We are children! We are children!" was one victim's last phrase before being killed in a shooting spree as American Staff Sergeant Robert Bales left sixteen Afghan civilians dead, according to witness testimonies. Seven Afghan witnesses from the Kandahar province testified over a live video link to the judge at a Washington State military courtroom. They recalled chilling details of the rampage, which claimed the lives of nine children and seven adults at two Afghan villages on March 11, 2012. The witnesses recounted the identities of those who lived in the villages, listing those killed. The victims' bodies were buried quickly under Islamic tradition, and no forensic evidence was available to show the number killed. The youngest witness was a thirteen-year-old Sadiquallah. He described being awakened by loud screams that an American had "killed our men." He then went to hide in a storage room with another boy, ditching behind the curtain. A bullet ricocheted off his head, fracturing his skull. "I was hiding behind the curtains. A bullet hit me," Sadiquallah told the court. He also said the killer had a gun and a light, but he could not identify the man. His friend was shot in the thigh and also survived. He is to testify later. Quadratullah, Sadiquallah's older brother, meanwhile, was hiding with other children in a different part of the house. When the killer found them, the kids yelled "We are children! We are children!" Quadratullah testified. Haji Mohammed Naim, the boys' father, was the first person shot at their residence. He told the court that he was woken up by dogs barking and shots being fired, after which he saw the shooter climb over a compound wall. "He just started shooting me," Naim said. Faizullah, one of the eldest sons, told the judge that he was awoken by someone telling him about shooting at his father's compound. As he rushed to the residence, he found his father with a gunshot wound to the throat. One of Naim's daughters was also wounded, as were two neighboring siblings. All five wounded survived, after being treated at a nearby base and then flown to a military hospital in Kandahar. '(*)Everybody was shot on the head' Khamal Adin, a witness from the second massacre site, the village of Najiban, told the judge how he came to his cousins house on the morning after the rampage and found bodies piled together and burned. Adin said he found an aunt dead in a doorway with a gunshot wound to her head. Inside, he found the bodies of six of his cousin's seven children, his wife, and other relatives. The fire that burned the bodies was out by then, but he said he could still smell smoke. When Adin began presenting his testimony, Bales moved from his seat to be closer to the monitor. Neither at that time or at any other moment of the hearing did he give any discernible reaction to the stories he heard. The court then asked Adin to describe the injuries. He said: "Everybody was shot on the head I didn't pay attention to the rest of the wounds." Bales was not expected to testify, as he has not entered a plea. His defense team says their client has a post-traumatic stress disorder and suffered a concussive head injury while on duty in Iraq. The formal hearing at Joint Base Lewis-McChord is needed to determine whether the 39-year-old father of two will face a court-martial, as he has been charged with premeditated murder. According to the prosecutor, Bales drank whiskey and watched an action movie before leaving the military base twice to carry out the killings the deadliest committed by an American soldier during the Afghan war. If convicted he faces execution. Prosecutors say Bales divided his shooting spree into two episodes attacking one village, returning to the base and then leaving again to assault another. In between his acts, he is alleged to have woken a comrade to tell him about the first massacre, that soldier testified, but believing it to be a hoax, he went back to sleep. Two Afghan National Army guards also recalled a figure outside the base on the night of the killings. One guard remembered that a man had arrived at the base and did not stop even after he was asked three times to do so. Later in the night, the second guard said, he saw a soldier leave the base laughing as he went out. Neither of them could tell if it was Bales. (*) Witnesses suggest Bales was not alone during massacre (*)It was revealed on Saturday that Afghan witnesses claimed that Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was not alone during his shooting rampage. Special Agent Leona Mansapit of the Criminal Investigations Command testified in court that one of the witnesses to the massacre saw at least two American soldiers on the scene. A woman whose husband was shot and killed recalled seeing two soldiers in her house. One soldier restrained her while the other shot her husband dead. Another witness claimed he heard English being spoken outside his house while the massacre took place. Days after the massacre took place, several sources speculated that Bales was not alone during the killings, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The hearings are scheduled to last until November 16 http://rt.com/news/afghanistan-village-massacre-witnesses-427/ And an interesting comment on the page, from a US veteran. In Vietnam, the US military used LSD on combat troops to see if it improved their combat effectiveness. A movie called Jacob's Ladder was made about the issue. It would be foolish to think that the US military is done with their drug experiments just yet. Veterans full of Agent Orange are routinely overlooked at VA hospitals, and must go to private doctors to get detoxed, as a friend of mine had to do. The US military has little regard for its own, so why would they care about anybody else? I am a veteran, but it was long ago when I served. There is NO WAY that I would serve in the present US military, and I'm not shy about telling young Americans why they need to stay out of it. Let them get their useful idiot somewhere else, because it doesn't need to be me or anybody else with halfway functioning brain cells. Every veteran that served in this Bale guy's outfit needs to go have themselves tested for residual chemicals in their body. It took me about 5 years to get the garbage the US Navy dumped into me out of me using a safe natural detoxifier, but it was totally at my expense and diagnosed by a private physician. It was totally overlooked by every VA physician I met, but they are mainly a bunch of incompetent hacks anyway. I think a lot more clearly now.
Obviously. Yet it is more than that. I for one think the PTSD defence, is lame. An over used excuse, like the predisposition these days for pathologising everything, and bolting a 'syndrome' on it, to excuse all behaviours. Besides which, he must have been passed fit for duty, so no use rolling that one out now, is there? Moreover, I am quite sure that there are literally hundreds of thousands in Iraq etc that must be 'suffering from PTSD',. given what they have been subjected to, right? Or Palestinians, for the last 45yrs or so. It is more likely that the current US military lends itself to attracting guys that are not stable. Look at the % of rape from male to female colleagues, in the US armed forces. It is SHOCKING. And I also think a lot of them are out of their faces on drink and drugs.
The veteran is right, the usually are, which is why the US state hate them, in reality. That's those that live. Those that die? 274 American Troops Found Dumped In Landfill News of the dumped bodies was discovered at the pressing of the Washington Post at which time records from the Dover Air Force Base mortuary revealed that 274 troops were sent to the landfill along with 1,762 unidentified remains that were collected from battlefields around the world. Damaged remains that were dumped only occurred when DNA testing could not find a match among military databases. Exposed last month the practice of dumping military remains was stopped in 2008 after it was determined that the military was not alerting the families of fallen troops to their practices. Speaking about the embarrassment last month Pentagon officials said that it would take massive effort in order to identify the remained that have been disposed. Angered by the situation New Jersey lawmaker Rush Holt noted: We spent millions, tens of millions, to find any trace of soldiers killed, and theyre concerned about a massive effort to go back and pull out the files and find out how many soldiers were disrespected this way? he says. They just dont want to ask questions or look very hard. Do you think the military should do more to ensure such practices do not occur in the future? Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/166310/274-american-troops-found-dumped-in-landfill/#zPlh9qQchuEsl07e.99
"The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism." Karl Marx Let's hear from a few of Lincoln and Marx's communist revolutionaries: Republican Senator John Sherman, brother of General T. Sherman who Marched to the Sea, advised his fellow senators to "nationalize as much as possible [making] men love their country before their states. All private interests, all local interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals, everything, should be subordinate now to the interests of the Government." "We believe in a war of extermination," said Union Brigadier General Lane. Communist journalist Karl Heinzen writing about Lincolns war on the South: "If you have to blow up half a continent and cause a bloodbath to destroy the party of barbarism, you should have no scruples of conscience. Anyone who would not joyously sacrifice his life for the satisfaction of exterminating a million barbarians is not a true republican." In 1862 Sherman wrote his wife that his purpose in the war would be "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people" of the South. His wife wrote back that her wish was for "a war of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing." Sherman elsewhere declared "We are not fighting against enemy armies, but against an enemy people, both young and old, rich and poor, and they must feel the iron hand of war in the same way as organized armies." And later around 1902 in another attempt to "clean" for "world order" US General Jacob H. Smith tells the commanding officer of the Marines assigned to clean up the island of Samar, Philippines: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please me." He orders that the entire island of Samar be converted into a "howling wilderness." He specifically orders that all males over the age of ten are to be shot. Step one is to burn the town of Balangiga to the ground. The US military went on to kill over 1 million Philippinos. The US military has been doing these things continuously since before Lincoln. They did it in Vera Cruz, Mexico, to other Native Americans, Germans, Japanese, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Iraqis, Yugoslavians, Afghanis, Somalians, Congo, Yemen, Pakistan, Vietnam, etc. etc. Welcome to the Communist reservation.
At least, I suppose, the US still do make them stand trial, for a serious crime. The IDF would give them a medal.
Jack is right to point to the veracity of troops who speak out. The BBC deserves credit for a film broadcast by Newsnight on March, 2006 called ‘Soldiers: Coming Home.’ The film followed members of Iraq Veterans Against The War on their “Walkin’ to New Orleans” protest march against the Iraq war (see: www.ivaw.net). A veteran on the march, Jody Casey, was asked if the US military had been concerned about the people of Iraq. He replied: “Oh no. Definitely that was not a concern at all... I was not concerned about them at all.” Asked if this was simply his personal view, or the view of the military in general, Casey responded: “No! I mean that's why they call them ‘Hajji’ [the Iraqi equivalent of ‘Gook‘]. I mean you have got to de-sensitise yourself from them: ‘They're not people they are animals’. [There was a] total disregard for human life.” The veteran described how Iraqi civilians discovered in the vicinity of detonated Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) were routinely shot: “I have seen innocent people being killed. IEDS go off and you just zap any farmer that is close to you... hit him with the 50 [heavy machine gun] or the M-16 [rifle]. Overall there was just the total disregard - they basically jam into your head: 'This is Hajji! This is Hajji'. You totally take the human being out of it and make them into a video game... If you start looking at them as humans, and stuff like that, then how are you gonna kill them?” Former soldiers claim that this attitude extends up the chain of command, right to the top. In April 2004, the Daily Telegraph reported great unease among senior British army commanders in Iraq at the "heavy-handed and disproportionate" military tactics used by US forces who, they said, viewed Iraqis "as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life... their attitude toward the Iraqis is tragic, it is awful". (Sean Rayment, 'US tactics condemned by British officers,' Daily Telegraph, April 11, 2004) An apparent example of the kind of indiscriminate killing described by Casey was reported in The Nation: “On November 19, after a roadside bomb killed Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 15 Iraqi civilians – including seven women and three children – were allegedly shot and killed by a unit of US Marines operating in Haditha, Iraq. Then, this past Friday, a battalion commander and two company commanders from the same unit were relieved of their duties. “We also know that the Marine Corps initially claimed that the 15 Iraqi civilians were killed by a roadside bomb. But in January, after Time magazine presented the military with Iraqi accounts and video proof of the attack's aftermath, officials acknowledged that the civilians were killed by Marines but blamed insurgents nonetheless who had ‘placed noncombatants in the line of fire.’ “However, video evidence shows that women and children were shot in their homes while still wearing nightclothes. And while there are no bullet holes outside the houses to support the military's assertion of a firefight with insurgents, ‘inside the houses... the walls and ceilings are pockmarked with shrapnel and bullet holes as well as the telltale spray of blood.’” www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=76825 One eyewitness told Time: "I watched them shoot my grandfather, first in the chest and then in the head. Then they killed my granny."(Quoted, Hala Jaber and Tony Allen-Mills, ’Iraqis killed by US troops “on rampage”,’ Sunday Times, March 26, 2006) This is how the incident was originally reported in the Mirror: “Elsewhere, an ambush on a joint US and Iraqi patrol north-west of Baghdad left 15 civilians, eight insurgents and a US Marine dead. An improvised explosive device was detonated next to the Marine's vehicle in Haditha on Saturday.” (Brian Roberts, ‘Brit toll rises after roadside blast kill soldier,' Mirror, November 21, 2005) The most shocking revelation in the Newsnight film concerned the carrying of shovels and AK-47 rifles on US patrol vehicles - these were regularly dumped beside bodies to give the impression that they had been planting roadside bombs. Casey explained the orders he had been given: “’Keep shovels on the truck and an AK, and if you see anybody out here at night on the roads, shoot them. Shoot them, and if they weren't doing anything, throw a shovel off.’ At that time when we first got down there, you could basically kill whoever you wanted - it was that easy... “You’re driving down the road at 3 in the morning, there's a guy on the side of the road, you shoot him... you throw a shovel off." The IVAW website contains a harrowing interview with Iraq veteran, Doug Barber, who subsequently took his own life. Asked if he had seen any Iraqi civilians being killed, Barber replied: “You know, I didn’t see any get killed, but we heard about it on a daily basis. I knew some guys in our unit had gone through it. They had experienced a situation where they were ambushed and had to open up, uh, open fire, on these people. The guys in the unit that had to open fire, well it really messed them up. It really messed them up bad, it really got to them. “We would hear about our own friendly fire from the helicopters and some other combat units would hurt or kill civilians, things like that we knew were going on all the time.” http://groups.google.com/group/Coalitionforfreethoughtinmedia/msg/2fe6cd944011c4b5?dmode=source To be continued.
It is symptomatic of wars of aggression and occupation. The more you do them, and for longer, the more things like this happen. It is fine that the US system is putting this guy on trial, but in reality, he was just the monster, and Frankenstein has a creator...
STANDARD US MILITARY POLICY "We are not fighting against enemy armies, but against an enemy people, both young and old, rich and poor, and they must feel the iron hand of war in the same way as organized armies." US General Sherman.
Haditha is not an isolated incident despite the intention of the mainstream media to portray it that way. The media at the time of the Vietnam war also attempted, for example, to portray the US targetting of 500 Vietnamese civilians, commonly known as the My Lai massacre, as an abhoration too. Even today, as with Haditha, many reporters and journalists continue to peddle this myth. In fact, My Lai, part of Operation Wheeler Wallawa, was unusual only in that it was reported. Newsweek journalist Kevin Buckley wrote: An examination of that whole operation would have revealed the incident at My Lai to be a particularly gruesome application of a wider policy which had the same effect in many places at many times. Of course, the blame for that could not be blamed on a stumblebum lieutenant. Calley was an aberration, but Wheeler Wallawa was not. The fact that children die on a daily basis as a direct result of Western intervention in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is unmentionable. Also ignored by the media is the fact that the mortality of human beings in Iraq has increased by a third compared to the Saddam Hussein era. Back in 2006, Marie Fernandez, spokeswoman for European aid agency Saving Children from War, reported: For weeks, there were no I.V. [intravenous] fluids available in the hospitals of Basra. As a consequence, many children, mainly under five-years old, died after suffering from extreme cases of diarrhoea. Hospitals have no ventilators to help prematurely-born babies breathe." Fernandez added that, for the last three years, the Maternity and Children's hospital in Basra has not received any cancer drugs from the health ministry: "In all of Basra, a city with nearly two million inhabitants, there's no radiotherapy department available." This was reported by the UNs Integrated Regional Information Network but was not covered by a single British newspaper. Recall that the protection of the civilian population of Basra is the legal responsibility of the British occupying forces. Why is the catastrophe befalling the children of Basra not filling the front pages of the Guardian and Independent? Why are government ministers not being called to account? Where are the demands for increased medical assistance and supplies from one of the worlds wealthiest countries? Where are the media campaigns of support? We can be sure that the better, more compassionate journalists are doing what they can to bring these horrors to the attention of a deceived British public. But the struggle is uneven - major corporate media have everything to gain from the current insane but lucrative status quo. And that status quo inevitably requires the Wests projection of military power for profits and control. I've quoted Thomas Friedman's often repeated quote before, but it's particularly relevant to the above: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.
And what do the US establishment do to good and decent people like medical doctors whose job it is to keep people alive and who tried to to do the same to Iraqi's during a period when UN sanctions were killing 500,000 Iraqi children under 5 years of age? What they do to them is they lock them up for decades. Please read John Pilger's latest piece, it's truelly mindblowing, but not surprising given that the US is little different in principle to a fascist state: In 1999, I travelled to Iraq with Denis Halliday who had resigned as assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations rather than enforce a punitive UN embargo on Iraq. Devised and policed by the United States and Britain, the extreme suffering caused by these "sanctions" included, according to Unicef, the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. Ten years later, in New York, I met the senior British official responsible for the imposition of sanctions. He is Carne Ross, once known in the UN as "Mr.Iraq". I read to him a statement he made to a parliamentary select committee in 2007 : "The weight of evidence clearly indicates that sanctions caused massive human suffering among ordinary Iraqis, particularly children. We, the US and UK governments, were the primary engineers and offenders of sanctions and were well aware of this evidence at the time but we largely ignored it or blamed it on the Saddam government. [We] effectively denied the entire population a means to live." I said, "That's a shocking admission." "Yes, I agree," he replied, "I feel very ashamed about it... Before I went to New York, I went to the Foreign Office expecting a briefing on the vast piles of weapons that we still thought Iraq possessed, and the desk officer sort of looked at me slightly sheepishly and said, 'Well actually, we don't think there is anything in Iraq.' " That was 1997, more than five years before George W. Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq for reasons they knew were fabricated. The bloodshed they caused, according to recent studies, is greater than that of the Rwanda genocide. On 26 February 2003, one month before the invasion, Dr. Rafil Dhafir, a prominent cancer specialist in Syracuse, New York, was arrested by federal agents and interrogated about the charity he had founded, Help the Needy. Dr. Dhafir was one of many Americans, Muslims and non-Muslims, who for 13 years had raised money for food and medicines for sick and starving Iraqis who were the victims of sanctions. He had asked US officials if this humanitarian aid was legal and was assured it was -- until the early morning he was hauled out of his car by federal agents as he left for his surgery. His front door was smashed down and his wife had guns pointed at her head. Today, he is serving 22 years in prison. On the day of the arrest, Bush's attorney-general, John Ashcroft, announced that "funders of terrorism" had been caught. The "terrorist" was a man who had devoted himself to caring for others, including cancer sufferers in his own New York community. More than $2 million was raised for his surety and several people pledged their homes; yet he was refused bail six times. Charged under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Dr. Dhafir's crime was to send food and medicine to the stricken country of his birth. He was "offered" the prospect of a lesser sentence if he pleaded guilty and he refused on principle. Plea bargaining is the iniquity of the US judicial system, giving prosecutors the powers of judge, jury and executioner. For refusing, he was punished with added charges, including defrauding the Medicare system, a "crime" based on not having filled out claim forms correctly, and money laundering and tax evasion, inflated technicalities related to the charitable status of Help the Needy. The then Governor of New York, George Pataki, called this "money laundering to help terrorist organisations ... conduct horrible acts". He described Dr. Dhafir and the supporters of Help the Needy as "terrorists living here in New York among us ... who are supporting and aiding and abetting those who would destroy our way of life and kill our friends and neighbours". For jurors, the message was powerfully manipulative. This was America in the hysterical wake of 9/11. The trial in 2004 and 2005 was out of Kafka. It began with the prosecution successfully petitioning the judge to prohibit "terrorism" from being mentioned. "This ruling turned into a brick wall for the defence," says Katherine Hughes, an observer in court. "Prosecutors could hint at more serious charges, but the defence was never allowed to follow that line of questioning and demolish it. Consequently, the trial was not, in fact, what it was really about." It was a political show trial of Stalinist dimensions, an anti-Muslim sideshow to the "war on terror". The jury was told darkly that Dr. Dhafir was a Salafi Muslim, as if this was sinister. Osama bin Laden was mentioned, with no relevance. That Help the Needy had openly advertised its humanitarian aims, and there were invoices and receipts for the purchase of emergency food aid was of no interest. Last February, the same judge, Norman Mordue, "re-sentenced" Dr. Dhafir to 22 years: a cruelty worthy of the Gulag. With their "terrorist" case "won", the prosecutors held a celebration dinner, "partying," wrote a Syracuse lawyer to the local newspaper, "as if they had won the Super Bowl... having perpetuated a monstrous lie [against a man] who had helped thousands in Iraq suffering unjustly ... the trial was a perversion". No executive of the oil companies that did billions of dollars of illegal business with Saddam Hussein during the embargo has been prosecuted. "I am stunned by the conviction of this humanitarian," said Denis Halliday, "especially as the US State Department breached its own sanctions to the tune of $10bn." During this year's US presidential campaign, both candidates agreed on sanctions against Iran which, they claimed, posed a nuclear threat to the Middle East. Repeated over and again, this assertion evoked the lies told about Iraq and the extreme suffering of that country. Sanctions are already devastating Iran's sick and disabled. As imported drugs become impossibly expensive, leukaemia and other cancer sufferers are the first victims. The Pentagon calls this "full spectrum dominance". http://johnpilger.com/articles/the-political-trial-of-a-caring-man-and-the-end-of-justice-in-america
This butcher has no sympathy from me. He's no different than a Joeseph Mengele or Himmler to me, no excuses. Hang the child killer on the lawn of the Pentagon as an example. Better yet hang him from the statue of Liberty, right under the torch.
Afghan Villagers Pleaded to Bales: 'We Are Children'... Afghan girl, 7, says she hid behind father during massacre, as gunman shot, killed him Nov 11, 2012 - Soldier's hearing in massacre under way in Washington state
I stand by the Sgt. He was doing what he was programmed to do by the military and its disgusting they are just washing their hands of it.
crazy, not sure what kinda person think that was ok, sounds like it had been going on for awhile and was only discovered in 2008 - that means many many people had to know about it, but did not care enough to try and stop it .
well let's take a look see here. you seem to be confused. I read it twice. no connection to any vet on your link. or were you talking about the flick Jacob's Ladder at the bottom of the post??? that was a 1990 hollywood fiction movie. did you see it???? now lets look at the post itself. http://arabic.rt.com/. default in arabic. one of your fav terrorists websites??? yes I think so. finally and the most important thing is you forgot to tell the members here your a racists jew hater. remember??? i still have your posts admitting to it. would it do any good to put them up here????
Worse, surely. But while I agree with your latter sentiment, do not forget.....he is symptomatic of something deeper and more malevolent, which is lending itself to this.
Well, what about when those brave US troops raped a kid, and murdered her family, then called in an airstrike, to bury the evidence? Like I say, these are not merely bad apples, but the symptom of the greater cause..
Army Seeks Death Penalty for Bales... Army Seeks Death Penalty in Afghan Massacre Nov 14, 2012 - But defense cites toxic mix of drugs, alcohol in stressful environment
Well, hold on to your PTSD hats because I just saw on the news yesterday that they are now claiming there is "secondary PTSD"...meaning the spouses of the military members have it now too. Some woman on the report said she was having bad dreams about Iraq too and had never been there...
Oh god - really? I am sure the psychiatric and pharam industries will be thrilled. On a sort of related note, take a look at this, tell me what you think; [video=youtube;AVUHalR8P0I]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVUHalR8P0I&feature=my_watch_later_videos&list=WLB71F37C497E5CC42[/video]
I read an article about this the other day, tears in my eyes just awful. How the man (a father himself) sat there with a face of indifference is beyond me. Saying this man's actions are somehow indicative all other US soldiers is asinine and hysterics. Quotes from Sherman during the civil war somehow reflecting US military policy today? Come on.
