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Tracklist

01. Look Who’s Talking Now

02. Dangerous

03. Telephone

04. Strangest Love

05. Love 2 Love U

06. 911

07. Abroad

08. Rock Star

09. Mad Love

10. Burning Up

11. Dramatic

12. Tell Me (Am I A Sinner)

13. When I Say So

14. Everyday

15. Gasoline (Ballad Version)

                                            

Above a small base in southern Afghanistan, a spy blimp captured video of the perpetrator of Sunday’s massacre surrendering to base forces. The question now becomes what other aspects of the killings, which left 16 Afghan civilians dead, are detailed in that video — or in any other footage that may have been shot by the U.S. military’s innumerable surveillance sensors in the region.

Reuters reports that video footage, “taken from a security camera mounted on a blimp above” the base, showed the perpetrator, allegedly a U.S. Army staff sergeant, surrendering after his fateful, early-morning trip off the Combat Outpost Belamby. “The footage showed the uniformed soldier with his weapon covered by a cloth,” Reuters adds, walking to the gates “and throwing his arms up in surrender.”

The existence of the video is a new and potentially major detail in a case that’s still under investigation. And it’s possible that the video shows much, much more than the surrender.

Navy Capt. John Kirby, a top Pentagon spokesman just back from Afghanistan, said he would not discuss “evidence into an ongoing investigation.”

The video wasn’t just snapped, it was preserved and distributed. Reuters says that it’s been shown to Afghans investigating the massacre, “to help dispel a widely held belief among Afghans, including many members of parliament” that there were multiple gunmen. If the video can establish a lone shooter, then it very likely displays the entire grisly incident. Even if the video can’t capture what happened inside houses, sequential muzzle flashes inside darkened buildings could tell the story of the massacre.

Several other U.S. wartime disasters have been captured on camera. WikiLeaks became famous after acquiring and distributing a video, “Collateral Murder,” purporting to show U.S. troops in Iraq killing civilians. Footage also exists of an airstrike in the western Afghan region of Garani, even though the military has yet to release it three years after swearing it would prove the strikes targeted Taliban positions. Such footage refuted Taliban propaganda that claimed the U.S. was responsible for a 2009 grenade attack in Kunar province that the insurgents perpetrated.

It’s possible that Reuters didn’t actually mean a “blimp.” Smaller military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan use tethered aerostats as relatively cheap platforms for hosting cameras, allowing troops a broader vantage and awareness of incoming threats. As of March 2011, there were 184 of the floating, chubby spies in Afghanistan. Many bases also have cameras affixed to heightened areas for the same reason. The most likely explanation for the video is that the cameras were either running 24-7 or the blimp/aerostat was an impromptu surveillance tool for the search party.

Still, even if it was tethered to the base, Danger Room’s sources indicate that Belamby — a small base hosting both special operations and conventional forces — is only a short distance from Zangabad, and very likely within camera range. While Belamby’s conventional forces might have had small drones on base, like Ravens, those are more likely to be used on missions than for force-protection efforts like recovering a soldier who went out at night on his own.

Most accounts of the shooting in the media say the suspect only left the base for a short amount of time before he turned himself in. It probably wouldn’t have taken long for the search party to have gotten approval from nearby Kandahar airfield, which is home to lots and lots of drones and manned spy aircraft. (The coalition flew 717 recon missions over Afghanistan in the last week alone, according to U.S. Air Force statistics.)  There may also have been other eyes in the sky on separate missions that might have absorbed imagery of the assault. “I don’t know what ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] assets were available at the time, or were used at the time,” Kirby said.

The Washington Post notes that the reaction inside Afghanistan to the horror has been surprisingly muted. It’s possible that the lack of nationwide protests has to do with the routinization of U.S. special operations “night raids,” which many Afghans already believe are as bloody as the Zangabad massacre. But if videotape emerges, that relative calm may not hold.

                                             

On Monday, the Defense Department’s best-known geek announced that she was leaving the Pentagon for a job at Google. It was an unexpected move: Washington and Mountain View don’t trade top executives very often. But it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. The internet colossus has had a

To the company’s critics in Congress and in the conservative legal community, Google has become a puppet master in Obama’s Washington, with Plex executives attending exclusive state dinners andbacking White House tech policy initiatives. “Like Halliburton in the previous administration,” warned the National Legal and Policy Center in 2010, “Google has an exceptionally close relationship with the current administration.” To the company’s foes outside the U.S. — especially in Beijing — Google is viewed as a virtual extension of the U.S. government: “the White House’s Google,” as one state-sponsored Chinese magazine put it.

But in the halls of the Pentagon and America’s intelligence agencies, Google casts a relatively small shadow, at least compared to those of big defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, and Northrop Grumman, and SAIC. Yes, a small handful of one-time Googlers joined the Obama administration after the 2008 election, but most of those people are now back in the private sector. Sure, Google turned to the network defense specialists at the National Security Agency, when the company became the target of a sophisticated hacking campaign in 2009. (Next week, the Electronic Privacy Information Center goes to federal court in an attempt to force the NSA to disclose what exactly it did to help Google respond.) The Lockheeds and the Northrops of the world share with the Pentagoninformation about viruses and malware in their networks every day.

Government work is, after all, only a minuscule part of Google’s business. And that allows the Plex to take a nuanced, many-pronged approach when dealing with spooks and generals. (The company did not respond to requests to comment for this article.)

Google has a federally focused sales force, marketing its search appliances and its apps to the government. They’ve sold millions of dollars’ worth of gear to the National Security Agency’s secretive eavesdroppers and to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s satellite watchmen. And they’re making major inroads in the mobile market, where Android has become the operating system of choicefor the military’s burgeoning smartphone experiments. But unlike other businesses operating in the Beltway, Google doesn’t often customize its wares for its Washington clients. It’s a largely take-it-or-leave-it approach to marketing.

“They shit all over any request for customization,” says a former Google executive. “The attitude is: ‘we know how to build software. If you don’t know how to use it, you’re an idiot.’”

Some of that software, though, only made it to Mountain View after an infusion of government cash. Take the mapping firm Keyhole, backed by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. Google bought Keyhole in 2004 — and then turned it into the backbone for Google Earth, which has become a must-have tool in all sorts of imagery analysis cells. When I visited a team of Air Force targeteers in 2009, a Google Earth map highlighting all the known hospitals, mosques, graveyards, and schools in Afghanistan helped them pick which buildings to bomb or not.

Around the same time, the investment arms of Google and the CIA both put cash into Recorded Future, a company that monitors social media in real time — and tries to use that information to predict upcoming events.

“Turns out that there are several natural places to take an ability to harvest and analyze the internet to predict future events,” e-mails Recorded Future CEO Christopher Ahlberg. “There’s search, where any innovation that provides improved relevance is helpful; and intelligence, which at some level is all about predicting events and their implications. (Finance is a third.) That made Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel two very natural investors that provides us hooks into the worlds of search and intelligence.”

The government and Google have more than a mutual interest in mining publicly available data. The feds ask Google to turn over information about its customers. Constantly. Last fall, the Justice Department demanded that the company give up the IP addresses of Wikileaks supporters. During the first six months of 2011, U.S. government agencies sent Google 5,950 criminal investigation requests for data on Google users and services, as our sister blog Threat Level noted at the time. That’s an average of 31 a day, and Google said it complied with 93 percent of those requests.

Google is pretty much the only company that publishes the number of requests it receives — a tactic which sometimes causes teeth to grind in D.C. But it’s essential to the well-being of Plex’s core business: its consumer search advertising. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of its products, and because there’s some sense that the Plex and the Pentagon aren’t swapping data wholesale. These small acts of resistance maintain that perceived barrier.

Not long ago — in the middle of the last decade, say — Google held an almost talismanic power inside military and intelligence agencies. Google made searching the web simple and straightforward. Surely, the government ought to be able to do the same for its databases.

“You kept hearing: ‘how come this can’t work like Google,’” says Bob Gourley, who served as the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Chief Technology Officer from 2005 to 2007. “But after a while the technologists got educated. You don’t really want Google.”

Or at least, not in that way. Even complex web searches are single strands of information. Intelligence analysts are hunting for interlocking chains of events: Person A in the same cafe as person B, who chats with person C, who gives some cash to person D.  Those queries were so intricate, government engineers had to program each one in by hand, not so long ago. But lately, more sophisticated tools have come onto the market; the troops and spooks have gotten better at integrating their databases. Google’s products are still used, of course. But it’s just one vendor among many.

What spurred one American soldier to allegedly massacre 16 Afghan civilians earlier this week? That’s a complicated question, and one that could take military investigators months or years to figure out.

What is known, among sparse details, is that this soldier suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). That factor will no doubt play a role in the military’s investigation, and it offers yet another reminder of the military’s awful track record in diagnosing and treating that ailment, widely known as one of the signature wounds of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In my years reporting on TBIs among soldiers and vets, it’s become increasingly apparent that problems in TBI management start even before a soldier deploys, and persist — often with devastating results — long after he or she comes home. “We got hit a lot of times in Iraq, [so] I definitely got rattled around,” Staff Sgt. Victor Medina, a soldier afflicted with TBI, told me in 2010. “It wasn’t until the fourth time we got hit, and I blacked out, that anyone took me to get looked at.”

Medina later relied on alternative therapies like massage and acupuncture, in part because it was so tough for him to get adequate care at Fort Bliss, where he was stationed. “One doctor told me I was making it all up,” he said, of symptoms like stuttering and blinding headaches that followed the TBI he suffered during a massive IED explosion in 2009.

He’s hardly the only soldier to feel inadequately cared for by military docs.

Indeed, the military’s mismanagement of TBIs over the past decade is nothing short of astonishing. Military docs have failed to diagnose soldiers who showed clear symptoms of injury. Potentially thousands of medical diagnoses for TBI have been all-out lost. Soldiers sometimes wait months to start TBI treatment. Most importantly, scientists still don’t even know what TBIs do to a person’s body, brain or long-term mental health.

An estimated 200,000 soldiers have suffered from a TBI over the past decade. At least, as far as the military can tell. Even after the Pentagon in 2007 injected $1.7 billion into better management of TBIs, military docs still can’t accurately diagnose the injuries during a soldier’s deployment or upon his or her return to base.

Right now, the military typically uses a three-phase screening test to spot TBIs in personnel. One baseline test is taken before deployment, another after a possible TBI has been sustained during deployment, and a third when a soldier returns home.

But, as highlighted in a 2010 ProPublica/NPR investigation, those tests are hopelessly flawed: One screening test failed to spot 40 percent of TBI cases among military patients. Another was described as “basically a coin flip,” by Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the former Army Surgeon General.

And a better replacement has yet to be found. Both the Army and the Navy have touted breakthrough TBI diagnostic measures — the Army’s is a blood test, the Navy’s is an online exam — that later proved to be wildly overhyped. The Navy’s test actually doled out more false positives than the military’s current screening program, while the Army’s blood test hasn’t even undergone clinical trial.

Even if a soldier is diagnosed with a TBI, there’s no guarantee that the diagnosis will make it into his permanent medical records. That’s because the handheld systems used overseas to track injuries often broke. In other instances, they couldn’t connect to adequate bandwidth to transmit a given diagnosis.  As a result, plenty of TBI diagnoses have been lost: One unpublished Army survey, reviewed by ProPublica, noted that 75 percent of soldiers suffering from a brain injury had no record of ever sustaining one.

Treatment for TBI among soldiers is yet another major problem. Over the past decade, media reports that soldiers with TBIs were forced to fight for care have trickled out with frightening consistency. TheWashington Post’s 2007 investigative series on Walter Reed, for example, dug up myriad instances of neglect and inadequate treatment of ailing soldiers, including those with brain injuries.

In the years to follow, soldiers with TBI have continued to express frustrations about many of the same problems. Indeed, military medical records show that soldiers still often wait weeks or months to undergo therapy. This, even though a panel of experts convened by the Pentagon recommended that a patient’s TBI treatment be initiated as soon as possible, so as to minimize long-term damage.

Madigan Medical Center, where the solder alleged to have opened fire on civilians this week was treated, is no exception to such lapses. A recent Army investigation, for example, concluded that doctors had inappropriately downgraded the PTSD diagnoses of 280 soldiers, rendering them eligible for fewer benefits and less treatment. And of course, doctors at Madigan had the same problems with diagnosis and treatment as colleagues elsewhere — a lack of effective tools and concrete knowledge.

These gaps in knowledge even extend beyond diagnosis and treatment, right down to the physiology of TBI itself. Even the symptoms of TBI can be incredibly diverse, tough to spot, and sometimes emerge months after an injury is sustained. The most well-known symptoms include confusion, headaches and difficulty reading or speaking. Other soldiers, however, suffer nausea and fatigue. And there’s also a clear link between TBIs and violent, aggressive behavior — which is frequently noted in the military’s own TBI treatment guidelines.

In addition to a puzzling, scattershot array of symptoms, Pentagon-funded scientists still aren’t sure how brain injuries affect the brain, both in the short and long term. Researchers even suspect — though they aren’t sure — that TBIs “prime” the brain for post-traumatic stress disorder, the other signature wound of this decade’s wars. PTSD symptoms, of course, often include problems like hyper-arousal, irritability or outbursts of rage.

With so many questions that persist about how to treat a TBI, it’s hard to know when a soldier suffering from one can be safely redeployed — like the Staff Sergeant who allegedly went on this week’s rampage — or if they even can at all.

“I am trying to find out basically whether there was a premature ‘OK’ on this guy,” Rep. Bill Pascrell, founder of a congressional task force on brain injuries, told Reuters today. “If this soldier fell through the cracks, does that mean others have?”

It’s not known yet how big a role this soldier’s brain injury played in this week’s tragedy. But there’s no question that for 10 years, the military has failed to adequate diagnose and treat these ailments. And that other soldiers with TBIs have, indeed, fallen through the cracks.