US 'kill team' trophy photos may trigger Afghan riots

[Jeff]

US Army 'kill team' in Afghanistan posed with photos of murdered civilians

Commanders brace for backlash of anti-US sentiment that could be more damaging than after the Abu Ghraib scandal

Jon Boone
The Guardian, Monday 21 March 2011

Commanders in Afghanistan are bracing themselves for possible riots and public fury triggered by the publication of "trophy" photographs of US soldiers posing with the dead bodies of defenceless Afghan civilians they killed.

Senior officials at Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Kabul have compared the pictures published by the German news weekly Der Spiegel to the images of US soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq which sparked waves of anti-US protests around the world.

They fear that the pictures could be even more damaging as they show the aftermath of the deliberate murders of Afghan civilians by a rogue US Stryker tank unit that operated in the southern province of Kandahar last year.

Some of the activities of the self-styled "kill team" are already public, with 12 men currently on trial in Seattle for their role in the killing of three civilians.

Five of the soldiers are on trial for pre-meditated murder, after they staged killings to make it look like they were defending themselves from Taliban attacks.

Other charges include the mutilation of corpses, the possession of images of human casualties and drug abuse.

All of the soldiers have denied the charges. They face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.

The case has already created shock around the world, particularly with the revelations that the men cut "trophies" from the bodies of the people they killed.

An investigation by Der Spiegel has unearthed approximately 4,000 photos and videos taken by the men.

The magazine, which is planning to publish only three images, said that in addition to the crimes the men were on trial for there are "also entire collections of pictures of other victims that some of the defendants were keeping".

...

One security manager for the US company DynCorp sent an email to clients warning that publication of the photos was likely "to incite the local population" as the "severity of the incidents to be revealed are graphic and extreme".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/ma ... -civilians

[anothershamus]

With the internet and social digital interaction, nowadays, anything could trigger a riot or incursion.
We have moved to a whole new level of reaction! Viva las interwebs!

On Edit: I wish we could trigger those pesky aliens to interact more!

[Nordic]

4,000 photos and they're going to publish 3.

Zounds.

[82_28]

Ah, again. The good old fashioned double bind writ bullshit psyop and death otherwise known as genocide when "sane" motherfuckers supposedly cared about their fellows in the nineteen motherfucking forties, the fucking high water mark supposedly of fucking global murderous insanity. We need a new fucking term for this supposedly ghastly genocide thing. Ugh.

You fuckers. (not you, fellow riggies)

When I was in 10th grade (and I know, yes, yes, I've told this fucking story before), but a girl in my remedial class brought in real honest to god, printed on Kodachrome pics of motherfuckers posing with bodies, sticking cigs in their mouths, thumbs upping, with the corpses the fucking US military had just got done exterminating on the "highway of death". She told us never to speak of them. Her stepdad was one of the "heroes" back then. Now, like porn, it's fucking everywhere. Absolutely no respect for any life or mind anywhere.

Some motherfucker told me tonight that "don't they realize this shit we're doing in Libya is just practice" for, ostensibly, all this new awesome weaponry. Good ol' "liberal Seattle".

A fucking double bind of intense proportions. Nobody will know the better once this spirals into complete media control.

[dbcooper41]

4,000 photos and they're going to publish 3.

i don't think these pics were selected randomly.

http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?s ... 6006518438

Jeremy Morlock & his family have been friends of the Palin's for 20+ years. If Jeremy Morlock and/or the Morlock Family were good friends with the Obama family instead of the Palin family...Sarah Palin and The Republican Party would make this Headline News everywhere in the world from now until 2012.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/2 ... 38254.html

SEATTLE — A photograph of a U.S. soldier smiling as he posed with the
bloodied and partially naked corpse of an Afghan civilian was among those
published digitally Sunday by a German news organization, despite attempts by
Army officials to keep them under wraps as part of a war crimes probe.
The photos published by Der Spiegel were among several seized by Army
investigators looking into the deaths of three unarmed Afghans last year. Five
soldiers based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, south of Seattle, have been charged
with murder and conspiracy in the case.
Officials involved in the courts-martial had issued a strict protective order,
seeking to severely limit access to the photographs due to their sensitive
nature. Some defense teams had been granted copies but were not allowed to
disseminate them.
It was not immediately known how Der Spiegel obtained copies.
One of the published photographs shows a key figure in the investigation, Cpl.
Jeremy Morlock of Wasilla, Alaska, grinning as he lifts the head of a corpse by
the hair. Der Spiegel identified the body as that of Gul Mudin, whom Morlock was
charged with killing on Jan. 15, 2010, in Kandahar Province.
Another photo shows Pvt. 1st Class Andrew Holmes, of Boise, Idaho, holding the
head of the same corpse. His lawyer, Daniel Conway, said Sunday that Holmes was
ordered "to be in the photo, so he got in the photo. That doesn't make him a
murderer."
The photo was taken while the platoon leader, Lt. Roman Ligsay, was present,
Conway said. Ligsay has asserted his Fifth Amendment right against
self-incrimination in refusing to testify in the legal proceedings against his
troops.
Conway sought copies of the photographs so that he could present them to a
ballistics expert, who he argued might be able to tell whether the victim had
been struck by the weapon Holmes was carrying. His request was rejected.
"I'm very disappointed that in an American judicial proceeding, I have to get
potentially exculpatory evidence from a German newspaper," Conway said.
Story continues below
AdvertisementA third photo depicts two apparently dead men propped against a
small pillar. Der Spiegel said the photo was seized from a member of the
platoon, but did not involve the deaths being investigated as war crimes.
Soldiers have told investigators that such photos of dead bodies were passed
around like trading cards on thumb drives and other digital storage devices.
"Today Der Spiegel published photographs depicting actions repugnant to us as
human beings and contrary to the standards and values of the United States
Army," the Army said in a statement released by Col. Thomas Collins. "We
apologize for the distress these photos cause."
The killings at issue occurred during patrols in January, February and May 2010.
After the first death, one member of the platoon, Spc. Adam Winfield, sent
Facebook messages to his parents, telling them his colleagues had slaughtered
one civilian, were planning to kill more and warned him to keep quiet about it.
His father notified a staff sergeant at Lewis-McChord, but no action was taken
until May, when a witness in a drug investigation in the unit separately
reported the deaths. Winfield is accused of participating in the final killing.
Morlock has given extensive statements claiming the murder plot was led by Staff
Sgt. Calvin Gibbs of Billings, Mont.; Gibbs maintains the killings were
legitimate.
Morlock told investigators he and Holmes shot Mudin without cause; Holmes says
that he fired when Morlock told him to, believing that Morlock had perceived a
legitimate threat.
Morlock's court martial was scheduled for Wednesday. He has agreed to plead
guilty to murder, conspiracy and other charges and to testify against his
co-defendants in exchange for a maximum sentence of 24 years in prison.
One of his lawyers, Geoffrey Nathan, said while Morlock might be "physically
responsible" for his crimes, including actions depicted in the photograph, "the
people who are morally responsible are the American leaders who have us in the
wrong war at the wrong time."
In addition to the five soldiers charged in the deaths, seven soldiers in the
platoon were charged with lesser crimes, including assaulting the witness in the
drug investigation, drug use, firing on unarmed farmers and stabbing a corpse.
___
Associated Press writers Richard Lardner in Washington, D.C., and Kirsten
Grieshaber and Tomislav Skaro in Berlin contributed to this report.

who'da thunked it?

[Nordic]

photos are here:

http://warisacrime.org/category/image-g ... fghanistan

They blurred out the faces of the victims, which takes a way a lot of the impact of course.

WARNING: They're still pretty gruesome. Not as bad as a lot of the Abu Ghraib ones, IMO. But similar.

[The Consul]

Remeniscent of Tiger Force in Viet Nam. What I don't understand is...."4,000 photos and videos?....."
Even if there are 12 soldiers and, assuming all the imagery is pertaining to death squad type behavior; that means on average each grunt had more than 330 pic/vids. I guess if you have never killed anybody, let alone an innocent person running away from you in horror, you couldn't possibly understand.
Disturbing psychology behind it. Gestapo guys, even after they cut out the SS tatoo under their armpits were still caught carrying pictures of naked people they slaughtered and threw in a ditch.
It can't happen here. We are the good guys. We value life more than they do. God bless America.

[Laodicean]

Bruce Dazzling's previous RI post:

A Few Ugly Truths about the Death State and Its Supporters

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=31558

[freemason9]

how can this be at least somewhat mitigated?

the suspects must all be turned over to afghan officials for trial

and this must become standard procedure in cases like this

at least, until finally end this travesty and bring all troops home

[8bitagent]

Hopefully this will be the last straw to wake liberals up from supporting the Afghan war or thinking its the "right war"(hence why liberals get so defensive and mad 10 years later about questioning 9/11)

I was seen as a pariah in local anti war rally groups on and offline in 2003/2004 for daring to suggest the left should focus half its energy on the Afghan war and not just Iraq. Even in 2006 a lot of the left was heavily supportive of the Afghan war, and even by 2008 there were many who used the old meme of "Bush shoulda forgone Iraq and stuck with the real important war of Afghanistan and getting bin Laden".

[82_28]

I have never understood what was so important or "right" about the Afghan "war". So, I have just kept quiet about it. Now we have another war in which to keep quiet about. Shit's outta hand and I really feel and fear we're just going to have to let them trip on their own shoestrings anymore. I intend on using my 1st amendment "rights" for as long as I can and then when those are gone, I will still use them.

I just realized something and I don't know if it's true or not. But an image of the aircraft carrier "Ronald Reagan" just appeared on screen and I imagined that shit attacking my city. The elites live in perpetual fear they never need feel. What they crack down upon is people who do not fear them or their military yet remain lawful within their communities and thusly create laws in which to confound on a grander level.

[seemslikeadream]

THE “KILL TEAM” PHOTOGRAPHS
Posted by Seymour M. Hersh

It’s the smile. In photographs released by the German weekly Der Spiegel, an American soldier is looking directly at the camera with a wide grin. His hand is on the body of an Afghan whom he and his fellow soldiers appear to have just killed, allegedly for sport. In a sense, we’ve seen that smile before: on the faces of the American men and women who piled naked Iraqi prisoners on top of each other, eight years ago, and posed for photographs and videos at the Abu Ghraib prison outside of Baghdad.

It’s also the cameras. Der Spiegel reported this week that it had obtained four thousand photographs and videos taken by American soldiers who referred to themselves as a “kill team.” (Der Spiegel chose to publish only three of the photographs.) The images are in the hands of military prosecutors. Five soldiers, including Jeremy Morlock, the smiling man in the picture, who is twenty-two years old, are awaiting courts-martial for the murder of three Afghan civilians; seven other soldiers had lesser, related charges filed against them, including drug use. On Tuesday, Morlock’s lawyer said that he would plead guilty.

We saw photographs, too, at My Lai 4, where a few dozen American soldiers slaughtered at least five hundred South Vietnamese mothers, children, and old men and women in a long morning of unforgettable carnage more than four decades ago. Ronald Haeberle, an Army photographer, was there that day with two cameras. He directed the lens of his official one, with black-and-white film in it, away from the worst sights; there is a shot of soldiers with faint smiles on their faces, leaning back in relaxed poses, and no sign of the massacre that has taken place. But the color photos that Haeberle took on his personal camera, for his own use, were far more explicit—they show the shot-up bodies of toddlers, and became some of the most unforgettable images of that wasteful war. In most of these cases, when we later meet these soldiers, in interviews or during court proceedings, they come across as American kids—articulate, personable, and likable.

Why photograph atrocities? And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units? How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost? No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question. As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare. In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary. In long, unsuccessful wars, in which the enemy—the people trying to kill you—do not wear uniforms and are seldom seen, soldiers can lose their bearings, moral and otherwise. The consequences of that lost bearing can be hideous. This is part of the toll wars take on the young people we send to fight them for us. The G.I.s in Afghanistan were responsible for their actions, of course. But it must be said that, in some cases, surely, as in Vietnam, the soldiers can also be victims.

The Der Spiegel photographs also help to explain why the American war in Afghanistan can probably never be “won,” in my view, just as we did not win in Vietnam. Terrible things happen in war, and terrible things are happening every day in Afghanistan, as Americans continue to conduct nightly assassination raids and have escalated the number of bombing sorties. There are also reports of suspected Taliban sympathizers we turn over to Afghan police and soldiers being tortured or worse. This will be a long haul; revenge in Afghan society does not have to come immediately. We could end up not knowing who hit us, or why, a decade or two from now.