We become enemy to those deemed but never were enemies

U.S. War on Terror Caused

Presumed Enemy’s Enemy: USA

Re-reporting, editing, commentary by Carolyn Bennett

America indoctrinates the young, the ideologues, the clueless, the indifferent in the false belief that “they” (Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Somalis, Iranians, Malians, Pakistanis, Turks, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorans, Muslims, an endless list of expedient enemies and pretexts) are America’s enemies.

U.S. War on Terror Caused

Indoctrinated by invader nations into the belief that a sovereign people are their enemies, soldiers land among them; and in their time among sovereigns, in their aggression, their occupation and in their departing ─ soldiers and invader nations become the enemy of a sovereign people.

Pakistani coffins

Limitless Consequences

“Invade a series of countries. Drop millions of pounds of ordnance on heavily populated cities. Destroy infrastructure. Murder millions of people. Cause incalculable suffering. And feel not an ounce of remorse or regret,” Lebanese-American journalist Mark Glenn wrote this week at Press TV news. A couple of his thoughts resonated with me.

Consequences may be coined in two syllables, he said: “‘blowback’, as inescapable as gravity, inertia, action ≥ reaction ( ⇄ ).” (Symbols added.)

In the contemporary “world of post-destruction Iraq, Syria, Libya,

U.S. War on Terror
Afghanistan's dead

Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon and others, it is more than a little believable that someone” from the neighborhood of one of these countries “might harbor enough of a grudge to strike back.… It is entirely believable, even expectable,” that ─ from a people in the throes of “raw and powerful emotions” after seeing unspeakable harm inflicted on family members ─ there might emerge “a few who decide to pull an ‘Uncle Sam.’”

I

believe in neither offensive or preemptive violence nor violence as justice. But I understand Afghans’ emotions expressed in news accounts covering the case of a U.S. soldier who, made to believe “they” are our enemies, turns us into “theirs”: a 2012 massacre of a sovereign people.

U.S. War on Terror 

American coffins

“If someone entered your house and killed the children and old men and women of the family, what would your response be?” asked Haji Baran, whose brother died in yet another massacre carried out in the course of the U.S. “War on Terror.”

Iraqi coffins

Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, age 39, recipient of medals by the U.S. government during his combat assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan, has admitted to leaving his post in the Afghan province of Kandahar last March and then gunning down and setting fire to unarmed villagers ─ mostly women and children ─ asleep on their family compounds. Bales had been charged with walking off a U.S. outpost in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province in the early morning of March 11, 2012, and shooting or stabbing to death the Afghan civilians. 

According wire services and the Guardian, “The U.S. Army insists that Bales acted alone (but) an Afghan fact-finding mission has found that the American trooper was not the only perpetrator of the crime and that up to 20 U.S. soldiers collaborated in the carnage.”

Gaza's dead

In a military court this week in the U.S. State of Washington, the soldier pleaded guilty of the crimes. In adherence to the plea deal, he provided detail of the carnage. The military judge, Colonel Jeffery Nance, this week accepted the guilty plea. In August, a jury will decide the length of his life sentence: life with the possibility of parole or life without the possibility of parole.

U.S. in Afghanistan

How much is a life (whose life) worth?

BBC March 25, 2012

After the Kandahar massacre, the United States (U.S. military), according to Afghan officials and tribal elders, paid death dollars to Afghan family members who survived the U.S. attack ─

$46,000 (£29,000) for each person killed

U.S. in Afghanistan

$10,000 (£6,300) for each person injured

U.S. in Afghanistan

Guardian June 2, 2013

In Afghan tradition, payments of this sort are usually handed out after a killing in order to end hostilities between families. According to this tradition, if a family accepts the payment, they “renounce the right to avenge the death.”  Though handed out by U.S. and Afghan governments for seemingly similar reasons, some Afghan villagers consider the payments equivalent to “blood money.”

Many Afghans are angry. Some had called for trial before an Afghanistan court instead of a U.S. military court. Many have called for the death penalty. Some have pledged revenge for the 2012 massacre by the accused, U.S. Staff Sergeant Robert Bales.

   

U.S. in Afghanistan

One eyewitness to the attacks, Haji Satar Khan, reportedly said, the “usual compensation for a killing in the area was around $10,000; (but) because the payouts to victims’ families had been far more generous, they would get little support from their neighbors …: ‘people will not help them if they protest’ the sentencing of the U.S. soldier charged with the massacre.’”

U.S. in Afghanistan

Though “‘it is their right to take the money,’” said Abdul Halim Noorzai, a former mujahedeen commander from Panjwai district; doing so relinquishes their “‘rights to decide (the U.S. soldier’s) punishment. …. Relatives of the people who were killed and wounded,’” Noorzai said, “‘have already sold their bodies to the Americans.’”

Immeasurable Suffering

Guardian November 2012 ─ witness accounts

Night-time killing spree: five hours of chaos and terror

Preliminary hearing testimony of survivors

U.S. drone strikes

“Mohammad Wazir lost 11 members of his family and survived only because, on the night of the attack, he and one of his sons were away from home. His cousin, Khamal Adin, recounted going to his home and finding his aunt dead in the doorway, a gunshot wound to her head. Inside were the partially burned bodies of six children, Wazir’s wife, and other victims. … ‘Everybody was shot in the head.’...”

U.S. in Afghanistan

A young girl hiding behind her father saw him shot and dying in agony.

One boy saw his grandmother wrestle with a gunman after the gunman pushed a pistol into the mouth of her granddaughter.

Other children cowered in a room as the attacker stalked through their home.

‘We are children, we are children,’ the group shouts, says Quadratullah, whose father, Haji Mohammad Naem, survived a shot through the throat.

The shooter ‘jumped from the wall and I saw the light on his head … He just started shooting me.

U.S. in Afghanistan

Naem had been awakened by gunshots and barking dogs and went out to investigate. The gunman’s head lamp dazzled a family used to living without electricity and no one from the house said they would be able to identify the shooter.

“A bullet fractured the skull of Naem’s younger son, Sadiquallah, who said he had been awakened by a neighbor screaming that an American had killed their men.”

Sixteen civilians died in the five-hour massacre. Nine of the dead were children.

T

U.S. in Afghanistan
protested

he scale of his massacre “shocked Afghanistan and the West,” the Guardian wrote. But airstrikes have caused “far larger death tolls” and these have been accepted as mere “tragic mistakes” ─ at least in the “home countries” of the foreign troops who committed the massacres.

Middle East
South/Central Asia
Sovereign peoples
protest USA

Through elected officials and their tribes and agents and corporate connections, America indoctrinates the young, the ideologues, the clueless, the indifferent in the false belief that “they” (Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Somalis, Iranians, Malians, Pakistanis, Turks, Yemenis, Bahrainis, Russians, Chinese, Cubans, Venezuelans, Ecuadorans, Muslims, an endless list of expedient enemies and pretexts) are America’s enemies ─ all the while weakening America and making America the enemy of countless nations and peoples. We are on the wrong wave and unless we rid the helm of a cabal whose character is violence we will never steer this ship into progressive waters.

Sources and notes

“Boston massacre: Bibi’s ‘gift’ to Americans” (Mark Glenn, a Lebanese-American journalist and author of several books focusing on the dangers of Zionist power; co-founder of the Crescent and Cross Solidarity Movement, an organization set up to refute the Zionist [inaccuracies] perpetrated against Islam and to bring Christians and Muslims together against a “common enemy”), June 6, 2013 12:34PM GMT, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/06/307488/boston-massacre-bibis-gift-to-us/

“Afghans demand arrest of U.S. troops over killings” KABUL, Afghanistan—“Hundreds of Afghans blocked a major highway south of Kabul on Tuesday, carrying freshly dug-up bodies they claimed were victims of torture by U.S. Special Forces and demanding that the Americans be arrested, officials said. A spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition said the claims are false” (RAHIM FAIEZ Associated Press News Fuze, Associated Press writers Kay Johnson and Patrick Quinn contributed to this report; Posted: DenverPost.com), http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_23382908/afghanistan-road-bomb-kills-3-children-fatheroutput

“Afghans furious at Bales plea bargain ─ Relatives of the 16 Afghan villagers who were killed by an American trooper last March in southern Afghanistan are furious at a plea bargain that could save him from execution in return for confessing to the murders,”  June 2, 2013 10:51PM GMT, http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/06/02/306855/afghans-furious-at-bales-plea-bargain/

“A military judge has accepted a guilty plea by the US soldier charged with killing 16 Afghan civilians in two villages last year,” http://uk.news.yahoo.com/afghan-massacre-suspect-pleads-guilty-161933542.html#V6IR9cw

“Robert Bales: Soldier who killed 16 Afghan civilians pleads guilty ─ In chilling account of Kandahar slaughter, Robert Bales says there is 'not a good reason in the world' for what he did” (Reuters, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 6 June 2013 02.46 EDT),

“Relatives of murdered Afghans demand death for American sergeant ─ Staff Sergeant Robert Bales due to plead guilty to March 2012 massacre of 16 people, in return for life sentence), (Emma Graham-Harrison in Kabul, guardian.co.uk),  June 2, 2013 09.58 EDT), http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/02/afghanistan-murders-staff-sergeant-robert-bales?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487

  

“Afghan massacre: Kandahar families given compensation ─The Panjwai district shooting spree has rocked already tense Kabul-Washington relations,” Also: U.S. staff sergeant Robert Bales was charged on Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Meanwhile, eight Afghan police officers and an Isaf foreign soldier have been killed by a bomb in Kandahar province. They were on patrol when they were hit by an improvised explosive device late on Saturday, officials said. ‘Four Afghan local police and three national police, one ISAF soldier and one Afghan interpreter were killed,’ Shah Mohammad, administrator for Arghandab district, said,”

March 25, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17503733

“Afghan massacre witnesses recount killing spree ─ Sergeant Robert Bales accused of worst attack on civilians by a single American soldier in decade-long conflict in Afghanistan” (Emma Graham-Harrison and agencies guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 11, 2012 13.08 EST,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/11/afghan-massacre-witnesses-killing-spree

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