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Obama’s War: Death to Women and Children, Cover-Ups to
Protect the US Killers
08 April 2010 By Dave Lindorff
So finally the truth comes out...sort of.
After initially claiming that two pregnant women and a
teenage girl killed in a US Special Forces raid on an
Afghan home in Khataba in February had been discovered
bound and slain by the Americans, the US military has
admitted that they were actually shot and killed by
those US troops--who then tried to cover up their
“mistake” by carving the bullets out of the bodies
with knives, removing other incriminating bullets from
the compound’s walls, and then washing away the bloody
evidence with alcohol.
In this new grisly version of the story issued from
the US command in Afghanistan, it was a case of the
Special Forces Unit lying to superiors about what had
transpired in their botched raid, which also killed an
Afghan police commander and a government prosecutor.
The only reason we know all this today is because of
the intrepid digging by a relentless reporter from the
Times of London, Jerome Starkey, who, unlike the hacks
in Kabul passing themselves off as journalists from
American news organizations, didn’t just accept the
press release on the incident put out by Gen. Stanley
McChrystal’s office, but instead did his own
investigation, talking to Afghan and UN investigators,
as well as local people where the incident happened.
For his efforts at getting to the truth, Starkey was
attacked by the US military, accused of lying and
misrepresenting US statements.
Now that Starkey has been fully vindicated, there has
been no apology from McChrystal’s office, or from the
military public relations operation. Nor have US
reporters and editors, who left Starkey undefended
while his credibility was being attacked by the US,
said anything about his role in bringing the truth to
light.
The New York Times, in an article today by Richard A.
Oppel, Jr., datelined Kabul, said that the US
military, “after initially denying involvement in any
cover-up in the deaths,” had “admitted that its forces
had killed the women during the nighttime raid.”
The paper also credited the Times of London (without
mentioning Starkey), with, a day before the military’s
about face, disclosing that American forces on the
scene had “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in
the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with
alcohol before lying to their superiors about what
happened.”
What the paper didn’t mention is that Starkey had
broken the story weeks earlier, only have his exposé
ignored by the US media, which allowed him to be
slandered by the American military.
This story is not over yet, either.
The US military, incredibly, is still claiming that
despite an official investigation by US/NATO personnel
into the incident, “Nothing pointed conclusively to
the fact that our guys were the ones who tampered with
the scene.” As Oppel demurely observed, “However,
given that Special Operations forces killed the women,
it was not clear why anyone else would have a
motivation to remove bullets from the bodies or tamper
with evidence at the scene.”
It would appear that a cover-up is still underway.
There has been no talk of bring charges against the
Special Forces personnel who committed these killings
and who then sought to cover up their actions, or
those who were with them who allowed this crime to be
committed and didn’t report it.
It is worth pointing out that Gen. McChrystal’s
background is running Special Forces operations. He
ran a major death squad operation in Iraq before being
put in charge of the Afghan War, and was widely
reported to be planning to repeat that tactic in
Afghanistan. This particular night raid, on what was
thought to be a Taliban household, but which turned
out to be a party for the naming of a new baby boy,
was almost certainly part of just such a mission.
The point to be taken from this ugly window on
American operations in Afghanistan is that far from
being an aberration, this is precisely how the war is
being fought. Had this raid not been based on bad
information, so that instead of killing a police
officer and a prosecutor, the Special Forces hit-men
had actually taken out a Taliban fighter or two, the
fact that they also slaughtered a few pregnant women
and a girl would have gone unnoticed and unremarked.
In fact, the Special Forces killers wouldn’t have even
bothered to try to cover up their handiwork by digging
knives into the victims’ bodies to gouge out their
bullets.
We can safely assume that this kind of thing is going
on all over Afghanistan every day.
Welcome to Obama’s War.
Editorial Comment:
Once again, we need to make the point that while
individual soldiers in the US military may behave in a
heroic fashion on occasion, there is nothing heroic
about our military these days. If you want proof of
that, just check out the Wikileaks tape, just released
over the strenuous efforts of the Pentagon to hide it
for the past three years, of a helicopter crew in Iraq
mowing down 12 unarmed Iraqis, including two Reuters
photographers, and joking about the slaughter as they
do it. There is no threat. They are way up in the air,
firing 30 mm rounds with abandon. There is a lust to
finish off one wounded man trying to crawl away from
the scene, as there is a lust to blow away some
samaritans in a van who stop and try to help the
victim.
America's wars are obscene slaughters, in which the US
kills from a distance, sometimes, thanks to robotic
drone aircraft, even thousands of miles away from
danger.
Our soldiers are hardly the "heroes" that our
government and our media automatically refer to them
all as. They are armed gangsters, sent out to enforce
US hegemony over desperately poor societies, and their
basic strategy is to spread fear and terror in hopes
of isolating those few who dare to fight back against
absurd odds from the general public. Of course, the
majority of US military personnel are also
victims--victims of poor education, victims of an
economic system that leaves many without any
opportunity other than military enlistment, victims of
propaganda, and victims of recruiters' lies. But for
all that they are not heroes.
The heroes are those few who realize what they are
being ordered to do and who refuse, they are those who
report on the crimes of their fellow soldiers and
especially their commanders. And there are not enough
of them.
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