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US Soldiers 'Killed Afghan Civilians for Sport and Collected Fingers as Trophies'
Soldiers face charges over secret 'kill team' which allegedly murdered at random and collected fingers as trophies of war
Twelve American soldiers face charges over a secret "kill team" that allegedly blew up and shot Afghan civilians at random and collected their fingers as trophies.
Andrew Holmes, Michael Wagnon, Jeremy Morlock and Adam Winfield are four of the five Stryker soldiers who face murder charges. (Photograph: Public Domain) Five of the soldiers are charged with
murdering three Afghan men who were allegedly killed for sport in
separate attacks this year. Seven others are accused of covering up the
killings and assaulting a recruit who exposed the murders when he
reported other abuses, including members of the unit smoking hashish
stolen from civilians.
In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan.
According to investigators and legal documents, discussion of killing Afghan civilians began after the arrival of Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs at forward operating base Ramrod last November. Other soldiers told the army's criminal investigation command that Gibbs boasted of the things he got away with while serving in Iraq and said how easy it would be to "toss a grenade at someone and kill them".
One soldier said he believed Gibbs was "feeling out the platoon".
Investigators said Gibbs, 25, hatched a plan with another soldier, Jeremy Morlock, 22, and other members of the unit to form a "kill team". While on patrol over the following months they allegedly killed at least three Afghan civilians. According to the charge sheet, the first target was Gul Mudin, who was killed "by means of throwing a fragmentary grenade at him and shooting him with a rifle", when the patrol entered the village of La Mohammed Kalay in January.
Morlock and another soldier, Andrew Holmes, were on guard at the edge of a poppy field when Mudin emerged and stopped on the other side of a wall from the soldiers. Gibbs allegedly handed Morlock a grenade who armed it and dropped it over the wall next to the Afghan and dived for cover. Holmes, 19, then allegedly fired over the wall.
Later in the day, Morlock is alleged to have told Holmes that the killing was for fun and threatened him if he told anyone.
The second victim, Marach Agha, was shot and killed the following month. Gibbs is alleged to have shot him and placed a Kalashnikov next to the body to justify the killing. In May Mullah Adadhdad was killed after being shot and attacked with a grenade.
The Army Times reported that a least one of the soldiers collected the fingers of the victims as souvenirs and that some of them posed for photographs with the bodies.
Five soldiers – Gibbs, Morlock, Holmes, Michael Wagnon and Adam Winfield – are accused of murder and aggravated assault among other charges. All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.
The killings came to light in May after the army began investigating a brutal assault on a soldier who told superiors that members of his unit were smoking hashish. The Army Times reported that members of the unit regularly smoked the drug on duty and sometimes stole it from civilians.
The soldier, who was straight out of basic training and has not been named, said he witnessed the smoking of hashish and drinking of smuggled alcohol but initially did not report it out of loyalty to his comrades. But when he returned from an assignment at an army headquarters and discovered soldiers using the shipping container in which he was billeted to smoke hashish he reported it.
Two days later members of his platoon, including Gibbs and Morlock, accused him of "snitching", gave him a beating and told him to keep his mouth shut. The soldier reported the beating and threats to his officers and then told investigators what he knew of the "kill team".
Following the arrest of the original five accused in June, seven other soldiers were charged last month with attempting to cover up the killings and violent assault on the soldier who reported the smoking of hashish. The charges will be considered by a military grand jury later this month which will decide if there is enough evidence for a court martial. Army investigators say Morlock has admitted his involvement in the killings and given details about the role of others including Gibbs. But his lawyer, Michael Waddington, is seeking to have that confession suppressed because he says his client was interviewed while under the influence of prescription drugs taken for battlefield injuries and that he was also suffering from traumatic brain injury.
"Our position is that his statements were incoherent, and taken while he was under a cocktail of drugs that shouldn't have been mixed," Waddington told the Seattle Times.
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Show All“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them”
--- George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism
On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.
~George Orwell, 1984
USA-USA-USA- THE CHEER GOES UP
Support the empire send your neighbors kids
Even my mother found this article disturbing.
I do not want to hear, ever again, about "Good Germans."
I think we can now talk about "good Americans," as the average American bloak continue to support US global war crimes.
Our victims since the Second Great Imperialist Slaughter have easily surpassed the 6 million victims of the Germans.
I will not total up the victims but it can easily be done.
Thanks for the quotes, "Orwell" - I e-mailed them to a nationalist I know ;o)
Per the Orwell quites above, it won't.
I saw (and have a copy on my computer) of a CNN International OUTTAKE showing a US Marine (under 20) gunning down a civilian in Iraq and then, right into the camera, telling how much fun it is to kill like that. This clip went around the internet 3 or 4 years ago. Plus ca change...
CNN USA didn't, and wouldn't, show it.
It puzzled me that, in an era of almost total exposure, of an internet that allows secrets to be exposed, facts to trump lies, and all to participate, whether actively or passively, so many believe falsehoods.
Because all of our soldiers "fighting for our freedom" are looked upon by the media and most Americans as "heroes."
i agree. one moment someone is talking about american imperialism and the next about our heroes in iraq or afghanistan. its as if orwell wasn't a writer of fiction but a journalist that actually wrote the truth. strange when there is more truth in fiction and fiction in what purports to be journalist truth. are any of us sane? how could we be with more lies in our heads then truth, more illusion than reality.
The American media - what's that?
This story isn't going to sell soap.
Katrine, this story is unlikely to wake a nationalist from his slumber, for he or she will just view these soldiers as a few bad apples. Prosecuting these individuals will, paradoxically, just add more props to the lie being fed to Americans and the world.
Another bucket of whitewash and this will all go away. The only people who will remember are the Afghans, Iraqis and Pakistanis who used to have loved ones.
I'm sure the "Military Grand Jury" will find that there is not enough evidence. Perhaps it was all just a "pipe" dream?
I'm sure this will all remain below the radar of MiniProp.
Minitrue
I suspect what you say is true as both liberals and conservatives will claim that this was done only by a few bad apples and is not indicative of the whole military though any intelligent person should be able to perceive that the whole barrel is rotten to the core. I also checked both the New York Times and the Washington Post and, unless I missed it, neither of those two alleged liberal papers reported any mention of this atrocity. Neither does the print edition of The USA Today. Do they not remember an event that occurred in the village of My Lai in Vietnam in March of 1968?
As Harold Pinter noted in his acceptance speech when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 of those killed overseas by the United States:
"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
But of course these events by these soldiers most certainly did happen which the mainstream media apparently believes to be of no interest to the American public.
As Pinter continued to point out:
"The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."
The corporate media is doing an excellent job of proving Pinter correct as very few of them seemed to be interested in the crimes and outrages that have been committed by the United States against people in foreign lands.
It would not be all that surprising if a military court lets these soldiers off with a light sentence. Will an international court ever try our nation's leaders and soldiers for war crimes?
"The world is drenched in mutual slaughter. Held to be a crime when committed by individuals, homicide is called a virtue when committed by the state."-Saint Cyprian [3rd century], Carthaginian bishop and early Christian writer
Erroll: Excellent post!
I was going to quote Harold Pinter, but you beat me to it.
I was reminded of a series of articles, written by journalists at the Toledo Blade, in 2003, for which they were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The Tiger Force, in Vietnam, collected ears, etc., as trophies of the Vietnamese people when they were killed. This new article is NOT reporting anything new concerning the history of the U.S. -- and I write this with tremendous sadness!
To read the Toledo Blade series, go to:
http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SRTIGERFORCE
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Erroll says: "The corporate media is doing an excellent job of proving Pinter correct as very few of them seemed to be interested in the crimes and outrages that have been committed by the United States against people in foreign lands."
It's not a matter of the corporate media being interested in these crimes or not. I'm sure some of them are personally, privately very interested and several of them probably track these stories over time in much more detail than you and I will ever see in corporate media. Their paychecks and hopes of career advancement DEPEND on them steering Americans to look the other way and on them creating McNews that dumbs down, muddies up and distracts the masses from any significant public focus on any one ruling-class crime among the legions of those crimes--already this early in the 21st century too numerous to count.
Most of the Kens and Barbies and occasional "little brown brothers" & sisters one sees network TV "news" these daze were carefully hired and promoted from the Ivy League and the upper-middle & upper-classes of other countries. This is most noticeably true about the ones from the upper-castes of India. You will NEVER see a college graduate of the working-class hosting the nightly network news on any channel anymore and very very few from the middle-middle-class, either. Corporate news interests are now hermetically class interests protecting class interests--definitely not journalists and editors in any authentic professional sense of those terms.
They kill over there so they can come back and kill over here.
Coming soon to a police department near you.
Or, coming home to a family living near you.
Now soldiers are committing atrocities while in Afghanistan...previously stressed out, war damaged, used up soldiers waited till they returned home.
And tricky Dick, W and their band of henchmen and women (rice) go free. And, of course, you can throw Mr. Hope/Change in there with them now. No wonder he said we need to move forward when he took office and was asked if he would pursue war crimes charges against the previous administration. He was planning on committing plenty of his own.
The soldiers in this story are monsters, created and enabled by the real war criminals in the government.
The invasions of both Iraq, and Afghanistan, involved the absolute premeditated and systematic extermination of civilians.
I rest my case about the USA being a civilized country. It may contain a few citizens striving to be civilized, but overall it is a massively barbaric country with absolutely zero merit to be emulated by any other country unless the country intends to rival the USA's Barbarity.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
There were once aspects of America worth emulating, but that's all rivers of blood and hundreds of millions of back-stabbings under the bridge now. Post-Bush II 21st century schizoid "Amurka" is now sullenly marching into the worst Dark Age in human history, with most Americans psychologically seared into irrational conflicted wreckage by decades of constant fascist corporatist indoctrination. Their inner self-image is little different from the intellectually & spiritually suffocated thralls trudging in their silent beaten-down ranks to and from the elevators to their subterranean control-garrets in Fritz Lang's Metropolis--soon to be drown like economically and environmentally un-viable rats as reward for their submission.
Powerful stuff!
Very well written - I'll have to work harder at my English :p
I would suggest that the reverse is true. A few run this nation, a few are responsible for its policies, its injustices and its slide to third world status. By and large most Americans are as civilized and compassionate as those in any other nation. One hears only from the extremes and then judges the rest by those standards.
"In one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict, the killings are alleged to have been carried out by members of a Stryker infantry brigade based in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan."
I think the most serious accusation of war crimes is the one against the entire war of aggression which made this psychopathic behavior possible.
I just Googled "afghanistan war fingers as trophies" and nothing from any mainstream US media site.
Try "Kill Team." It's definitely out now.
Have you no shame Mr. Chris McGreal? Days before the burn a Quran act is to take place you have decided to stir up the pot by this opportunistic revelation. This can only aggravate the situation as it happened when the Abu Greieb torture photos were leaked.
"This can only aggravate the situation as it happened when the Abu Greieb torture photos were leaked."
Eh, right, because the actions of soldiers on the ground don't already 'aggravate' the situation already and should not be reported to people. Get real. This war, and the Iraq war, they're all ****ed up and should have ended a loooong time ago.
US citizens, US soldiers, US actions, and when a backlash ensues, you wonder why?
This is ****ing why. It doesn't happen in a vacuum.
Is this ironic? Can't tell.
This dont surprise me at all because every time American go to war the civilians casualties is just part of statistics. In contrast when 1 of their soldier die then the news will go to mainstream media across the globe. Few hundreds foreign civilian life will not equal one US soldier. Anything happen to 1 single American will be a great concern. To them the value of life in 3rd world country are not the same as those in developed nation.
The rich nations feel they have the right to control others. They can do anything in order to serve their own interest and later justify with words. The world is not economicly balance. Let's hope the current economic crisis can shift a little wealth to other nations.
A great number of Americans both military and civilian have long since been operating like Nazi's both in mindset and actions.
I'm sure they'd aspire to something like the Nazi massacre of Oradour-sur-Glane and say it was 'justified' with or without a haloed American soldier being involved as a catalyst.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
We still don't know all the details of Falluja. Massive cover-up still going on about that.
OK but the rich don't go to war. The rich deign to allow the poor to feel equal to themselves just long enough to do their killing for them.
So this is what the American education system produces.
I would like to know how each of these young men came to join the military, and what high schools they attended, and whether they participated in 9-11 assemblies that provoked deep, religious feelings of patriotism.
And what their guidance counselors discussed with them about their futures.
No, it's not uniquely American. Some soldiers commit atrocities during war time. They always have done, and they always will do. That's _the_ reason why some of us are anti-war. You can not wage a war without some atrocities being committed. The idea of waging a "just war" is the idea that atrocities are justified by your goal. It's one step short of saying "might makes right."
Right on. Good comment. Those who would throw out the baby with the bath water need to remember this. American soldiers are like any other national soldiers. In times of war some of them commit atrocities. Not all. Some. Keep those kids out of a war situation and some of them become thugs, but most will live non violent lives. War is the issue. Atrocities ALWAYS happen during war. The American Empire is currently in control, and our actions are not so different from the Persian Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Roman Empire, the English Empire. It is war which needs to be controlled. The rest will follow.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Two wrongs don't make a right. It is war AND imperialism that need not just to "be controlled" but ended.
I think I respond to this in my response to the other poster.
I would, rather, characterize your remark as "throwing out the baby with the bath water."
WHAT WAR? The US INVADED Iraq and Afghanistan in total disregard of international law and the Geneva and Hague Conventions - laws designed to protect civilians. The American people were overwhelmingly supportive of these INVASIONS, despite knowing that there would be a lot of suffering.
The atrocity was INVADING, which has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq ALONE, millions suffering various hardships, and widespread poverty. Any further killings are just "icing on the cake".
Why doesn't America invade Uzbekistan? Uzbekistan has a dictator every bit as vile as Saddam - worse, in fact, as Karimov has completely wrecked his country's economy. Bush didn't invade Uzbekistan because Karimov allowed a US base in his country.
And don't give me this nonsense about America liberating the Iraqi people - the Iraqis rose up in 1991, shortly after the first Gulf War, and were close to overthrowing their vile regime. But Bush Senior gave Saddam permission to fly his military helicopters and quell the rebellion in blood - tens of thousands were butchered! Why did Bush do this? Because the US didn't want Iraqis carrying out their own regime change, as it might have led to a government hostile to US "interests" in the Middle East. So, Saddam was kept in power, and brutal sanctions imposed, which killed over 500,000 children.
And let's not forget that America armed Iraq in the 1980s - read "Spider's Web" by Alan Friedman.
How about if the world now invades America for its crimes, and labels all those who rebel as insurgents and terrorists?
America isn't far from another civil war. Peace is sneered at by a great many. I fear the America my grandchildren will inherit won't know the meaning of peace. Every protest I attend seems to get smaller as people lose hope. Already our 'leaders' are setting the stage for the next war without having finished the ones before. War seems the only plan they can agree on. Eventually we will invade enough countries that the world will be forced to unite against us. I hope the invaders are more humane.
Don't put words in my mouth. I didn't say it was "uniquely American."
I think you're having a kneejerk response to the mention that the American education system bears a great responsibility in this, along with the state licensed guidance counselors who recruit these young men for wars, and in violation of the law protecting a parents' right to opt out of military recruitment.
I think you're sweeping under the rug a very real story of what happened to these young men in high school, what high school, as well. Where did they attend school? Who were their guidance counselors? What are their academic records like? How involved were their teachers? Who inspired them the most in their life decisions?
Besides that, even if it's not "uniquely American," it's certainly characteristically American warfare in terms of our current foreign policy! There are certainly ARE differences in to what extent nations and cultures engage in this kind of barbarism during wartime, depending on what they're fighting for.
And that certainly DOES have to do with the educational systems of those cultures, however informal or formalized they are.
Just a modification of the act of scalping. Bounty hunting and all of those good things from the old west.
Do you think that as a nation we are toast?
Yep! Burnt too. Has beeb for over 100 years. Watch Freedom from Facism on Utube.
I wonder if a "trophy photo" will make the front page of TIME, with the byline "What happens if we don't leave?"
It would make a good front page for some publication.
Joe
Well if renditions and torture are good enough for the Bush and Obama administrations why can't our troops join in the fun? This ties in pretty well to the ninth circuit court of appeals tossing out a law suit by a man who was seized overseas and turned over to the CIA so that they could have him tortured in Morocco. The ninth circuit was afraid that if the suit were allowed to go forward it would reveal state secerts! Eleven judges of the ninth circuit heard this case, six of them need to be removed from the bench as of yesterday! It is getting to the point were if you want justice in the United States, you will have to seek it in the international courts!
We certainly have become a bloodthirsty, grasping and ungracious people!
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
I disagree. This behavior is aided and abetted and routinely covered-up by various levels of the military brass and their civilian leaders, but American culture has for thirty years now become gradually much more violent, punitive, coercive, conscience-less and gratuitous. American "entertainment" now is rife with orgasmic murder spectacles, including insanely cruel and violent video games for American children that are visually more exciting than operating a computerized aerial drone that actually kills groups of people--the advantage for these remote 'collateral damagers' being a salary & military benefits for tele-flying the drones. These soldiers are as much a product of the era of American history and anti-kulture in which they grew up as they are murderous curs released from their leash by their also degenerate leaders.