Poor Mojo's Newswire

As revealed by a State Department diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks last week, US forces committed a heinous war crime during a house raid in Iraq in 2006, wherein one man, four women, two children, and three infants were summarily executed. The cable excerpts a letter written by Philip Alston, Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions, addressed to then Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. American troops approached the home of Faiz Harrat Al-Majma’ee, a farmer living in central Iraq, to conduct a house raid in search of insurgents in March of 2006. “It would appear that when the MNF [Multinational Forces] approached the house,” Alston wrote, “shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued” before the “troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them.” Mr. Faiz Hratt Khalaf, (aged 28), his wife Sumay’ya Abdul Razzaq Khuther (aged 24), their three children Hawra’a (aged 5) Aisha ( aged 3) and Husam (5 months old), Faiz’s mother Ms. Turkiya Majeed Ali (aged 74), Faiz’s sister (name unknown), Faiz’s nieces Asma’a Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 5 years old), and Usama Yousif Ma’arouf (aged 3 years), and a visiting relative Ms. Iqtisad Hameed Mehdi (aged 23) were killed during the raid. Alston’s letter reveals that a US airstrike was launched on the house presumably to destroy the evidence, but that “autopsies carried out at the Tikrit Hospital’s morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed.” The details revealed in the cable are a valuable insight into how many of these house raids turn out. The raids, often carried out in the middle of the night, have become one of the primary strategies of the US war in Afghanistan, with tens of thousands orchestrated just in the last year. . . .

Fox News is firing back at Gawker for its Bill O’Reilly story. Earlier today, Gawker posted what it billed as a major exclusive—a story by John Cook claiming that prime-time host Bill O’Reilly had attempted to coax the internal affairs unit of his hometown police department into investigating one of its officers, because O’Reilly believed an officer was having an extra-marital affair with his wife. . . . The story centers on a detective in the Nassau County Police Department’s internal affairs unit named Richard Harasym who, according to Gawker, “at some point during the summer of 2010,” was pulled into the office of “his commanding officer, Inspector Neil Delargy . . . with a highly unorthodox assignment: Harasym was to launch an investigation into a fellow officer based not on what he had done, but on who he was dating.” In relating its story, Gawker cites a single source who Cook says “has a longstanding personal relationship” with Harasym and “heard the account directly from Harasym himself.” Gawker goes on to say that “the source provided contemporaneous e-mail traffic to support his account.” After laying out its allegation against O’Reilly, Gawker proceeds to give a lengthy accounting of alleged troubles in O'Reilly's marriage. . . .