Harry D. Tunnell IV, commandant van het "kill team", krijgt een reprimande en gaat vrijuit. Het 'kill team' was een geheim genootschap van 12 Amerikaanse soldaten in Tunnell's 5th Stryker Brigade, die 'voor de lol' onschuldige Afghaanse burgers vermoordden, trots met de lijken poseerde op door hen gemaakte foto's, en lichaamsdelen verwijderde en bewaarde als jachttrofeeën, waaronder vingers en schedels. Oorlogsmidaden dus, een woord dat weer angstvallig vermeden werd in de verslaggeving van onze nationale "kwaliteitspers".Links:
» Amerikaans "Kill Team" poseert met gedode Afghaanse burgers (Hotel Terminus)
» The Kill Team (8 pagina's in Rolling Stone)
» Army ‘Kill Team’ Member: ‘We All Said Yes’ to Slaying Afghan Civilian (Wired, hier ook veel links naar info)
»: The Kill Team Photographers (Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker)
Toen Harry D. Tunnell IV en zijn mannen in 2009 Afghanistan arriveerden, verbood Tunnel zijn mannen te spreken van "counterinsurgency strategy" die de VS het leger had opgelegd. Zonder omhaal verklaarde hij dat hij niet geïnteresseerd was is het winnen van de "hearts and minds" van de Afghanen. Het motto van de brigade is "Strike and Destroy", en Tunnell verklaarde dat het de taak van zijn mannen om alleen maar "zo veel mogelijk" Talibanstrijders te doden.
15-jarige Afghaanse jongen 'voor de lol' vermoord. De brede grijns van de soldaat geeft aan dat dit een normale zaak is in het Amerikaanse leger.
Nederland verzocht VS al eerder om "kill team" commandant aan te pakken
U.S., Dutch and Canadian officials asked Army Brig. Gen. John Nicholson, then the deputy commander of Regional Command South, to intervene with Tunnell. Nicholson agreed to talk to the brigade commander, but the chat had little effect, the State Department official said. Nicholson did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
"Tunnell was just apparently totally unimpressed by what he was told," the official said. "He spoke to us and said, 'Some of you might think I'm here to play this COIN game and just pussyfoot with the enemy. But that's not what I'm doing.'"
In some of the gravest war-crime charges to arise from the Afghan conflict, five soldiers have been accused of killing unarmed Afghan men, apparently for sport, and desecrating their corpses. Seven other platoon members have been charged with other crimes, including smoking hashish - which some soldiers said happened almost daily - and gang-assaulting an informant.
Brigade linked to Afghan civilian deaths had aggressive, divergent war strategy, Washington Post 14 October 2010
Kolonel Tunnell verklaarde ronduit geen bevelen van hogerhand op te volgen, en een eigen 'kill and destroy' strategie te gaan implementeren. Zijn meerderen waren bij klachten of protesten ineens niet bereikbaar. Dus, greep ISAF/Nederland toen in? Nee. Nederland liet het erbij zitten, want het was te druk bezig met de zogeten 3D-benadering, waaronder het winnen van de "hearts and minds" van de Afghaanse bevolking. En nu de commandant vrijuit gaat, horen we weer niets. Ook geen vragen in de Tweede Kamer. It never happened.
A sign – handwritten on cardboard fashioned from a discarded box of rations – hangs around the dead men’s necks. It reads: TALIBAN ARE DEAD. According to a source in Bravo Company, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the men were killed by soldiers from another platoon, which has not yet been implicated in the scandal. “Those were some innocent farmers that got killed,” the source says. “Their standard operating procedure after killing dudes was to drag them up to the side of the highway.” (Photo: Rolling Stone)
"We're bringing hell with us"
In een bericht op de officiële website van het Amerikaanse leger van 6 juli 2009 kunnen we lezen hoe de toen al "controversiele" Tunnell en zijn mannen klaarstonden om hun 'werk' te gaan doen in Afghanistan: "...we're bringing a lot of folks with a lot of guns and we're bringing hell with us." Daar zijn de Afghanen nu wel van overtuigd, dat "vrede en democratie" een Westers eufemisme is voor "hell". Het mag duidelijk zijn dat het 'werk' van het "kill team" niets te maken had met wat het Amerikaanse leger officieel beoogt in Afghanistan. Daaruit kunnen we o.a. opmaken dat de huidige verontwaardiging van de VS over de oorlogsmisdaden van het "kill team" louter cosmetisch zijn. En vanwege het zwijgen over deze aanpak na het niet behandelen van onze klacht over Tunnell is Nederland indirect schuldig aan het mogelijk maken van Amerikaanse oorlogsmisdaden.
Net als na het uitkomen van de martelingen in Abu Ghraib zien we wederom dat enkele laaggeplaatste militairen gestrafd worden en het verantwoordelijke kader vrijuit gaat. En dat het weer een 'onfortuinlijk incident' betreft, een uitzondering op de regel. En zal wederom niemand zich afvragen wat er mis is met de cultuur in het Amerikaanse leger (en de onze), en hoe het toch komt dat dit soort misdaden keer op keer worden gepleegd - bij weten van en onder het toeziend oog van commandanten.
"Let's kill those motherfuckers"
De Washington Post schrijft over het rapport van het onderzoek van het Amerikaanse leger naar het "kill team":
An Army investigation into the brigade commander [Tunnell] of five soldiers accused of murdering unarmed Afghan civilians last year has concluded that he should have been relieved of duty for poor performance, but pins virtually all the blame on junior officers for failing to prevent the killings.
In particular, the report found, Tunnell mocked the doctrine of counterinsurgency, under which U.S. and NATO forces attempted to win the loyalty of Afghans by protecting civilians from the Taliban. Instead, Tunnell advocated for an old-fashioned “counterguerrilla” strategy, in which he instructed his soldiers to concentrate on engaging and destroying the enemy.
The report also found that Tunnell’s disdain for counterinsurgency was apparent well before the Stryker brigade went to Afghanistan. Commanders at the Army’s National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., nearly failed to certify Tunnell’s brigade as ready to deploy because of his resistance to the counterinsurgency doctrine.
"The unit leadership was unable to adjust its mindset," Brig. Gen. Randy Dragon, who was the operations group commander at the National Training Center, said in a statement for the report.
Video taken by an Australian reporter embedded with American troops in Afghanistan aired in 2005 on SBS' Dateline, showing US soldiers burning the bodies of suspected Taliban insurgents. To make matters worse, the bodies were intentionally positioned to towards Mecca. Soldier: "Wow, look at the blood coming out of the mouth on that one, fucking straight death metal." (complete transcript here)
Meer uit het Amerikaanse onderzoek:
As the base [in Afghanistan] sustained heavy casualties, Tunnell directed forces to conduct “counter-guerrilla” operations during patrols, focusing on raids into the small farming villages and lethal force. Der Spiegel cited testimony in the report that “Tunnell himself had spoken about ‘small kill teams,’ who were supposed to ruthlessly hunt down the Taliban.” One soldier quoted in the report characterized the policy after Tunnell outlined the strategy: “If I were to paraphrase the speech and my impressions about the speech in a single sentence, the phrase would be: ‘Let’s kill those motherfuckers.’”
The material makes clear that far from being the product of a few low-ranking “rogue soldiers,” as the Army insists, the atrocities were widely known about and encouraged by the culture of the military.
Moreover, the material strongly suggests that the charge sheet in the kill team case represents the tip of the iceberg, with some photos documenting mangled, unidentified corpses and bound bodies propped up before Stryker vehicles belonging to other platoons. Army documents obtained by Rolling Stone describe incidents in which soldiers lobbed grenades from their Stryker vehicles into heavily populated areas to make it appear the unit had come under attack, then opened fire on civilians.
The report on Tunnell also contains details of rampant drug use and sadism among soldiers at the base. According to the Washington Post, Col. Twitty found that “soldiers killed chickens and dogs for sport, and that one platoon member negligently fired a grenade launcher, destroying a protective barrier” at the base. “Soldiers also regularly scrawled the word ‘Crusader’ on portable bridges over Afghan irrigation ditches.”
Military brass was well aware of the “counter-guerrilla” strategy being pursued at FOB Ramrod. The military newspaper Army Times carried a report on Col. Tunnell’s leadership on December 21, 2009, just a few weeks before the first murder for which the soldiers are charged in the kill team case.
“In command briefings and interviews, 5/2 Stryker Brigade leaders are keen to give the impression that the unit has fully embraced the tenets of counterinsurgency doctrine,” the Times noted. “There is much discussion of the governance, reconstruction and development fusion cell…”
However, one officer told the paper, “When we first started operation, we were told we were going to stay enemy-focused.” Another officer commented, “That has absolutely been the message that’s been delivered from higher.” Tunnell told the Army Times that the base policy was drawn directly from the Army Field Manual 90-8.
(Bron: WSWS, 8 april 2011)
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