Posted on 03/20/2011 7:38:42 PM PDT by Cardhu
Commanders in Afghanistan are bracing themselves for possible riots and public fury triggered by the publication of "trophy" photographs of US soldiers posing with the dead bodies of defenceless Afghan civilians they killed.
Senior officials at Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul have compared the pictures published by the German news weekly Der Spiegel to the images of US soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq which sparked waves of anti-US protests around the world.
They fear that the pictures could be even more damaging as they show the aftermath of the deliberate murders of Afghan civilians by a rogue US Stryker tank unit that operated in the southern province of Kandahar last year.
Some of the activities of the self-styled "kill team" are already public, with 12 men currently on trial in Seattle for their role in the killing of three civilians.
Five of the soldiers are on trial for pre-meditated murder, after they staged killings to make it look like they were defending themselves from Taliban attacks.
Other charges include the mutilation of corpses, the possession of images of human casualties and drug abuse.
All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.
The case has already created shock around the world, particularly with the revelations that the men cut "trophies" from the bodies of the people they killed.
An investigation by Der Spiegel has unearthed approximately 4,000 photos and videos taken by the men.
The magazine, which is planning to publish only three images, said that in addition to the crimes the men were on trial for there are "also entire collections of pictures of other victims that some of the defendants were keeping".
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
Sometimes the enemy looks a lot like civilians. Most Afghan insurgents take pains to do that.
You are totally buying into the liberal left media spin.
Time is not to distant when we all will have to start our own collections...
Never mind I answered my own question. He was with my dad in nam!
I do believe that is correct.
I wonder do they look just exactly like the ones Obomb a killed?
I’m pretty sure the media won’t blame Obummer although they all laid Abu Graib(?) at Bush’s door.
The average age of the 58148 soldiers who were killed in Vietnam was 23.11 years, say 24. Where’d you get your 18 from? Put the beer down and fly right.
Couldn’t be “18”. The enlistment/draft age was “18”. Most Lieutenants would be at least 21-23, minimum, and we lost a lot of them. The higher the rank, the older the soldier.
Don’t believe everything you read about Vietnam because about 50% of it is wrong to start with.
Been there.
THis article is so convoluted I’m not sure what war Boone is writing about.
“Persian New Year”? - That’s Iran, not Afghanistan.
You don’t throw grenades at someone you want to shoot. The grenade would kill you too.
Mullahs just don’t wander down the road in wartime. They’re not that stupid.
How do you tell a civilian from a Taliban relative unless the Talie is dressed in black? The Viet Cong used to dress just like everyone else. You could tell they were VC when you found them with communist weapons.
The Guardian - makes Tass and Pravda seem like amateurs.
If you can find a copy Eric Maria Remarque who wrote
All quiet on the Western Front about the horror
of WW I. also wrote a companian piece called,
The Road Back. In AQWF the hero paul is killed
just as the war ends, but in TRB he survives the
war and has to go home, all the signs of PTSD are
in this companian story, how he copes and how his
comrades don’t, with the change from front line to
peace. Every example I saw after coming from Nam was
already chronicaled in this book.
Warriors today are not allowed trophies so they take
pictures, the enemy who tried to kill you is dead on
the ground and you are alive so that’s what you take,
so that later you can say, look Hill 3XX there is
smitty and bohunk, that was before smitty got it and
the hunk had his legs blown off after being caught
outside the guntub at Khe San...
A whole nother world.
The way this reads, reminds me of that great movie with Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel Jackson, where Jackson was accused of mowing down defenseless civilians. A Clintonista type SecDef of course was in charge of fabricating and destroying evidence................
A very believable film unfortunately.............
...that entire miserable excuse for a country should have been turned into a glowing sheet of glass on 9/12/2001.
You are totally buying into the liberal left media spin.
Not me. But, apparently, some of that "spin" is coming from the U.S. Army, which said it apologized for the distress caused by photographs “depicting actions repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States.”
If the Army said that, then I find the report disturbing, to say the least. It's not what we need.
STOLEN VALOR by BG Burkett states ...average age of U.S. Military in Vietnam War was 22.8 years old. But I won’t quibble with your figure. But the average age certainly wasn’t 18/19 as some here contend. More 20 year olds were KIA than any other age.
Most Americans still believe it a war fought by conscripts, when in fact, 66% of those of us who served were volunteers. Not sure how we change the perception...
I have done 4 combat tours; 3 in Iraq and 1 is Shitcanistan. I know how they conceal themselves, but I also know that soldiers sometimes do very stupid things, expecially if one of their own gets wounded. I will admit to double tapping many an insurgent to make sure they were dead, and did not roll over and toss a grenade at us after we walked by.
See #55
Agreed, but since you have experience with both scenrios, and since it is a whacko lefty publication running with this story, why don't we wait and see?
From the book written by Chuck Dean:
Nam Vet making peace with your past
Did not research any of it just half way through it.
Chuck was with 173 airborne
You said: “The winds of civil war in the are strong these days Pelosi said so.”
You know, I almost hope that they are; I [cynically] believe nothing less will reset the [federal] governments concerns to where it should properly be: the safety and security of the Citizen and his rights. Simply put, as far as the government is concerned a single American should be valued at an infinitude of foreign citizens. {This isn’t to say that foreigner’s lives are worth nothing, only that the US should consider a single Citizen as worth more than each and every other country’s existence.}
They do not generally wear uniforms, do not carry arms openly (when we can see them), try to blend in with noncombatant women and children.
When looking at a picture of a dead man (or dead woman or teen, considering that terrorists are not exclusively adult males) how do the reporters KNOW that they are "innocent unarmed civilians"?
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