PID News

The piece excerpted below describes Seymour Hersh’s recent speech in Doha, Qatar as “a rambling, conspiracy-laden diatribe”.  Note that the blog is published by the editors of Foreign Policy, the official publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. Somebody with juice wants to make Hersh look like a nutjob conspiracy theorist. — PID

(PASSPORT BLOG) — (Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh) alleged that Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before briefly becoming the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and his successor, Vice Adm. William McRaven, as well as many within JSOC, “are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.”

“Many of them are members of Opus Dei,” Hersh continued. “They do see what they’re doing — and this is not an atypical attitude among some military — it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.”

via Seymour Hersh unleashed | FP Passport.

How is Wikileaks getting these documents? Is there an ‘insider’ at work in the Pentagon? If they are sensitive, then surely these docs are not available, unredacted via FOIA. — PID

(BBC NEWS) — The US military has assembled a 120-member team to prepare for the expected publication of some 400,000 Iraq war documents on the Wikileaks website.

/SNIP/ Col Lapan said the files should be returned to the Pentagon because “we don’t believe Wikileaks or others have the expertise needed. It’s not as simple as just taking out names. There are other things and documents that aren’t names that are also potentially damaging.”

via BBC News – Pentagon braces for new Iraq war Wikileaks publication.

Ah, gee, I totally didn’t know those antiquities were underneath my desk. Moo moo. My bad. — PID

(BBC NEWS) — More than 600 antiquities have been returned to the Iraqi National Museum after they were found in boxes in Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s office.

The missing historical artefacts, some dating back thousands of years, had been smuggled out of Iraq at various times and ended up in the US.

via BBC News – Missing Iraqi antiquities located in PM Maliki’s office.

(ARMY TIMES) — As the final convoy of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., entered Kuwait early Thursday, a different Stryker brigade remained in Iraq.

Soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division are deployed in Iraq as members of an Advise and Assist Brigade, the Army’s designation for brigades selected to conduct security force assistance.

So while the “last full U.S. combat brigade” have left Iraq, just under 50,000 soldiers from specially trained heavy, infantry and Stryker brigades will stay, as well as two combat aviation brigades.

via Combat brigades in Iraq under different name – Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq – Army Times.

(DEBKAfile) — The crossing of the US 4th Stryker Brigade and 2nd Infantry Division from Iraq into Kuwait Thursday morning, Aug. 19, ended America’s combat involvement in the seven and-a-half year Iraq war. DEBKAfile’s military and Baghdad sources note that, for Washington, the war which cost 4,400 American lives and $1 trillion – is over, as per US President Barack Obama’s pledge.

But for Iraq, it is just beginning: At least two civil conflicts are at boiling point – Sunni-Shiite strife and hostilities between the two Muslim factions and the Kurds of the North – and Iran’s followers stand ready to seize Iraq’s oil-rich South potentially sparking yet another world conflagration.

via DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

(THE DAILY BEAST) — Pentagon investigators are trying to determine the whereabouts of the Australian-born founder of the secretive website Wikileaks for fear that he may be about to publish a huge cache of classified State Department cables that, if made public, could do serious damage to national security, government officials tell The Daily Beast.

The officials acknowledge that even if they found the website founder, Julian Assange, it is not clear what they could do to block publication of the cables on Wikileaks, which is nominally based on a server in Sweden and bills itself as a champion of whistleblowers.

via Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Hunted by Pentagon Over Massive Leak – The Daily Beast.

(AP) – A senior Kurdish official in northern Iraq says Iranian troops have crossed the Iraqi border in pursuit of Iranian Kurdish rebels.

Jabar Yawar, a deputy minister in the Kurdish autonomous region in northern Iraq, said Saturday that 35 Iranian soldiers remain in the Iraqi village of Perdunaz after crossing the border last Thursday.

He said Iranian troops have been shelling the region for days in pursuit of a Kurdish rebel group known as the Party for Free Life in Kurdistan, or PEJAK.

via Iraqi official says Iranian troops cross border.