UN: Somalia Vows to Release Child Soldiers in Army

Published November 03, 2010

| Associated Press

NAIROBI, Kenya -- A U.N. envoy says Somalia's government will work with the global body to release and rehabilitate the child soldiers in its army.

Radhika Coomaraswamy says the number of children in the Somali army is unclear. But she welcomed the commitment of Somalia's Prime Minister Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed to develop a plan to address the problem of child soldiers in the Somali army.

Human rights groups and media have been reporting about the existence of child soldiers in Somalia for years.

In June, President Sheik Sharif Sheik Ahmed ordered an investigation into the reports.

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Alaska Judge Orders Release of Miller's Employment Records

Published October 24, 2010

| Associated Press

FAIRBANKS, Alaska -- The Fairbanks North Star Borough must release personnel records from Senate Republican candidate Joe Miller's time as an attorney for the borough, a judge ruled Saturday in a decision that favors several news organizations that sued for the information. 

Miller recently acknowledged he was disciplined for violating the ethics policy while working for the borough, but said it was unrelated to his departure from the job. 

Miller's attorney, Thomas Van Flein, had argued that the records were protected from release by borough code and the Alaska Constitution's right to privacy provision. But retired Superior Court Judge Winston Burbank said in the ruling that the public's right to know outweighs any right to privacy. 

The Daily News-Miner reported that Burbank ordered the documents be released by 4 p.m. on Tuesday, which allows time for an appeal. 

Media attorney Chris Zimmerman said the judge ordered that some of the documents not be disclosed for medical privacy reasons or because of an attorney-client privilege. Some of the other documents will have information redacted for similar reasons. 

Miller worked as an attorney for the Fairbanks North Star Borough between 2002 and 2009. Although Miller has listed the work experience on his LinkedIn professional networking profile, he has left it off his campaign website. 

Van Flein said Saturday it was too early to say whether he would file an appeal at the state Supreme Court.

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Iraqi PM: WikiLeaks Release Is Political Sabotage

BAGHDAD –  New documents detailing alleged prisoner abuse by Iraqi security officials prompted fresh doubts Saturday about Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's bid to remain in power for a second term.

The Shiite prime minister swiftly responded, accusing WikiLeaks of timing its document release to sabotage his re-election hopes.

The trove of nearly 400,000 WikiLeaks papers detail U.S. military reports of alleged abuse by Iraqi security forces -- some of which happened after al-Maliki became prime minister in May 2006. The documents were released as al-Maliki scrambles to keep his job, nearly seven months after national elections failed to produce a clear winner.

In a statement, al-Maliki's office lashed out at WikiLeaks, accusing it of creating a national uproar by releasing documents that it said were being used "against national parties and leaders, especially against the prime minister."

Al-Maliki's office questioned the timing of the release, but expressed confidence in "our peoples' awareness regarding such games or media bubbles that are motivated by known political goals."
The statement said the documents did not present any proof of detainees being improperly treated while al-Maliki has headed Iraq's Shiite-led government. Instead, it praised him as courageous for taking a tough stance against terrorists. It did not offer any details.

Cases of prisoner abuse were also widely reported in Iraq before al-Maliki took the top job.

Al-Maliki's political opponents quickly seized on the documents to highlight their long-standing concerns about a possible second al-Maliki term as prime minister.

A spokeswoman for the Sunni-backed Iraqiya political alliance that won the most seats in the March national election said the WikiLeaks documents show why it's important to have a power-sharing system of government in Iraq.

"Putting all the security powers in the hands of one person who is the general commander of the armed forces have led to these abuses and torture practices in Iraqi prisons," Iraqiya spokeswoman Maysoun al-Damlouji said in an interview Saturday.

"Al-Maliki wants to have all powers in his hands," she said.

Most of the victims of abuse at the hands of Iraqi security after 2003 were believed to be Sunnis. In that year, Saddam Hussein's Sunni-led regime was ousted and replaced with a government dominated by Shiites and Kurds.

In March, Sunnis turned out in droves to vote for the secular Iraqiya bloc led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, who is Shiite. The Sunni push gave Iraqiya a narrow two-seat win over al-Maliki's State of Law bloc, but Iraqiya still fell far short of capturing enough support to control parliament and oust al-Maliki.

The close vote touched off a scramble as the sides seek enough support from other parties to secure a majority in the 325-seat parliament.

Until the WikiLeaks papers surfaced Friday, al-Maliki appeared closest to garnering the 163 seats needed for a majority, with the backing of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who lives in self-imposed exile in Iran.

The leaked documents include hundreds of reports from across Iraq with allegations of abuse. In a typical case from August 2006, filed by the 101st Airborne Division, U.S. forces discovered a murder suspect who claimed that Iraqi police hung him from the ceiling by handcuffs, tortured him with boiling water and beat him with rods.

A "serious incident report" filed in December 2009 in Tal Afar said U.S. forces had obtained footage of about a dozen Iraqi army soldiers -- including a major -- executing a detainee. The video showed the bound prisoner being pushed into the street and shot, the Americans said.

There was no indication of what happened to the video, or to the Iraqi major or his soldiers. The incident is marked "closed."

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Somali Govt Asks Pirates to Release British Couple

Published October 22, 2010

| Associated Press

MOGADISHU, Somalia -- Somalia's government is calling for the release of a British couple kidnapped by pirates, as the one-year anniversary of their capture approaches.

Minister of Information Abdirahman Omar Osman says the continued captivity of Paul and Rachel Chandler is "inhuman and un-Islamic."

The retired British couple have been in pirate custody since their yacht was hijacked off the Seychelles on Oct. 23 last year.

Osman also called on the international community to put more into the struggling government, which he says is incapable of fighting piracy on its own off the coast of the lawless East African country.

Somalia has been a failed state for nearly 20 years, and piracy is one of few opportunities to make money.

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WikiLeaks Near Release of Secret U.S. War Documents

LONDON -- The WikiLeaks website is poised to release what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret U.S. documents in history -- hundreds of thousands of intelligence reports that could amount to a classified history of the war in Iraq.

U.S. officials said Friday they were racing to contain the damage from the imminent release, while NATO's top official told reporters he feared that lives could be put at risk by the mammoth disclosure.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said any release would create "a very unfortunate situation."

"I can't comment on the details of the exact impact on security, but in general I can tell you that such leaks ... may have a very negative security impact for people involved," he told reporters Friday in Berlin following a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
In a posting to Twitter, the secret-spilling website said there would be a "major WikiLeaks announcement in Europe" at 5 a.m. EDT Saturday. The group has revealed almost nothing publicly about the nature of the announcement.

Meanwhile, a team of more than a hundred analysts from across the U.S. military, led by the Defense Intelligence Agency, has been combing through the Iraq documents they think will be released in anticipation of the leak.

Called the Information Review Task Force, its analysts have pored over the documents and used word searches to try to pull out names and other issues that would be particularly sensitive, officials have said.

The task force has informed U.S. Central Command of some of the names of Iraqis and allies and other information they believe might be released that could present a danger, officials have said, noting that -- unlike the WikiLeaks previous disclosure of some 77,000 documents from Afghanistan -- in this case they had advance notice that names may be exposed.

Once officials see what is publicly released, the command "can quickly push the information down" to forces in Iraq, Marine Corps Col. Dave Lapan, a Defense Department spokesman, said Friday in Washington.

"Centcom can jump into action and take whatever mitigating steps" might be needed, Lapan said.
While the latest WikiLeaks revelations may not change public perceptions of the Iraq war -- it has been extremely unpopular in Europe and divides opinion in the United States -- they could provide new insight about a conflict that seemed headed for success after the invasion in 2003 before descending into a yearslong, blood-soaked struggle.

The documents could shed light on the root causes of the insurgency, for instance, or the growth of sectarian violence that blighted Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. It may also give a behind-the-scenes glimpse at some of the major episodes of the war -- like the manhunt for insurgent chief Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, or the killing of U.S. security contractors on March 31, 2004, by a mob in Fallujah, an incident which ultimately led to the U.S. assault on the Iraqi city.

Wikileaks' previous release in July of secret war documents from Iraq and Afghanistan outraged the Pentagon, which accused the group of being irresponsible. Fogh Rasmussen said Friday that leaks of this nature "may put soldiers as well as civilians at risk."

It appears that those fears -- which the military has invoked in its appeal to WikiLeaks and the media not to publish the documents -- have yet to materialize. A Pentagon letter obtained by The Associated Press reported that no U.S. intelligence sources or practices were compromised by the Afghan war logs' disclosure.

Still, the military feels any classified documents release can harm national security and raise fears for people who might consider cooperating with the U.S. in the future, Lapan said.
Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2007-08, said the disclosures would be more worrisome if the U.S. were still fully engaged in combat in Iraq -- but he still sees it as a major problem.

"I'd really be worried if -- as looks to be the case -- you have Iraqi political figures named in a context or a connection that can make them politically and physically vulnerable to their adversaries," he told a conference Friday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"That has an utterly chilling effect on the willingness of political figures to talk to us -- not just in Iraq but anywhere in the world," he said.

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WikiLeaks Goes Through With Massive New Release of Classified War Documents

The self-proclaimed whistle-blower website WikiLeaks published nearly 400,000 pages of secret Defense Department documents on the Iraq war Friday evening, calling it "the largest classified military leak in history."

WikiLeaks said in a news release that the classified reports describe the Iraq war "as seen and hear by U.S. military troops" from Jan. 1, 2004 through Dec. 31, 2009.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell called document release "deplorable" and said he's concerned about "harm that could come to our forces."

According to WikiLeaks, the documents include previously undisclosed numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, over 300 recorded reports of coalition forces committing torture and abuse of detainees, accounts of Iran meddling in the war and information suggesting there were 691 Iraqi civilians killed at U.S. military checkpoints.

It says analysis by the independent organization Iraq Body Count suggests the logs contain 15,000 civilian deaths that have not been previously disclosed publicly. The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq during the six years, including 66,081 identified as civilians.

A task force of 120 analysts within the Defense Department reviewed the documents ahead of time, studying everything they thought WikiLeaks may have had access to within the "Iraq Significant Activity" reports.

The Pentagon says these reports are similar to the 70,000 Afghan war documents released by WikiLeaks this summer, but this time on a much larger scale. Similar to the last time, Morrell said, locals who worked with the U.S. military are at risk of being killed after their names are made public. He said thousands of names could be revealed, and the Pentagon has started to reach out to just over 300 Iraqis it feels are at higher risk.

WikiLeaks claims it redacted the names and got no help in doing so from the Pentagon.

Either way, Morrell said, the enemy will try to take advantage of these files.

"Remember that in the aftermath of the Afghan document leak in July, our enemies stated publicly that they were going to mine this information and look for ways that they could take advantage of it and find vulnerabilities and then exploit them," Morrell said in an interview with Fox late Friday. "Our intelligence backs that up. This leak is potentially four times as large as the last one."

The documents also shed new light on Iran's role aiding militias and allegations of detainee abuse by Iraqi security forces, reportedly without objection from the U.S.

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen described such a document release as "a very unfortunate situation."

"I can't comment on the details of the exact impact on security, but in general I can tell you that such leaks ... may have a very negative security impact for people involved," he told reporters earlier Friday in Berlin following a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Wikileaks' previous release in July of secret war documents from Iraq and Afghanistan outraged the Pentagon, which accused the group of being irresponsible. Fogh Rasmussen said Friday that leaks of this nature "may put soldiers as well as civilians at risk."

It appears that those fears -- which the military has invoked in its appeal to WikiLeaks and the media not to publish the documents -- have yet to materialize. A Pentagon letter obtained by The Associated Press reported that no U.S. intelligence sources or practices were compromised by the Afghan war logs' disclosure.

Still, the military feels any classified documents release can harm national security and raise fears for people who might consider cooperating with the U.S. in the future, Lapan said.

Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2007-08, said the disclosures would be more worrisome if the U.S. were still fully engaged in combat in Iraq -- but he still sees it as a major problem.

"I'd really be worried if -- as looks to be the case -- you have Iraqi political figures named in a context or a connection that can make them politically and physically vulnerable to their adversaries," he told a conference Friday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"That has an utterly chilling effect on the willingness of political figures to talk to us -- not just in Iraq but anywhere in the world," he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Calif. Man Home After Release From Iranian Prison

LOS ANGELES -- A California businessman who spent more than two years in an Iranian prison after being accused of passing money to a rebel group returned home Thursday.

Reza Taghavi, 71, arrived at Los Angeles International Airport at about 7 p.m. with his attorney, former U.S. diplomat Pierre Prosper, who won Taghavi's release after talks with Iranian envoys.

After clearing customs and meeting separately with his immediate family, Taghavi arrived at a terminal room where he was greeted by dozens of cheering friends and relatives. He flashed a dimpled smile as he hugged and kissed supporters, many of whom burst into tears as they clapped and chanted "We love you!"

In halting English, Taghavi told reporters: "My name is Reza Taghavi, I've been in Iran in jail for 29 years. Now I'm glad that I'm back to the United States in my home now."

"I'm glad that I'm here and hope everything can be all right from now on," he added.

Taghavi, a retired Orange County businessman who regularly visits his native Iran, was jailed on allegations that he passed $200 to someone suspected of links to a rebel group called Tondar. Tondar is suspected of a 2008 mosque bombing that killed 14 people in the southern city of Shiraz.

Taghavi was never charged and denies knowingly supporting the faction. He was freed Saturday after 2 1/2 years in prison and had to meet with survivors of the bombing as a condition of his release.

For a time early Thursday, Taghavi and Prosper worried he might not be able to leave on time. Iranian authorities threw up unexpected last-minute passport requirements once Taghavi arrived at the airport, Prosper said. It took hours to resolve, but Taghavi boarded the flight as scheduled.

Prosper told The Associated Press that although Iran allowed Taghavi to leave, it did not dismiss his case outright.

Iran appears hopeful it can use Taghavi's release to draw attention to the threat of violence and terrorism by opponents of the clerical regime.

Taghavi agreed to discuss the group Tondar and the wrong he claims the group did to him as a condition of his release.

"He's ready to tell his story, because he feels aggrieved," Prosper said. Prosper hinted that Taghavi may sue someone from the group, but he would not elaborate.

It is not clear whether Iran was trying to use Taghavi's case for any larger purpose, such as a bargaining chip with the United States or a means to open back-channel discussions that might one day help improve relations.

Prosper is a former diplomat and Republican political appointee with no current government connection. He has briefed U.S. officials on the case before, and said Thursday he will do so again if asked. He traveled to Iran several times during negotiations.

Taghavi's daughter, Leila Taghavi, said earlier this year that her father is kind and giving, and his impulse to help people got him into trouble.

Taghavi's release comes as Iran is under international sanctions over its nuclear program. The U.S. and allies believe Iran could use its nuclear labs to eventually produce weapons-grade material, while Iran claims it only wants reactors to produce energy.

Taghavi's lengthy imprisonment was much less known than the case of three American hikers who were detained along Iran's border with Iraq last year and accused of spying.

One member of the trio, Sarah Shourd, was recently released on $500,000 and returned to the U.S. Her companions, Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, remain jailed in Iran and could face trial on espionage charges.

Shourd and families of the two men deny any crime was committed and contend that if the trio did cross the border into Iran, it was an accident.

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