Uh huh.
They're disfunctional.
Posted on 12/04/2001 9:53:48 AM PST by truth4all
Very good article below by a British journalist in Afghanistan doing his job and reporting events that we never hear about in "The New York Times", "Washington Post" or CNN etc. Civilian deaths are extremely high and mounting. High tech weapons make little difference if you bomb indiscriminately. In Vietnam we destroyed the village in order to save it, here we destroy the village in the hopes of killing a few terrorists and sacrifice dozens of innocents in the process. Please visit my nonprofit website.
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Thank you. Gavin.
A village is destroyed. And America
says nothing happened
War on terrorism
Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Afghanistan
04 December 2001
The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.
Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth. The rest are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes. At the moment when nothing happened, the villagers of Kama Ado were taking their early morning meal, before sunrise and the beginning of the Ramadan fast. And there in the rubble, dented and ripped, are tokens of the simple daily lives they led.
A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the blast; a collection of charred cooking pots; and the fragments of an old-fashioned pedal-operated sewing machine. A split metal chest contains scraps of children's clothes in cheap bright nylon.
In another room are the only riches that these people had, six dead cows lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And all this is very strange because, on Saturday morning – when American B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs that killed 115 men, women and children – nothing happened.
We know this because the US Department of Defence told us so. That evening, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of civilian casualties in eastern Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the US is meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial decisive statement: "It just didn't happen."
So God knows what kind of a magic looking-glass I stepped through yesterday, as I travelled out of the city of Jalalabad along the desert road to Kama Ado. From the moment I woke up, I was confronted with the wreckage and innocent victims of high-altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings.
The day began at the home of Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the pro-Western anti-Taliban mujahedin commander who is being discreetly supplied and funded by the US government. The previous day I had followed him around Jalalabad's mortuary, where seven mutilated corpses were being laid out – mujahedin soldiers of Commander Zaman who had been killed when US bombs hit the government office in which they were sleeping. And now, it had happened again.
There they were in the back of three pick-up trucks – seven more bloody bodies of seven more mujahedin, killed when the guesthouse in which they were sleeping in the village of Landi Khiel was hit by bombs at 6.30am yesterday morning.
Commander Zaman is a proud, haughty man who fought in the mountains for years against the Soviet Union, but I've never seen him look so vulnerable. "I sent them there myself yesterday,'' was all he could say. "I sent them for security.''
But the commander provided us with mujahedin escorts of our own, and we set off down the road to Landi Khiel. We found the ruins of the office where the first lot of soldiers had died, and the guesthouse where they perished the previous morning. And there, in the ruins of a family house, was a small fragment of nothing. It was the tail-end of a compact bomb. It bore the words "Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM 114", and a serial number: 232687. It was half-buried in the remains of the straw roof of a house where three men had died: Fazil Karim, his brother Mahmor Ghulab, and his nephew Hasiz Ullah. "They were a family, just ordinary people," said Haji Mohammed Nazir, the local elder who was accompanying us. "They were not terrorists – the terrorists are in the mountains, over there.''
So we drove on in the direction of the White Mountains, where hundreds of al-Qa'ida members, and perhaps even Osama bin Laden himself, are hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex. A B-52 was high in the sky; a billow of black smoke was visible, blooming out of the valley. Something, surely, was happening over there. And then we reached the ruins of Kama Ado. Among the pathetic remains I found only one sinister object - an old leather gun holster with an ammunition belt. It is conceivable that a handful of al-Qa'ida members had been spending the night there, and that US targeters learnt of their presence.
But after 22 years of war, almost every Afghan home contains some military relic, and the villagers swore they hadn't seen Arab or Taliban fighters for a fortnight. Certainly there could not have been enough terrorists to fill the 40 fresh graves. One person told me a few holes contained not intact people, but simply body parts.
We had been warned that white faces would meet an angry reception in the village where nothing happened, but I encountered despair and bafflement. I had only one moment of real fear, when an American B-52 flew overhead. We halted our convoy, clambered out of the cars and trotted into the fields on either side. The plane did a slow circle; I was conscious of electronic eyes looking down on us, the only traffic on the road. Then, to everyone's relief, the bomber veered away.
Before we left the city, an American colleague in Jalalabad telephoned the Pentagon and informed them of our plans to travel to the village where nothing happened. I can't help wondering, in these looking-glass times, what that B-52 would have done to our convoy if that telephone call had not been made. Perhaps nothing would have happened to me too.
It's mainly a method to refine an arguement through logic, and hopefully reach some fence sitting lurkers.
"We"?
He he he.
Trav, please don't include a keyboard warrior like yourself amongst the generation who actually fought fascism in the 40s. I've never met an ex-soldier who loves the thought of spilling blood the way you do.
But you don't know, do you?
Just like all the armchair phonies here who didn't know B-52s fly low, you're winging it to suit your prejudices.
That would certainly fit the profile. But the reason was that your post was such a cluttered and unintelligible mess I didn't consider it deserved a response. Want to try again?
I knew this guy was lying, here he admits it! Rumsfeld said all along there would be civilian casualties.
Uh huh.
So....do you think those ladies would be proud of your work on this thread?
....You may wish to be emotional about this matter and bring out the Judeo Christian weakness of compassion for an adversary,that is your privilidge and prerogative. I have no such scruples being an atheist....
Well, possibly.
On the other hand, I'm quite sure I've made no mistake in assuming anyone selecting the screen name 'Skull Stomper' would be a four star jerk, in real life.
B-52's can fly low, but I doubt they are doing that in Afghanistan. I am pretty sure they are doing what they did in Vietnam, dopping bombs in cells of 3, from about FL 300. They are much too big of a target to bomb from low level.
Yes.
You've simply confirmed you're an ignorant, no class moron. Your opinions and comments are obviously fouled by the fact you've got your head up your ass.
If you didn't understand my post, it should have given you a clue that perhaps you were in over your head.
It should have warned you that you're a lightweight in a heavyweight world.
No need to respond this time....you've convinced me there is no hope of getting intelligent or informed responses from you - just bull shit.. I've added you to my IGNORE list.
Semper Fi
BTW, my father and all 5 of his brothers served in WW2.
So yes, "we" saved Australia from Japanese slavery in WW2.
Dude -- you miss an important point. Aussie & Euro-trash anti-American types and leftist really do believe this crap. Their anti-American b.s. goes practically unopposed in their little cess-pits across the seas. These countries grab ahold of ridiculous ideas and run with them in the name of fashion and arrogance.
How do you think France became such a loser country. In the 1890's France was the world epicenter of art, literature and science. Now, they're disfunctional can't-do-anything twits who can only criticize those who can and will do from afar. This transformation occurred over many years where the French babbled about fashionable nonsense ideas (like their brand of Socialism) and passed laws to isolate/protect their "superior" French culture from any American influence.
Because I think the crux of your argument is that most soldiers who have seen real battle don't engage in the type of gleeful bloodletting rhetoric as is sometimes engaged in on these threads. And that true soldiers wage their war in the fear of the Lord.
BTW I also agree that it is quite facile, and not particularly well-advised to use the catch all pronoun "we" when describing action or activity that you have not personally taken part in, especially concerning something as large scale as war.
Exactly. And what does it profit a man, if in war he destroys the values he's fighting for? You might like to check this out :
...how the military increases the killing rate of soldiers in combat is instructive because our culture today is doing the same thing to our children. The training methods militaries use are brutalization, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and role modeling. I will explain each of these in the military context and show how these same factors are contributing to the phenomenal increase of violence in our culture....
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a375d88046184.htm
Now please excuse me, while I poke a few keyboard Rambos through the bars. Regards, By.
Yes...
Beep! Nope, screwed up again.
What is it with you death lovers, that you can't focus on the topic at hand?
Better stick to posting 'git some, git some!' on a daisy-cutter thread, killer.
Uh huh.
They're disfunctional.
...and did they used to go 'whoohoo!' at civilian casualties like you do, Trav?
P.S. Piss on your website!
The journalist probably used the term "HELLFIRE" because it conjurs up an image.
The journalist has an axe to grind. Note his comment about him "not happening" at the end.
I'd imagine you have an axe to grind as well
I cannot imagine that you are a veteran of military service or combat
Things like this happen in war
And for all your incindiary comments, they happen least when Americans make war
You display the absolutest moral certainty of a person who really hasn't experienced much in life.
I'd reccommend a tour in the Australian Army. They're a good bunch.
You could even end up in Afghanistan or some similar place
Then you could show us how it's done
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