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March 27, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

07:03

1879 Afghanistan Slaughters

The script for tomorrow is written in the blood of today. http://www.fdrurl.com/afghanistan

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	Those who cheer war need to know what they're cheering.
	I'm not going to put any videos on here.
	You can search for this yourself if you want, but this is the reality of war.
	It always has been and it always will be.
	Recent Rolling Stone investigation has shown how a U.S. brigade has been murdering and mutilating innocent Afghan civilians and keeping their body parts As trophies, there is no horror story worse than reality.
	There's a young farmer who was killed for fun before his finger was used in a card game by American troops.
	A couple of soldiers see a young farmer working by himself.
	His name is Ghul. He's 15.
	He's the only Afghan around.
	He's got no weapons on him, and he had a, quote, welcoming face.
	They asked him to come to them and he walked towards them and he stopped when they asked him to stop.
	One of the soldiers threw a grenade at him using a wall as cover and then both soldiers opened fire.
	He fell down onto the ground and there was soon a pool of blood coming from his head.
	So of course one of the soldiers screams that he's come under attack but one of the soldiers told another soldier that it was more likely a staged killing.
	The soldiers told their sergeant that the young boy had been about to attack them with a grenade, and they therefore had to shoot him.
	The idea that a lone Taliban fighter with one grenade is going to ambush a platoon in broad daylight seems pretty unlikely to the top officer involved.
	But still, he tells the staff sergeant to be sure, to make sure that the young boy is dead.
	So the guy fires his rifle twice at the boy.
	A local elder working nearby comes over and accuses the soldiers of murder, but he's ignored.
	This older man was asked to identify the boy, and it turned out that he was the boy's father.
	As the official army report noted, the father was very upset.
	The soldiers followed army protocol of cutting off the dead boy's clothes and stripping him naked to check for tattoos before scanning his iris and fingerprints.
	They then began taking photographs of themselves celebrating the kill.
	with one of the soldiers posing for the camera by grabbing the boy's head by the hair as if he were a deer.
	The staff sergeant then started, quote, messing around with the kid, kid, moving his arms and mouth like a puppet before slicing off the dead boy's finger and giving it to one of the other soldiers who took the finger around with him in a Ziploc bag.
	One of his friends said he wanted to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out He was proud of his finger.
	A few hours after the killing, the two soldiers were playing cards and said they would better finger in a game of spades before tossing the boy's finger onto the pile.
	The investigation by Rolling Stone has also revealed how troops shot dead civilians and tried to cover their tracks.
	U.S. soldiers hacked off part of a dead man's skull.
	Soldiers cheered as they filmed a U.S. airstrike blowing up two Afghan civilians.
	A video showing two Afghans on a motorcycle being gunned down.
	The magazine claims the men hacked off bits of skull from their victims and kept them as trophies of their kills.
	Soldiers are also accused of opening fire on civilians for no reason, and covering up their attacks by planting guns and magazines on their victims.
	The magazine claims that amongst the accused, quote, killing innocent Afghan civilians became less a reason for concern than a cause for celebration.
	According to Rolling Stone, the men and soldiers joked for weeks about killing, quote, savages before finally murdering a boy of about 15 in a farming village their first kill.
	The Rolling Stone article talks in detail about how the soldiers felt invincible and emboldened by the lack of policing by their superiors.
	It also details a series of disturbing videos and pictures of the victims taken by the men.
	One shows a hand with a missing finger, another depicts a severed head on a stick, and others show blown-up legs.
	In two cases, soldiers pose over the bodies of their victims as if they are hunting trophies.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Rolling Stone has for the first time published the videos which were supposedly passed around by the men of this combat brigade as they carried out their executions in Kandahar province.
	In the first clip, the men can clearly be heard joking, they're going to fucking die, you don't fuck with us.
	As the airstrike starts, so does the song Envie by Apocalypta, a cello rock band from Helsinki.
	One of the men is killed instantly, but a second runs off and is caught by another volley of explosions.
	As the men whoop and cheer, fuck yeah.
	A title card called Aftermath comes on screen, followed by a close-up color images of the men's bloodied bodies with horrific close-ups of their injuries.
	The US Army has been keen to paint the men involved as if they were working alone, but the article claims that the internal records show that the kill team was operating out in the open in plain view of the rest of the company.
	Far from being clandestine, as the Pentagon has implied, the murders of civilians were common, knowledge among the unit and understood to be illegal by pretty much the whole platoon, says the article.
	The revelations have been a PR disaster for the U.S. Army and is the most serious prosecution of alleged U.S. military atrocities during ten years of war in Afghanistan.
	And this is what you get when you take traumatized young men and give them terrifying weapons and send them to do the dirty work of the military-industrial complex to the land that has been called the graveyard of empires, Afghanistan. It brutalizes, it traumatizes, it dehumanizes.
	And the casual decision to go to war has effects that last for generations and these men may come home one day and they may start families and how are they going to treat their children's disobedience and rebelliousness and how are they going to treat people who cut them off in traffic what kinds of seeds of violence are going to be planted that will flower for generations to come when you cheer war This is what you are cheering when you look at the firework lights of Pentagon propaganda videos of rockets rising from ships into the night.
	This is where they land.

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