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'Scores Die in Afghan Village Raid'
A rocket attack on an Afghan village has killed at least 45 civilians, including women and children, a spokesman for Afghan president Hamid Karzai said.
A US soldier frisks an Afghan villager during a patrol in Dand district of Kandahar Province. A rocket attack on an Afghan village killed up to 45 civilians, a spokesman for President Hamid Karzai told AFP on Monday, as leaked documents laid bare the civilian toll of the US-led war.(AFP/Manpreet Romana) An investigation is underway to determine who was responsible for the reported attack in Sangin district of southern province Helmand on Friday.
"Our understanding is yes, there was a rocket launched. Yes, it hit a civilian house where many people sought refuge and yes there were around 45 to 50 people killed," Waheed Omar said.
Asked if the attack was carried out by NATO forces, Omar said: "We will need to wait until we have a final report before we have the source as to what happened and who did it."
Karzai ordered the National Security Council to investigate the incident, Sediq Sediqqi, head of media relations at the presidency, said earlier.
Helicopter attack
Reports surfaced on Saturday that a helicopter gunship fired on villagers who had been told by insurgents to leave their homes as a firefight with troops from NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was imminent.
According to witness accounts, men, women and children fled to Regey village and were fired on from helicopter gunships as they took cover.
Abdul Ghafar, 45, told the French press agency, AFP, that he lost "two daughters and one son and two sisters" in the attack.
He and six other families fled to Regey, about 500 meters from their village of Ishaqzai, after being warned about the imminent battle, he said.
Men and women took shelter in separate compounds, he said, ahead of an expected firefight between Taliban and NATO troops.
"Helicopters started firing on the compound killing almost everyone inside," he said, speaking at the Mirwais hospital in Kandahar city.
"We rushed to the house and there were eight children wounded and around 40 to 50 others killed," he said.
He took three girls and four boys to the Kandahar hospital, he said, adding: "Three of the wounded are my nephews and one is my son.
"One of the wounded children is four years old and has lost both parents."
The BBC said it sent an Afghan reporter to Regey to interview residents, who described the attack and said they buried 39 people.
Civilian casualties are an incendiary topic in Afghanistan, though surveys have shown that most are caused by Taliban attacks.
ISAF spokesman Colonel Wayne Shanks said the location of the reported deaths was "several kilometers away from where we had engaged enemy fighters".
ISAF forces had fought a battle with insurgents, he said, but an investigation team dispatched after the casualty reports emerged "had accounted for all the rounds that were shot at the enemy", Shanks said.
"We found no evidence of civilian casualties," he said.
Wikileaks
But leaked documents carried by the web whistleblower Wikileaks on Sunday pointed to under-reporting of civilian casualties, which Omar said were a cause of concern for the Afghan government.
The Pentagon files and field reports spanning the period from January 2004 to December 2009 detail hundreds of unreported civilian deaths caused by NATO and Taliban attacks.
"We have continuously stated that the Afghan government and Afghan people were upset about civilian casualties," he told reporters, adding that Karzai had found nothing new in the leaked documents.
The White House condemned the leaks, saying the information could endanger US lives but also pointed to the administration's long-held concerns about alleged links between Pakistani intelligence agents and Afghan insurgents.
Source: Agencies
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33 Comments so far
Show AllIt was a common practice in Nam to kill civilians in villages suspected of being used by the Viet Cong whether the local people were cooperating or not.
Burning villages down and destroying food supplies were also part of that policy.
What Dr. King said long ago remains true today.
“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.”
And from that speech:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/058.html
"This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words:"
"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
I doubt that the Pashtun people of Afghanistan and Pakistan will ever forgive what we have done. Their resistance will be carried on for generations if necessary.
Still more evidence that war crimes are being committed in the Middle East by the United States and yet Obama and others in his administration as well as in the military still have not been arrested to answer charges that they are war criminals. As Hugh Thompson, who was the helicopter pilot who ordered his gunner to fire upon American soldiers if the continued to shoot at Vietnamese civilians at the My Lai massacre observed, "My Lai ... was no accident whatsoever. Pure, premeditated murder... Are we too big to apologize?"
The question now is not only whether the United States is too big to apologize. It should also be asked: Is the United States also considered to be above the law?
Obama sold us the biggest lies ever to win the office. He is evil (evil never wins). F**k him.
This sham of patriotic America, we are 'saving the world for freedom is a lie'. The US government has been using and torturing Americans with thought reading technology, verbal abuse and memory changing dream manipulations since at least (as I can attest) 1994, Bitch Clinton's second year in office. I am threatened with death for even these lame comments. America is dead, the land is good.
Kathleen Heckman
2212 26th Street, #5
Sacramento, Ca 95818
If you can't stop them, maybe you can look at it this way:
If they are reading your thoughts, you must be important.
Would you mind providing some sources so that I could find out more about the technology you mention?
If you are getting death threats maybe you oughtn't post your address?
If she really is getting death threats I am sure they know here address.
Then there is the Taos Hum.
I wonder why they hate us?
Terrorism, pure and simple. But the villagers had to die because of the long war on terror, you know the one that started on 9/11 when elements in the highest levels of our shadow government, dovetailed their attack on us with the plot of the hapless morons that the CIA, FBI, NSA, and Pentagon had been tracking.
Oh but no, our government would never conspire to kill its own citizens right? That's just crazy talk!
Explosions all over the place on 9/11, from a variety of local and national media sources, but no mention of them from 9/12 until now, except by the much maligned "truthers".
It is hard for me to fathom, just how brain dead most Americans are on this matter, that they don't even have questions regarding the official story.
Even the 9/11 commissioners themselves have acknowledged that their report was based on disinformation from virtually every source, which conveniently for them, allows their cover up to be caused by a cover up that they can point to, and years after the fact.
Hue_sir_name wrote:
"...hard for me to fathom, just how brain dead most Americans are on this matter, that they don't even have questions regarding the official story."
Perhaps it'd be different if they did'nt hear the same lies over and over millions of times, about how great the USA is, and if the US ruling elite didn't consist of insanely greedy bastards who control the white house, news media, & minds of the masses, and if us citizens weren't treated like cattle and if they enjoyed the same rights/advantages that those from all the other developed nations enjoy - like minimum of 5 or 6 weeks of paid vacation days for all workers, universal health care, a much smaller/saner military industrial complex, etc.
While the average overworked american is led to believe that the USA is the greatest of all countries, people outside the US see it as something like a spoiled, teenager on steroids, weed, & heavy metal noise (that some call music).
All true.
" ... the plot of the hapless morons that the CIA, FBI, NSA, and Pentagon had been tracking."
I contend that the "pilots in training" was a black-op being run by the CIA thru the ISI as we do know the ISI was the conduit for the group's financing. We also know it was started by the Clinton admin.; and everytime the FBI got close, they were told to go bark up another tree by both Clinton/Gore and BushCo. And the airplane remote control technology they denied having despite reports otherwise suddenly surfaces as a very mature architecture in both US and Isareli drones. Mike Ruppert was correct.
Because of the rather efficient "memory hole press" we have in the good ol' USA you and me are the only people who remember Mike Ruppert.
"The White House condemned the leaks, saying the information could endanger US lives"
Absolute Rubbish!
The only thing those leaks endanger is the extremely huge pork barrel that those who are endeared to the military industrial complex enjoy. They don't care whose or how much blood is on their filthy money. Like morbidly obese people -they don't know when they've had enough.
The Truth will set us free - eventually from all the horrors caused by the insanely greedy, and their lies that cause most Americans to believe that their tax dollars are used to defend the USA.
Shame on the USA - the empire of shame - the #1 obstacle to world peace!
------------------------------------------
Keep up with wikileaks! http://twitter.com/wikileaks
-------------------------------------------------
Noam Chomsky's recorded address to the United National Peace Conference, 7/24/2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcIVNzcMucU
(recorded june 30)
----------------------------------------------------------
"The White House condemned the leaks, saying the information could endanger US lives but also pointed to the administration's long-held concerns about alleged links between Pakistani intelligence agents and Afghan insurgents."
Bush is still president right?
What a horrible prices to pay so Big Oil can run pipelines through Afghanistan to market Central Asian oil and natural gas throughout Asia !
Endless human suffering and $Trillions of taxpayer money (or shall we say debt plus interest) for Afghanistan and Iraq as our domestic economy implodes.
"Abdul Ghafar, 45, told the French press agency, AFP, that he lost "two daughters and one son and two sisters" in the attack."
Another heart won! Another mind won! Right?
"The White House condemned the leaks, saying the information could endanger US lives"
Because, after all, US lives are the only lives that matter.
I love it, "The White house condemned the leaks." The White house did not condemn the murder of innocent civilians, after all "The White House adds people to its Assassination List (Black List) whenever they want. This country is feeding itself on the murder of innocent civilians.
Watch Congress approve another supplemental murder budget and continue to let the rich, like John Kerry, make more and more money from their investments in the Military Industrial Complex by continuing the tax breaks.
What a country we have become!
"This country is feeding itself on the murder of innocent civilians."
Sort of like the Aztecs, which is a comparison I've made before.
Big oil ....when we drive our cars we are burning these dead people up, and as long as we keep needing oil instead of painting our countryside with windmills, and putting solar pannels on all our houses, which by the way could totally be paid for with the money we spend to get oil, which is old technology. We could lead the world in Clean Energy, and take ourselves to a Modern Future. Imagine a world where we didn't have to kill anybody to heat our homes, and drive our cars. We do not have to take over the world! Our Country provides everything we need to be happy, and productive. Murder is murder, killing for oil is murder... not War. We should only be engadged in War if we are attacked by a Country. 9/11 was a terrorist attack, most likely encouraged, and even aided, by our own Country.It was not a War. Oil is the only reason for all of this mess. I feel so bad when my Country kills women, and children ,terrorizing all these people, and saying we are liberating them...what a lie !
The world has a reason to hate us, and they used to like us, that was nice. I remember being so proud of being an American. We used to be seen as the greatest place on Earth. Now even the Countries that are supposed to be our Allies can't stand us. Also we were as a people still liked, even when the world hated what our Goverment was doing, but now they know, "we the people" aren't doing anything to change, or stop our Goverment, from the horrors they have been commiting. So they don't even like us, the people, and I don't blame them. I really am in to history and learning from mistakes. I think we could pull out of all of this, and start being responsible for ourselves. We need to demand that our Goverment listen to us, and get out of both of these attacks on innocent people, and get on with the business of running our Country, and leaving people alone.
Pakistans ISI has been the single biggest threat to the entire region. This is not new, the U.S. just winked and let it slide. Now that the shit has hit the fan we have to show fake concern. The U.S. and Pakistan along with Israel are the biggest threats to world peace.
"World peace" is already grossly violated by both the US Empire and its vassal Israel. If you include Pakistan, then you must include its co-belligerant India; but I would say they just threaten each other, not the planet as a whole.
But hey, we are spreading democracy. And by the way, Every Middle East country except Israel sees us as terrorists. It is not a strech to see why.
Some of the most productive pre-1941 propaganda used to show the evilness of the Nazis was film of Stukas divebombing and straffing defenceless retreating Polish civilians; quite similar to what the USA did to retreaating Iraqis on what became known as the Highway of Death. Both were War Crimes. Only the first crime was ever brought to trial. And, yes, I'm making a direct comparison between the evilness of Germany's Nazis with that of the USA's.
As I remember, those "retreating" civilians were in Kuwait. Indeed, they were military soldiers carrying their looted booty in commandeered civilian vehicles.
I will not defend the administration of our government, but we should see all the facts.
The USA did hang Sadam for his war crimes; too bad that Cheney and Bush have not dropped on the end of a rope, too. Maybe Obama should be in the doc, too.
enjoy
http://vimeo.com/11491707
''Civilian casualties are an incendiary topic in Afghanistan, though surveys have shown that most are caused by Taliban attacks.''
Another load of turd posing as news.
Not only is this 'most' statistically highly suspect, it is extraordinarily compromised by the source.
Moreover such deaths as they occur would not be happening if the Coalition of the Willing was not there.
Not only for this reason would somebody please investigate AlJazeera English or aljazeera.net? I often smell US propaganda in it. It is usually just a vague whiff but it is there. We need a whistleblower from its ranks.
Its attempt to take the site aljazeera.com from the owners was more than a whiff. It smells.
War propagates from our economic/political system. Our legislative, executive and judicial members operate with too little answer-ability to the public they serve. We need a parliamentary system.
Indeed you're correct.
Chelsea