Another Nato Service - Body Parts Collected

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.
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. Full Story Here

Human Rights Report - Afghan Civilian Casualties

'The arrival of thousands of additional US/NATO forcesforces into the country, and the desire to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" the insurgents and their al Qaeda associates by military might, bodes ill to civilian Afghans who have suffered the brunt of war casualties. The troop surge and the appointment of Gen. David Petraeus as the commander of all US/NATO forces has widely been interpreted as 'the last push before exit' which not only has emboldened the insurgents but has also encouraged Pakistan, Iran and other regional interventionist states to resurface and back proxies for a post-US/NATO Afghanistan.'

Link to Relief Web article and full report here

Tony Blair And 'The Politics of Condemnation'

In the days of the long war in Northern Ireland, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness for years used the same response when asked to condemn IRA bombings and killings. They would say 'we are not going to indulge in the politics of condemnation'. Since the Good Friday Agreement the phraseology had become redundant. But Tony Blair, US Middle East Puppet 'Peace Envoy' (God help us) courtesy of George Bush, dusted it off and trotted it out as his weasel worded whitewash for the phosphorous bombing of civilians in Gaza in 2009 by his Israeli friends. Within hours his New Labour acolytes were trotting it out on the BBC and Channel 4 news. The same, exact phrase. Where is the 'Peace Envoy' now that his chums have innocent blood on their hands once again? A deafening and eloquent silence. Surely it merits at least a quote for the Murdoch media along the lines that we shouldn't indulge in the 'politics of...........' Well, you know the rest.  

Bomb Disposal Deaths (2 in a year) 'Unacceptable' Says Coroner

Oh yes? Try 2 deaths among Afghan civilians every half an hour on average as a death rate which is unacceptable, Mr. Coroner? Thought about that?

This is What We Are All Up Against

Robert Fisk called the Arms Fairs and promotions 'War Porn'. He was right and here it is in all its obscenity. Complete with price lists.

US Strategy In Afghanistan - Short Film

Latest NATO Massacres

Most recent atrocities here, here and here.

Did You Kill Blair Peach?

I remember seeing many people throughout the 80's wearing t-shirts with the emblazon 'Who Killed Blair Peach? Did You Kill Blair?' The murder in East London in 1979 of the teacher and peace activist has just been confirmed to be the work of the Metropolitan Police. The contemporary reports, released under the 30-year rule, have established that the police evidence of the time was falsified. The culprits have moved on but are still alive. Scotland Yard have said there will be no charges. Why not? Witnesses might be hard to trace but the report, and the background paperwork, date from 1979. This smacks of the ‘let’s move on and forget it’ brigade of New Labour and their London establishment-based cronies. ‘It was all a long time ago’ was never recognised before now to be a defence against murder (and, interestingly, war crimes) in Britain.The killers could be charged within a week.

NATO Credibility Questioned

'Chairman of the Freedom Association (Özgür-Der) Rıdvan Kaya labels those atrocities as NATO and US terrorism. “If we define terrorism as targeting civilians for political ends, then what has happened there is simply NATO and US terrorism,” he said, further arguing that the regret announced on the part of international forces does not translate into action. “The same thing happens after every civilian casualty. One of them takes the floor and says an investigation was launched into that particular incident. Nothing else happens after that. Innocent people simply keep being murdered in their homes, in public transportation vehicles and even in mosques.” He called on everybody with a conscience to speak up against those atrocities.' Full story here.

Daily NATO Massacre Bulletin

Four Afghan civilians were killed when NATO troops opened fire today on a bus in the southern province of Kandahar, the province where coalition forces are preparing a new offensive.A patrol of ISAF soldiers fired on the vehicle when it 'failed to respond to hand signals' an old chestnut which was used all the time in the aftermath of similar massacres in Iraq. Hamid Karzai “strongly condemned” the shooting in his usual inept and feeble fashion. Eighteen people were wounded in the attack Fazl Ahmad Sherzay, an official with the local police force, said to French news agencies.

More Civilian Deaths At NATO's Door

Officials in Afghanistan are investigating the latest deaths of civilians caused by an air strike and a clash with insurgents in the southern as well as eastern parts of the country. The probe comes as the U.S commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan had to assure a traditional assembly of Afghan leaders his troops are making utmost efforts to avoid civilian casualties in what he described as "a difficult war". NATO says its forces carried out an air strike Monday night on a compound in the district of Nahr-e-Saraj in southern Helmand province after 'coming under fire from insurgents' hiding inside. NATO officials say four civilians, including two women and a child died in the airstrike. The second incident occurred in the eastern Kapisa province where NATO troops wounded four children. One of the children died of wounds. The picture shows villagers burying people who were killed in an overnight raid in the Nangarhar province's Khogyani district, east of Kabul, on 05 April, 2010.

Spinning The Carnage Away

Glen Greenwald of Salon.com reports that Americans are being fed false and misleading "news" about the U.S. war in Afghanistan because major American media outlets, like the New York Times and CNN, publish propagandized Pentagon accounts of the violence and killing occurring there, without questioning the information they are fed.

One egregious example of of this occurred on February 12, 2010, when NATO's joint international force issued a press release that bore the headline Joint Force Operating In Gardez Makes Gruesome Discovery. The release said that after "intelligence confirmed militant activity" in a compound near a village in Paktika province, an international security force entered the compound and engaged "several insurgents" in a fire fight. Two "insurgents" were killed, the report said, and after the joint forces entered the compound, they "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed."

But an Afghan news report about the same incident differed wildly.

"The Latest Imprecise Operation"

Pajhwok Afghan News reported that U.S. Special Forces, acting on a misleading tip-off, mistakenly stormed the residence of the intelligence chief in the Zurmat district. His name was Daud, and he was inside the home celebrating the birth of his son with his family. Killed in the raid were Daud, his brother Zahir, and three women. The Afghan news further reported that "A gubernatorial spokesman ... verified the latest imprecise operation by NATO-led troops."

Despite this very different account of the incident, CNN repeated the Pentagon's fake version of the events, in an article titled Bodies found gagged, bound after Afghan "honor killing." In the article, CNN quoted an unnamed "senior U.S. military official" who speculated that the Taliban "could be" responsible for the women's deaths. The New York Times, too, published an article about the incident in which they admitted there were "differing accounts" of what had happened, but failed to describe these differing accounts beyond a mere mention, while reprinting NATO's version of the events in its entirety.

Pentagon Finally Admits Botched Raid

Almost two months later, the Pentagon was finally forced to admit that international forces had badly bungled the raid that night in Paktika, and that military troops had, in fact, killed the women during their assault on the residence. One of the women was a pregnant mother of ten, and the other was a pregnant mother of six children.

Reporters Who Tell the Truth are Intimidated

The Times of London's Afghanistan reporter, Jerome Starkey, wrote an article about the botched raid that was published at NiemanWatchdog.org. In his piece, he detailed how the U.S.-led forces had lied about the events at the February 12 raid, and speculated about why the American media mindlessly repeats lies advanced by the Pentagon about military events in Afghanistan. Starkey said he personally went to the scene of the raid and spent three days interviewing survivors -- something most news organizations won't do. He blamed news organizations' lack of resources, the danger of traveling around Afghanistan and the "embed culture" for the failure of news organizations the print the truth. But he also revealed that NATO tries to censor, intimidate and punish reporters who fail to report their official versions of events in Afghanistan. After Starkey wrote about whatreally happened at Paktika, NATO issued a press release titled ISAF Rejects Cover Up Allegation, which named Starkey personally and called his reports of the incident "categorically false." The release continued to claim that the women at Paktika were killed prior to the arrival of American and international troops, attributing their binding and gagging to a cultural pre-burial ritual.

Americans' Diet of Phony War News

In May, 2007, PRWatch published another blog listing over half a dozen other accounts of occasions on which the military fed false information to the media and soldiers' families. It seems the practice has not changed. This incident takes its place alongside a slew of other fictionalized "news" that the Pentagon has fed the media, like the myth of Jessica Lynch's "heroic firefight" and the circumstances surrounding the friendly-fire death of football star Pat Tillman.

Americans have been fed a diet of fictionalized accounts about the war in Afghanistan, thanks to our military which cannot be trusted to tell the public the truth about what they do. We can only wonder what might happen to support for the war if Americans got truthful accounts from its military about what happens in Afghanistan, instead of lies that have to be "outed" by the very few brave independent reporters who have the integrity to undertake that task, no matter the cost.

US Troops Removed Bullets From Bodies of Their Victims

Relatives at the grave of 5 of the victims

American troops removed bullets from the bodies of the victims, which included two pregnant women, a teenage girl, a police officer and his brother.police officer and his brother. The soldiers then cleaned the wounds with alcohol before telling their commanders the civilians had been discovered already dead for many hours. More here.