The survivors of a NATO night raid against a house party in Afghanistan’s Paktia Province remain up in arms about the slaying of several of their family members, and say that they have rejected US “compensation” payments of $2,000 per person killed.
“I don’t want money, I want justice,” noted Haji Sharabuddin, the head of the family. US forces killed five people, including three women, in the raid. One of the men killed was also a key member of local security forces.
The killings have sparked more questions than most of the night raid civilian deaths in Afghanistan, primarily because NATO issued an initial statement claiming they killed “several insurgents” in a firefight and made a “gruesome discovery” of the slain women.
About a month after the raid, NATO was forced to admit that all of the slain people were civilians and that the “firefight” in question didn’t involve any firing from anyone but the NATO forces. The eight “militants” arrested were all released, without charges.
But the real issue at this point is that, other than the “blood money” offered by the US, officials have made no effort to hold anyone responsible for the killings, and officially the US refuses to even identify who was involved in the raid, citing “national and strategic security.”
To Sharabuddin and his family, the thought of his loved ones being added quietly to the growing number of “extrajudicial killings” in the nation is unfathomable. He has suggested that if officials do not do anything to rectify the situation, he and his relatives will launch revenge attacks, up to and including suicide attacks. Though the US did not actually find any militants in their invasion of the home, they may well have created several.
UUUGGHHH guess we shot yer mothea….. Heerz $2000. Is dat gonna covva dis problim…??
well now we know the price of freedom
good thing we sold all of our while it was still worth somthin
criminal gangsters….
I'm afraid this was not a NATO action, but purely an American "BLIETZKRIG" style variant. The purpose is to spreaqd fright and obedience.
At Times.co.uk the story included that fact. Because NATO has stopped night raids, but CIA and some of your beloved psycho troops, very well known through decades to perform illegal actions, are still doing so, because Americans are too dumb and lasy to bother to understand things in general. As long as they can go to Disneyland, and consider knowledge of the world as a "show".
With no acccountability given, nor demanded by your very much alike representatives, it is always possible to maintain such organizations.
I think the afghan family acts raqtionally and worthy of human dignity, by drawing the conclusion, that then it is morally right to kill anybody participating in such illegalities, which will include at least any American in such forces, at any level.
May i remind you that germans were prosecuted after WW2, and the excuse "following orders" brushed aside as irrelevant? It seems to me the philosophy of the "Übermensch" is now carried on by the very same victorious people.
The logic, that instant killing is a necessity, when someone is perhaps present in a roofless slump in the mountains of Afghanistan, really presupposes a very strong imagination.
After this tragedy it was also found, that the sought after person at that place was working on an American base, and had been doing that for 5 months! He was subsequently questioned, when he by himself came in, but let go as innocent.
That NATO angle is purely another obfuscation to somehow include much more of the world as innocent wrongdoers.
As our war-makers continue this bloody, assault on citizens of rural Afghanistan, in pursuit of the ghost/s and remnants of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, we continually show the world that only American lives are of value. This answers the question for those who wonder or cannot conceive of why they hate us as opposed to the government propaganda: That "they hate us become of our freedoms."
this is war folks peop;e die tough shit
"This is war" . Yeah, sure. But war among people who long have considered it imperative to carry out revenge killings when someone in their family has been killed. So trying to get someone in a distant land with totally different customs than yours to become resigned to such losses is naive at best, cavalier and foolish at worst. To know us is to hate us, lately, in some places. They know us no other way than by death from the sky. You will never ever ever win their hearts and minds, and a lot of rusting Soviet equipment is there to say that even when communists come in to annex another territory, it doesn't turn out well. How much harder it is for someone from so far away to nation build with such fragile building materials. It's a quixotic quest that turns out to have been sent out based on a series of hoaxes that would make Chalabi blush.
While the criminals are at work, the NYT, the Washington Post and the other fawning media have nothing better to do than to publish idiocies such as what a positive difference the US is making in the places they occupy in Afghanistan.
Do these stories get mentioned in the corporate media? If you get your news from CNN, Fox, ABC, PBS etc, will you even know about this case? In other words, are Americans complying out of ignorance, or do they actually support their criminal government?
Its a mix. Some are ignorant, some support the criminal government. Some are ignorant but would still support the criminals if they knew whats going on.
In a situation like these people are in, the first thing you're going to do is sit down and get drunk. The second thing, having accomplished the first objective, is you're going to start considering ways to get back at those who killed your family and destroyed everything you had to live for. That's not a trait peculiar to Muslims. It's a universal human one. If we do the same thing in Iran we've been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're going to have another 75 million people thinking identical as they sift through the rubble of their homes and villages.
http://leftwing-christian.net/2010/02/23/no-war-w…