Tuesday, March 22, 2011



What the US does in Afghanistan

Murders children, then poses, smiling of course, with the corpses:

Kill Team Afghanistan

(Image stolen from Der Spiegel; original here)

This is just one image of over four thousand taken by a group of US soldiers who operated as a de facto death squad, murdering civilians and taking body parts as souvenirs. Those soldiers are currently being court-martialed on charges of murder, desecration of corpses, illegal possession of photographs of corpses, drug abuse, and assaulting other soldiers. The US will no doubt roll out the usual line about how these are just the actions of a few "bad apples", just as they did at Abu Ghraib. But when they foster and tolerate an attitude of contempt towards the Afghan people, elevate US over Afghan lives in the name of "force security", and blame an entire religion for the crimes of 9/11, its not exactly surprising that incidents like this happen. And no doubt we'll see more of them before this whole sorry business is done.