Are US
Forces Executing Kids in Afghanistan? Americans Don't Even
Know to Ask
5 January 2010By Dave Lindorff
The Taliban suicide attack that killed a group of CIA
agents in Afghanistan on a base that was directing US
drone aircraft used to attack Taliban leaders was big
news in the US over the past week, with the airwaves
and front pages filled with sympathetic stories
referring to the fact that the female station chief,
who was among those killed, was the “mother of three
children.”
But the apparent mass murder of Afghan school
children, including one as young as 11 years old, by
US-led forces (most likely either special forces or
mercenary contractors working for the Pentagon or the
CIA), was pretty much blacked out in the American
media. Especially blacked out was word from UN
investigators that the students had not just been
killed but executed, many of them after having first
been rousted from their bedroom and handcuffed.
Here is the excellent report on the incident that ran
in the Times of London (like Fox News, a Rupert
Murdoch-owned publication) on Dec. 31:?
Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan
civilians, including children
By Jerome Starkey in Kabul
American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging
innocent children from their beds and shooting them
during a night raid that left ten people dead.
Afghan government investigators said that eight
schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from
the same family. Locals said that some victims were
handcuffed before being killed.
Western military sources said that the dead were all
part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for
manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs),
which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and
civilians.
“This was a joint operation that was conducted against
an IED cell that Afghan and US officials had been
developing information against for some time,” said a
senior Nato insider. But he admitted that “the facts
about what actually went down are in dispute”.
The article goes on to say:
In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster
[of the local school] said that the victims were
asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. “Seven
students were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A
student and one guest were in another room, a guest
room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third
building.
“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and
shot two of them. Then they entered another room and
handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them.
Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came
outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He
was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”
A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were
killed in one room and five were handcuffed before
they were shot. “I saw their school books covered in
blood,” he said.
The investigation found that eight of the victims were
aged from 11 to 17. The guest was a shepherd boy, 12,
called Samar Gul, the headmaster said. He said that
six of the students were at high school and two were
at primary school. He said that all the students were
his nephews.
Compare this article to the one mention of the
incident which appeared in the New York Times, one of
the few American news outlets to even mention the
incident. The Times, on Dec. 28, focusing entirely on
the difficulty civilian killings cause for the US war
effort, and not on the allegation of a serious war
crime having been committed, wrote:
Attack Puts Afghan Leader and NATO at Odds
By Alissa J. Rubin and Abdul Waheed Wafa
KABUL, Afghanistan — The killing of at least nine men
in a remote valley of eastern Afghanistan by a joint
operation of Afghan and American forces put President
Hamid Karzai and senior NATO officials at odds on
Monday over whether those killed had been civilians or
Taliban insurgents.
In a statement e-mailed to the news media, Mr. Karzai
condemned the weekend attack and said the dead had
been civilians, eight of them schoolboys. He called
for an investigation.
Local officials, including the governor and members of
Parliament from Kunar Province, where the deaths
occurred, confirmed the reports. But the Kunar police
chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, cautioned that his office
was still investigating the killings and that
outstanding questions remained, including why the
eight young men had been in the same house at the
time.
“There are still questions to be answered, like why
these students were together and what they were doing
on that night,” Mr. Ziayee said.
A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation
said that the raid had been carried out by a joint
Afghan-American force and that its target was a group
of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of
homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces
call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s.
According to the NATO official, nine men were killed.
“These were people who had a well-established network,
they were I.E.D. smugglers and also were responsible
for direct attacks on Afghan security and coalition
forces in those areas,” said the official, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy
of the issue.
“When the raid took place they were armed and had
material for making I.E.D.’s,” the official added.
While the article in the New York Times eventually
mentions the allegation that the victims were
children, not “men,” it nonetheless begins with the
unchallenged assertion in the lead that they were
“men.” There is no mention of the equally serious
allegation that the victims had been handcuffed before
being executed, and the story leaves the impression,
made by NATO sources, that they were armed and had
died fighting. There is no indication in the Times
story that the reporters made any effort, as the more
enterprising and skeptical London Times reporter did,
to get local, non-official, sources of information.
Moreover, the information claiming that the victims
had been making bombs was attributed by Rubin and Wafa,
with no objections from their editors in New York, to
an anonymous NATO source, though there was no
legitimate reason for the anonymity (“because of the
delicacy of the situation” was the lame excuse
offered)--indeed the use of an anonymous source here
would appear to violate the Times’ own standards.
It’s not that in American newsrooms there was no
knowledge that a major war crime may have been
committed. Nearly all American news organizations
receive the AP newswire. Here is the AP report on the
killings, which ran under the headline “UN says killed
Afghans were students”:
The United Nations says a raid last weekend by foreign
troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight
local students.
The Afghan government says that all 10 people killed
in a village in Kunar province were civilians. NATO
says there is no evidence to substantiate the claim
and has requested a joint investigation.
UN special representative in Afghanistan Kai Eide said
in a statement Thursday that preliminary investigation
shows there were insurgents in the area at the time of
the attack. But he adds that eight of those killed
were students in local schools.
Once again, the American media are falling down
shamefully in providing honest reporting on a war,
making it difficult for the American people to make
informed judgements about what is being done in their
name.
Let’s be clear here. If the charges are correct, that
American forces, or American-led forces, are
handcuffing their victims and then executing them,
then they are committing egregious war crimes. If they
are killing children, they are committing equally
egregious war crimes. If they are handcuffing and
executing children, the atrocity is beyond horrific.
This incident, if true, would actually be worse than
the infamous war crime that occurred in My Lai during
the Vietnam War. In that case, we had ordinary
soldiers in the field, acting under the orders of
several low-ranking officers in the heat of an
operation, shooting and killing women, children and
babies. But in this case we appear to have seasoned
special forces troops actually directing the taking
captives, cuffing them, herding them into a room, and
spraying them with bullets, execution style.
Given the history of the commanding general in
Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who is known
to have run a massive death squad operation in Iraq
before being named to his current post by President
Obama, and who is known to have called for the same
kind of tactics in Afghanistan, it should not be
surprising that the US would now be committing
atrocities in Afghanistan. If this is how this war is
going to be conducted, though, the US media should be
making a major effort to uncover and expose the crime.
On January 1, the London Times’ Starkey, in
Afghanistan, followed up with a second story,
reporting that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is
calling for the US to hand over the people who killed
the students. He also quoted a “NATO source” as saying
that the “foreigners involved” in the incident were
“non-military, suggesting that they were part of a
secret paramilitary unit based in the capital” of
Kabul. Starkey also quotes a “Western official” as
saying: “There’s no doubt that there were insurgents
there, and there may well have been an insurgent
leader in the house, but that doesn’t justify
executing eight children who were all enrolled in
local schools.”
Good enterprise reporting by the London Times and its
Kabul-based correspondent. Silence on these
developments in the US media.
Meanwhile, it has been a week now since the New York
Times reporters Rubin and Wafa made their first flawed
and embarrassingly one-sided report on the incident,
and there has been not a word since then about it in
the paper. Are Rubin and Wafa or other Times reporters
on the story? Will there be a follow-up?
On the evidence of past coverage of these US wars and
their ongoing atrocities by the Times and by other
major US corporate media news organizations, don’t bet
on it. You’ll do better looking to the foreign media
for real information about a story like this.
By the way, given that we’re talking the allegation of
a serious war crime here, it is important to note
that, under the Geneva Conventions, it is a legal
requirement that the US military chain of command
immediately initiate an official investigation to
determine whether such a crime has occurred, and if
so, to establish who was responsible and bring them to
justice. One would hope that the commander in chief,
President Obama, would order such an inquiry.
Any effort to prevent such an inquiry, or to cover up
a war crime, would be a war crime in itself. We just
had one administration that did a lot of that. We
don’t need another one.
Editorial Comment:
As a teenager, I spent a year going to school in
Darmstadt, in what was then West Germany. I used to
have many discussions with German friends about how
Germans could have allowed Nazism to happen, and how
anyone could have allowed the kinds of atrocities
which we Americans learned that German soldiers had
committed during the war--the destroying of entire
towns when one partisan fired on a German soldier, the
killing of prisoners of war, etc. Of course we know
now that Americans too committed equally heinous war
crimes, culminating in the use of the two atomic bombs
against civilian targets, not to mention the
firebombing of Darmstadt itself by the Brits. But the
larger point at the time was, how could Germans, who
are decent people for the most part, have allowed the
horror of Nazism to happen?
Now we are confronted yet again with an example of
American military forces (and it matters not a whit
whether they are uniformed regular soldiers or paid
mercenaries who executed those Afghan kids) apparently
committing exactly the type of atrocity for which the
German Waffen SS was known. And whether or not the
charges are true, there is enough evidence at this
point, with the special UN representative in
Afghanistan saying it happened, for us to believe it
probably did happen. Yet there has not been one
editorial in the US media calling for an open
investigation into this alleged atrocity. No Americans
are marching in the street demanding answers. Obama,
whose daughter Malia is 11--the same age as the
youngest of the slain boys--has not said a word,
although Afghan students are demonstrating en masse,
and burning him in effigy because of this latest
outrage.
So what makes us Americans any better than the Germans
of 1940? In a way, we are really worse. It would have
taken considerable courage, as my German friends have
pointed out, to take a stand against German atrocities
in 1940, when such a stand could mean arrest,
imprisonment and even execution, even execution of
one's family. No such risks are faced by Americans who
take a stand against American atrocities. Here one
faces, at most, social ostracism or a minor citation
for arrest at a protest.
We are, as a nation, only as good as our worst
behavior and our worst impulses, and can be judged by
how we respond to them when they are manifested in our
name. And right now, Americans aren't looking very
good at all.
PS: Kudos to David Swanson of the website
www.afterdowningstreet.org, for bringing attention to
this story.
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