Afghan Witnesses Say Sgt. Robert Bales Did Not Act Alone

[sad sally]

The video is worth watching. May this brave journalist, Yalda Hakim, be safe. The US doesn't think too highly of those who report the truth.
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by John Glaser, March 29, 2012

Child witnesses to the massacre of 17 Afghan civilians by Staff Sgt. Robert Bales say there was more than one U.S. soldier party to the crime, contradicting the story told by the Pentagon.

Yalda Hakim, a journalist for SBS Dateline in Australia, was born in Afghanistan and immigrated to Australia as a child. She is the first international journalist to interview the surviving witnesses, which she was able to do after American officials tried to prevent her contact with the village witnesses.

An 8-year old Afghan girl named Noorbinak, according to the MSNBC, “told Hakim that the shooter first shot her father’s dog. Then, Noorbinak said in the video, he shot her father in the foot and dragged her mother by the hair. When her father started screaming, he shot her father, the child says. Then he turned the gun on Noorbinak and shot her in the leg.”

“One man entered the room and the others were standing in the yard, holding lights,” Noorbinak said in the interview.

A brother of one of the victims said the children who witnessed saw many soldiers. “They don’t know whether there were 15 or 20, however many there were,” he said in the interview.

http://news.antiwar.com/2012/03/29/afghan-witnesses-say-sgt-robert-bales-did-not-act-alone/

[dballance]

1. Sadly I beleive the 8-yr old far more than I believe our government

It wouldn't surprise me at all that there were 15 or 20 involved and Bales is taking the fall. He must have pissed off someone in command prior to this incident.

[monmouth]

2. You took the words right off my keyboard. These children have no reason to lie,.

our government has become untrustworthy. Bales had so much baggage it wouldn't surprise me if he volunteered to be the scapegoat..

[qazplm]

3. yeah unlikely

1. why him? why not one of the others? Just dumb luck? Do you think they drew lots?

2. if this is what they do, why not do the same with all of the other mass killings? what makes this one different from all the others where there were multiple suspects? Not like this is the biggest casualty count, or the first time children or women were killed.

3. heck, why not just pick one other guy, make it seem like a two man team, just to you know make it seem more plausible?

[Igel]

4. Helicoptors?

All or nothing.

Why have 15-20 soldiers around with just one doing any shooting if you're going to lie and say there was only one soldier? What were they doing? All illuminating one building? So why didn't they shoot the kids observing them? After all, killing minors wasn't a problem?

Why have helicopters there if you don't use them?

Why have 15-20 men with lights on their helmets and on the end of their guns if the helicopters can illuminate the scene well enough? Or were they just there to provide transportation? (If so, wouldn't a lot of the tracks have been obscured by the downdraft and a lot of the sound masked by the chopper noise?)

Would have been easier to have just had 5 men there with hand grenades. Toss them in through the windows--5 windows every two seconds. A minute later, no witnesses, no survivors, no ballistics possible.

But, more to the point, if you have children as witnesses, why are they suddenly reliable? They've often been unreliable; they easily and readily build false memories, esp. when terrified in the middle of the night and then are traumatized by having so many family members/acquaintances killed in cold blood. People often remember not so much the events as the narratives they recount to themselves.

This is especially true when they are supporting the narratives they've been told by adults and want to support the adults. In the '80s there was a private school sex abuse scandal. It turns out that the kids weren't lying; the parents and investigators had encouraged false memories and explicitly or tacitly rewarded compliance with their own narratives. The kids went with the program, and over time kept including new and ever more graphic details of sexual abuse that never happened as they were encouraged to embellish.