Rick Raw: WikiLeaks Documents Expose U.S. War Crimes in Afghanistan

By Rick Grant Commentary rickgrant01@comcast.net

Among the shocking revelations revealed in the tens of thousands of WikiLeaks.com documents from the Afghan war reveals that U.S. and coalition troops adopted a scorched earth strategy. This means kill every living thing and burn houses and hutches to the ground.

Remember the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War? Since the VC hid out in the villages, the unit that committed the massacre had just lost a popular Sargent and another soldier was blinded in a firefight with the VC. They tracked the VC to the My Lai village and the unit was hell bent on revenge.

So Lt. Calley ordered his men to kill every living thing, including the babies. Then an elaborate coverup ensued. Ultimately, Calley was convicted of murder and sentenced to life. However, President Nixon ordered Calley held under house arrest, and he was paroled. It was tantamount to a pardon.

In WWII, Hitler adopted a scorched earth policy when his troops invaded Russia. He ordered his troops to kill everyone in the villages and burn them to the ground as his blitzkrieg rolled into the vast Russian hinterlands.

The WikiLeaks documents show egregious human-rights abuses "every day, every hour, and in every location." This strategy was sanctioned by high ranking generals who never reported the atrocities.

Specific incidents are chronicled in the WikiLeaks papers, such as, how U.S. soldiers fleeing a suicide bombing opened fire indiscriminately, killing 19 innocent civilians. The soldiers pointed their weapons at the journalists present, forcing them to delete their photos of the massacre. The incident was never mentioned in the official report.

Even worse atrocities were committed by U.S. special forces death squads in Afghanistan. These elite units were tasked with the assassination of targeted Taliban leaders. During the mission, as the squad made entrance into a house of a suspected Taliban leader, the hit-team went in shooting on full auto, killing anyone in the house, including the target’s family.

The squads operated with complete immunity, killing dozens of innocent civilians for every one Taliban official they killed. The U.S. soldiers had no respect for the civilian population, and if they got in the way, too bad, they were collateral damage. This mind-set was the unofficial order of the day.

As the U.S. forces took casualties and deaths from unseen suicide bombers and IEDs, the troops took out their revenge on the civilian population if they couldn’t find the enemy, that had already melted into the general population.

This raises an important question: Now that the WikiLeaks papers have exposed war crimes, will the individuals responsible be prosecuted as war criminals. Not a chance. First the U.S. did not sign the treaty that established the International Criminal Court–the forum for trying war criminals. Second, there is no moral imperative to bring these soldiers up on war crimes since they were operating with official immunity.

Recently in Afghanistan, Marines were never court marshaled for using chemical weapons in the form of phosphorous bombs against Iraqi civilians in Fallujah in 2004. It’s a well known fact that U.S. soldiers consider Afghan civilians’ lives worthless. When the enemy looks like civilians after they blowup Americans, it’s easy to rationalize killing a random sampling of civilians, and maybe they got at least one or two Taliban perpetrators in the pile of dead bodies.

These documents will inflame the anti-American passions of the Afghans who have accused the U.S. of indiscriminately killing civilians since the start of the Afghanistan war. It will also inspire more young men to join the Taliban and al Qaeda ranks as Jihadists, who harbor deep hatred for Americans who have committed countless war crimes.