1/1/11

American Soldiers Killing Afghans for Sport

An American soldier has pleaded guilty to being part of a "kill team" that deliberately murdered Afghan civilians for sport, and, to add to the atrocities, mockingly posing for photos with their victims and cutting off their fingers as trophies. The Abu Ghraib prison tortures in Iraq were but child’s play in comparison. To ease our collective conscience here at home we might assume that those sport killings were rare, isolated incidents perpetrated by a few rogue soldiers, but neither can we claim that there haven’t been many other similar cases, in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan, and probably Pakistan. There must be reason why so many of the people that we are supposedly liberating despise us.

Be it few or many, what these sport killings reveal (provided that the perpetrators were not already thugs before they enlisted) is the predictable, inevitable loss of moral compass by burnt-out soldiers caught in a mindless, endless war—an evil aptly depicted in "The Valley of Elah," a must-see film for wide-eye Americans who have fallen for the propaganda pitch that all our "boys" in Iraq and Afghanistan are over there building schools and fighting for democracy. The time to bring them home is long overdue.

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