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BURN THEM ALL

by Open-Publishing - Saturday 22 October 2005
10 comments

BURN BABY BURN

By Peter Fredson

October 22, 2005

A reporter on the Afghanistan scene last Thursday photographed and described the burning of corpses of Afghan soldiers who had died fighting invading U.S. troops.

On the rocky hilltop above Gonbaz village in southern Afghanistan U.S. soldiers burned the corpses of the two Taliban fighters. Lt. Eric Nelson, of B Company, I-508 platoon told the villagers to pick up the corpses and bury them. But the villagers refused so the Lieutenant decided to burn the corpses due to their bloated and stinking condition.

Lt. Nelson took the decision that could jeopardize his service career. "We decided to burn the bodies," one soldier recounts, "because they were bloated and they stank."

The horrible act was recorded on film by Australian photojournalist, Stephen DuPont or nobody would have been the wiser. The army propaganda machine would ignore any such incidents as deleterious to morale and to the flow of cash and votes to the Bush machine.

When the footage was shown on Australian TV it unleashed a storm of rage. A Pentagon spokesman, true to the Bush overview of much recent criticism of acts of brutality against Muslims, said the incident was "repugnant" and that the army would investigate into the alleged incident.

After a short time to develop news of some kidnapped girl or of some feast for visiting dignitaries in Crawford, Texas, the public will be distracted enough to forget the entire incident.

To make matters much worse than desecration of bodies in Muslim culture was the statement that a U.S. Psychological-Operations team came to the scene with loudspeakers blaring "Taliban, you are cowardly dogs. You are too scared to come down and retrieve the bodies. This just proves you are the lady-boys we always believed you to be.”

Probably Karl Rove will explain this away as tantamount to a football player dancing a little victory dance after scoring a touchdown. No big deal.

We now can expect some pious statements about a few rotten apples, and how wonderful American values really are and what a wonderful sensitive and heroic leader George Bush is and how horrified he and Laura and Condi and Donald were at such unusual behavior.

Probably a corporal will be demoted.

There will surely be a dozen references to 9/11, some moralizing, and a lot of True Believer bloggers showing how those indecent infidels had it coming to them.

Some U.S. Army officers will make statements about the fact that Muslims also create atrocities, and will take considerable pains to point out several beheadings as exculpatory excuses to condone American behavior. They will show how they came to combat EVIL and are making good progress in killing 100,000 Muslims as revenge for the 3,000 deaths during the 9/11 tragedy.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, already angered by U.S. troops alleged desecration of the Koran, and continued reports of torture and abuse by U.S. troops in Guantanamo, and fully aware of the contemptuous reply of Bush to his request that U.S. troops begin to pull out of Afghanistan, condemned the action of U.S. troops without any hope that anything significant will be done about the invading army’s tactics.

Bush wants to “stay the course”, whatever that might be, and any hint that he might leave is received with imperial disdain that it might give aid and comfort to the enemy. Besides Karzai knows that Bush IS the law, and can do anything he pleases as long as word does not leak out that might cost him votes and cash.

Bush will give a speech carefully crafted by Karl Rove, in which he makes frequent reference to “democracy and freedom”, to the Syrians and Iranians, to Peace and Jesus, and again to 9/11 in an attempt to salvage his plummeting ratings and save his Senate sycophants their seats.

The U.S. Military Command issued a statement: "Under no circumstances does U.S. Central Command condone the desecration, abuse or inappropriate treatment of enemy combatants.” This will undoubtedly produce great laughter in the Oval Office where prayers will be said for George and Laura.

Islamic leaders warned of anti-American demonstrations but Bush policy is to ignore all such warnings as he wants to “bring ‘em on.”

The fact that the Geneva convention says that the "dead are to be honorably interred, if possible according to the rites of the religion to which they belonged" signifies nothing to Christian Bush supporters as any beliefs of Muslims are to be regarded as false, and their false religion, false sacred book, and false god are to be eradicated as soon as the Bush crusade towards the Rapture is accomplished.

Same old, same old.

Forum posts

  • Peter Ustinov said that "Terrorism is the war of the poor and war is the terrorism of the rich". We will never overcome the pain and suffering of war and injustice until we expose the false dichotomy of the right and wrong "sides" of armed conflict. All people who participate in wars, whether declared or otherwise are terrorists. The US, or any other soldiers for that matter, are just as much terrorists as the Taleban, or suicide bombers. I don’t care what flag you fly or what holy book you thump, it is subhuman to burn, maim, rape, and otherwise violate other people. When people wake up and refuse to participate in the terrorism de jour, the state will no longer have pawns to use in their evil endeavors to take power land and resources.

    • I could not agree more. It doesn’t matter who or for what reason the killing takes place.

  • You go overboard with your condemnation when you don’t know the whole story. The muslims would not pick up their own. The local muslims would not take them because they were "foreign fighters" You can’t bury a body on a mountain - its solid rock up there. The bodies were already bloated and would have been starting to become a health hazard. so what would you have done?

    Would you risk sending several soldiers down the mountain, carrying the bloated dead bodies so they could be properly buried? Thats not feasible. A war is going on out there, in case you haven’t noticed. This would be a good way to stop the war. Kill a muslim and then make the soldiers wait while they carry them down the mountain.

    The Geneva Convention says "Cremation can take place only for imperative reasons of hygiene or if required by the religion of the deceased."

    Your report is not balanced, shows your bias and lack of knowledge

    • 24. Thanks for your spirited defense of the occupation of your military hero George W. Bush. As a blogger remarked to me:

      "Would anyone truly believe that screaming in loudspeakers abusive messages while burning corpses helps sterilize the air from the stinking dead flesh?..."

      If the dead soldiers had been U.S. the rest of the platoon would have exerted full efforts to get them off the mountain. I have been on mountain ridges with dead around me, and would have carried dead and bloated soldiers off the ridge for proper burial at all risks to myself. I did not distinguish between what nation the dead were from.

      The whole affair stinks of undisciplined soldiers, of cultural hatred toward enemy combatants, and of the facility with which some soldiers adopt cruel and illegal practices, because, after all, George Bush is above the law, can do what he wants with enemy soldiers, and is part of his crusade against Muslims.

      No I hadn’t noticed that a war was going on there. I thought it was a crusade, a police action, or possibly a revenge from Bush against infidels to bring on the RAPTURE for his loonies.

    • Hey moron...there is no point making excuses for the disgusting perverted acts of the U.S. soldiers. The United States government through several of their military spokspersons and the congress too have all said it was a dispicable criminal act and that the perverts involved would be repramanded. So what are you doing going around trying to act like you know something they do not, were you there? NO. Are you in charge of the investigation to bring these perverts to justice? NO....so why don’t you just shut the fuck up and stop pretending.

    • I think you missed the point....We have no right to be there in the first place ! The men who died trying to defend their territory are heroes. We have violated every human right by our presence. What for... Bush’s oil of course, and for the benefit of his cronies.... Killing is WRONG. What is war anyway??? It’s the governments playing chess with human lives in order to fill their greedy powermongering souls.

    • The facts seem to be that the soldiers cremated the bodies when it became necessary to do so. The psy-ops "bullhorn" attack then came from other soldiers, who didn’t mention the burning itself in their taunts which were restricted to the putative cowardice of those who would not retrieve their dead. In "wartime" of whatever sort, both actions seem reasonable to me and it is only by twisting the link between the two separate actions that one can ascribe cruel or unusual motives to the soldiers, whom even the Australian journalist who broke the story defends.

  • I think you are making a big deal about some soldiers burning some stinking rotten corpses. The villagers should have buried them to begin with, because the corpses can cause all sorts of nasty diseases.

    These are Taliban soldiers not "freedom" fighters from Afganistan. They deserved to die for trying to opress the people of that country. They chose to fight and kill, and so they were killed themselves. They were not doing it for the people, they were doing this to spread their diseased view of the Koran.

    • And you are the Taliban American style....no difference....you think it is okay to torture and kill innocent people for your cause however sick it is...and the desecration of corpses is a perverted act...all the false excuses for burning these bodies as just doing it because they were "rotting" or "stinking" just shows that you are a sick puppy, without ANY morals....I would put money on a bet that you think you are a Christian don’t you????

    • What makes them false, those excuses for burning these bodies? What makes them an excuse. They did it for a reason: to dispose of the bodies the only way possible to them. If they could bury them, I’m sure they would have, but that was not possible, not in any way that could have been acceptable to the tenets of Islam. I know this from the source of the controversial video, Stephen Dupont. Whether the act was then used for psychological insult is besides the point. That psychological, and only psychological intent, was manufactured after the fact, for legitimate and laudable ends of war. If they wanted to burn them all, they could have destroyed the whole village instead of taunting combatants into conflict. To "burn them all" was not the intent, nor the manner in which our soldiers prosecute this war. Whatever you think about its origins, or our President (I, myself, believe he’s engaged us in a wholly unjustified war in Iraq), these soldiers committed to service, our nation’s service, and if you want to blame them for being there in the first place, blame yourself for your wholly ineffective arguments about how to run a progressive country. Calling people names–sick puppy, Christian, whatever-is absolutely pathetic. If you don’t blame yourself for Bush’s second term, then you don’t know the meaning of democracy.