Is the U.S. covering for additional troops involved in Afghan massacre?

March 20th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

By Madison Ruppert

Afghan men investigate at the site of an shooting incident in Kandahar province, March 11, 2012. Afghanistan’s defense ministry said coalition forces killed 15 civilians in a shooting spree in Kandahar province on Sunday, an incident likely to deepen a crisis in relations between Washington and Kabul. (Image credit: REUTERS/Ahmad Nadeem via Public Intelligence)

Rumors and eyewitness accounts have been circulating since the news first broke of the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, which left 16 dead.

Most of these focus on casting doubt on the American account of a lone wolf gunman acting completely on his own without the involvement of any other soldiers.

However, it is not pure rumor; indeed a probe conducted by the Afghan parliament determined that up to 20 American troops were involved in the killing.

According to Pajhwok Afghan News, the nine-member parliamentary probe spent two days in the southern Kandahar province conducting interviews with the families of the victims, tribal elders, as well as survivors while collecting evidence at the site of the brutal slayings in the Panjwai district.

Hamidzai Lali, a lawmaker representing the Kandahar province at the Wolesi Jirga, told Pajhwok Afghan News, that their probe concluded that there were anywhere between 15 to 20 American soldiers involved in the murders.

“We closely examined the site of the incident, talked to the families who lost their beloved ones, the injured people and tribal elders,” he said.

Lali stated that the attack lasted an entire hour and involved two different groups of American soldiers.

“The villages are one and a half kilometer[s] from the American military base. We are convinced that one soldier cannot kill so many people in two villages within one hour at the same time, and the 16 civilians, most of them children and women, have been killed by the two groups,” he said.

Lali has called for the Afghan government along with the United Nations and the rest of the international community to make sure that those who were responsible for the killings are brought to justice in Afghanistan.

Unfortunately, that looks almost entirely unlikely due to the fact that the soldier allegedly responsible for the killing spree has already been returned to Kansas, far out of the reach of the Afghan government.

Lali expressed anger with the fact that the soldier was flown out of Afghanistan, although at the time of his comments he was in Kuwait, whereas now he is all the way back in the United States.

He issued a somewhat grave warning from the people that they had met with concerning the massacre.

Lali stated that if those troops who were responsible were not punished, they would launch a movement in opposition to the Afghans who had agreed to the presence of foreign soldiers during the first Bonn conference back in 2001.

According to Lali, the Wolesi Jirga – Afghanistan’s “Assembly of the People,” the lower house of the Afghan parliament – will not stop their quest for justice until the killers were prosecuted in Afghanistan.

Of course, the United States is wholly opposed to subjecting American troops to the laws of the countries in which they operate, as this would open many soldiers up to criminal prosecution for their activities.

“If the international community does not play its role in punishing the perpetrators, the Wolesi Jirga would declare foreign troops as occupying forces, like the Russians,” Lali warned.

As I reported last year, polls have shown that the majority of the people in Afghanistan already see the foreign troops as occupying forces, and I bet that if I lived there I would feel exactly the same.

Even as an outsider, I find our sustained presence and the murder of Afghans that comes with it wholly deplorable, unnecessary and unacceptable.

The American military seeks to keep their soldiers as immune as possible when it comes to prosecution in foreign lands, in order to enable brutal activities which are likely illegal under the domestic law of the nations they are operating in.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been making some heated statements and demands, although it now appears that these may be nothing more than an attempt to pacify the rightfully angered people of Afghanistan.

Karzai’s account of the recent phone call between President of the United States Barack Obama and himself diverges significantly from the impression given by an anonymous Obama administration official to the New York Times.

“What we found out,” one Obama administration official with knowledge of the 20-minute call said to the New York Times, was that when it comes to the endgame, “we’re actually on the same page.”

This page is likely the understanding that North American Treaty Organization (NATO) and International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops will move towards a support role this coming year with 2014 seeing a winding down of combat operations.

After 2014, American Special Forces trainers under the guise of a “counterterrorism force” would continue to operate in Afghanistan and train the Afghan security forces to become brutally efficient killers.

However, as I have repeatedly reported, the likelihood of this plan becoming reality is slim, at best.

This is evidenced by discussions at last year’s Loya Jirga, along with the continued development of cutting edge military hardware and the deployment of said hardware to Afghanistan.

While White House insiders claim that Karzai and Obama are in agreement – something which is supported by Karzai’s actions – Karzai’s description of the call is entirely different.

“I told him what I had told him before — that you should get out of our villages,” Karzai said, adding that he wanted to see the transition completed in a year, not by the 2014 deadline which has been bandied about so often.

“We will insist on this issue,” he said. “We know that our country has suffered both from its own people and the foreigners.”

“This has been going on for too long. You have heard me before, therefore, it is by all means the end of the rope here,” he said of the latest round of killings, which he tied to the “hundreds” of such incidents which have occurred across Afghanistan.

“This form of activity, this behavior, cannot be tolerated,” Karzai added.

“On the question of the account of the one person, supposedly, who has done this, the story of the village elders [in the region of the killings] and the affected people is entirely different. They believe it is not possible for one person to do that,” Karzai said.

Addressing a meeting with the parliamentary investigation team, family members of the victims along with Karzai himself, one man from a family which lost a shocking 11 family members said, “When I saw my wife’s body, her hand had been cut off. This was not the work of one person.”

“Helicopters were over the village … we have witnesses that saw it was more than one person,” he added although he himself did not personally witness the attack.

Western military officials have explained the presence of helicopters by saying that they were dispatched to pick up the injured.

They also say that groups of soldiers which were witnessed in the village were sent out as a search party once it was noticed that the killer was absent.

They claim that surveillance footage supports the lone wolf conclusion, although Karzai said that the parliamentary investigators did not find the surveillance video provided by the United States to be convincing, according to the British Guardian.

Furthermore, the Afghan army chief of staff reported to the meeting that a U.S. commander critical to the investigation had not returned their calls during the course of the investigation.

“The Afghan investigation team did not receive the co-operation that they expected from the United States, therefore these are all questions that [we] will be raising, and raising very loudly and raising very clearly,” Karzai said, referring to the unanswered questions surrounding multiple troop involvement in the killing.

He emphasized that his call to get foreign troops out of Afghan villages was quite serious, adding that these types of rural settlements are not the centers of terrorism, instead he pointed to neighboring countries (which was likely a jab at Pakistan).

Later, the White House said that during the conversation Karzai and Obama “agreed to further discuss concerns voiced by President Karzai about the presence of foreign troops in Afghan villages.”

However, I find it highly unlikely that any progress will be made on this front, since the United States government has made in painfully clear that this will not, in any way, affect or change their current approach to Afghanistan.

I find this quite unfortunate, as I see the latest massacre as yet another item on a long list of reasons why we need to stop the occupation and leave Afghanistan altogether.

But since war profiteers dominate American politics and the complete sham that is the “War on Terror” continues to burn in the minds of so many Americans, I doubt that we are going to see major change any time soon.

The question of if multiple individuals were involved is still up in the air, with the Afghan inquiries raising some major problems with the official story.

To me, it makes complete sense that the American military would decide that one person was responsible and defend that assertion as much as possible, since more troops being involved would mean more of a political and legal headache for the military.

It would likely look much worse if 20 troops went out on a coordinated killing spree – which honestly seems much more likely given some of the details brought up in the inquiry – rather than one lone soldier who had a mental breakdown of some kind.

The Western media and American government have been attempting to shift the blame as much as possible, with New York Times quoting an anonymous U.S. official who claimed that the soldier may have “snapped” after illicitly consuming alcohol.

Similarly, Wired’s Danger Room recently tried to pin some of the blame on the brain injuries the soldier had sustained previously, which indeed has been linked to decreased impulse control. However, no science links brain trauma to atrocious killing sprees.

Personally, I think all of these reasons are a way to ignore the real culprit: war.

The military creates these individuals who kill with cold-blooded efficiency, puts them in an unimaginably high-stress situation for years at a time, and then acts surprised when someone “snaps” and uses their training against innocent people.

Perhaps we should blame the fact that we are even in Afghanistan to begin with, especially after a decade of zero progress.

If anything should be implicated and held responsible, it is the culture of violence that is the military as well as the presence of American occupiers in a foreign nation.

If we truly want to prevent horrific incidents like this from occurring, then the only option is to leave Afghanistan and stop our international warmongering and imperialistic interventionist adventurism.

Did I miss anything? Would you like to send me some of your own original work, tip me off to a story or just give me some much needed feedback? Email me at [email protected]

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