The American Muslim (TAM)

“Kill Team” War Crimes in Afghanistan

Sheila Musaji
Posted Mar 29, 2011 •Permalink • Printer-Friendly Version

“Kill Team” War Crimes in Afghanistan

by Sheila Musaji

Over the past few weeks a disturbing story has been emerging from Afghanistan. It seems that a group of United States Infantrymen formed a “kill team” in order to kill some “haji’s”.

A Haji is for Muslims a term of respect for those who have been fortunate enough to have made the Pilgrimage to Mecca. It has become, for some others, a derogatory term for Muslims in general.

These soldiers not only killed innocent civilians randomly, they photographed each other with the dead, much as a hunter might have himself photographed with a “trophy” deer or other game animal. And, in the photographs they have beaming smiles and look proud of themselves.

Not only did they murder people in cold blood, for sport, but they mutilated the bodies and took “trophies” of body parts.

I can’t even begin to imagine how a human being can become so degraded.

Mark Boal of Rolling Stone has just published a lengthy expose on this “kill team” group that includes a link to a number of the photographs.

Here are a few passages from that article:

Indeed, it would have been hard not to know about the murders, given that the soldiers of 3rd Platoon took scores of photographs chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. The photos, obtained by Rolling Stone, portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing Afghan civilians is less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration. “Most people within the unit disliked the Afghan people, whether it was the Afghan National Police, the Afghan National Army or locals,” one soldier explained to investigators. “Everyone would say they’re savages.” One photo shows a hand missing a finger. Another depicts a severed head being maneuvered with a stick, and still more show bloody body parts, blown-apart legs, mutilated torsos. Several show dead Afghans, lying on the ground or on Stryker vehicles, with no weapons in view.

... Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos – an effort that reached the highest levels of both governments. Gen. Stanley McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai were reportedly briefed on the photos as early as May, and the military launched a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib. Investigators in Afghanistan searched the hard drives and confiscated the computers of more than a dozen soldiers, ordering them to delete any provocative images. The Army Criminal Investigation Command also sent agents fanning out across America to the homes of soldiers and their relatives, gathering up every copy of the files they could find. The message was clear: What happens in Afghanistan stays in Afghanistan.

... So far, though, no officers or senior officials have been charged in either the murders or the cover-up. Last October, the Army quietly launched a separate investigation, guided by Brig. Gen. Stephen Twitty, into the critical question of officer accountability. But the findings of that inquiry, which was concluded last month, have been kept secret – and the Army refuses to say whether it has disciplined or demoted any of the commanders responsible for 3rd Platoon. Even if the commanding officers were not co-conspirators or accomplices in the crimes, they repeatedly ignored clear warning signs and allowed a lethally racist attitude to pervade their unit. Indeed, the resentment of Afghans was so commonplace among soldiers in the platoon that when Morlock found himself being questioned by Army investigators, he expressed no pity or remorse about the murders.

Toward the end of Morlock’s interview, the conversation turned to the mindset that had allowed the killings to occur. “None of us in the platoon – the platoon leader, the platoon sergeant – no one gives a fuck about these people,” Morlock said.

Then he leaned back in his chair and yawned, summing up the way his superiors viewed the people of Afghanistan. “Some shit goes down,” he said, “you’re gonna get a pat on the back from your platoon sergeant: Good job. Fuck ‘em.”

I would like to know if these “soldiers” are an aberration or the norm. I would hope that the Pentagon rather than trying to just sweep this under the rug would conduct a serious investigation of the mental state of our military serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of whether or not it is the “training” that produces this level of disgust towards other human beings. Were these perfectly normal young men who became dehumanized by war, or are we not properly checking out individuals who volunteer for the military?

I can’t imagine how anyone who has been a part of such brutality is going to be able to return home at the end of their tour of duty and simply resume “normal” life as decent and productive members of society.

Seymour Hirsch wrote in The New Yorker

Why photograph atrocities? And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units? How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost? No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question. As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare. In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary. In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy—the people trying to kill you—do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise. The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous. This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us. The G.I.s in Afghanistan were responsible for their actions, of course. But it must be said that, in some cases, surely, as in Vietnam, the soldiers can also be victims.

The Der Spiegel photographs also help to explain why the American war in Afghanistan can probably never be “won,” in my view, just as we did not win in Vietnam. Terrible things happen in war, and terrible things are happening every day in Afghanistan, as Americans continue to conduct nightly assassination raids and have escalated the number of bombing sorties. There are also reports of suspected Taliban sympathizers we turn over to Afghan police and soldiers being tortured or worse. This will be a long haul; revenge in Afghan society does not have to come immediately. We could end up not knowing who hit us, or why, a decade or two from now.

Here is the full text of the Pentagon apology released after the Rolling Stone article came out

“The photos published by Rolling Stone are disturbing and in striking contrast to the standards and values of the United States Army. Like those published by Der Spiegel, the Army apologizes for the distress these latest photos cause. Accountability remains the Army’s paramount concern in these alleged crimes. Accordingly, we are in the midst of courts-martial, and we continue to investigate leads. We must allow the judicial process to continue to unfold and be mindful that the government has distinct obligations to the victims and to the accused, which include compliance with the court’s protective order to ensure a fair trial. That said, the Army will relentlessly pursue the truth, no matter where it leads, both in and out of court, no matter how unpleasant it may be, no matter how long it takes. As an Army, we are troubled that any soldier would lose his ‘moral compass’ as one soldier said during his trial. We will continue to do whatever we need to as an institution to understand how it happened, why it happened and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again.”

If the loss of our humanity is part of the cost of war, is it worth it? And, if some relative or friend of one of those murdered so senselessly attempts revenge on American civilians - will we continue to insist that our foreign policies and wars have nothing to do with any such act of terrorism - it is just because they are “haji’s”, or “ragheads”, or Muslims? We will we continue to insist that “they” hate “us” for our freedom?

Recently, Councilwoman Deborah Pauly, an elected representative said at a demonstration in Orange County, California:

”What’s going on over there right now, make no bones about it, that is pure unadulterated evil ... I know quite a few Marines who would be very happy to help these terrorists to an early meeting in Paradise.”

“Over there” was the community center which Muslim families were entering. I can see no other meaning to Councilwoman Pauly’s statement except that she knows United States Marines who would be happy to kill these men, women, and children because since they are Muslims, they must be terrorists.

Are the Marines she was talking about infected with the same attitudes as these soldiers in Afghanistan?

The U.S. Army will need to do more than apologize “for the distress” caused by the photos.

UPDATE 3/31/2011

Malalai Joya, an Afghan woman, just published an article in The Guardian in which she gives an Afghan view of these atrocities which includes this statement

I must report that Afghans do not believe this to be a story of a few rogue soldiers. We believe that the brutal actions of these “kill teams” reveal the aggression and racism which is part and parcel of the entire military occupation. While these photos are new, the murder of innocents is not. Such crimes have sparked many protests in Afghanistan and have sharply raised anti-American sentiment among ordinary Afghans.

I am not surprised that the mainstream media in the US has been reluctant to publish these images of the soldiers who made sport out of murdering Afghans. General Petraeus, now in charge of the American-led occupation, is said to place great importance on the “information war” for public opinion – and there is a concerted effort to keep the reality of Afghanistan out of sight in the US.