The Kill Team

One of the objections I've voiced, regarding the use of private mercenaries rather than our military is that when US soldiers commit such gruesome offenses, pictures of which Rolling Stone and Der Spiegel have just published, there are sometimes consequences. When mercenaries do, as Blackwater did in Iraq, there seldom are and we tend not to hear about them.

The photos taken in Afghanistan, where we're engaged once again in winning the "hearts and minds" of the population by slaughtering their children and playing like ghouls with their mutilated bodies, are horrifying and it's small consolation that at least some of the drug crazed bastards who did it will face serious but barely adequate punishment -- but at least it's punishment.

Perhaps you've never seen what someone looks like after being hit by a rocket fired from above. It's pretty hard to tell whether the grizzly pile of bones and guts was an innocent bystander or a "terrorist" but the sight is far more terrifying when we see American soldiers wetting their knives in the blood, cutting fingers from dead kids' hands for trophies, displaying severed heads of "savages" and planting guns on innocent bodies to justify their having been slaughtered and mutilated and displayed on the side of the road -- to win hearts and minds, of course.

The men of Bravo company, we're told, had been considering "bagging Haji's" for a while it seems and eventually the bloodlust won out. Stupidly, they took photos and kept souveniers. I've decided not to show the photos. If you choose to click on the Rolling Stone link, please be sure you aren't the sensitive type, but you can avoid projectile vomiting and read about it on Raw Story.

There's no happy ending and the occupation of Afghanistan and the constant civilian casualties continue, but as a small degree of justice, Cpl. Jeremy Morlock who is seen posing with a dead boy, deliberately murdered for sport, has been sentenced to 24 years. Calvin Gibbs, a squad leader in the same Platoon , along with five other soldiers, pleaded guilty last week to lesser crimes in exchange for their testimony.

Who will pass judgment on us? Who will forgive us?