Dave Lindorff.
After initially claiming that two pregnant women and a teenage girl killed in a US Special Forces raid on an Afghan home in Khataba in February had been discovered bound and slain by the Americans, the US military has admitted that they were actually shot and killed by those US troops--who then tried to cover up their “mistake” by carving the bullets out of the bodies with knives, removing other incriminating bullets from the compound’s walls, and then washing away the bloody evidence with alcohol.Amy Goodman.
In this new grisly version of the story issued from the US command in Afghanistan, it was a case of the Special Forces Unit lying to superiors about what had transpired in their botched raid, which also killed an Afghan police commander and a government prosecutor.
The only reason we know all this today is because of the intrepid digging by a relentless reporter from the Times of London, Jerome Starkey, who, unlike the hacks in Kabul passing themselves off as journalists from American news organizations, didn’t just accept the press release on the incident put out by Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s office, but instead did his own investigation, talking to Afghan and UN investigators, as well as local people where the incident happened.
For his efforts at getting to the truth, Starkey was attacked by the US military, accused of lying and misrepresenting US statements.
Now that Starkey has been fully vindicated, there has been no apology from McChrystal’s office, or from the military public relations operation. Nor have US reporters and editors, who left Starkey undefended while his credibility was being attacked by the US, said anything about his role in bringing the truth to light.
The New York Times, in an article today by Richard A. Oppel, Jr., datelined Kabul, said that the US military, “after initially denying involvement in any cover-up in the deaths,” had “admitted that its forces had killed the women during the nighttime raid.”
The paper also credited the Times of London (without mentioning Starkey), with, a day before the military’s about face, disclosing that American forces on the scene had “dug bullets out of their victims’ bodies in the bloody aftermath” and then “washed the wounds with alcohol before lying to their superiors about what happened.”
What the paper didn’t mention is that Starkey had broken the story weeks earlier, only have his exposé ignored by the US media, which allowed him to be slandered by the American military.
This story is not over yet, either.
The US military, incredibly, is still claiming that despite an official investigation by US/NATO personnel into the incident, “Nothing pointed conclusively to the fact that our guys were the ones who tampered with the scene.” As Oppel demurely observed, “However, given that Special Operations forces killed the women, it was not clear why anyone else would have a motivation to remove bullets from the bodies or tamper with evidence at the scene.”
It would appear that a cover-up is still underway.
Chris Floyd.
While I am certainly no prophet, I think I am safe in saying we will see a similar reaction to the gut-wrenching footage unearthed by Wikileaks. The American people are simply too good, too just to let stand such a foul besmirching of their national honor. After all, didn't they rise up as one after the Abu Ghraib atrocities were revealed in 2004, and boldly oust the architects of these crimes in the ensuing presidential election? Didn't they take to the streets in their millions when first Bush and then Obama claimed the right to have any citizen put to death without charges or trial simply by declaring the victim a "suspected terrorist"? Didn't a great groundswell of public ire force Congress to open impeachment proceedings against George Bush and Dick Cheney for their Soviet-style gulag of concentration camps and systematic tortures -- and threaten similar justice for Barack Obama's continuation and cover-up of this system? Didn't the American people demand a national day of mourning and atonement when they realized that hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis had been murdered in a war based on false pretenses and cynical manipulation?
So let us have faith in the American people. They have proven time and again in this last decade that they will not countenance crimes and atrocities being committed in their names. They will not abide leaders who unleash a war machine of blood money and blind fury against innocent people. When push comes to shove, when the truth is revealed to them, they will always -- always -- do the right thing.
