Barbara Kay  The National Post - 22 March, 2011

In a story whose scandalous details have already been compared to the shameful abuses inflicted on Abu Ghraib prisoners in Iraq in 2004 by a feckless group of American military police, the U.S. has apologized for “repugnant” actions of an alleged Afghanistan “kill squad.” Five of the Army soldiers face murder charges while seven others are charged with participating in a cover-up.

The apology came in response to an investigation by the German magazine Der Spiegel’s March 21 edition, which featured three damning trophy photographs of soldiers posed with dead Afghan civilians. In one a U.S. soldier smokes a cigarette beside a partially naked corpse. In another, a unit member holds up a dead man’s head while he grins in apparent triumph.

According to the news report, last year 12 U.S. soldiers deployed in Kandahar province were charged with crimes, from keeping body parts as war mementos, to outright murder. The suspected perpetrators, who are accused of several killings, are to be court-martialed in the near future.

The U.S. Army’s Colonel Thomas Collins issued a statement, which in part said that the actions archived in the photographs are “repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States.”

Will these appropriately abject apologies carry any weight with the average Afghan who sees these terrible pictures? Will apologies ward off a crisis of the magnitude Abu Ghraib provoked? Unlikely. The blowback will be crippling to the at-best fragile good will the U.S. has established in Afghanistan. In honour/shame based societies like Iraq and Afghanistan, such indignities to the dead cannot be explained away or expunged with blood money, as was the case with CIA employee Raymond Davis, who in late January “only” shot two men and was released after a ritualized payment.

Why do these terrible things happen? One can understand that war brings out an inchoate, primeval blood lust in testerone-flooded warriors, and that it is precisely such animal instincts that can make the difference in who is the victor and who is the vanquished. Ruthlessness can be justified in a just war.

But triumphalism over the dead is dishonourable by any civilized society’s standards. That such triumphalism exploited the bodies of civilians is simply beyond explanation or excuse.

There is nothing new under the martial sun. Rape, looting, pillaging, terrorizing: throughout history, there is no horror that has not been perpetrated on civilians by a conquering army. In some cases warriors were encouraged by their commanders; in others, they simply gave in to the temptation for revenge on a hated enemy.

This is not news to the U.S. military. People go into the armed forces for all kinds of reasons. Not every soldier is Dudley Do-Right in terms of his motivation to kill. A soldier can be both brave and competent, but also harbour unsavoury impulses that are kept in check under normal conditions, but blossom under more fluid battleground conditions. Which is why psychological profiling is important in the Army’s incoming triage process, and no soldier’s training can be considered complete without intensive immersion in the importance of abiding by a military honour code.

Did these rogue code-breakers receive such training? We’ll find out a lot more as their court-martial unfolds, and doubtless we will find out about weaknesses in their chain of command. Perhaps the lessons taken from this blot on the U.S. military escutcheon will be useful in future wars, but it’s too late for this one. These incidents will likely set back American interests and credibility in Afghanistan to an irrecoverable point. If war is equal parts conquering the enemy and winning over hearts and minds, half the battle in Afghanistan has just been lost.
(original link)

'Repugnant': U.S. army apologises for graphic photos of soldiers posing with dead Afghan civilians

Mail Online - 21 March, 2011

American soldiers have appeared in leaked photographs posing with the bloodied and partially naked bodies of Afghan civilians they allegedly killed in cold blood.

Last night, the U.S. army was forced to apologise for the ‘repugnant’ pictures.

And Nato commanders in Afghanistan were said to be bracing themselves for a public backlash and possible riots over the 'trophy' photographs, especially since it has been alleged that the Afghan civilians were unarmed and innocent.

The photographs were published yesterday by Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine and were among 4,000 they have obtained.

Some of the images allegedly taken by a rogue U.S. army unit in Afghanistan last year show two soldiers kneeling over a bloodied, half-naked body. 

They each hold the face of the dead man up to the camera by grabbing his hair and turning his head. One of the soldiers is grinning.

Senior military officials fear they could lead to the kind of worldwide protests caused by the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal, in which U.S. soldiers were pictured abusing prisoners in Iraq.

It is feared that these pictures - which show the aftermath of the murders at the hands of a rogue U.S. Stryker 'kill team' - could be even more damaging as the trials of the 12 accused men are currently under way in Seattle.

On Sunday night, many organisations employing foreign staff - including the United Nations - ordered their staff into a 'lockdown', banning all movements around Kabul and requiring people to remain in their compounds.

Army officials attempted to keep the photographs under wraps as part of the war crimes probe fearing it could inflame feelings at a time when anti-Americanism in Afghanistan is already running high.

In their statement, the U.S. army said the photographs depicted 'actions repugnant to us as human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States Army.

'The actions portrayed in these photographs remain under investigation and are now the subject of ongoing U.S. court-martial proceedings, in which the accused are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.'

Der Spiegel magazine says it has identified one of the soldiers in the photographs as Cpl Jeremy Morlock of Alaska.

He is one of five soldiers accused of the premeditated murder of three Afghan civilians earlier this year.

Morlock agreed to plead guilty in late February and get a shorter prison term if he testified against the other accused soldiers.

Four other soldiers based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have been charged with murder and conspiracy in the case - they deny the charges.

Seven others have been charged with conspiracy to cover up the alleged murders.

Other charges include the mutilation of corpses, the possession of images of human casualties and drug abuse.

In one of the photos, Morlock is seen grinning as he lifts up the head of a corpse by the hair, turning it towards the camera.

Der Spiegel identified the body as that of Gul Mudin, whom Morlock was charged with killing on January15, 2010, in Kandahar Province.

Another photo shows Private 1st Class Andrew Holmes, of Boise, Idaho, holding the head of the same corpse.

His lawyer, Daniel Conway, said on  Sunday that Holmes was ordered 'to be in the photo, so he got in the photo. That doesn't make him a murderer'.

The five accused of murder allegedly threw grenades and opened fire on civilians in unprovoked assaults, while the other seven are accused of dismembering the victims and collecting body parts.

They are accused of staging the killings to make it look like they were defending themselves from Taliban attacks.

The magazine, which is planning to publish only three images, said that in addition to the crimes the men were on trial for there are 'also entire collections of pictures of other victims that some of the defendants were keeping'.

The photo was taken while the platoon leader, Lieutenant Roman Ligsay, was present, Mr Conway said.

Ligsay has asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to testify in the legal proceedings against his troops.

Mr Conway sought copies of the photographs so that he could present them to a ballistics expert, who he argued might be able to tell whether the victim had been struck by the weapon Holmes was carrying. His request was rejected.

He said: 'I'm very disappointed that, in an American judicial proceeding, I have to get potentially exculpatory evidence from a German newspaper.'

A record number of civilians were killed in Afghanistan last year. More than 2,700 civilians were killed in 2010 - up 15 per cent on the year before.  (original link)

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