[Peace-discuss] American Marine criminals

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Naturally you'll read about this only in the foreign press. --CGE]

	Published on Saturday, May 16, 2009 by The Independent/UK
	These Killings Will Only Strengthen the Taliban
	by Patrick Cockburn

It is astonishing to discover that the same small American unit, the US Marine 
Corps' Special Operations or MarSOC, has been responsible for all three of the 
worst incidents in Afghanistan in which civilians have been killed. Its members 
refer to themselves as "Taskforce Violence" and the Marines' own newspaper 
scathingly refers to the unit as "cowboys".

The US military commanders in Afghanistan must have known about MarSOC's 
reputation for disregarding the loss of life among Afghan civilians, yet for 10 
days, they have flatly denied claims by villagers in the western Afghan province 
of Farah that more than 100 of their neighbours had been slaughtered by US air 
strikes.

Everything the US military has said about the air strikes on the three villages 
in Bala Boluk district on the evening of 4 May should be treated with suspicion 
- most probably hastily-concocted lies aimed at providing a cover story to 
conceal what really happened. Official mendacity of these proportions is 
comparable to anything that happened in Vietnam.

The US military now seem to have dropped their previous suggestion that Taliban 
gunmen had run through the village streets lobbing grenades into houses because 
villagers had failed to give them a cut of the profits from the opium crop. No 
evidence was produced for this unlikely tale. Witnesses saw no signs of grenade 
blasts or machine gun fire. A US official source in Washington eventually 
admitted that the claim was "thinly sourced".

Survivors from Gerani, Gangabad and Khoujaha villages say that there had been 
fighting nearby but the Taliban had long withdrawn when US aircraft attacked. 
This was not a few errant sticks of bombs but a prolonged bombardment. It had a 
devastating effect on the mud-brick houses and photographs of the dead show that 
their bodies were quite literally torn apart by the blasts. This makes it 
difficult to be precise about the exact number killed, but the Afghan Rights 
Monitor, after extensive interviewing, says that at least 117 civilians were 
killed, including 26 women and 61 children.

The US military has now fallen back on the tired old justification that the 
enemy was using civilians as human shields. This certainly is not satisfying 
infuriated Afghans from demonstrating students at Kabul university all the way 
to President Hamid Karzai. Whatever MarSOC troops thought they were doing in 
Bala Boluk, the killing of so many civilians will do nothing but strengthen the 
Taliban.

© 2009 The Independent

Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, Patrick 
Cockburn was awarded the 2005 Martha Gellhorn prize for war reporting. His book 
on his years covering the war in Iraq, The Occupation: War and Resistance in 
Iraq (Verso) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 
non-fiction.