Comments on: Pentagon tried to prevent publication of Afghanistan corpse abuse photos

By: teapot

teapot — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:43:00 +0000

Yeah.. it’s a thing. Look it up.

By: teapot

teapot — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:08:00 +0000

Thankfully I don’t live in your land of freedom to be waterboarded.

By: teapot

teapot — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:02:00 +0000

There are rules to war which dictate acceptable bahviour – most of which I am confident the US Army follows. The UN CCW cover the use of mines or booby traps and Protocol II:

prohibits the use of non-detectable anti-personnel mines and their transfer; prohibits the use of non-self-destructing and non-self-deactivating mines outside fenced, monitored and marked areas
^This covers IEDs

Protocol III prohibits, in all circumstances, making the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects, the object of attack by any weapon or munition which is primarily designed to set fire to objects or to cause burn injury to persons through the action of flame, heat or a combination thereof, produced by a chemical reaction of a substance delivered on the target.
^This does too

I don’t know why you bring up the cost of aircraft and bombs… that is America’s economy’s problem and bears no relation to the (im?)morality of war.

Your idea of the Taliban attacks being “better targeted” is odd considering they are responsible for far more Afghan civilian deaths than the coalition forces. Additionally I think you’ve been drinking the Taliban بارد المساعدات (that’s Arabic for kool-aid) if you accept their claims that the coalition are ‘foreign invaders’. You’d think if that was the case then the Afghan Army and Government would be fighting them too.

But that’s cool because you don’t need to think to post stuff on the internet do you? So go nuts.

By: Thebes

Thebes — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 03:33:00 +0000

And how do we deal with the fact that making these photographs was a War Crime under the Geneva Convention?
Or do we only care about treaties when we accuse nations we wanna bomb of violating them??

By: Thebes

Thebes — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 03:31:00 +0000

Hope you get the waterboard treatment when the Police State turns on its own people.

By: Thebes

Thebes — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 03:28:00 +0000

Yet another incident where our Kill Squads have committed blatant war crimes.
I wonder how many times we DIDN’T hear about this sort of thing.
Did this squad operate under an SS flag?
Did they collect any actual body parts too?
Did they burn the bodies or rape the victims first, like the last incident (blamed on a lone nut despite two rapes and all those homicides and burnings in two villages in under an hour) ??

By: travtastic

travtastic — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 23:35:00 +0000

I liked it better before when we could pretend that M-4s shot out lots of tiny little constitutions.

By: travtastic

travtastic — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:58:00 +0000

Your entire comment is a very literal description of the military’s S.O.P. There is no such thing as fairness in war.

By: beenwiser

beenwiser — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:52:00 +0000

if you have a financial stake in the game, and you are a total sociopath, then you DO want war. think dick cheney’s former employer getting billions of dollars worth of contracts in the middle east. if it waddles and quacks like a war profiteer, is it really paranoid to call it a war profiteer?

By: Navin_Johnson

Navin_Johnson — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:37:00 +0000

More kids being killed in American cities than in Afghanistan.

By: Navin_Johnson

Navin_Johnson — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 20:34:00 +0000

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander..

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:29:00 +0000

We don’t just need the photos as a reminder, we often need them to convince our own people that these things are being done at all. Relatively few Americans would have believed, much less acknowledged, all the horrors that went down at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay if it weren’t for the photographic evidence that leaked out.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:20:00 +0000

I could imagine a hypothetical reason for doing so… say, an impassive blue-gloved technician holding a ruler for scale during the course of a forensic investigation. In other words the opposite of this kind of thing.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:14:00 +0000

I’m 99% sure NO ONE wants war with Iran.

Sure, except for a few extremists—like that guy who came within a stone’s throw of winning the Presidency in 2008. Remember “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran?”

Almost no one openly admits they “want” war. Even Bush said he didn’t “want” to go to war in Iraq. And yet they continue to happen! Funny, that.

By: Brainspore

Brainspore — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:08:00 +0000

The ideal way to address the issue would be privately, with sanctions (or therapy) quietly invoked against all involved

Everything I’ve read indicates that this incident is only being investigated (years after the fact, mind you) BECAUSE the photos were published. The “quietest” investigation is no investigation.

By: EH

EH — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 16:08:00 +0000

“Adversarial respect?” LOL

By: Ultan

Ultan — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:36:00 +0000

Perhaps they should be wearing brightly-colored uniforms with white straps crossed in in the middle of their torso, and advance in well-formed lines to fire their muskets in volleys, rather than hiding behind rocks like cowards and sniping? Oh, wait – different war. That’s what the British said about American tactics in the 1770s.

Apparently laying mine fields and using hugely expensive aircraft to carelessly drop very costly bombs and missiles all over a foreign country is the responsible thing to do, while walking or driving up much better targeted and smaller bombs to foreign invaders and their quislings in one’s own country is a terrorist tactic.

By: .

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:22:00 +0000

”It is a violation of Army standards to pose with corpses for photographs outside of officially sanctioned purposes,” said George Wright, an Army spokesman.

Officially sanctioned purposes? Glad to know there is a way to get posing with corpses officially sanctioned. Like for recruiting or charity drives.

By: Ultan

Ultan — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 15:19:00 +0000

Don’t want to be prosecuted in a foreign court? Then don’t go abroad, or if you must, don’t commit crimes while you’re there.

By: strugglngwriter

strugglngwriter — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:04:00 +0000

America is war weary. However, those that make the decisions for America are not so much war weary. Too much money to gain in it

By: donovan acree

donovan acree — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:19:00 +0000

The military’s primary concern is not the welfare of troops. That’s crazy. If you are so concerned about the welfare of soldiers, you do not put them in harms way.
The primary concern is always the mission.
So, what is the mission in Afghanistan? Ostensibly it would be to help establish stability, train the government and military, and make sure the new Afghan government can stand once we leave.
Instead we have installed Karzai therby making sure that very few Afghani will volunteer for military or police duty. They hate him. With that hatred comes the surety that the Afghan government will never be stable. In other words, this is a farce or at the very least an untenable goal.
Puiblishing pictures in no way puts troops in danger. The Afghani people see this death in person. They see how our troops treat the locals and murder their pets for sport. They are already aware our troops desecrate corpses. They have seen it for 10 years. It’s the U.S. public who is in need of education here. We MUST show the public what we are doing so that we can stop it.
The military answer of covering this all up has nothing to do with the troops and everything to do with the continuation of a war for little more gain than the profits to be made by the arms manufacturers on both sides.
It was Afghanistan that eventually broke the Soviet economy. Let’s not make the same…. oh wait… too late.

By: Ah El

Ah El — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:56:00 +0000

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today said, “The reason why we should condemn this kind of behaviour and take disciplinary action now and in the future, dishonorably discharging the involved soldiers is that these incidents are used by the enemy to incite violence and radicalize regular people. Many lives have been and will be lost as the result of the thoughtless, impious actions undertaken by few.”
Thar, I fixed it.

By: efergus3

efergus3 — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 12:15:00 +0000

“US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta today said, “The reason for that is those kinds of photos are used by the enemy to incite violence, and lives have been lost as the result of the publication of similar photos.”” Translation: “We’re REALLY pissed off that the paper wouldn’t help us bury this story. Traitors.” Asshole. Sadly, Antinous is right. NO officer, NO senior NCO will be punished for this. and the couple of soldiers at the bottom of the food chain that they DO punish, will get slaps on the wrist. “After all, they were just dead gooks.”

By: Noctilucent Studios

Noctilucent Studios — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:54:00 +0000

Is the soldier in the background of the photo missing his hand? Looks strange.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:28:00 +0000

The US seems to have negotiated a unilateral extradition treaty with most of the world. Oh, and anybody with a US passport in Iraq or Afghanistan has diplomatic immunity no matter what they do. At the same time, Texas has cheerfully executed foreign nationals.

By: Frederik

Frederik — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:19:00 +0000

War is not a nice thing, and to get through it you do strange things. Things that in normal society seem weird. A situation where it’s kill or be killed tends to skew reality in weird ways.
Like has been pointed out before: de-humanizing the enemy (these were suicide bombers, not innocent bystanders) is a not a new phenomon, it’s a way of dealing with the fact that you need to kill in order to win.

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:06:00 +0000

I think it is a failure of journalism that 18 were leaked, and only 2 were released.

Maybe the pictures were truly unprintable.

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:04:00 +0000

But THEN you get into the complicated issue of an American citizen being prosecuted in a foreign court, which raises all sorts of diplomatic issues as has been exemplified through various prior cases.

Off hand I can think of three of four US citizens who were prosecuted in my country (Australia) without any damage to our relationship with the US. Overall there must be hundreds.

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:50:00 +0000

The US has strongly pushed to look at every incident as separate and unrelated to every other incident. I think that it’s valuable to look at all of them together. This, although vile, is obviously not as horrible as actually murdering civilians, but it surely has similar root causes.

Leon Panetta said, “This is not us” as if this were some extraordinary anomaly. But this is very much us. This is who we are: a nation that can commit any crime with impunity.

By: Hanglyman

Hanglyman — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 07:47:00 +0000

Regardless of government involvement, why would soldiers take photos like this at all? Are they going to show them to their grandkids and their loved ones back home? What the fuck are they thinking?