8 Jun 2013

the asymmetrical war on terror

"Our" leaders call it asymmetrical warfare. One thing that is definitely asymmetrical is what "we" do to "them" compared to what "they" do to "us". A quick couple of examples. 

In March 2012 US soldier Robert Bales massacred 16 Afghan civilians including nine children during a night-time attack on two Kandahar province villages.

According to Jeremy Scahill's Dirty Wars, in February 2010 US special forces, acting on information about an alleged Taliban compound in Gardez in Afghanistan, raided the compound in the middle of the night, killing a number of men and two pregnant women. But they weren’t Taliban. In fact they were doing a most anti-Taliban thing, which was having a party with live music to celebrate the naming of a child. Furthermore the man of the house was a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the US forces. When the US commandos realised what they had done, they dug the bullets out of the women’s bodies, told their commanders that there had been a Taliban ambush and that they were essentially heroes that had gone in and saved everyone else. But then the family contacted reporters and Jerome Starkey of The Times reported that this was a botched Nato raid and that Nato had tried to cover it up. Nato first accused him of lying but, with media attention focused on the village and the family, they changed tack and admitted that their forces had killed these pregnant women and that the men were not Taliban commanders.

And has any of that been in the front-page news alongside the murder of Lee Rigby? 


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