Marine Urination:
Washington Must 'Fulfill its Moral Responsibility'
"Now,
when there is a chance to start talking to the Taliban - comes what Obama
called simply an 'inhumane act.' … For political reasons alone, Washington
should quickly fulfill its moral obligation to punish those involved, using all
the rigor of the military code."
The first casualty of war is truth.
This we know. But extinction of the basic sense of human decency comes soon after.
Wars are neither gallant nor chivalrous. They are brutal and barbaric. They always
have been and always will be. In both military and civilian affairs, there is only
a faint hope that testimony documenting acts of brutality and barbarity lead to
punishment of the perpetrators and the type of moral disgrace that a chain of
command responds to. After all, although international conventions are violated
if not reduced to objects of derision - as in Bush's America - they continue in
force as lines that dictate what soldiers can and cannot do and the limits of
the orders they receive from their superiors. This is in an effort to reduce
the incidence of war crimes.
It is true that in this case
- the video shows four American Marines urinating on three Afghan corpses,
possibly Taliban fighters - there is no reason to suppose that officials of the
3rd Battalion of the 2nd Marine Regiment witnessed the repulsive scene or even
suggested desecration of the bodies. It is unclear who recorded the images that
ended up on YouTube, the natural fate today of an infinite number of items for
every conceivable genre. The episode occurred between March and September 2011,
when the 1,000-man unit served in Afghanistan, where President Barack Obama
plans in this election year to withdraw nearly a third of the 100,000 American
soldiers stationed there.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Neither can the upper
echelons be held responsible for the execution “for sport” of three Afghan
civilians between January and May of 2010. Ten months later, by the way, the
head of this group of soldier-assassins was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
But officers and their men are accused by the Afghan government of the torture and
death of Afghan detainees at Bagram Airbase in the country’s interior. In 2010,
WikiLeaks revealed the existence of a detachment formed to eliminate insurgents
they were able to capture. And then there is the most ignominious record of all
- photos of American soldiers, including Lynndie England, who became a
celebrity torturing Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Such images
became the symbol of the Iraq occupation. Eleven torturers were given light
sentences. No officer was punished, although they knew of the atrocities.
Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and all
the unidentified places where outrages were and continue to be committed in the
name of the “war on terror” are subsidiaries of the last circle of hell
installed thousands of miles from the east - the American Naval base at
Guantánamo Bay. Its transformation into one of the most infamous prisons in the
world turns 10-years-old this month. Reports of the horrors that have occurred
at the “detention center,” where 800 people have been imprisoned, continue to
come to light. Read the article My
Guantánamo Nightmare, by Lakhdar Boumediene, a Bosnian of Algerian
origin that was published in The New York Times on January 12. The
author details what he suffered through in seven and a half years of
imprisonment until he was cleared of an absurd accusation. (He now lives in
France).
Closing Guantánamo within a
year after his inauguration was one of the biggest unfulfilled promises of
President Obama. His government was unable to decide what to do with the remaining
171 prisoners. Of these, only four are serving time for terrorism. Thirty-two
are awaiting trial. Ninety are to be transferred - it isn't known when and to
where. And 46, considered too dangerous, will continue languishing at the base.
It's like Obama said: The United States created more terrorists at Guantánamo
than it took there. And now, when there is a chance to start talking to the
Taliban - for which the United States depends on Afghan President Hamid Karzai
- then comes what Obama called simply an "inhumane act."
For political reasons alone,
Washington should quickly fulfill its moral obligation to punish those involved,
using all the rigor of the military code.
