Afghanistan blames vendetta for civilian deaths

[bemildred]

Source: AP

KABUL, Afghanistan - An American military operation that killed up to 90 civilians was based on false information provided by a rival tribe and did not kill "a single Taliban," the president's spokesman said Sunday.

Afghan police arrested three suspects accused of giving the U.S. military false information that led to the bombardment of the village of Azizabad, the Afghan Interior Ministry has announced.

"There was total misinformation fed to the coalition forces," Humayun Hamidzada, the spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, told The Associated Press.

The Aug. 22 bombing has strained the U.S.-Afghan relationship, Hamidzada said. An Afghan government commission found that up to 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, a finding backed by a preliminary U.N. report.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080914/ap_on_re_as/afghanistan

[Nambe]

1. I take it dimson and company didn´t read the fine print.

[NOLALady]

2. Pathetic.

[leftchick]

3. "oops!, Our Bad!"

:puke:

[Bigmack]

4. Actually, ya gotta hand it to the Afghans....

If I'm pissed at somebody, I can do things like send them nasty emails. They can call a fucking airstrike in on somebody they don't like. They just get the dumb fucking Americans to do it!

Obama wants to make Afghanistan the central front in the war on terrorism.

Shiiiiiit!

[pleah]

5. Are we winning those hearts and minds yet?

I think not.

[UK populist]

6. So is this a War Crime ?????

I don't know the ins & outs of military doctrine or Geneva conventions, but surely somewhere along the line the US military has got to corroborate the information they are given by an outside source before dropping bombs on a village.
I would have thought that if there is no corroboration of targets on the grounds by US military or trusted allies this would be classified as an indiscriminate act of MURDER which can only be classed as a War Crime under any Non-Dictatorial Regime's military doctrine.

[bemildred]

7. I think dropping bombs on a village pretty much speaks for itself.

Whether it rises to the level of a war crime seems more in doubt. Maybe it's a plain old vanilla sort of crime, like murder.

[JohnyCanuck]

8. Ollie North and Fox News tried their best to help the Pentagon sweep this under the rug

Glenn Greenwald explains how:

The government, the media and Afhanistan

SNIP

While local villagers, the Afghan government, U.N. investigators, and independent journalists all insisted that the U.S. air attack resulted in the slaughter of 95 civilians, including 50 children, and killed no Taliban fighters, the U.S. military repeatedly issued vehement denials of those claims, insisting for weeks "that only 5 to 7 civilians, and 30 to 35 militants, were killed in what it was a successful operation against the Taliban." The Bush administration even "accused the villagers of spreading Taliban propaganda" and claimed "that the villagers fabricated such evidence as grave sites," even though those "villagers have connections to the Afghan police, NATO or the Americans through reconstruction projects, and they say they oppose the Taliban."

But a gruesome video has now surfaced clearly documenting the huge number of civilians that were killed. A very thorough, independent, on-the-scene investigation by the New York Times' Carlotta Gall -- who Floyd, a former colleague of Gall at The Moscow Times, rightly hailed as a truly intrepid war reporter -- resulted in the discovery of mountains of new documentary evidence and highly credible and pro-U.S. witnesses confirming not only that at least 90 civilians were killed, but also casting serious doubt on the U.S.'s claim that there were even any Taliban in the village at all.

There are numerous vital issues raised by this episode relating both to the bombing and particularly how the U.S. Government so frequently issues false claims, but in light of all the recent uproar over what is and is not "appropriate journalism," I want to focus for the moment on Fox News' role in this. When the U.S. military originally was denying the villagers' claim, the Pentagon claimed it had had conducted an investigation and that an unnamed "independent journalist" who happened to be with them confirmed their account that large numbers of Taliban were among the dead and only very few unarmed civilians were. But then this was revealed:

The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was a< Marine> colonel.

That "independent journalist" is the same person who, in 1986, proudly went before Congress and boasted: "I will tell you right now, counsel, and to all the members here gathered, that I misled the Congress," and then justified that lying -- and to this day still justifies it -- on the ground that it was for a greater good. That behavior -- which led to multiple felony convictions that were ultimately overturned because he had received immunity in connection with his testimony -- hasn't prevented North from being employed as a "reporter" by the serious, legitimate news arm of Fox News, nor from appearing regularly on Brit Hume's Serious News Show as a journalist, nor being cited as an "independent journalist" by the U.S. military to confirm its claims and accuse Afghan villagers of lying about the number of their dead.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/11/azizabad/index.html

[libodem]

9. Bleak

diabolical and no one will take responsibility on the American end of this. I'm so sick up the posture of the arms held to the side palms facing up with the jaw drop of an idiot. Blame it on poor intelligence, what a shtick. Culpability comes to mind. I wish Afghanistan had the where with all to kick us out. But I don't think they are considered a free, sovereign, nation, so they could expel the Americans from thier country. I would suppose they are actually under an occupation just as Iraq is? This kind of shit makes me want to stop paying my taxes and just go to prison.