Afghan Civilians Slaughtered By U.S. Troops

[Makalakumu]

Well I have the advantage of you I guess, I've been there and am going again in a while. I don't rely on friend's opinions, I speak to the Afghans.

Maybe someday I'll change that and we can have a different conversation. At any rate, I've learned quite a bit with the resources I have and that's more then most.

This is hardly the history of a peaceful and organised country.

True enough and it's not getting any better.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/hamid_karzai/index.html

Awash in American and NATO money, Mr. Karzai’s government is widely regarded as one of the most corrupt in the world. The Times has reported on the extensive web of Karzai family members leveraging the president’s position to put them at the center of a new oligarchy of powerful Afghan families.

Sure, the Taliban are monsters, but what kind of monsters are we putting in power now?

I have a feeling we're going to be there for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.

 

[Makalakumu]

BTW, good luck when you go Tez3. Aloha.

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[Makalakumu]

I speak to the Afghans.

At the University of Hawaii, the US started a program called the East-West Center. The whole idea is that Hawaii's unique location makes it a melting pot, so the idea of drawing all of the cultures together and working together makes a lot of sense. I went to the Central Asia Forum in 2010 and heard a man speak of his life in Afghanistan before the Soviets invaded and about how he fled when the war intensified. Later, he became a professor and specialized in Central Asian studies. My biggest takeaway from this experience was the history of intervention and about how much Afghanistan has suffered because of it.

And it's still going on. If NATO is successful and the Karzai government is able to hold onto power, looking at their level of corruption and their history of human rights abuses, they are not going to form a benevolent form of government. So, are we simply installing another brutal Western backed dictator? That might be the best we can actually do there before the politicians decide that enough money has been spent. What will be the unintended consequences of forming this government? Is it even possible in the first place?

 

[MA-Caver]

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged on Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder, a capital offense that could lead to the death penalty in the massacre of Afghan civilians, the U.S. military said.

The 38-year-old soldier is accused of walking off a U.S. military base with his 9mm pistol and M-4 rifle, which was outfitted with a grenade launcher, before dawn on March 11, killing nine Afghan children and eight adults and burning some of the bodies. It was the worst allegation of civilian killings by an American and has severely strained U.S.-Afghan ties at a critical time in the decade-old war.

http://news.yahoo.com/us-soldier-charged-afghan-shooting-rampage-182910560.html

Now we'll see how the trial plays out.

 

[Makalakumu]

Beside the obvious moral issues of fighting aggressive wars to force other people to live the way you want, there is another perspective to view this tragedy.

Note this article...

http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/20/afghan-massacre-soldier-doesnt-remember-killings/

The military’s version has Bales wandering off base, hitting two villages some 8 km apart, massacring 16 Afghan civilians and burning a number of their corpses, then returning and immediately being captured by troops. The US insists Bales acted alone, while the Afghan government’s probe says more than a dozen of attackers were involved. Bales’s lack of memory will make it even more difficult to sort out this major difference.

Readers can't be sure who actually killed these people. We have conflicting reports from "officials".

That aside, the same article makes an allusion to something else that is important.

Adding further intrigue to the impending charges against Staff Sgt. Robert Bales for the massacre of 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar Province, his lawyer now says Bales “doesn’t remember” carrying out any massacres that night.

Bales has had part of his foot blown off. He's got a TBI from an accident. He begged to not be sent again, as he has already been deployed to combat zones a number of times and been injured multiple times. How many drugs do you think the military put him on?

http://isepp.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/was-sgt-robert-bales-on-psychiatric-drugs/

At a time when the military is awash in psychiatric drugs we encounter no such mention in the in the New York Times or in the press generally. Not one. Might Sergeant Bale’s deadly change of character and murderous rampage have been due to a “perfect storm” of multiple psychiatric drugs coursing through his brain and body neutering his mind, deleting all sense friend, foe, right and wrong. Strangely enough psychiatric drug cocktails—polypharmacy—has become official military policy today. It is not rare to encounter soldiers on 14 or 15 such drugs.


Does this make a better soldier? Faster? A sharper shooter? Is it safe and efficacious ‘treatment’ for any actual disease? In June 2011, a Department of Defense Health Advisory Group backed a highly questionable policy of “polypharmacy” asserting: “…multiple psychotropic meds may be appropriate in select individuals.” The fact of the matter is that psychiatric drug polypharmacy is never safe, scientific, or justifiable. But polypharmacy maximizes profit, while making it impossible to blame adverse effects on any one drug. From 2001 to the present, US Central Command has given deploying troops 180 day supplies of prescription psychiatric drugs–Seroquel included.


In a May 2010 report of its Pain Management Task Force, the Army endorsed Seroquel in 25- or 50-milligram doses as a ‘sleep aid.’ Over the past decade, $717 million was spent for Risperdal and $846 million for Seroquel–an astounding $1.5 billion. This, when neither Risperdal nor Seroquel have been proven safe or effective for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or sleep disorders. Nor do they recruit schizophrenics/psychotics. Appearing together on a local San Diego radio show, retired military psychologist Bart Billings, PhD, estimated that ninety percent of active duty troops are on psychiatric drugs.

Boldface emphasis mine.

If Bales really did snap and kill all of these people, there is a good chance he was over medicated on multiple psychotropic drugs that are being prescribed for uses they were never intended to be used for. The use of psychotropics in this way is not safe and is PROVEN to cause outbreaks of psychotic behavior. Time to zoom out and take a look at the bigger picture this all alludes to.

The message being sent by the fascists that run our government is clear. They're going to propagandize the youth and trick a number of you into signing your rights away to become Imperial Stormtroopers. They're going to send you to combat until your body breaks or you go insane, so you can install brutal dictators that will enslave their populations and make sweet deals for that countries natural resources. They're going to pump you full of psychotropic drugs so you don't care about killing these people, so you don't care about being deployed over and over again, so you don't care about missing your children growing up. They're going to throw every drug in the book at you no matter if it's safe or not. They're going to make sweet deals with their other fascist friends who run the government to do this, stealing the money indirectly from you with inflation, and from your children with debt.

People need to wake up in a big way and put a stop to this madness.

 

[Tez3]

or he could just be a murdering SOB.

 

[Makalakumu]

or he could just be a murdering SOB.

Or maybe there's more to the story...

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...f-massacre-of-16/story-e6frg6so-1226305886039

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 against a wall after the bombing on either March 7 or 8, and told them they would pay a price for the attack.

More info leaks out...

Mr Mohammad said that as the two discussed the incident, two Afghan soldiers approached them and ordered them to join other men from the village who had been told to stand against a wall.


"One of the villagers asked what was happening," he said. "The Afghan army soldier told him 'Shut up and stand there'."


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.

People are losing their minds in Afghanistan, apparently. For more information on the history of testing chemicals and drugs on soldiers see this link.

 

[Tez3]

Or maybe there's less to this story.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ns-robert-bales-had-debts-of-15m-7579491.html


why do you always side with those who are against your country? Why would they always be right and your country always wrong?

 

[Makalakumu]

Or maybe there's less to this story.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...ns-robert-bales-had-debts-of-15m-7579491.html

The propaganda machines have already decided that Bales is guilty. Now, they are going to trundle out every tawdry detail in his life to pin it on him before any more information comes out. The fascists need to make another "lone gunman" or support for this war is going to dry up like water in the desert. NATO soldiers lining women and children up against the wall and executing them, that's the kind of thing Stormtroopers do. I wonder how many times this has happened and it wasn't reported on...

Why do you always side with those who are against your country? Why would they always be right and your country always wrong?

I'm an individual, Tez3. The idea that I am a citizen of the United States because I was born within certain imaginary lines, hasn't stood that test of reason. In fact, all of what I have been conditioned to believe as a child simply hasn't withstood the test of reason. The bottom line is that I'm not going to support any government if I think they are in the wrong. For the last twenty years (since I was old enough to know that such a thing mattered), I haven't been able to support any of this country's foreign policy. Sure, it looked like I'm reflexively against everything that our rulers decide, however, put me in another tax farm with different rules and I might be more agreeable. I support self defense, liberty and peace. We get there through limited government, sound money, and free enterprise.

 

[Big Don]

Beside the obvious moral issues of fighting aggressive wars to force other people to live the way you want

So, it would be more moral to let religious extremists continue to treat women as chattel, execute homosexuals, execute people for having a different religion, execute people for blasphemy, and otherwise engage in what any sane person would consider barbarity?
Your idea of morals is a little ****ed imho

 

[Makalakumu]

Simplistic and thoughtless propaganda.

Ask those questions before putting those *******s into power. Assuming that the facists give a rats *** about human rights, lining women and children up against the wall, blowing them them away, and burning the bodies to hide evidence isn't the way to win the hearts and minds. But this war isn't about "human rights" or anything approaching something like that. It's just more fascist pillaging.

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[Makalakumu]

Raping and pillaging. Put in Karzai, take the loot.

http://www.livescience.com/16315-rare-earth-elements-afghanistan.html

Recent exploration of rare volcanic rocks in the rugged, dangerous desert of southern Afghanistan has identified world-class concentrations of rare earth elements, the prized group of raw materials that are essential in the manufacture of many modern technologies, from electric cars to solar panels. So far, geologists say, they have mapped one million metric tons of these critical elements, which include lanthanum, cerium and neodymium.

That's enough to supply the world's rare earth needs for 10 years based on current consumption, points out Robert Tucker, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) scientist who is the lead author on a report released on September 14. And from clues his team gathered during three high-security reconnaissance missions to the site, he suspects the deposit is actually much larger.

"I fully expect that our estimates are conservative," Tucker told Scientific American. "With more time, and with more people doing proper exploration, it could become a major, major discovery."

The USGS's exploration time has been strictly limited due to the deposit's location in the most dangerous part of the country, near the southern border with Pakistan. The geologists were delivered to the site in Black Hawk helicopters, and armed soldiers watched over them as they scoured the ground for clues.

Why is this war so important?

Already, then, Afghanistan could provide an alternative source of rare earth elements for industrial countries concerned that China currently controls 97 percent of the world's supply, Tucker says. Chemical analyses of rock samples his team collected in February show that the concentration of so-called light rare earth elements in the Afghan deposit are on par with the premier site mined in China, at Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia.

...and more "national interest"...

Vast deposits of copper and iron in the northeast near the nation's capital, Kabul, are together worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The Afghanistan Ministry of Mines has already tendered an exploration lease for a copper prospect called Aynak, in Logar Province, and they plan to do the same for several additional sites in the coming months, including a massive iron ore deposit valued at $420 billion.

None of the companies that will make the deals with the government we install will have spent any money securing them. That's why they take control of governments and put the tax cattle to work to do. And we're going to get stuck with the bill in the form of inflation and debt.

 

[john2054]

Nice one Makala Gonzo, I dare say you already know this but I am totally behind everything you say. I too also have a friend who is over from Afghanistan, and he fled the violence there which has simply gotten out of hand since we have invaded. They are lining up whole villages and shooting the lot you know? Well I am totally against this kind of brutality, as i dare say you are, and people who go over 'imbedded' with the forces are sleeping from the wrong side of the trough i dare say. It was exactly the same in Iraq. And you know the one British journalist who dared to get down and dirty with the natives? Shot like an enemy. By an american (woman gave the order).

War is bad, to this it seems like we all agree. And there are definite fears that cutting and running isn't the best way out. However unfortuanate as it may seem, we may have little alternative. Or it is that, or a case of staying for as long as there aren't people left to shoot at. But if that is the policy chosen, what will be left of the country when we do finally leave it? A pigs ear ill tell you, thats what. Just like Iraq, where there is a car bomb every day the same as there has been for the last five years. And please Tez dont try to pull the one about women being better off. With their husbands and sons either in jail, or most likely sixteen feet under. We have both been around this block one too many times to know that that story, just wont wash.

On a slightly nicer note, i did some more gardening today, and planted some red yellow orange blue white and pink flowers ok?

 

[Tez3]

John just stay in your nice delusional world, 'Imbedded? I don't think so try embedded, different meaning. Whole villages being lined up and shot, don't think so but carry on believing and keep taking the tablets.

 

[Makalakumu]

Isn't people being line up and shot what is at issue here? How about hellfire missiles taking out wedding parties or family gatherings in order to get one bad guy?

Isn't that what the Afghans are reporting? Isn't that what they are telling the international new agencies? What is the truth?

 

[Tez3]

Isn't people being line up and shot what is at issue here? How about hellfire missiles taking out wedding parties or family gatherings in order to get one bad guy?

Isn't that what the Afghans are reporting? Isn't that what they are telling the international new agencies? What is the truth?

How come you believe everything the Afghans say but nothing your side does? Do you not consider taking everything either side says with a pinch of salt? Do you not think the Afghans have an agenda too? they are just as capable as playing politics and telling the big lies as any other country. One should be cynical about all politicians from all countries.

 

[Big Don]

It's pretty clear he is a terrorist and was fighting against NATO in Afghanistan. No need to muddy the water on this one. One of their fighters came to the West to bring the fight to us. The back story is interesting though. It would explain why an Algerian would pull up stakes and go and fight in the first place.

Maybe terrorists blowing up his fellow soldiers drove him to it.
I mean if soldiers killing terrorists creates terrorists, wouldn't the reverse be true also?

 

[Big Don]

How come you believe everything the Afghans say but nothing your side does?

Have you not read his posts? He believes in every harebrained conspiracy theory out there.

 

[Makalakumu]

Have you not read his posts? He believes in every harebrained conspiracy theory out there.

Not every single one, only the ones that are true...lol.

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[Makalakumu]

How come you believe everything the Afghans say but nothing your side does? Do you not consider taking everything either side says with a pinch of salt? Do you not think the Afghans have an agenda too? they are just as capable as playing politics and telling the big lies as any other country. One should be cynical about all politicians from all countries.

The problem in the West is that we've stopped viewing these events with any sort of reason. Cause and effect doesn't exist. We can't look at generations of mistreatment as an answer as to why certain people hate us, we've got to make it about something else. It's there religion, it's there race, it's anything else but the economic truth of how our system has been running.

Instead, we turn them into terrorists and dehumanize them further, which leads to more mistreatment, more radicalization, and more retaliation. The only winners are the people who profit off the conflict. And those people also control the information and the narrative.

My countrymen aren't telling me this story about what is going on in afghanistan. The MSM is a multinational corporation with an agenda that

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