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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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190 Comments so far
Show Allmetal, I avoid war games, but I watched one on YouTube: when you kill another person, blood splatters into your eyes, your vision darkens, and droplets of blood cloud your view.
War games, today, are becoming shockingly realistic. Ever since large corporations took control of the computer gaming market, most of the fun, imagination and ingenuity has drained away.
Notice, also, how so many of these war games are based on real wars - the Gulf War, War in Afghanistan, etc. It certainly seems like indoctrination.
Hitler said that, to really control a country you must control the courts. Then, everything you do is legal and anything the opposition does is illegal.
The Oligarchy owned and controlled the executive and legislative bodies for quite a few years. Now, they own the judicial so they can do whatever they wish.
I think that is why they are now coming out of the shadows where they have dwelt for so long. From the Supremes on down, everything now seems to be judged to maximize profit and control and to minimize freedom and actual justice.
Obama will lose his a** in Afghanistan; even Petraeus is beginning to have his doubts. And did that surge really work in Iraq? America is a colossally arrogant and greedy country, and the tide of blow black is starting to roll in, both at home and abroad. And fewer and fewer are listening that smooth talking conman in the White House.
About the article: a lot of gung-ho military people are psychopathic (remember the movie "Natural Born Killers"?), otherwise they wouldn't be there. The ones who aren't invariably suffer some kind of psychological trauma, which they call PTSD.
What contrasts!
Within just a few hours, CD posts articles referencing Cindy Sheehen, Chris Hedges, Theodore Bickel.....and then these soldiers.
Human beings who have the courage to resist/confront evil and those who succumb to the pervasivce violence that has infected our culture.
Saints and demons I guess.
I have a strong urge to just flip off the demons, to separate myself from them.
But I know whence they came.
Try finding a movie to watch. How many of them feature graphic and gratuitous violence? Where in american culture do we teach human rights? Respect for diversity? Living together in peace and community? SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY???
I think the thing to do is not so much to condemn the outcome as to alter the process that produces the evil.
We are all a part of the process that produced this evil. I think a tiny bit of each ofus in in the photos of these soldiers and that's why we find them so horrific.
We are the ones who need to work to fix this.
It's called American Exceptionalism.
Our finest young men? These war heroes? If it wasn't for this damn war, they would have grown up living fairly ordinary lives in the (most likely) small towns in the South where they lived. Now they are criminals. Another consequence of joining the US military.
It is prejudice such as yours that causes such incidences. They are Americans, not Southerners.
No. They are Barbarians who happen to be US citizens.
They might have been ok. But I suppose killing for a job, with no real explanation WHY, just might push a young man's sanity over the edge. Especially when we're talking 4,5 or 6 tours of duty. I blame the system that created these monsters.
"Sergeant Gibbs, from Billings, Montana, and Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 22, of Wasilla, Alaska..."
What an ass you have made of yourself, drosera.
People underestimate the sheer pleasure many Americans get by killing foreigners which is one of the many reasons people join the armed forces in the first place. Being the most war like country on the planet affords many opportunities to engage in sadistic killings the great majority of which will be covered up. The body count for foreigners is not even taken by the American Empire Inc.
This reminds me of the CIA "recruiting" poster that turned up on bulletin boards in colleges across the country many years ago.
Join the CIA
Travel to exotic lands
Meet fascinating people
Kill them!
Nothing much seems to change, does it.
Minitrue
I had a bumper sticker and currently have a T-shirt which bears that same message except mine states Join the Army instead of the CIA.
As a random note here. I have met vets from the current wars who had rage to begin with. Usually abusive backgrounds. In fact, consistently. And they themselves were wanting the chance to be violent.
Granted this is a very small sample, but it is consistent. Even when i have worked with older guys who were in vietnam. They had very abusive fathers.
Violence is not power. It is the acting out of a feeling of powerlessness. People need to get the anger out - alone. If not, it doesn't go away. It is all just energy which is creative. Don't sublimate it. Scream it out - alone. See the difference immediately. But it isn't once and done. It is an ongoing process of refinement. There is always clarity of mind afterwards.
Some sharing.
This new-age proclivity to personalize everything is EXACTLY what the powerful want us to do. Don't the people, serviong powerful institutons, who ordered these brutes to kill, count for anything?
Yes, just go into a soundproof chamber and scream your despair at the powerful who play us like pawns - that will really work at changing things.
If you completely avoid facing what's going on inside of you, your proclivities, motivations and tendencies, then you wind up being an unconscious slave and a 'tool' for whoever and whatever attracts you. It's not all about being 'new age,' and it is disingenuous and silly to deny that self-interest drives us to do most of what we do; rather than condemn this fact, why not simply face it? It's always better to be more aware than less, and if you merely believe in something without knowing or caring why, then you leave yourself wide open to exploitation and manipulation.
This is what war is really like. All the flag waving, pretty ribbons, and shiny medals are part of the propaganda campaign used to appease the masses and hide the blood.
Thumbs up to that. Atrocities like that (and far worse than that) have been committed in every war that has ever been fought. You can not say that a war is "just" without saying that achieving your goal justifies the atrocities that will be committed by both sides. You can not say that war is "acceptable" without saying that you accept a certain number of atrocities as part of the price that you pay.
That's the face of war. To anybody who has ever wondered why some of us are anti-war, that's the reason.
¿But BUSH, BLAIR and the gang walk free...? Only in the good olè USA. ¿Sickening, isn`t it?
Sure does give smoking hash a bad reputation.
A kill team? Is that a euphemism for death squad?
I would say not. "Death Squad" would imply that the soldiers executed orders from the top by the assassination of specific individuals and acts of terror against specific groups. The soldiers in the story above weren't following any orders. The self-styled kill team was just a gang of hoods who took advantage of the fog of war to murder innocents for fun
Pretty soon, these and thousands of other souless and crazy bastards will be returning to a neighborhood near you.
Where they will probably kill fellow homeless people, for the coins in their cups.
What is it, ultimately, but sadism? The US military 'trophy' thing goes way back, doesn't it? Barbarism is cultivated by the military culture and this is what we have come to expect, is it not, from a country that has consistently trampled on international law where war and occupation is concerned. The order to torture came from Rumsfeld. This kill-randomly-and-torture-randomly POLICY 'scares' all sane people around the world and gives the Barbarian status.
From an Australian paper:
"Sergeant Gibbs, from Billings, Montana, and Specialist Jeremy Morlock, 22, of Wasilla, Alaska, are charged with three counts each of premeditated murder and one count of assault."
What is in the water of that place?
Let us not forget that every one is personally responsible for their acts. The soldier who kills is responsible. The government who declares war is responsible. The voters who elect the government are responsible. The media which idolise soldiers and call them all heroes, while the enemy are all portrayed as subhuman, are responsible. So are all those who turn away from the truth and indulge in nationalistic fantasies. There are no excuses for these barbaric acts - not "I was following orders" nor "I was expressing the wish of the people". Neither "boys will be boys" nor "we must understand the stress they were under" nor "they were provoked" can exculpate them. If we are to be taken as mature and responsible participants in our own lives, as equal wielders of power in our democracies, we have to take responsibility for our own choices, and recognise we make these choices every day. Are you pro violence or anti it? For humane values or against them? Every act proclaims the answers - we know what the answers for Terry Jones are. At the very least one should be aware of the fact.
No, You can not separate the good side of war from the dark side. You can't lay the blame for atrocities on the soldiers who commit them. There have been atrocities committed in every war, and there will be atrocities committed in every future war. The politicians and the generals who send soldiers to war have always/will always be sending _some_ soldiers to rape, to murder, to torture, to act with genocidal intent.
That is the reason why some of us believe that war should only be waged as a last resort. They say that starting an "aggressive war" is the ultimate war crime because it leads to all others. That is true, but they should have been more explicit. The ultimate war criminal is the politician or the general who orders the first shot to be fired, because until that shot has been fired, there is always hope that the war (and the atrocities that go with it) could have been avoided.
Don't forget to "support the troops"...
Ghandighost
Speaking of supporting the troops, I have just read in my local paper [which, unlike such liberal rags as the New York Times and The Washington Post, actually saw fit to not only report this story but to also place it on its front page]that some of the families of these soldiers have "set up websites to support the two soldiers and raise funds for their defense." As per expected, Americans cannot possibly conceive that their sons and husbands could ever commit such heinous acts. Their family members must always be as pure and innocent as the driven snow while the evil doers must always be those swarthy foreigners who live in those faraway countries that are supposedly bereft of civilized people. A most striking example of delusion and self deception at its finest [or worst].
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The New York Times and Washington Post have not even qualified as liberal rags since the late 1980s. They are corporatist/militarist/Zionist "free trade" anti-working-class agit-prop sheets. What, exactly, is liberal about them? Authentic liberalism is pro-working-class.
Metal
The Times and the Post wish to give the pretense of being liberal which is why I consider myself a leftist and not a liberal. It seems that most liberals always end up being seduced by the Democrats and by doing that they end up placing party over principle. A true leftist would not allow that to happen.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Your point is taken, but my point is that to allow the contemporary media and politicians to perpetually adulterate and thereby gradually obliterate the original meaning of liberalism and progressivism and not actively resist their Orwellian framing of terminology (and thus history) is to play into their hand. The original principles of these ideas should be vigorously defended on moral and historical grounds, and frankly, through the lens of the still valid Marxist critique of capitalism, which in its present 21st century American form is more virulent and laissez-faire than it has been since before the advent of child labor laws.
I read an older article recently decrying Marx as wrong because the detrimental effects on the American working class were not yet evident at the time of the writing (or may have been evident, but not yet unavoidably so)...
my thought was: how odd to pronounce Marx's theories incorrect before they had run their full course...
what I see around me seems to confirm Marx's thinking...
I liked your phrase 'still valid Marxist critique of capitalism'...
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
As I have posted on CD previously, I believe the Marxist critique of capitalism is still correct and some of it almost specifically predictive of the recent derivatives/housing implosion. The historical "solutions" to the problems created by capitalism suggested by Marx are what didn't work out. Marx made too many leaps without laying out a comprehensive stepped plan for getting from revolution to the State withering away to rule by the proletarian committees. Marxism was also a reflection of a late 19th and early 20th century world economy with a very different agricultural & industrial structure than what now exists under contemporary globalized capitalism. The movement now is globally towards a kind of automatic, as brainless as possible totalitarian plutonomy that places a one-size-fits-all emphasis on the ruthless process of capitalist exploitation of labor and natural resources and increasingly less emphasis on the real or perceived validity of ANY historically understood political system.
This has rendered the late 19th and 20th century political spectrum from communism to fascism (and every form of socialism, democracy, failing republic, etc., in between) obsolete in terms of honestly and comprehensively addressing the greatest and historically unprecedented threats now confronting all humankind and much of the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms. These are global degradation of the biosphere and the acceleration of that degradation by human over-populations and a wasteful and inequitable capitalist distribution system for allocating resources that plunders all available resources as if they were infinite.
America long has been a nation of cowardly war criminals -- not just its leaders, but also its sheeple, who like to think of themselves as citizens of the greatest country in the world. But no matter how brutal the acts of individual soldiers, they pale before the destruction that we rain down on the Afghan population from the air. Our press never talks about it, but America fights its wars from the air, using our born again Christian air force to slaughter thousands.
The air force theorizes that it will "break" the population, but decades of history of air warfare debunks this claim. People resist.
But unlike fat and complacent Americans, the Afghans will continue to fight against the most brutal military force in the world.
Why take a finger as an artifact,that's primitive! In Vietnam we wore garlands of ears proudly as we murdered dangerous people in grass huts that threatened the American way of taking care of business.
America long has been a nation of cowardly war criminals -- not just its leaders, but also its sheeple, who like to think of themselves as citizens of the greatest country in the world. But no matter how brutal the acts of individual soldiers, they pale before the destruction that we rain down on the Afghan population from the air. Our press never talks about it, but America fights its wars from the air, using our born again Christian air force to slaughter thousands.
The air force theorizes that it will "break" the population, but decades of history of air warfare debunks this claim. People resist.
But unlike fat and complacent Americans, the Afghans will continue to fight against the most brutal military force in the world.
from the article:
'Morlock and another soldier, Andrew Holmes, were on guard at the edge of a poppy field'...
the clues are so obvious...
Here's a reflection on the Abu Graib incident, no doubt the same will happen with this one.
The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts
The rush to attribute a “bad-boy:” dispositional judgment to the few offenders is all too common among the guardians of the System. “Frankly, I think we are all disappointed by the actions of the few,” said Brigadier General Mark Kimmot, interviewed on 60 minutes.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld denounced the acts as “terrible” and “inconsistent with the values of our nation. Any wrongdoers need to be punished, procedures evaluated, and problems corrected. If someone doesn’t know that doing what is shown in those photos is wrong, cruel, brutal, indecent, and against American values, I am at a loss as to what kind of training could be provided to teach them.”
The archconservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, the photos, such as one of a pyramid of naked prisoners, seemed little more than a college prank: “This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones [a Yale University secret society] initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper them [the accused soldiers] because they had a good time. You know these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people. You ever hear of emotional release? You heard of need to blow off some steam?”
What is significant is the number of people who knew of the abuses, witnessed them, even participated in them in various ways and did nothing to prevent, stop, or report them. They provided “social proof” to the MPs that it was acceptable to continue doing whatever they wanted to do. Medics and nurses often were guilty of not helping victims in distress, of observing brutality and looking the other way, and worse, they signed off on false death certificates and lied about the nature of wounds and broken limbs.
And here's a perspective on Atrocity Kills...
On Killing by LtCol Dave Grossman, 2009, Excerpts
Atrocity has always been part of war, and in order to understand war we must understand atrocity. Atrocity – this close-range murder of the innocent and helpless – is the most repulsive aspect of war, and that which resides within man and permits him to perform these acts is the most repulsive aspect of mankind. The killing is always traumatic. But when you have to kill women and children, or when you have to kill men in their houses, in front of their wives and children, and when you have to do it not from twenty thousand feet up, the horror transcends description or understanding.
The shock and horror of seeing unprovoked violent death meted out creates a deep atavistic fear in human beings. Through atrocity the oppressed population can be numbed into a learned helplessness state of submission and compliance. The effect on the atrocity-committing soldiers appears to be very similar. Human life is profoundly cheapened by these acts, and the soldier realizes that one of the lives that has been cheapened is his own.
http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2010/2/28/4466517.html
In discussing the barbarian in Florida who plans to burn a pile of Qurans on 9/11, General Petraeus compared him to, in his words, "the extremists" who released the pictures of Abu Ghraib, thereby stirring up hate in the Muslim world.
"Morlock and another soldier, Andrew Holmes, were on guard at the edge of a poppy field"
Were they guarding the poppy field for the CIA?
"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."
It would seem that the "cocktail" also included hashish because cannibinoids are known to stay in the system for thirty days or more. So, of course, he must be excused of drug abuse because he was using drugs. Catch 22, subcatch (d) I suppose.
Ah, yes, our best and brightest.
GET THE "EFF" OUT OF AFGHANISTAN.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The U.S. military, true to its intensified 21st century schizophrenia, has for several years now been selectively guarding some Afghan poppy fields and helping to destroy others depending on who benefits economically from them. I saw articles (with pictures of U.S. Marines protecting opium fields) about this over 2 years ago in my Deep South city's only daily McNews rag. Just another ugly fact from which post-Bush "Amurkans" automatically avert their eyes lest they contemplate what it reveals about American "exceptionalism." The pre-2001 Taliban were a mixture of sexist semi-literates and illiterates but they had vanquished mass opium farming from Afghanistan until the U.S. and its puppets revved it up again.
Did you see the movie Green Zone?
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
No. Haven't heard of that one before.
GREEN ZONE is a movie released this year - 2010.
'Chessgames' is right on. Don't miss this one.
What'll ya bet our filthy media won't cover this story.
They're busy with important news, like covering every bowel movement of the nut-case preacher (OK - I realize that's and oxymoron.)
BREAKING NEWS
Effective immediately troops scheduled for overseas deployment will be schooled in the Dale Carnegie book, How to win friends and influence people.
The Guardian calls this crime "one of the most serious accusations of war crimes to emerge from the Afghan conflict." As terrible as these actions are, they pale in comparison to the war crimes and crimes against humanity of W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowicz, Barry Obama, Hillary Clinton, et al.
Our national leaders are the real war criminals.