Now that the space, Archetype Gallery, and the time, January 2011, are set, it is time to start fundraising for this incredible exhibition. Please take a look at both the kickstarter page as well as my own. The work by the Palestine Child Art Center and their children is truly amazing and inspiring. The work presents a new view into war and occupation. Please help me spread the word. Thank you.
A blunt speech by Mike Prysner of Iraqi Vets Against the War at the Winter Solider Conference mixed with some images that sometimes fit and sometimes don't. Most important are the words.
Washington, DC - International humanitarian organization Oxfam America commends the US Congress for making disclosure of payments from oil and mining companies to governments around the world a legal requirement. Included as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation passed by the House and Senate, this historic measure will increase financial transparency in the oil, gas, and mining industry and help reduce the corruption, mismanagement, and conflict that are too often associated with natural resource extraction booms.
"Congress has made an unprecedented commitment to financial transparency and good governance in a sector that not only affects American wallets, but also some of the most vulnerable communities around the world," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. "Secrecy of oil, gas and mining company payments to governments fosters government corruption and violent conflict in resource-rich countries that are home to more than half of the world's poorest people. Instability in these regions poses a long-term threat to national security, foreign policy, and economic interests in the United States."......
I know I am a little late on this (It was released Sunday), but artists need a break too. I haven't even started to comb through this monster document of 91,000 reports (200,000 pages), but Wiki Leaks has set up a dedicated page to help readers manage it content.
Here is part of the statement from Wiki Leaks about the diary:
The Afghan War Diary an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.
Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.
Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the US Army considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broad type of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event as classified by US Forces, how many were detained, wounded, and killed from civilian, allied, host nation, and enemy forces; the name of the reporting unit and a number of other fields, the most significant of which is the summary - an English language description of the events that are covered in the report.
And in an interview by Channel 4 News, Julian Assnage, founder of Wiki Leaks, stated:
This is really the entire war and it includes nearly every military event that has occurred. So it includes all the small things that are not normally reported but that actually result in the civilian casualties and the troop kills. For example, a man is seen digging a road, troops think he is an insurgent placing an IED. They shout, he runs away, they try to shoot him, he runs away, then they fire some mortars. The mortar overshoots, hits a village and kills a five year old boy. The material was full of things like that. Similarly, troops are in a field, they see some unexploded ordnance. They could leave it alone or shoot it with their guns but for some reason, probably because they're bored, they call in an airstrike. Just a single shell. The bomb comes in, hits a village, 17 people go off to hospital. Then there are also the big events - so operation Medusa, late 2006. 181 people killed at once, most by an AC 130 gunship - a big airplane with canons fixed on the side, circling and shooting. What is the full story behind that event? This information gives you the time, the place, the number of killed, the different aircrafts involved. But precisely what happened? It still needs to be discovered by linking up this information with reports on the ground, witnesses if there are any left, by soldiers who were involved.
Another example is Task Force 373 - US Special Forces Assassination Squad. Why this material does not tend to include Special Forces is that sometimes Special Forces work together in tandem with the US regular army. There are many reports discussing the assassination lists that the US military have - with hundreds, maybe thousands of people on these lists. We can see bungled operations, Special Forces go in to kill an alleged Taliban or Al Qaida, fire off missiles, kill seven children and in fact the target wasn't there. We can see how these lists are probably abused. There's no judicial process or review. We can see governors, local warlords, unhappy with a competitor and they nominate them to go onto these assassination lists. It's something quite interesting and serious and they are called JPEL - Joint Priority Effects Lists.
The cache of classified U.S. military reports on the Iraq War as yet unreleased by WikiLeaks may be more than three times as large as the set of roughly 76,000 similar reports on the war in Afghanistan made public by the whistle-blower Web site earlier this week, Declassified has learned......
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has received international backing for plans that would see Afghan forces to take over security across the country in four years.
Karzai outlined the plans at an international conference in Kabul attended by ministers and diplomats from around the world. "I remain determined that our Afghan national security forces will be responsible for all military and law enforcement operations throughout our country by 2014," Karzai told delegates at the meeting in the Afghan capital. Read the full article
Gaza Strip has been under siege since June 2007, when Israel declared it an "enemy entity". A group of international activists organized a siege-breaking movement, the Free Gaza movement. Thanks to their efforts, and despite the Israeli ban on foreign correspondents and humanitarian aid workers to cover and witness operation "Cast Lead" on the ground, a group of international volunteers: self organised members of the International Solidarity Movement were present in Gaza when the bombing started on December, 27th 2009. Together with two international correspondents from Al Jazeera International (Ayman Mohyeldin and Sherine Tadros), they were the only foreigners who managed to write, film and report for several radio stations what was happening inside the besieged Palestinian strip.
This is an incredible 2-year report by the Washington Post as well as a FRONTLINE documentary on the growth of the CIA, and because of its size and secret budget has lost control. And in the process making it ineffective.
The report shows that the intelligence bureaucracy in the US has become "so unwieldy and so secretive that no-one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programmes exist within it, or exactly how many agencies do the same work."
As you can see there are some changes that have been made from the old site. It can tiring to try to manage so much with work, and the website just became another annoyance, so with the help of squarespace.com I have created a new site that will be easier to manage my work, projects, research, and process.
The biggest and most obvious change is this blog. I hope to continue to post the many amazing things I see and read here for you to follow along with. Within my work I research to an extreme, but even from day to day I find work, articles and videos that I want to share with others. So I hope you will stay tuned.
Friday, July 30, 2010 at 11:35 PM 
Chris Revelle
