Story Of Why There Are Burned Children's Corpses in Afghanistan Stinks

Source: Al Jazeera, from a US military newsletter.

This blurb about the supposedly lone gunman in the Kandahar massacre caught my eye in Al Jazeera's coverage of the ongoing controversy about whodunit to 16 civilians in the middle of the night:

Bales was flown from Kuwait to a military base in Kansas where he will be held in solitary confinement awaiting charges, the US army said.

"The Army confirms that Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Bales is being held in pre-trial confinement," the army said in a statement on Friday.

So Bales is now locked up in the same facility with inconvenient truth teller Bradley Manning. And being held in the same torturous conditions as Manning was at Quantico before being transfered to Leavenworth. Manning's pre-trial hearing resumed this week; he's now been in detention for 664 days. Why was he kept in solitary for so long before being charged or tried?

There are two plausible reasons for this type of cruel and unusual punishment:

1) To keep the prisoner from talking to anyone who might be able to leak the truth to the rest of us.

2) To induce psychological deterioration that will render the prisoner unfit to defend himself from the lies the government plans to tell about him and his actions.

On the other hand, maybe it's not so unusual anymore.

In 2012 nonviolent protesters can be physically assaulted, have their coats confiscated, and be locked up overnight in a freezing cell with no bed or chair, merely for calling out Bank of America's defrauding of the 99%. In other words, for speaking the truth in public -- dangerous for all concerned.

Your government is so serious about this that they will fire you for linking to Wikileaks.

This proved to be a big problem for the prosecution in the Manning case because they failed to get several important emails from the court since government spam filters block out anything with the word Wikileaks! (Stuff like this makes me wonder how the humorists at The Onion hope to write headlines funnier than that. You cannot make this shit up.)

In the Bales case, President Karzai told family members of the 16 victims that U.S. officials  'did not cooperate' with Kandahar probe. Many in Afghanistan doubt that the massacre could possibly have been effected by someone acting alone, considering the multiple locations and timing. Some are suggesting an investigation by Afghan officials uncovered evidence that as many as 15 or 20 Special Forces soldiers were involved, possibly as retaliation for an IED event that produced troop casualties.
  
But would the U.S. military lie about how many were involved? What do you think?

In a week of bad news another incident was swept under the carpet but, the bulge still shows: Secretary of Defense Panetta landed in country on Friday, but his high ranking military welcome committee had to hit the deck to avoid being run over by an Afghan translator who had stolen an SUV just minutes prior. The interior of his vehicle ignited shortly after missing them, and he died of burns later that day, so we'll never know his side of the story. But here's what top brass put out for info on the incident, as reported by AP via sfgate.com:

Very shortly after Gurganus dodged the car, the commander spoke to reporters at Camp Leatherneck, which is adjacent to Bastion, a British air field. And despite repeated questions about security in the area, did not reveal the incident. Instead, he told reporters that there had been no violence in his area in the wake of the shooting spree by a U.S. soldier that killed 16 Afghans last weekend.

"We've had zero incidents," Gurganus said. "We've not so much as even had a two man protest at this point in time." He later added that, "You can't get a whole lot safer than right here when you're surrounded by everybody else on the base."

Really? Is that why he took everyone's rifles away from them?
  
Let's just end with the third fishy story of our week in the graveyard of empires, this one about a NATO helicopter that crashed killing, among others, 12 Turkish soldiers, and two unfortunate young women that were in the house it landed on in Kabul. Why did it crash? As reported by AP via Common Dreams:

the Turkish military said in a statement "Twelve of our military personnel on board were martyred,"...

There was no enemy activity in the area at the time of the crash, NATO said.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the helicopter was one of two that took off on Friday. "Unfortunately, the one in front came down for an unknown reason," he said.

Wreckage from the helicopter crash depicts your tax $$ at work in Afghanistan after more than a decade of war. SOURCE: Euronews