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Forum Post: Massacre Cover-Up: The Beginning of the End for the US in Afghanistan?

Posted 12 years ago on March 24, 2012, 6:12 p.m. EST by humanityrules (14)
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Massacre Cover-Up: The Beginning of the End for the US in Afghanistan?

By ; Patrick Henningsen

March 23, 2012

We are told that the US military have their man.

US military courts handed down their judgment to Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales - 17 counts of murder for the massacre of innocent Afghans. Bales, 38, will be formally charged today. Another lone gunman charged, and we are told that this horror story is meant to end there, with ‘closure’ for all sides.

The said slaughter of defenseless Afghan civilians was the worst of its kind since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan began in 2001. It comes just weeks after copies of the Koran were burned at a US military base, an event which set off mass riots across the country.

Sgt. Bales could be a fall guy for this incident, and clearly he possesses a suitable back story necessary to pin the entire incident on one man – uses antidepressant pharmaceuticals as well as a chequered ‘stressful’ financial history – all of which paints the picture of ‘a soldier on the edge’, snapping in the line of duty. A nice clean, open and shut case. Predictably, and asking no questions, the US mainstream corporate media has marched to the beat of the US military press department, relying solely on military reporting of the incident and dutifully ignoring multiple other reports coming out of Afghanistan, reports which point to a very different conclusion.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has gone on record, slamming the US military of not cooperating with a team he appointed to investigate the killings. Considering Karzai serves as President at the pleasure of Washington and its NATO allies, his remarks on this matter make it all the more compelling.

The reality outside of the US military’s press office points towards something completely different – a revenge attack involving a conspiracy numbering at least 10 US soldiers who left the US base in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, gunning down nine children, four men and three women on the morning of March 11 in the villages of Balandi and Alkozai.

AP reports confirmed as much yesterday:

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(in Afghanistan) against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack. The appeal of the lone gunman theory has always been popular with Americans and the US media, and in this case, the rest of the world are meant to swallow an implausible story that a single US soldier single-handedly walked off the base, visiting not one, but two villages, carrying out his solo slaughter going home to home, and then proceeded to set fire to some of the victims’ bodies.

The awkward, official US military account of events only furthers speculation of a cover-up on the part of the US military, a cover-up which is now being steered by a White House who quite understandibly – but not excusably – is at pains to come clean on yet another military scandal with a public suffering from conflict fatigue.

The AP report continues:

“The soldiers called all the people to come out of their houses and from the mosque,” he said. “The Americans told the villagers ‘A bomb exploded on our vehicle. … We will get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people,”‘ Mr Rasool said. “These are the reasons why we say they took their revenge by killing women and children in the villages.” … Mr Mohammad said a US soldier, speaking through a translator, then said: “I know you are all involved and you support the insurgents. So now, you will pay for it – you and your children will pay for this’.” Mr Mohammad’s neighbour, Bakht Mohammad, and Ahmad Shah Khan, also of Mokhoyan, gave similar accounts. The US soldiers arrived in the village with their Afghan army counterparts and made many of the male villagers stand against a wall, Mr Khan said. “It looked like they were going to shoot us, and I was very afraid,” said Mr Khan. “Then a NATO soldier said through his translator that even our children will pay for this. Now they have done it and taken their revenge.” Several Afghan officials, including Kandahar lawmaker Abdul Rahim Ayubi, said people in the two villages that were attacked told them the same story. Reports of drunken soldiers Additional reports place several intoxicated US soldiers at the scene of the crime, shooting and pouring chemicals over the bodies of dead Afghans: “They were all drunk and shooting all over the place,” Reuters cites Agha Lala, a villager in Kandahar’s Panjwayi district. Lala’s neighbor Haji Samad lost all of his 11 relatives in the rampage, including children and grandchildren. He claims Marines “poured chemicals over their dead bodies and burned them.” Twenty-year-old Jan Agha says the gunfire “shook him out of bed.” He was in the epicenter of the horrible shooting, witnessing his father shot as the latter peered out of a window to see what was going on. “The Americans stayed in our house for a while. I was very scared,” the young man told reporters.

Should the US public come to realize that America’s crusade in Central Asia has reached a point where their boys overseas are carrying out bloody reprisals on unarmed villagers- it would all but kill the public will at home. A cover-up would therefore be essential for Washington. If the story broke about a reckless, drunken revenge attack involving approximately a dozen or more US soldiers (officers in command of the base should have been aware of a platoon leaving the base), aside from being a PR epic fail for NATO allies in US and Europe, it would almost certainly spark off a massive rebellion against an increasingly unpopular US-led NATO occupation of the country. And history has not been very kind at all to such military misadventures.

Of course, the military or even the Afghan police could put our minds at rest and clear up this case by simply carrying out a forensic ballistic test of all the spent ammunition and then match it to the weapons on the base…

Afghanistan’s My Lai Names of similar events are etched in the history of modern warfare. Iraq saw the brutal Haditha massacre and the pulverization of Falluja’s civilian population, but this latest event in Afghanistan has the potential become this war’s own My Lai massacre.

My Lai took place in 1968 and saw between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians killed during a US military raid in South Vietnam. Like the case of Sgt Bales in the Afghan massacre, My Lai was eventually pinned on one single soldier - even though evidence pointed clearly towards mass participation, and like Mokhoyan, there were reports of drink and drugs involved.

In the case of My Lai, it served as one of the key public relations turning points for the 10 year-long war in Vietnam, and may have contributed for a rise in intensity on the part of the North Vietnamese forces culminating in their 1968 Tet Offensive, a Vietcong surge which peaked in the summer of ‘68, with heavy losses sustained by US forces at the time. Following the Tet Offensive, the percentage of Americans who believed that the U.S. had made a mistake by sending troops to Vietnam rose sharply, along with the feeling the struggle was not worthwhile, and with mounting casualty figures and rising taxes at home – all for an open-ended war that had no clear objective and no end in sight.

Mistakes are often made in the fog of war. In the worst cases, it’s not just a mistake, but policy. Western intelligence agencies are on record running terror operations known as ‘false flag’ events - designed to bait one side of a conflict, or used to sway public opinion in favor of some military interventionalist policy. This was the case in the early days of the Vietnam conflict, where the CIA were organizing bombs in Saigon – bombs that killed innocent civilians and Americans.

US soldiers who lost their comrades might do better to inquire to what degree is their government’s own CIA running al-Qaida in the Afghanistan. Bearing this in mind, it’s not impossible that the very bombing which took US soldiers’ lives and was the object of US soldiers’ revenge attack against villagers in Mokhoyan, could have been carried out by a terrorist with links to the CIA.

President Karzai has grown to rely on the U.S. and NATO military occupation in order to hold-off a Taliban-led insurgency counter-attack, but as each day passes he is likely to reach his limit as to how close he can position himself to the occupying foreign forces without losing face with his country’s people. Following the massacre and alleged cover-up by US military investigators, Karzai rashly referred to US troops as “demons”, and stated publically that he would prefer that foreign troops withdraw from villages across the country, a total defeat for U.S. military’s counterinsurgency strategy.

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[-] 1 points by nomdeguerre (1775) from Brooklyn, NY 12 years ago

WHOA!! The Bales-lone-PTSD-sufferer story is unraveling. The U.S. and world need to get to the bottom of the truth on this one.

"The Afghan investigation team of legislators investigating the Kandahar killings submitted a chilling report to the Afghan parliament in Kabul earlier today, which alleges that the killings were not the rampage of a rogue sergeant, as Pentagon claims, but a planned massacre involving many troops and even US army helicopters. The team also alleged that two Afghan women were sexually assaulted by the US troops before they were shot. The team claimed that 15 to 20 American troops were involved and it was a case of revenge killing following some insurgent activity in the area. " http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2012/03/17/flood-gates-of-afghan-anger-are-opening/

[-] 0 points by bensdad (8977) 12 years ago

so you believe a bunch of Afgan "investigators"
rather than accept the fact that a soldier could go berserk?
have you ever been in combat? do you know anyone who has ever been in combat?

[-] 1 points by nomdeguerre (1775) from Brooklyn, NY 12 years ago

My, my, a bit touchy aren't you?

The official Afghani investigation and report has already caused the military to change its story. Now Bales took two trips. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57403946/u.s.-bales-went-on-2-shooting-sprees/

Otherwise he would have had to jog 3-4 miles between the towns, one of which was north of the base, the other south of the base and he would reportedly have had to kill one person every 3 minutes when he was in the towns to fit the original report.

We'll see if the story changes any more.

[-] 1 points by redandbluestripedpill (333) 12 years ago

You are brutal with this truth. A crusade, . . . and it is. Americas self perception includes one of separation between church and state, STILL. Meaning America does not know what it is doing.

humanityrules "Should the US public come to realize that America’s crusade in Central Asia has reached a point where their boys overseas are carrying out bloody reprisals on unarmed villagers- it would all but kill the public will at home."

[-] 0 points by Secretariat (33) 12 years ago

""NATO is staging "Massacre of Christians in Syria by Muslims", by bringing Al Qaida and other radical Islamists to Syria, in order to initiate a war, where they can nuke Iran, give a lesson to rising China, control Middle East oil resources, and allow some people to print as much money as they wish by using petrodollars, so they can control the society and the world through their wealth and power. This will also allow capitalism to continue by breaking the Eastern and the Socialist spirituality which is growing around the world and which is the biggest threat to capitalist ruling elite. ""

[-] 2 points by humanityrules (14) 12 years ago

Thank you. This should shock the hell out of us, but it doesn't, at this point anything is possible. NATO = Global wrecking ball.

[-] 2 points by shadz66 (19985) 12 years ago

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