IWPR documentary on war crimes committed in Afghanistan over two decades.
By IWPR - Afghanistan 30 Mar 12
“The Forgotten Victims”, a new documentary produced by IWPR, sheds light on the war crimes and other human rights abuses committed in Afghanistan over two decades of serial conflict. The film raises difficult issues about accountability in a country where the victims of crimes against humanity are sidelined, while the perpetrators walk free and in some cases continue to hold political power.
“The Forgotten Victims” covers the period from just before the 1979 Soviet invasion and the ensuing war with the mujahedin, through the brutal civil war of the early 1990s, to the Taleban’s rule from 1996 to 2001.
Because of this wide historical sweep, the film focuses on selected incidents, such as a massacre of civilians in Yakawlang, central Afghanistan, committed by Taleban forces at the beginning of 2001.
At public screenings around Afghanistan, audiences praised the filmmakers for telling the victims’ stories and opening up a debate on justice and accountability.
“Making a film like this in the current climate requires a lot of courage. It’s a great step towards seeking justice,” Mohammad Nader Atash, a defence lawyer in Nangarhar.
(via leptiir)
While we save these women we’ll kill their husbands, brothers, fathers, and.. Oh wait, them too.
- Micha Balon
From M16 rifles to boots, Afghan troops feel slighted
“Afghans feel disrespected, the soldiers say. Handing out inferior equipment is disrespectful; burning Qurans, however accidental, is disrespectful; urinating on dead bodies, even if Taliban, as video that emerged in January showed U.S. troops doing, is disrespectful.”
“A soldier named Abdul Karim said he’d prefer a 30-year-old Russian-made Kalashnikov to an M16. The Americans “are giving us old weapons and try to make them look new with polish and paint. We don’t want their throwaways,” he said.”
“At the firing range, the complaints flew thick and fast. Col. Abdul Haleem Noori grabbed a young recruit’s foot to show a gash in the heel of his boot.
“It’s only two months old and it is falling apart, and we are told it is supposed to last one year,” he said. The footwear was made by a manufacturer under contract to the Afghan Ministry of Defense.
Even the 3-year-old army band bemoans their equipment, including soldered trumpets dating back to the 1970s.”
” The foreigners don’t let civilians drive in front of their convoys even if they are rushing a sick person to treatment, referring to the heavy security measures U.S. troops impose around their vehicles.”
“In May last year, a U.S. Army team led by a behavioral scientist released a 70-page survey that revealed both Afghan and American soldiers hold disturbingly negative perceptions of the other.
According to the survey, many Afghan security personnel found U.S. troops “extremely arrogant, bullying and unwilling to listen to their advice” and sometimes lacking concern about Afghans’ safety in combat. They accused the Americans of ignoring female privacy and using denigrating names for Afghans.
U.S. troops, in turn, often accused Afghan troops and police of “pervasive illicit drug use, massive thievery, personal instability, dishonesty, no integrity,” the survey said.”
Drone strike in Afghanistan kills five children. Greenwald: "If one of the relatives of the children just killed in Afghanistan decided to attack the U.S., what would they be called by the U.S. media? Terrorists. Primitive, irrational, religious fanatics beyond human decency."
This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:
1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.
At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are.
Continued here
[Islam] will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction. [That opens the possibility of applying] “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina[’s] destruction.
Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley - U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam.
The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.
Please read that again:
The historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina[’s] destruction.”
He also said:
Saudi Arabia [should be] threatened with starvation. Mecca and Madina destroyed. Islam reduced to cult status.
This is Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley’s Joint Staff Forces College presentation on “A Counter-Jihad Op Design Model” (.pdf) that calls for violent measures in a war against Islam. If this is the mentality of an individual providing lectures to the army, imagine the impact he has on those listening to him and following his orders. I don’t know what to say anymore.
(via mehreenkasana)
(via leptiir)
Why I refused to return to fight in Afghanistan's brutal occupation | Joe Glenton
At the same time as the Taliban attacks there has been a rise in atrocities. We have recently seen British soldiers convicted for raping children, as well as the stabbing by a squaddie of a 10-year-old Afghan boy. A multinational operation in all respects, the US has done its share; kill teams, SS flag-waving, photographing bodies, urinating on corpses and the Panjwai massacre carried out, according to the witnesses, by 15 to 20 US troops. When young men are shaped for war and sent to fight there are consequences – even in “just” wars. The training involves two-way dehumanisation – both of our soldiers and of the enemy – as Giles Fraser highlighted lately. These acts are coming thick and fast at the end of a long, dehumanising, failed war. Conscientious objection was a hard road for me, but while I was in military prison I received 200 letters a day, which helped. As did the support of my fellow soldiers.
US Soldiers Find Themselves Being Terrorists in Afghanistan [worth a watch]
As the US continues to step up war efforts in Afghanistan, the number of American soldiers refusing deployment to war zones is also increasing. Author and Independent Journalist Dahr Jamail tells RT that U.S. soldiers in combat zones find themselves being terrorist.
“Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.” - Albert Einstein
![“Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.” - Henry Kissinger
[watch] US Soldiers Find Themselves Being Terrorists in Afghanistan](http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/img/features/latuff/img/74.jpg)
“Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.” - Henry Kissinger
[watch] US Soldiers Find Themselves Being Terrorists in Afghanistan
Smoke Screen (US burn pits in Afghanistan)
In Afghanistan, the U.S. military disposes of garbage—computers, motorbikes, TVs, shoes, even human feces—in open burn pits. Are toxic clouds from these sites making everyone sick?
Shopkeepers close their doors when U.S. troops patrol Bagram Village just outside the American base of the same name.
Their shelves hold Army pants, boots and knives sold to them, they say, by Afghans working on the base, gifts to them from American soldiers but more likely stolen. Either way, soldiers confiscate these items on sight. The shopkeepers sit in the shade watching traffic inch past, motorcycles weaving between cars. They hear the saws and hammers from nearby construction. They watch steam rise from restaurant kitchens.
Sipping tea, the shopkeepers wait for my questions while keeping a wary eye on the passing soldiers. What is it like living so close to an American base? I want to know. I expect them to grumble about the soldiers searching their shops. Instead, they tell me about a strange odor they say comes from the base. It smells of plastic.
****
The odor, the Afghans said, comes from a burn pit, a huge open dump site used on U.S. bases to consume mountains of trash, unleashing harmful chemicals. Burning plastic, for instance, releases carcinogenic substances that may increase the risk of heart disease and respiratory ailments, cause rashes and damage the nervous system.
Computers, television sets and mobile phones release cadmium, lead, and mercury, which can also damage the nervous system and the kidneys.
As of last year, the United States Central Command estimates that there were 114 open burn pits in Afghanistan. According to a public information officer at Bagram Airbase who asked not to be identified, there were twenty-two burn pits in Iraq as of 2010. Used since the beginning of both wars, burn pits have consumed metals, Styrofoam, human waste, electronics and even, in some cases, vehicles and body parts. Diesel and jet fuel keep the pits burning, adding their own mix of dangerous elements.
There are more than 100,000 troops currently deployed in Afghanistan—and thousands more private contractors—and the Department of Defense estimates that each soldier and contractor generates about ten pounds of solid waste per day.
Military officials declined to comment on the decision to use open burn pits, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency bans open pit burning of materials that discharge toxic chemicals and whose smoke can contribute to the risk of cancer, asthma and reproductive problems. The EPA also prohibits open pit burning grass and leaves, food and petroleum products such as plastic, rubber and asphalt.
“Democracy requires dissolution of private power. As long as there is private control over the economic system, talk about democracy is a joke. You can’t even talk about democracy until you have democratic control of industry, commerce, banking, everything…” - Noam Chomsky
This is they way they are trained to kill no heart no feelings there is no humanity left any more they are animals and this inhuman call us terrorist huh
danceswithfaeriesunderthemoon:How war make man’s heart to stone. Real world example!
This makes me feel sick.
One of my friends brother said something similiar to this. My friends said he needed to get some of his “aggressions off”. He said he wouldn’t care who he shot, civillian or not. This guy is openly racist & he doesn’t care about it. Immigrants must leave “his country”.
Why do they send racists to foreign countries? Why?
Such people are sent to Afghanistan (mostly). I have seen thousands of similar posts from soldiers over the past years. And when they do kill civilians, they didn’t mean it, it was accident, they were mentally ill. Do they even know the ” towel” they call it, is Afghanistan’s traditional men attire?. Everyone wears that, all the civilians.
CNN: “No US Access to Sites of Afghan Killings”, But Did US Ask for Access?
Late last night, MadDog repeated a speculation he has raised several times regarding how Bales could have been undetected when he left the outpost twice on the night of the killings:
Given the 3 points above, I’ll again wonder as I’ve done here before whether Bales himself was an individual assigned to provide the very security that he’s purported to have breached.
The CNN article confirms that very fact:
The official said Bales, 38, was meant to have been on duty guarding the base that night, and would have had full body armour and weaponry as standard.
A point that I raised in an early post on this incident was that we would be able to tell how serious the US is in determining whether Bales truly acted alone or if other soldiers were present and fired weapons during the killings would be to observe how fully the US carries out forensic examinations of the crime scenes:
Although the bodies appear to have been buried already, we will know just how serious the US is about establishing the number of shooters involved in the attack if they actually visit the homes invaded to recover shell casings and bullets. Even rudimentary forensic evaluation should be able to establish conclusively how many weapons were fired. Slightly more advanced forensics can determine whether all the weapons involved were in the possession of the soldier who has turned himself in.
Remarkably, over two and a half weeks after the attack, we now learn that the US has not yet had “access” to the crime scenes:
U.S. military officials have yet to gain access to the sites in which 17 Afghans were killed in Kandahar, an obstacle that could impede efforts to prosecute the American soldier accused of the multiple homicides.
U.S. personnel had not been able to collect DNA from the sites or access the areas, although DNA collected by Afghan investigators may have been received, an official said.
However, DNA has been found in blood on the clothing of the suspect, Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales.
“We do not have access to the crime scene,” said the U.S. official, who has knowledge of the investigation but did not want to be identified discussing an ongoing inquiry.
With so much time having passed, it seems to me that the question of access now becomes moot. It seems virtually impossible that Afghan officials have sealed off the crime scenes and limited access there only to their own investigators, so any evidence gathered at this point is rendered virtually meaningless.
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