American Soldier(s) Massacre 16 Afghan Civilians

[compared2what?]

Rape is something that might not be reported right away due to embarrassment and other perfectly understandable factors.

Also, we've heard the stories as to the way rape victims might be viewed in certain fundamentalist Muslim societies. Or has that all been bullshit?

All I know is that the Afghans who are investigating are saying something completely different from what the Lie-a-gon is saying.

I take it for granted that we (the U.S. in all its manifestations) aren't telling ourselves or anybody else the truth. Because -- apart from our track record on such things and the obvious motives and so on -- there's just a very, very strong appearance that we're not. But I wouldn't really be surprised if the Afghani authorities didn't feel particularly obligated to tell it to us, either. We lie to them all the time. After all. And that's the least of our sins.

It's not actually all that unusual for rapes to appear to have been somewhat oddly reported anywhere on earth, however. So I'm sure not saying there's anything conclusively anomalous about it.

I really just feel like something central's missing from the whole scenario, for no particular reason that I can rightly identify, to be honest. You know how that is, sometimes.

[eyeno]

Rape is something that might not be reported right away due to embarrassment and other perfectly understandable factors.

Also, we've heard the stories as to the way rape victims might be viewed in certain fundamentalist Muslim societies. Or has that all been bullshit?

All I know is that the Afghans who are investigating are saying something completely different from what the Lie-a-gon is saying.

I take it for granted that we (the U.S. in all its manifestations) aren't telling ourselves or anybody else the truth. Because -- apart from our track record on such things and the obvious motives and so on -- there's just a very, very strong appearance that we're not. But I wouldn't really be surprised if the Afghani authorities didn't feel particularly obligated to tell it to us, either. We lie to them all the time. After all. And that's the least of our sins.

It's not actually all that unusual for rapes to appear to have been somewhat oddly reported anywhere on earth, however. So I'm sure not saying there's anything conclusively anomalous about it.

I really just feel like something central's missing from the whole scenario, for no particular reason that I can rightly identify, to be honest. You know how that is, sometimes.

If we were just throwing things in the air, what would your time frame be? What do you think? Months? Years? What are we looking at?

[justdrew]

so the story is he snuck out, was spotted, and they went looking for him, but didn't find him in time (or at all actually).

According to official reports, a heavily armed American soldier left combat outpost Camp Belamby at 3:00 a.m. local time wearing night vision goggles. The soldier climbed the base’s fence wearing traditional Afghan clothing over his ISAF fatigues. The soldier walked one mile, then proceeded to attack three civilian homes in the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, according to an eyewitness.

Afghan forces spotted him leaving his outpost before the massacre and U.S. commanders on base assembled their troops for a head count when it was discovered that the soldier was missing. A patrol was dispatched to find the missing soldier; it did not find him until the soldier turned himself in at the base after the massacre. He was reportedly taken into custody without incident. There were no military operations being conducted in the area at the time.

The surveillance video from the base reportedly shows "the soldier walking up to his base covered in a traditional Afghan shawl. The soldier removes the shawl and lays his weapon on the ground, then raises his arms in surrender." The video has not been released to the public.

Also, this would seem to indicate, that one of the main US forward bases in one of the "hotest" areas, is surrounded and watched closely by local Afghan forces they like to think of as loyal.

[StarmanSkye]

It appears Youtube suspended Russia Today's account shortly after reporting the story about Afghan Parliamentary investigators claiming witnesses told them up to 20 US Troops participated in the attacks that killed 16 villagers. Youtube hasn't provided any specific reason other than announcing it was due to breaking terms of service agreement. There is youtube communityb speculation that it is outright censorship while RT itself suspects their account was terminated by accident, in the absence of a detailed response to their query.

As you can imagine, Alex Jones' Infowars channel and supporters are claiming this is the first step in a major shutdown of alternative media
-- tho RT.com hosts their own channel; Youtube is convenient for its archive and subject-search-replay service -- but hardly critical as a secondary hosting service.

We'll have to see just what the deal is on the RT shutdown.

I'm still of the opinion the shooting doesn't really fit the official explanation -- it looks more like a false-flag provocation to me, to extend the US occupation-in-force by inciting popular outrage & ramping-up violence.

Wonder if any US media are repeating the Afghan Parliamentary investigation story claiming witnesses told of seeing up to 20 US Troops participating in the shootings. The 2 reported rapes preceeding the shootings sure don't sound like something done by a single soldier.

The whole thing stinks. I don't think it has anything to do with drugs, either.

[Nordic]

Good Gawd the official story is getting stoopider and stoopider.

What a deadly joke this country has become.

[StarmanSkye]

Nordic perceptively opined:
"Good Gawd the official story is getting stoopider and stoopider.

What a deadly joke this country has become."

--unquote--

Man, Dat the TRUEthe, dUde!

I know I'm not alone, for the past 5, 7, 10 or more years, my jaw keeps dropping lower and lower at how blatantly obnoxious, insidious and plain fucked-up and bullshit the shit is getting moreso all the time.

And too, I'm thunderstuck flabbergasted at the stubborn hard core idiocracy of a large dumbed-down stupidified public that has meekly accomodated to their disinfo programming and eagerly cheerlead the technocratic imperium -- while another sizeable group deny the total subversion of everything they hold dear in the midst of an induced narcoleptic state.

[Nordic]

Nordic perceptively opined:
"Good Gawd the official story is getting stoopider and stoopider.

What a deadly joke this country has become."

--unquote--

Man, Dat the TRUEthe, dUde!

I know I'm not alone, for the past 5, 7, 10 or more years, my jaw keeps dropping lower and lower at how blatantly obnoxious, insidious and plain fucked-up and bullshit the shit is getting moreso all the time.

And too, I'm thunderstuck flabbergasted at the stubborn hard core idiocracy of a large dumbed-down stupidified public that has meekly accomodated to their disinfo programming and eagerly cheerlead the technocratic imperium -- while another sizeable group deny the total subversion of everything they hold dear in the midst of an induced narcoleptic state.

At the same time, I wonder how much of their psyops game is to make us think that "everybody" is falling for their bullshit.

I mean, the media, simply reporting Pentagon lies as truth, over and over and over, gives that impression. And how many of the comments in news stories are planted these days? You know, to cement that impression.

It would be nice to know what percentage of the population doesn't believe this crap any more. I mean, how many times has the Pentagon lied to us, outright, about things like Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, WMD's, "spidey holes" etc. over the last 12 years or thereabouts?

In my circles, there is a pretty high level of not just skepticism, but knowledge that we're being lied to. But my circles are unusual, honestly.

[barracuda]

Serial Killer Ted Bundy’s Lawyer Representing Soldier in Afghan Massacre

John Henry Browne, the lawyer for the U.S. soldier suspected in the shooting deaths of 16 Afghan civilians, has a history of defending clients in multiple homicide cases, including serial killer Ted Bundy and mass murderer Benjamin Ng.

During his 40 years as an attorney, Browne, 65, the chief trial lawyer in the King County Office of the Public Defender in Seattle before going into private practice, has represented arsonists, a shoeless airplane thief and a man accused of killing a celebrity dog trainer.

“He seems to thrive on controversial cases, and he gets good outcomes for his clients,” said Richard Hansen, whom Browne hired in 1976 to work as a public defender in Seattle.

Browne’s newest client, a 38-year-old Army staff sergeant, is suspected of going on a rampage about three months into his first tour of duty in Afghanistan following three deployments to Iraq. The Army said in a memo to Congress that the soldier allegedly hiked to two villages close to his base near Kandahar city on March 11 to commit the killings.

The suspect is U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, according to a U.S. defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because charges haven’t been announced. A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Captain John Kirby, had said the suspect is being brought to the U.S. Bales is being held at a military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Army later said.

The stress of a fourth deployment, a troubled marriage and alcohol use appear to have combined to provoke the killings, said a U.S. official briefed on the case.

At a press conference at his Seattle office on March 15, Browne disputed that account.

‘Strong Marriage’

“This is a very strong marriage,” Browne said. “There’s a lot of love, a lot of respect, two children.”

There were no incidents of domestic violence “whatsoever” and no indication alcohol had played a part in the alleged attack. Browne said.

[compared2what?]

The whole thing stinks. I don't think it has anything to do with drugs, either.

I don't think it really adds up that way either, actually. Or at least not in the form of the hypothesis I outlined on the previous page. I mean, in some sense -- albeit possibly an almost purely semantic one -- it probably does have something to do with drugs, on some level, just as a function of the location. But that's kind of like saying that a murder spree in the Hollywood Hills probably has something to do with the entertainment industry. (IOW, while probably tangentially true, it's not necessarily germane.)

I'm still of the opinion the shooting doesn't really fit the official explanation

I agree.

-- it looks more like a false-flag provocation to me, to extend the US occupation-in-force by inciting popular outrage & ramping-up violence.

But I totally fail to see how inciting popular outrage at the U.S. occupation-in-force over a genuinely outrageous and unprovoked abuse of it achieves that end.

Especially because the only reason he was deployed there to begin with was to take part in "Village Security Operations" in southern Afghanistan, which is basically just a euphemism for "to continue, after a decade-plus of failure, to try to wrest enough control of the region from the Taliban for it at least to be incorporated into something like the structures of Afghani civil authority on a local level, since it traditionally has absolutely no regard for or relationship with the national government."

In short: There's no need to resort to false-flag provocations in order to create an occasion for conflict in Kandahar Province. It's already mostly Taliban-controlled, very hostile, and actively insurgent. It always has been. The ISAF has really never been able to do much more than temporarily reduce the appearance of that reality via "surge." So all they'd have to do to make it look like extending the occupation was justified would be to decrease existing troop levels in general, and VSO forward operating bases in particular.

FWIW, these graphics illustrate the state-of-play as it stood last spring, from around the time of that bombing at the U.S. base in Kandahar City:



___________________


Nevertheless. It doesn't sound at all like a violent rampage by a crazed soldier, either. In any of its iterations.

So I have no idea wtf is going on. Frankly.

[compared2what?]

If we were just throwing things in the air, what would your time frame be? What do you think? Months? Years? What are we looking at?

Time frame for...?

(Your question has gone over my head, is what I'm saying.)

[StarmanSkye]

Compared to What asked:

"In short: There's no need to resort to false-flag provocations in order to create an occasion for conflict in Kandahar Province. It's already mostly Taliban-controlled, very hostile, and actively insurgent. It always has been. The ISAF has really never been able to do much more than temporarily reduce the appearance of that reality via "surge." So all they'd have to do to make it look like extending the occupation was justified would be to decrease existing troop levels in general, and VSO forward operating bases in particular."

Short take:

My guess be they MIGHT want to provoke a greater 'insurrection' the Cia-Qaeda can exploit to infiltrate & work their mind-game/bribery psyops; Kinda shaking the pot 2 mix things up.
But whatta I know?

[Nordic]

I think it was a bunch of soldiers who got their hands on a lot of booze, and possibly some other drugs, and just went on some kind of revenge-killing spree.

You know, they started talking, got themselves all worked up, and just went nuts.

Happens in war situations, at least that's what I've been told.

In other words, I think it was personal on some level.

Then again, I'm just speculating, I sure as hell don't know squat.

I mean, these guys have been there for years, they're not in their right minds anyway. They're all pretty fucked up by now. But then there's this cover up and this silly stupid story that the Pentagon is giving out as some kind of lame-ass damage control. They don't want some kind of Mai-Lai situation, which was about as bad of PR as the Vietnam war ever had. Blame it on a lone nut who snapped and sneaked out on his own, without anyone knowing, you know, these things happen.

[Ben D]

Then there is this take...

Kandahar massacre revenge for attack on US troops: Afghan report

PressTV Sunday Mar 18, 2012

The head of the Afghan parliamentary investigation, Sayed Ishaq Gillani, said the locals suspect that the slaughter of the Afghan civilians was carried out in revenge for an attack which destroyed an American tank last week.

Earlier on Monday, the Afghan tribal leaders of Kandahar province also said that the carnage was in retaliation against the bomb attack on the US tank in the Zangabad region in Panjwaii district in the province of Kandahar.

Following the blast, the American forces summoned local Afghans and tribal leaders of the region and vowed a bloody revenge on their children and wives, the Kandahar tribal leaders added.

The new findings came in the wake of an earlier report by the team, which suggested that the American troopers also raped two female victims of the massacre before killing them.

The investigation mission also implicated up to 20 US soldiers in the carnage. “We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups,” investigator Hamizai Lali said.

Sergeant Robert Bales, one of the soldiers accused of involvement in the massacre of Afghan civilians, was flown from a temporary military prison in Kuwait to a maximum security cell in Fort Leavenworth in the US state of Kansas. The transfer of the US soldier outraged the Afghan people, who demanded the public trial of the perpetrators of the heinous act in their country.

Earlier on Friday, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai criticized the United States for not cooperating with the Afghan fact-finding team and said the killing of the civilians by foreign forces in Afghanistan “has been going on for too long.”

On March 11, a group of US soldiers went from house to house in Kandahar’s Panjwaii district and gunned down Afghan civilians inside their homes, killing at least 16 people, mostly women and children, and injuring several others.

[vanlose kid]

something bugs me about the way he ends the piece but here it is anyway.

Robert Fisk: Madness is not the reason for this massacre

Robert Fisk

Saturday 17 March 2012

I'm getting a bit tired of the "deranged" soldier story. It was predictable, of course. The 38-year-old staff sergeant who massacred 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, near Kandahar this week had no sooner returned to base than the defence experts and the think-tank boys and girls announced that he was "deranged". Not an evil, wicked, mindless terrorist – which he would be, of course, if he had been an Afghan, especially a Taliban – but merely a guy who went crazy.

This was the same nonsense used to describe the murderous US soldiers who ran amok in the Iraqi town of Haditha. It was the same word used about Israeli soldier Baruch Goldstein who massacred 25 Palestinians in Hebron – something I pointed out in this paper only hours before the staff sergeant became suddenly "deranged" in Kandahar province.

"Apparently deranged", "probably deranged", journalists announced, a soldier who "might have suffered some kind of breakdown" (The Guardian), a "rogue US soldier" (Financial Times) whose "rampage" (The New York Times) was "doubtless [sic] perpetrated in an act of madness" (Le Figaro). Really? Are we supposed to believe this stuff? Surely, if he was entirely deranged, our staff sergeant would have killed 16 of his fellow Americans. He would have slaughtered his mates and then set fire to their bodies. But, no, he didn't kill Americans. He chose to kill Afghans. There was a choice involved. So why did he kill Afghans? We learned yesterday that the soldier had recently seen one of his mates with his legs blown off. But so what?

The Afghan narrative has been curiously lobotomised – censored, even – by those who have been trying to explain this appalling massacre in Kandahar. They remembered the Koran burnings – when American troops in Bagram chucked Korans on a bonfire – and the deaths of six Nato soldiers, two of them Americans, which followed. But blow me down if they didn't forget – and this applies to every single report on the latest killings – a remarkable and highly significant statement from the US army's top commander in Afghanistan, General John Allen, exactly 22 days ago. Indeed, it was so unusual a statement that I clipped the report of Allen's words from my morning paper and placed it inside my briefcase for future reference.

Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are."

Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to "take vengeance" on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because – however much I dislike generals – I've met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings – and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately – in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing – to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday.

Yet it was totally wiped from the memory box by the "experts" when they had to tell us about these killings. No suggestion that General Allen had said these words was allowed into their stories, not a single reference – because, of course, this would have taken our staff sergeant out of the "deranged" bracket and given him a possible motive for his killings. As usual, the journos had got into bed with the military to create a madman rather than a murderous soldier. Poor chap. Off his head. Didn't know what he was doing. No wonder he was whisked out of Afghanistan at such speed.

We've all had our little massacres. There was My Lai, and our very own little My Lai, at a Malayan village called Batang Kali where the Scots Guards – involved in a conflict against ruthless communist insurgents – murdered 24 unarmed rubber workers in 1948. Of course, one can say that the French in Algeria were worse than the Americans in Afghanistan – one French artillery unit is said to have "disappeared" 2,000 Algerians in six months – but that is like saying that we are better than Saddam Hussein. True, but what a baseline for morality. And that's what it's about. Discipline. Morality. Courage. The courage not to kill in revenge. But when you are losing a war that you are pretending to win – I am, of course, talking about Afghanistan – I guess that's too much to hope. General Allen seems to have been wasting his time.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 75737.html

*

[Sounder]

Allen told his men that "now is not the time for revenge for the deaths of two US soldiers killed in Thursday's riots". They should, he said, "resist whatever urge they might have to strike back" after an Afghan soldier killed the two Americans. "There will be moments like this when you're searching for the meaning of this loss," Allen continued. "There will be moments like this, when your emotions are governed by anger and a desire to strike back. Now is not the time for revenge, now is the time to look deep inside your souls, remember your mission, remember your discipline, remember who you are."

Robert Fisk wrote...
Now this was an extraordinary plea to come from the US commander in Afghanistan. The top general had to tell his supposedly well-disciplined, elite, professional army not to "take vengeance" on the Afghans they are supposed to be helping/protecting/nurturing/training, etc. He had to tell his soldiers not to commit murder. I know that generals would say this kind of thing in Vietnam. But Afghanistan? Has it come to this? I rather fear it has. Because – however much I dislike generals – I've met quite a number of them and, by and large, they have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the ranks. And I suspect that Allen had already been warned by his junior officers that his soldiers had been enraged by the killings that followed the Koran burnings – and might decide to go on a revenge spree. Hence he tried desperately – in a statement that was as shocking as it was revealing – to pre-empt exactly the massacre which took place last Sunday.

Good catch for Mr. Fisk here. The solders are trained to hate the Hajj in basic training so it is patiently absurd to think that Americans have intentions of bringing anything positive to Afghanistan.

We've all had our little massacres. There was My Lai, and our very own little My Lai, at a Malayan village called Batang Kali where the Scots Guards – involved in a conflict against ruthless communist insurgents – murdered 24 unarmed rubber workers in 1948

This kind of thing seems disgusting in that there so many not little massacres going on all the time, nearly every day and all over the world. Do we get to deny remembrance to all the atrocities simply by holding up My Lai or Batang Kali as a totem of our sorrow?

This also may be the bone that must be tossed to those slathering dogs called editors.