Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Disappeared outrage
by Larry Geller
Many newspapers don’t cover news that reflects badly against our own country. The story of war crimes committed by US Special Forces in Afghanistan and the subsequent coverup did break into the national news.
Few accounts have the detail or pack the wallop that this one displays. It begins:
It was early morning on February 12, 2010, in the village of Khataba near the city of Gardez in Paktiya Province, Afghanistan. A local family was celebrating the birth of a child. Suddenly, gunfire erupted from a nearby rooftop striking two men, two pregnant women, their unborn children and an 18-year old girl. The two men appear to have been killed instantly. The women were injured and reported bled to death because the gunmen would not allow them to be taken to a local hospital. Other family members were forced out of the home and detained. The gunman turned out to be American special operations troops.
Realizing that they had killed seven innocent people, the Americans immediately began to create what would become a series of false stories and fabricated incidents. They would destroy evidence of this potential war crime and ultimately attempt to blame the killings on the Taliban. The killings might well have been accidental, but the cover-up was premeditated, intentional and criminal. [Kabulpress.org, Pentagon Invents Taliban Atrocity in Khataba, 4/19/2010]
So far, none of the perpetrators have been prosecuted. It’s not unusual, in the case of civilian deaths in Iraq or Afghanistan, for those responsible to avoid accountability, with the effect that the civilian death toll has skyrocketed. And as the article notes, this leads to endless recruitment opportunities for the Taliban, aside from the tragic loss of human life.
What is “disappeared news” about this incident, if it has been covered in the domestic press? The part we don’t see is an upwelling of outrage.
By not demanding that our country’s own war crimes be investigated and punished, we become complicit in them.
(Thanks to Viviane Lerner for pointer to this story)
I almost passed over this article. Beaten down from reading about this sort of thing. Decided that if those people can suffer at our hands in unimaginable ways, the least I can do is read their story.
"..we become complicit in them."
Yes that is true and paying taxes to finance mass murder.
Are we more afraid of our own thieving taxors than our victims are afraid of their murdering occupiers?
: April 23, 2010 at 7:44:00 AM HST << Home
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