The Australian, March 21, 2012: RESIDENTS of an Afghan village near where an American soldier is alleged to have killed 16 civilians are convinced that the slayings were in retaliation for a roadside bomb attack on US forces in the same area a few days earlier.
In accounts to The Associated Press and to Afghan government officials, the residents allege that US troops lined up men from the village of Mokhoyan against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack.
Holocaust Encyclopedia. SERBIA, April 1941, The Axis Occupation of Yugoslavia: Germany established a military occupation administration in Serbia, and an indigenous administration and police force nominally supervised by a puppet Serb government... By the end of summer an uprising, based in Serbia and Bosnia and initiated by the Communist-led Partisan Movement and by the Serb nationalist Cetnik Movement of Draza Mihailovic, had inflicted serious casualties upon German military and police personnel. Hitler ordered that, for every German death (including those of ethnic Germans in Serbia and the Banat), German authorities were to shoot 100 hostages.
Wikipedia.org The Panjwai shooting spree: The Panjwai shooting spree (or Kandahar massacre) occurred in the early morning of Sunday, 11 March 2012, when sixteen civilians were killed and five wounded in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan. Among the dead were nine children, four men, and three women, of whom eleven were from the same family. Some of the corpses were partially burned. United States Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales from Joint Base Lewis-McChord, age 38, was taken into custody by U.S. military authorities as the primary suspect.
United States authorities said the killings were the act of a single soldier, while some eyewitnesses reported seeing multiple soldiers. On 15 March, an Afghan parliamentary probe team made up of several members of the National Assembly of Afghanistan announced that up to 20 American soldiers were involved in the killings.
Rawa News: Probe team: Women sexually assaulted before killing in Panjwai The Wolesi Jirga’s, or lower house of Parliament, delegation investigating the Kandahar shootings by US troops said besides killing 16 civilians, the soldiers sexually assaulted them.
So has the US Army gone one step beyond that of the Nazi Reich, not only killing hostages in retaliation for US combat deaths, but raping them first then mutilating and burning the corpses?
Canspeccy – A very horrible situation made even more disturbing by the Afghan allegations that these may be revenge killings on the civilian population. But surely it is not the same as Nazism where such revenge killings were formally ordered by higher authority and the government itself, which no one is suggesting happened here. Indeed it does look like there will be justice. Nevertheless it is very bothering that an experienced soldier, if the allegations are prove true, could run amok like this and those in authority have to accept some responsibility for lack of oversight. A point I try to make in my own rather Orwellian situation, there is no such thing as entirely innocent bystanders.
ReplyDeleteWhat difference does it make whether retaliation was ordered or not? Retaliation was promised by "U.S. troops [who] lined up men from the village of Mokhoyan against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack."
DeleteAnd retaliation was anticipated by US military brass who failed to prevent it, but hastened to whitewash the crime, calling the alleged lone perpetrator mentally deranged.
Your remark about no innocent bystanders is chilling. Are you saying the victims, the women and children murdered at Panjaway, got what was coming to them?
Absolutely not - How could murdered victims possibly be regarded as bystanders!!!
DeleteI would have thought that in war situations, there are those (superiors, colleagues – i.e. bystanders) who had a duty to monitor the mind and rationality of fighting soldiers and clearly didn’t. After all given the horrible stresses that fighting soldiers are under, mental aberrations from shell shock on upwards are not unusual. Another analogy would be the Breivik situation in Norway where this guy was apparently signaling very extremist irrational thoughts of violence for ages and yet those who knew him (i.e. bystanders – his colleagues/friends) did nothing. That Breivik's colleagues/bystanders did nothing is not chilling, just shocking.
In my view when they become aware that something is wrong, people have a duty to speak out. A point I try to make in my own rather Orwellian situation, there is no such thing as entirely innocent bystanders.
Oh, O.K. Your comment seemed slightly cryptic, so it's good to have the misunderstanding cleared up.
DeleteAnd yes, you make an excellent point. Why is it that so many perpetrators of "terrorist" atrocities, e.g., the Toulouse killer, Mohammed Merah, turn out to have been under the eye of, or even under some kind of control by, one or other of the various national security organizations?
ReplyDeleteWhich does raise the suspicion of top down direction of the Afghan massacre: Was it part of a program of control through terror. Seems consistent with US/Israel/Nato's ready use of napalm, white phosphorous and depleted uranium on more or less civilian targets.