[News] Another U. S. Atrocity in Afghanistan

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff03152010.html

March 15, 2010


This Time It's Pregnant Women


Another U. S. Atrocity in Afghanistan

By DAVE LINDORFF

Another night-time raid on a housing compound in Afghanistan. Another 
bunch of innocent Afghans killed. Another round of lies by the US-led 
forces of the so-called International Security Assistance Force 
(ISAF). Only this time, among the dead are two pregnant mothers and a 
teenage girl.

And once again the US media remain mute, accepting the official 
story, which was of ISAF forces responding to an attack which in 
reality appears never to have happened.

Before I started to write this piece, which once again was broken by 
the intrepid 
<http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/afghanistan/article7060395.ece>Jerome 
Starkey, a reporter in Afghanistan who works for the Times of London, 
I thought maybe I should read the Sunday edition of the New York 
Times, to see whether America's "paper of record" had reported on 
this latest atrocity. But the night before we had suffered a heavy 
storm that knocked down three large trees in my front yard, and there 
was currently a thunderstorm underway, with rain pouring down, so I 
decided, what the hell, I'll just write it. There's no way the Times 
would cover this story.

I was right, of course. When the rain let up, and I went out and got 
the paper, and scoured it for word of this latest obscene slaughter 
by US forces, I found nothing. The Times' reporters in Afghanistan 
and the reporters in the paper's Washington bureau who cover the 
Pentagon had ignored it. So, a Google search discloses, did the rest 
of the servile US media.

So what actually happened?

According to Starkey, US and Afghan Army forces on February 12 
launched a pre-dawn assault on the home of a prominent and popular 
policeman's home just outside of Gardez, the capital of Paktia 
province in eastern Afghanistan. The first person to die was 
reportedly the policeman himself, Commander Dawood, who had stood in 
his doorway protesting the innocence of his family. In the volley of 
fire directed against him by the brave US-led team, his pregnant 
wife, another pregnant woman and an 18-year-old girl were also slaughtered.

Commander Dawood had been hosting a party to celebrate the naming of 
a newborn baby boy, Starkey reported. As he writes:

Sitting together along the walls of a guest room, the men had taken 
turns dancing while musicians played. Mohammed Sediq Mahmoudi, 24, 
the singer, said that at some time after 3am one of the musicians, 
Dur Mohammed, went outside to go to the toilet. "Someone shone a 
light on his face and he ran back inside and said the Taliban were 
outside," Mr Sediq said.

Also killed was Dawood's brother, Saranwal Zahir, a local prosecutor, 
who had been shouting for soldiers not to shoot as women had run 
outside to tend to the wounded.

A younger brother of the two men, Mohammed Sabir, was arrested by the 
invading forces and brought to a US base, where he was held for 
several days and interrogated by " an American in civilian clothes," 
before being released. Sabir said he was shown photos of a man who 
had been at the party, a certain Shamsuddin. Sabir says he told the 
interrogatyor, "Yes, he was at the party. Why didn't you arrest 
him?"  The man in question, Shamsuddin, later turned himself in and 
was, after questioning, reportedly also released.

Raising the question, what was this raid, and all the pointless 
killing, about in the first place?

As Starkey writes, the US and the ISAF initially, following what 
appears to be standard operating procedure, concocted a lie about the 
incident In a release immediately afterward, under the headline, 
"Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery," the NATO 
release claimed that the US-led team had found the women's bodies 
"tied up, gagged and killed" in a room. That statement went on to 
say: "Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and 
were killed."

As Starkey, who charges NATO with a "coverup," reports: "The family, 
however, insists that no one threw so much as a stone."

He goes on:

Rear Admiral Greg Smith, NATO's director of communications in Kabul, 
denied that there had been any attempt at a cover-up.

He said that both the men who were killed were armed and showing 
"hostile intent" but admitted "they were not the targets of this 
particular raid."

"I don't know if they fired any rounds," he said. "If you have got an 
individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is 
there, that is often the trigger to neutralise the individual. You 
don't have to be fired upon to fire back."

He admitted that the original statement had been "poorly worded" but 
said "to people who see a lot of dead bodies" the women had appeared 
at the time to have been dead for several hours.

Starkey reports that the Americans offered the distraught family 
$2000 per victim of the botched raid. But as the mother of the slain 
brothers, Bibi Sabsparie, told him bitterly, "There's no value on 
human life. They killed our family, then they came and brought us 
money. Money won't bring our family back."

So once again, we have a massacre (in a night-time raid that occurred 
two weeks after the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley 
McChrystal ordered an end to the practice because of the number of 
errors and civilian deaths, and the bad public relations such raids 
cause among Afghans), with no coverage by the US media.

Meanwhile, Starkey says that even in the UK, his stories have been 
ignored by the rest of the British media, and that his own efforts to 
get at the truth have begun causing problems with the US-led military 
command in Afghanistan.

As he told one reader who had written him to congratulate him on his work:

"Word in Kabul is that NATO are turning their wrath on me, 
personally, and about to release a rebuttal. All of a sudden it's a 
daunting prospect and more than ever I feel what it must be like to 
be churned through the military machine. It's good to know people 
appreciate it. I've also had emails from the victims' family, which 
is heartening."

It is not easy to be an honest reporter in wartime, where sycophancy 
and blind patriotism are what is demanded. Sadly, the US media are 
taking the easy way out, accepting the rules of being embedded, which 
require them to submit articles for censorship, to avoid being 
critical and to play the game, in return for getting easy human 
interest stories to send back to the readers and viewers back home.

That's not journalism. It's PR. It ought to be labeled as such.

Extra! Also ignored by the Times and most of the rest of the US 
corporate media was a 
<http://legaltimes.typepad.com/blt/2010/03/judge-refuses-to-dismiss-suit-against-rumsfeld-.html>historic 
decision by a federal judge in Chicago on March 4 to compel former 
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to respond to charges by to US 
torture victims that Rumsfeld authorized their torture by US forces 
at Camp Cropper in Iraq. The two men, David Vance and Nathan Ertel, 
were whistleblowers against the private security (mercenary) firm 
that had hired them, claiming it was secretly providing arms to 
insurgents. Instead of getting the firm investigated, they were 
arrested by US troops and held--and tortured, they claim--for three 
months, before being released without charge and sent home to the US.

Their attorney, Mike Kanovitz of Chicago's Loevy & Loevy, correctly 
calls the quashing of Rumsfeld's effort to have the suit against him 
thrown out, "pretty historic"--a former secretary of defense is being 
accused of authorizing the torture of American citizens and will have 
to answer the charge in a federal court--but you wouldn't know it 
from the response of the US mainstream media, which has been...nothing.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His 
latest book is 
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031237254X/counterpunchmaga>The 
Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in 
paperback). He can be reached at 
<mailto:dlindorff at mindspring.com>dlindorff at mindspring.com




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