First photo shows a soldier from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division posing with a dead insurgent’s hand on his shoulder. Second photo shows soldiers posing with the mangled corpse of a suicide bomber.
The Defense Department tried to prevent the photos from being published. Los Angeles Times went and did it anyway. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta:
"This is war. And I know that war is ugly, and it’s violent. And I know that young people, sometimes caught up in the moment, make some very foolish decisions. I am not excusing that. That’s—I’m not excusing that behavior. But neither do I want these images to bring further injury to our people or to our relationship with the Afghan people. We had urged the L.A. Times not to—not to run those photos. And the reason for that is those kinds of photos are used by the enemy to incite violence, and lives have been lost as a result of the publication of similar photos in the past. We regret that they were published."
Fucking christ. Bush's third goddamn term.
"And I know that war is ugly, and it’s violent."
The American people can't know this though. That's why you tried to censor the press and prevent us from seeing these photos.
I want to know why everyone acts so surprised when this shit happens. Are Army ads and propaganda really this effective, that we can just block these things out and pretend they don't happen? Body mutilation within war is something older than recorded history. The Greeks would drag dead bodies behind their chariots. American soldiers in World War II would take back souvenir decapitated Jap heads. You cannot go to war without accepting that body mutiliation will happen. If you can turn a blind eye to all of these horrors by saying "YEAH WELL THAT'S WAR, GET OVER IT", if you react to the idea of war with anything other than indescribable horror, then you don't know what war is. More veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have committed suicide than have been killed in combat. More female soldiers have been raped by their fellow soldiers than have been killed in combat. Oh, well. That's war, too bad. Get over it.
17 innocent Afghans were murdered by a U.S. soldier(s) in their homes recently. Most of the victims were children. 17. For the love of god, 15 people were killed at Columbine. We have the privilege of reading about this, saying "hm" to ourselves, and going back to dinner, but the survivors are going to live with this for the rest of their lives. More than half of the victims were from one family. The father wasn't home at the time, and his entire family was massacred. One child is all he has left.
When you choose to bomb a city from the air, you know, absolutely know, that there are going to be bombs that will land on innocent people. We can ease our minds, assure ourselves that we're different from the terrorists, by saying these deaths are accidental. But we would be lying to ourselves. When the hawks assure us that air raids are always organized in such a way as to "minimize" civilian casualties, they are telling us that they about to to drop bombs on innocent children, they are okay with that, and there is not a goddamn thing this "democracy" can do about it.
The pullout date for Afghanistan is supposed to be 2014. Why? Why not pull out now, immediately? Afghans don't want us there, for one thing. We keep bombing their homes and killing their families. Secondly, what is our goal in Afghanistan? What are we accomplishing within the next two years that will enable us to pull out? We're not launching some massive military attack on anything, because what could we possibly attack? Everything out of eyeshot of an American base is in insurgent control. If there's no goal and no way for us to declare victory, then what's the point of putting it off another couple years, during which thousands of more people are going to be killed? Why is this war being fought?
I'm fucking sick of this. I'm sick of dumbshit Americans pretending Afghanistan is over. I'm sick of America's only two parties being pro-war. I'm sick of American soldiers and Afghan civilians dying for contractors. I'm sick of them dying for no other reason than opening up foreign markets for American corporations. I'm sick of constantly being lied to, of being told that there's an actual reason why our soldiers are being killed, for my "freedom." The deaths of American soldiers are meaningless, and they need be remembered as meaningless. If we had taken that lesson away from Vietnam, maybe we'd stop fighting pointless fucking wars for neocolonialist shitheads.
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