because of allegations that detainees were being abused.

A fine example we've set for the world.

by Peter Sleeth, Special to ProPublica

The top Republican and Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs are demanding more information from defense Secretary Chuck Hagel about lost Army field records from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the subject of a ProPublica investigation last year.

In an unusually detailed letter sent Friday to Hagel, Reps. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., and Michael Michaud, D-Maine, said the Defense Department's response to an earlier request about why records are missing — and what the military is doing about it — didn't go far enough.

"Congress must have a clear understanding of the extent  of the lost records in order to safeguard the best interests of our service members and veterans,'' the letter says.

The 12 questions posed to Hagel in the letter focus largely on the Army because it has the largest records deficit. Among other things, the congressmen want to know what happened to operational records for the 1st Armored Division and the 82nd Airborne Division and what is being done to reconstruct them.

In November, ProPublica and the Seattle Times reported that they were among numerous Army units that had lost or failed to keep battlefield records as required, making it harder for some veterans to obtain benefits and for historians to recount what actually happened.

"Operational records can be used to track the history of our nation's military, plan for future operations and support innovative medical research,'' Miller and Michaud wrote to Hagel.

In addition to chairing the veterans' panel, Miller sits on the House Armed Services Committee, which has direct oversight responsibility for the Defense Department and service branches.

The department did not return a phone call seeking comment. 

For over a decade the CIA has been delivering money to the offices of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, in the shadiest ways possible: suitcases, backpacks, and plastic bags full of cash. The New York Times reports that tens of millions of dollars have gone to Karzai’s office. And it doesn’t seem like the CIA is getting what it wants for its money: much of it is used to pay off warlords and politicians, many with ties to the drug trade, fueling the corruption U.S. diplomats have been trying to fight. “The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” an American official told the Times, “was the United States.”

NYT:

For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency.

All told, tens of millions of dollars have flowed from the C.I.A. to the office of President Hamid Karzai, according to current and former advisers to the Afghan leader.

“We called it ‘ghost money,’ ” said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr. Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing.

Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan,” one American official said, “was the United States.”

The United States was not alone in delivering cash to the president. Mr. Karzai acknowledged a few years ago that Iran regularly gave bags of cash to one of his top aides.

At the time, in 2010, American officials jumped on the payments as evidence of an aggressive Iranian campaign to buy influence and poison Afghanistan’s relations with the United States. What they did not say was that the C.I.A. was also plying the presidential palace with cash — and unlike the Iranians, it still is.

When word of the Iranian cash leaked out in October 2010, Mr. Karzai told reporters that he was grateful for it. He then added: “The United States is doing the same thing. They are providing cash to some of our offices.” (See the video above)

At the time, Mr. Karzai’s aides said he was referring to the billions in formal aid the United States gives. But the former adviser said in a recent interview that the president was in fact referring to the C.I.A.’s bags of cash.

By Cora Currier, ProPublica

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment Wednesday charging Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun with six terrorism-related counts.

The announcement that Harun is in U.S. custody in New York may also shed light on a small part one of the most secretive aspects of U.S. counterterrorism operations during the Bush administration: What became of terror suspects held by the CIA in its network of "black-site" prisons around the world? Or disappeared into foreign cells in extraordinary renditions?

With their indictment of Harun, prosecutors offered a basic account of how the 43-year-old Nigerian – described as "a prototype Al Qaeda Operative" – spent the last decade. He fought U.S. forces in Afghanistan, prosecutors said, before leaving for Africa, where he allegedly conspired to bomb U.S. diplomatic facilities. Harun, also known by his alias Spin Ghul, eventually wound up in Libyan prison for six years before he was released amid the turmoil of the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi.

Did the U.S. know that he was in Libya, and did they play a role in his detention? Did the CIA work with the Libyans to then obtain information from him?

Testimony from an alleged former CIA detainee, a leaked document from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and evidence from cases of others rendered to Libya suggest that might be so.

A spokesman for the CIA said that the agency "does not, as a rule, comment on matters before the courts." The U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York declined to provide information beyond what was announced with the indictment. A lawyer for Harun, David Stern, also declined to comment.

The CIA has steadfastly refused to comment on the fates of most former detainees, publicly accounting for only 16 people of the roughly 100 the agency has said it once held. The U.S. has successfully dismissed lawsuits over rendition and asserted that much about the CIA program is still classified.

President Obama, for his part, ordered the CIA black-site prisons closed when he took office. (He allowed renditions to continue, with pledges of greater oversight of the countries where suspects were sent.) But still, little about the program has been officially disclosed.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations, as a consequence, have been trying to piece together the details of the CIA's detention and rendition programs for years. In 2009, ProPublica published a list of more than thirty people believed to have been held by the CIA whose whereabouts were still unknown—including a Spin Ghul.

Now and then, the fates of these detainees have emerged in the press or through rights groups, particularly since the upheaval caused by the Arab Spring.

Joanne Mariner, a senior researcher with Amnesty International who worked on identifying former detainees for Human Rights Watch, said that the information in the indictment of Harun lines up with what she knew about Spin Ghul. Operating in an arena of such secrecy, "when all this was going on, we'd get these little clues and bits of information. It's really quite interesting to see confirmation that these people did exist," she said.

Marwan Jabour, who alleges he was held in Afghanistan by the CIA ("Ghost Prisoner,") told Human Rights Watch that he was shown photos of Harun (whom he called Ghul) during interrogations, and was led to believe he was in U.S. custody. Jabour had met Harun in Pakistan in 2003, and described him as an African who spoke Arabic. Jabour was held from 2004 to 2006, during which time, according to this week's indictment, Harun was arrested in Libya.

A 2007 document from Guantanamo, released by Wikileaks, cites detailed information provided by Harun. For example: "Ghul also noted that Saudi authorities had detained Saudi Al Qaeda members…Ghul remarked that these two individuals were Al Qaeda members since approximately 1995." In the document he is identified as both Harun and Ghul, and described as a "Nigerian [sic] national and Al Qaeda operative." The citations refer to CIA intelligence reports, but don't specify where Harun was or when he provided the information.

Since Qaddafi's fall, evidence has emerged of close communication between the CIA and Libyan officials during the Bush administration, despite the Qaddafi regime's reputation for torture and brutal prison conditions. Documents found in the abandoned office of Libya's former top intelligence official refer to the rendition of several people to Libya and the sharing of information. Other "missing prisoners" believed to have been held by the CIA turned up in Libyan prisons. Some of them have given detailed accounts of detention in U.S. custody before being sent there.

"The U.S. delegated a lot of its detention capacity to abusive governments like Libya— they were perfectly happy to have Libya holding these people," says Mariner.

If the U.S. did know he was in Libya, it took authorities some time to catch up with him after he gained his freedom in June 2011.

After his release, Harun told prosecutors, he was placed on a ship full of Libyan refugees bound for Italy, where he was arrested for assaulting officials onboard. Italian authorities agreed to extradite him to the U.S. last fall.

Harun is the latest in a recent string of terror suspects brought to federal court from overseas by the Obama administration – including Osama Bin Laden's son-in-law Abu Gaith, who pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan to conspiring to kill Americans earlier this month.

Some Congressional Republicans have insisted that such cases are better prosecuted in military commissions like the one at Guantanamo. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said of Harun: "the administration has once again decided to forgo an extensive intelligence interrogation and instead bring an enemy combatant immediately into the federal court system."

According to court documents, Harun was interviewed by U.S. officials last September in Italy, with his Italian counsel present. He waived his Miranda Rights before those sessions. The indictment against him remained sealed because the government believed "he may be in a position to provide information…relevant to the national security of the United States."

Harun is scheduled to appear in court in Brooklyn this afternoon, and could face life in prison. Whether or not his trial reveals more about the CIA's role, at the very least, Harun can be crossed off the list of the missing.

Five U.S. service members were killed when a helicopter crashed in southern Afghanistan, a U.S. official said early Tuesday.

The chopper went down Monday in the Daman district of southern Kandahar during a rain storm, said Jawid Faisal, a government spokesman for the province.

There was no enemy activity in the area at the time of the incident, according to a statement by the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

The U.S. official, who did not want to be identified, did not offer additional information about the victims.

It was the first coalition helicopter crash with fatalities since September, when two separate crashes killed a total of 11 coalition service members.

One occurred in early September, killing two; the other in the third week, killing seven service members and injuring two more.

There were no reports of enemy fire in either of those incidents.

There have been 18 coalition deaths in 2013, including two U.S. service members who were killed Monday by an assailant wearing an Afghan National Security Forces uniform.

The deaths come just after newly installed U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel visited Afghanistan on his first overseas trip since his confirmation and as coalition members draw down their forces in the nation where war has been ongoing since 2001.

In August 2011, a helicopter went down killing at least 30 U.S. service members, the single deadliest loss for U.S. troops in the Afghan war. Insurgents shot down the CH-47 Chinook, which was carrying 25 U.S. special operations forces.

Some the those who died belonged to the same covert unit that conducted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, though they were not the same men, a military official said at the time.

[Video contains graphic war images.]

In this newly released audio, Private Bradley Manning explains his motives, noting how he believed the WikiLeaks documents showed wrongdoing by the government and how he hoped that the release would "spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan."

From Freedom of the Press Foundation:

"Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation is publishing the full, previously unreleased audio recording of Private First Class Bradley Manning’s speech to the military court in Ft. Meade about his motivations for leaking over 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks. In addition, we have published highlights from Manning’s statement to the court."

"While unofficial transcripts of this statement are available, this marks the first time the American public has heard the actual voice of Manning."
...
"We hope this recording will shed light on one of the most secret court trials in recent history, in which the government is putting on trial a concerned government employee whose only stated goal was to bring attention to what he viewed as serious governmental misconduct and criminal activity. We hope to prompt additional analysis of these proceedings by other journalistic institutions and the public at large. While we are not equipped (technically or as a matter of human resources) to receive leaked information nor do we plan on receiving them in the future, we are proud to publish and analyze this particular recording because it is so clearly matches our mission of supporting transparency journalism."

More at the website, including the unofficial transcript of what is reportedly "leaked" audio of Mannings' court statements.

Video report from February 1st tells of the discovery of new burial sites at the Dozier School for boys in Marianna, Florida.

The official stance on 98 dead boys from the Dozier School in Florida is that they were "accidents," or that the children died from "natural causes." Increasingly, it seems that may not have been the case.

From The Independent:

'A concentration camp for little boys': For years, almost no one at the Dozier School even knew about the burial ground in a clearing in the woods on the edge of campus. It was forbidden territory. The soil here, churned in places by tiny ants, holds more than the remains of little boys. Only now is it starting to give up its dark secrets: horror stories of state-sanctioned barbarism, including flogging, sexual assault and, possibly, murder.

That the Arthur G Dozier School – a borstal for delinquent boys founded in 1900 – was not a gentle place was well-established. Boys as young as six were chained to walls, lashings with a leather strap were frequent and, in the early decades, children endured enforced labour, making bricks and working printing presses. When it was closed in 2011, it had already been the subject of separate federal and state investigations.

But, as suspicions deepen about how the boys in the burial ground died, pressure is growing again on the state to shine new light into the darkest days of the school in Marianna, a Florida Panhandle town that once was a bastion of the KKK and the site of the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal. The pressure is coming from some of the school's survivors, from relatives of boys who died here, and from Florida's top US Senator, Bill Nelson."

All Apologies: A NATO commander describes the shooting of children, both under 10, as case of "mistaken identity" during fight with Taliban.

A report in the New York Times explains that sharing on Facebook now comes at a cost.

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