AP: U.S. Soldiers Promised Massacre, Including Children, Days Before Bales' Alleged Rampage

War is a Crime
Ralph Lopez

Anatomy of a Massacre - Afghanistan


This article is an update to previous "MSNBC: Evidence of Multiple Shooters, Night Raid in Sgt. Bales Case"

In a striking omission to mainstream coverage of the Afghan massacre which took the lives of 17 Afghans including many children, one as young as two, the AP has reported that US soldiers came to their villages after a roadside bombing two days before and promised retaliation.   The Pentagon has denied that any bombing took place, putting it in direct contradiction to the attorney for Sgt. Robert Bales, who alone is being accused of the rampage.
AP said on March 23d:

"KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) — Several Afghans near the villages where an American soldier is alleged to have killed 16 civilians say U.S. troops lined them up against a wall after a roadside bombing and told them that they, and even their children, would pay a price for the attack."

The Pentagon updated the number of dead to 17 after initial statements.  The attorney for Bales has long said that before Bales' alleged one-man rampage, he was upset over a close friend having lost a leg to a roadside bomb on March 9th.  The massacre was in the early morning hours of March 11th.
From KKTV Southern Colorado:

"Staff Sgt. Robert Bales met with his attorney, John Henry Browne, for the first time Monday. The meeting, which Browne described as one of the most emotional of his life, lasted three and a half hours....During the meeting, Browne said Bales confirmed a story first recounted by Bales' family, that a friend's leg had been blown off by a roadside bomb. Bales' clarified that it happened two days prior to the Afghan shootings."

AP writes on March 23d:

"One Mokhoyan resident, Ahmad Shah Khan, told The Associated Press that after the bombing, U.S. soldiers and their Afghan army counterparts arrived in his village and made many of the male villagers stand against a wall.

"It looked like they were going to shoot us, and I was very afraid," Khan said. "Then a NATO soldier said through his translator that even our children will pay for this. Now they have done it and taken their revenge."

Neighbors of Khan gave similar accounts to the AP, and several Afghan officials, including Kandahar lawmaker Abdul Rahim Ayubi, said people in the two villages that were attacked told them the same story.

Mohammad Sarwar Usmani, one of several lawmakers who went to the area, said the Afghan National Army had confirmed to him that an explosion occurred near Mokhoyan on March 8.

On March 13, Afghan soldier Abdul Salam showed an AP reporter the site of a blast that made a large crater in the road in Panjwai district of Kandahar province, where the shootings occurred. The soldier said the explosion occurred March 8. Salam said he helped gather men in the village, and that troops spoke to them, but he was not close enough to hear what they said.
....
Ghulam Rasool, a tribal elder from Panjwai district of Kandahar province, where the shootings occurred, gave an account of the bombing at a March 16 meeting in Kabul with President Hamid Karzai.

"After the incident, they took the wreckage of their destroyed tank and their wounded people from the area," Rasool said. "After that, they came back to the village nearby the explosion site.

"The soldiers called all the people to come out of their houses and from the mosque," he said.

"The Americans told the villagers, 'A bomb exploded on our vehicle. ... We will get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people,""

The reason for the discrepancy between the date given by the soldier and the one given by Bales' attorney for the bombing is not clear.

A Tale of "Three Tragedies"

Global Research
Felicity Arbuthnot

    “ ... she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news,

    which was no longer breaking news, when

    the aircraft returned to bomb a house with two windows and a door.”

     (The Girl/The Scream, Mahmoud Darwish, 1941-2008.)

March was another month of tragic, needless lives lost, the searing grief of mothers and fathers for lost sons and daughters.

Shockingly stark, however, has been the impression, that for the powers-that-be, for a swathe of public in the West, some deaths are indisputedly regarded as, more tragic, more noteworthy, than others.

On 6th March, six British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. Corporal Jake Hartley (20) and Privates Anthony Frampton (20) Christopher Kershaw (19) Daniel Wade (20) and Daniel Wilford (20) and Sergeant Nigel Coupe (33) died when their armored vehicle was blown up. The resulting fire reportedly burned all night.

More youthful annihilations in an invasion and occupation, illegal, ill-conceived and long lost. Human sacrifices at the alter of political ego, dying because the powerful would still lose, throw away, the lives of others, than “lose face” – one hundred and twenty five  months since the “war” started.

In the US, five of the six would have been too young to even legally order a drink in a bar, but are old enough to die for monumental imperial folly, regional foothold –  and a pipeline.

Before the month ended two more British servicemen were shot, and yet another, blown to eternity..

In Parliament Prime Minister Cameron paid vacuous tribute. They died, he said: “Keeping our country safe.” What nonsense. There are no Afghan hordes massing across the English Channel, planning invasion with near antique rifles - some so ancient they have Queen Victoria’s insignia on, relics from another historic British folly.

Prince Harry, cavorting round the Caribbean, filling in time before returning to Afghanistan in an Apache  Attack Helicopter - with fire power of 632 rounds a minute, plus up to sixteen Hellfire missiles - to wipe out more villagers, and their homes, hung his head and declared himself: “Devastated.” Flags in their home and base towns in the UK flew at half mast.

Five days later, on March 11, there was a massacre of seventeen Afghan villagers, by an American soldier, or, say numerous eye witnesses, soldiers. Nine of the victims were children, the youngest two years old.

The names have been gathered (i) but to date, their ages not matched with them. Mohamed Wazir lost five daughters: Masooma, Farida, Palwasha, Nabia, and Estmatullah, and his son, Faizullah.

The other known names are: Mohamed Dawood, Khudaydad, Nazar Mohamed, Payendo, Robeena, Shatarina, Zahra, Nazia, Essa Mohamed and Akhtar Mohammed. The name of the seventeenth victim is, so far, unknown.

The wounded have names too: Haji Mohamed Naim, Mohamed Sediq, Parween, Rafiulla, Zardana, Zulheja. Since they were taken to a US military medical facility, little is known of their condition.

John Henry Browne, is attorney for Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, the only person, so far, accused of the atrocities – which, allegedly, involved attempting to set fire to the bodies, having covered them with materials and doused them with gasoline. Browne claims that US forces have obstructed him and colleagues from reaching and questioning the survivors.(ii)

Afghanistan Crimes: Absolving Higher-Ups

The People's Voice
Steve Lendman

Murder anywhere is bad enough. Nuremberg chief prosecutor Robert Jackson called preemptive aggressive war killing "the supreme international crime against peace."

Convicted Nazi war criminals were hanged. American ones keep killing with impunity.
On March 11, up to 20 US Special Forces (trained killers) murdered 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children aged 2 - 12 while they slept. Two women were also raped before soldiers killed them. Bodies of all victims were then burned to conceal evidence.

It wasn't an isolated incident. It happens regularly in all US wars. Rarely is anyone held accountable, especially responsible parties up the chain of command to the top. More on that below.

On March 22, The New York Times headlined, "US Sergeant Faces 17 Counts of Murder in Afghan Killings," saying:

Sergeant Robert Bales "is accused of walking away from his remote base in southern Afghanistan and shooting and stabbing members of several families in a nighttime ambush."
He alone was charged for what up to 19 others committed.

"The Army has not suggested a motive."

Commanders deploy similar death squads regularly to kill with impunity. Bales is the exception that proves the rule. Like others occasionally charged, it's done to absolve higher-ups. Guilt goes right to the top.

In his 1948 book titled, "Politics Among Nations; the Struggle for Power and Peace," Hans Morganthau discussed post-WW II political realism and power politics.

His vision was darkly Hobbesian. He called international law, world organizations, and morality "irrelevant" when nations go to war. Winning alone matters. At issue is gaining absolute power at the expense of rule of law principles, democratic values, targeted countries, and most people everywhere.
 
Today's America reflects his might over right theme. It's likely worse than he imagined, given weapons able to destroy humanity and perhaps one day do it.

In his book titled, "Protesting Power: War, Resistance, and Law," Francis Boyle wrote:

Army Tried to Delete Bales From Web After Arrest

Military
David Goldstein and Matthew Schofield

WASHINGTON -- Besides waiting nearly a week before identifying the Army staff sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan villagers, the U.S. military scrubbed its websites of references to his combat service.

Gone were photographs of the suspect, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, as well as a recounting in his base's newspaper of a 2007 battle in Iraq involving his unit, a report that quoted him extensively.
But they weren't really gone.

Given the myriad ways that information remains accessible on the Internet, despite the best efforts to remove it, the material about Bales was still out there and available, such as in cached versions of Web pages. Within minutes of the Pentagon leaking his name Friday evening, news organizations and others found and published his pictures, the account of the battle - which depicts Bales and other soldiers in a glowing light - and excerpts from his wife's personal blog.

So why did the Pentagon try to scrub Bales from the Internet in the first place?

The military said its intention in removing the material wasn't to lessen the Army's embarrassment over the horrific attack - nine of the victims were children - but to protect the privacy of Bales' family.
"Protecting a military family has to be a priority," said a military official, who like several interviewed for this story spoke only on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

"I think the feeding frenzy we saw after his name was released was evidence that we were right to try. ... Of course the pages are cached; we know that. But we owe it to the wife and kids to do what we can."

A second Pentagon official acknowledged that one of the reasons for the delay in releasing Bales' name was to remove references to his Army service from the Internet. But when Army Maj. Nidal Hasan was arrested in the deadly shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009, the Pentagon released his name immediately.

US forces raped two women in Kandahar carnage: Probe mission

PressTV

The Afghan parliamentary mission investigating the recent massacre of 16 civilians by US forces in Afghanistan says two women were raped during the deadly incident, Press TV reports.

Two members of the fact-finding mission, Hamidzi Lali and Shakiba Hashemi, told the general meeting of Afghanistan’s parliament on Saturday that the American troopers raped two Afghan women before starting the massacre.

They said between 15 to 20 US soldiers were involved in the carnage.

This is while Washington claims that the 38-year-old Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, who has just arrived in the US, was the only American military personnel responsible for the massacre.

Earlier on Friday, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai criticized the United States for not cooperating with the Afghan fact-finding team and said the killing of civilians by foreign forces in Afghanistan “has been going on for too long.”

On March 11, a group of US soldiers went from house to house in three villages in Kandahar’s Panjwaii district and gunned down Afghan civilians inside their homes, killing at least 16 people -- mostly women and children -- and injuring several others.