An Australian TV crew has filmed US troops in Afghanistan burning dead Taliban soldiers in violation of their religious customs and the Geneva Conventions and broadcasting taunts about it into a village suspected of housing more Taliban.
Wasn’t Rumsfeld supposed to do something about this? What the fuck is going on with these troops? These guys are going to be coming home eventually and I am worried for their sanity… and for anyone they run into before or after they get back. My god people enough is enough. How much longer can the American public stand for this? Vietnam all over again all over the fucking place.
An investigation by SBS’s Dateline program, to be aired tonight, filmed the burning of the bodies.
It also filmed a US Army psychological operations unit broadcasting a message boasting of the burnt corpses into a village believed to be harbouring Taliban.
According to an SBS translation of the message, delivered in the local language, the soldiers accused Taliban fighters near Kandahar of being “cowardly dogs”. “You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burnt. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be,” the message reportedly said.
“You attack and run away like women. You call yourself Taliban but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion, and you bring shame upon your family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are.”
The burning of a body is a deep insult to Muslims. Islam requires burial within 24 hours.
Under the Geneva conventions the burial of war dead “should be honourable, and, if possible, according to the rites of the religion to which the deceased belonged”.
Of course, our “news” media will never report anything that hasn’t been spoon fed into their word processor for them, and if they did report this, the Bush lovers will say the Taliban and their supporters deserve everything they get. I’m sick of this.
</disgust with the actions of own country>
Geneva conventions, how quaint…I’m sure the brave psyops boys checked with Rummy and everything’s fine…nothing to see here, move along…don’t you have some shopping to do?
</snark>
Peace
but I don’t support the leadership that allows and encourages this type of puerile and hateful behavior.
This is not doing your job as a soldier, this is doing your job as a terrorist. This behavior will be more effective at escalating anti-American sentiment and violence than anything suicide bombers could dream up. Is it any wonder that U.S. talk of human rights abuses elsewhere is met with derisive laughter by the world?
As J. Robert E. Jackson, U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, once said:
How can you support troops who -whether under orders or not -have illegally invaded a soverign nation on false pretenses. There should be no talk of “supporting the troops” because there is nothing to support them about or for. They need to be rescued, not supported.
I do not support the troops. And in fact I cannot see any reason why there should not be an insurgency fighting them. That is why they need to be rescued, they are fighting on the wrong side. I have always said that the United States should be supporting the insurgents and not the Shiites on a political level…if they are going to get involved. ..The troops are in fact fighting for fundamentalism on a number of levels. They are:
1). Fightiing for the fundamentalsit government of Iraq supported by the fundamentalist government of Iran
2). They are putting in power a government that is more sympathetic to Osama Bin Laden than is sympatheitc to the United States.
Our troops are fighting for Bin Laden, not Freedom.
They need to be rescued from the madness and the word support should never be used as it only confuses the issue. Support is a republican word that has magical powers.
You are supposed to feel guilty if you don’t support the troops.
to include a “How will US punish Australia?” poll.
If this was in reverse and we saw them burning our soldiers and taunting us…
This country would damn we nuke that entire area till all the sand turned to glass.
What are we doing????? This is sick! In a long line of other sick, disgusting things.
clear, accessible and unframed synopsis of “exceptionalism.”
I tried my hand a while ago, and used way too many words.
Exactly Janet, and my very first thought also. If I had any kind of religion my basic tenet would be(and always has been)’do unto others as you would want done to you’. It seems instead of following that simple but effective rule the military under bushco/rummy seems to be following more along the lines of the BKT edict of that recently caught serial killer.
Yeah we’re a beacon alright, an ever more increasing beacon of the US’s willingness to sanction everything we supposedly hate in other dictators…what’s that line about we’ve met the enemy and they are us.
The damage to our soldiers mental states is going to be one of horrific consequences to not only themselves but to their family when they come home and to anyone who may be in their path. The damage to the people we are torturing and their families and loved ones will also yield horrific consequences for so many. There are no ‘winners’ here at all but all of us losers as our humanity is diminished daily by the fucken vile miscreants running/ruining our country and other countries.
And if this gets any traction in the media I suppose it will just set off another round of people who have sunk so low as to believe torture is always the answer. I don’t have a lot of answers but torture is not an answer and shouldn’t even be a question-as in is torture ever called for?
well I guess I could have gone with my first response to this story though which is just ..fuck fuck fuck and how much more fucken sick shit do we have to read about before we take to the streets/boycot the media till they start acting like reporters?..do something.
They burnt the bodies of the Contractors in Fallujah and those weren’t “nice guys” either and Americans lost their fucking minds over that one! Wonder how many NEW TALIBAN MEMBERS they created with this bullshit. I mean Abu Ghraib did so much to stop the insurgency in its tracks didn’t it? Time out to go beat my head against the brickwall again………
I hadn’t seen you in a while. I was worried you had maybe left or were upset. (((((((((((Tracy))))))))))))))
I remember at the start of the war the US showed video of the Taliban using Yellow Labs or Golden Retrievers to experiment on. I remember some were shouting that we should “kill them all”. Look how savage they are.
And yet we have photos of our troops disgracing the bodies of 14 year old girls, videos of beatings, and now this…
I fear for the safety of us all because there is a world outside that sees this – The US is not the only “town” on this planet.
Like Ukibikuki I support the troops but I do not support them being used as terrorists.
I was taking a break of sorts. The shit is really hailing down now as it well ought to be by God!!! I took a little time off to breathe fully and reassure myself that things can and often do sort themselves out in the world when enough pressure is applied. Lordy lordy what a long haul and a war and all kinds of shit this has all been though, and most of my nation just fell asleep at the wheel like zombies!
I was begining to wonder WTF I was doing.
Then a Marine came up behind me as I was posting a “Bring them Home NOW” post card that I got when I was Camp Casey and earlier at the UFPJ Veteran’s for Peace tent….
I’ll diarize about what happened when I can quit crying when thinking about it.
This poor young man spent 3 tours in Iraq. He’s home and found that none of his friends even bothered to vote. They don’t want to talk about anything and he should “just find something nice to talk about instead”.
It’s a heartbreaker. I gave him the contacts to IVFP.
Just like Vietnam, and nobody wants to know and nobody wants to talk about it because it is all too ugly and evil and nasty…….and it was done in our name with our troops that we have all paid for to outfit and train and employ. Poor fucking guy/kid! He has you though and you are someone who is listening and from you he will find others and then he will grow courage one day and stop the deaf in the streets.
When I go there, I see yet another face of a person who has every damn right to hate ME and my CHILDREN. Who has every right to wish I and my loved ones and all in my country were dead.
I see the faces of those we have “liberated” into a world of more terror and hatred.
and I wonder if and when and what it will ever take to heal.
“It’s just some good ol’ fashion hazing. Letting the boys have some fun.”
“It’s not like it hurt anyone, since they were already dead!”
(Yes, I can hear the GOP talking points already…)
.
Another returned troop, also anonymous, says, “We would defecate on and run over dead Iraqi bodies.”
As revenge, the U.S. Command ordered twice to raze the city of Fallujah, killing thousands, destroying lives and livelyhood of tens of thousands, in essence devastating communities.
By any measure a war crime, foretold by the heavy handed assault at the outset of the invasion, when U.S. forces wanted to establish their HQ in a local school. The protest that followed led to the death of 35 civilians. The rest is history.
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Australia’s SBS television – DATELINE
Psych War in Afghanistan
Transcript and Video of Interview
“You are too scared to
retrieve their bodies –
this just proves you are
the lady boys we always
believed you to be.”
US PsyOps’ alleged message
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This story was just reported on the Today Show of all things. This reaches the mass audience of folks who don’t pay much attention to the news.
.
IMAGE PROBLEM
The U.S. image abroad has been battered by a series of human rights scandals, from the abuse of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to the detention without trial of foreign terror suspects at a U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
More than 100 detainees have died in U.S. detention in Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. military consistently pins the blame on individuals and has denied there is any institutional tolerance of such behavior.
… The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights group, urged the Pentagon to conduct a review of policies and training related to personnel in Muslim countries.
“Given the growing number of such incidents involving American military personnel worldwide, it is imperative that the Pentagon launch a top-to-bottom review of policies and training to help prevent the war on terror from being perceived as a war on Islam,” CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad said in a statement.
Awad said reports of abuses of Muslim prisoners and disregard for Islamic sensitivities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, were harming the image of the United States and serving as recruiting tools for terrorist groups.
Rice before US Senate Foreign Relations Committee
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