But.... we're justified

Off Topic
21

Kuri,

I apologize for not having the time to do all the web research on it right now, but I will give you all a starting point. Robert Young Pelton is a freelance writer/reporter/adventurist, who was doing some freelance stuff for CNN (and I think some other groups) during the war in Afghanistan. He hosts a show on either National Geographic Explorer or Discovery Channel (not sure which one), called “World’s Most Dangerous Places,” and has written books, including one by that very name (now in its fifth iteration) on travel to some of the more hellish places on earth (Chechnya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Colombia, etc.).

He’s very well-known, well respected, credible, and by NO means a right-winger or Bush supporter – quite the opposite. He’s a very independent thinker, and a no-bullshit kind of guy. He is the ONLY writer/reporter who was with the very US Army Special Forces A-team whose actions are being questioned by this agenda-driven documentary filmmaker. Actually, he was with General Dostum, who was joined soon thereafter by the SF A-team, so he was with all of them all along. He says that none of this bullshit about US SF guys knowingly putting prisoners in trucks in which they’d suffocate EVER happened, and he has the utmost respect for the SF guys, having seen them in action over there. He ALSO says that the filmmaker in question (I forget his name offhand) was NOT AT ALL PRESENT during any of this. Pelton was with the SF A-team and Dostum at the time – the “filmmaker” wasn’t. I’ll try to find it in print on the web somewhere, but in the meantime, Pelton does have his own website with a discussion board (the board is located at http://comebackalive.community.everyone.net/community/scripts/topics.pl?NodeID=350665&ClientID=496398 ). If you do a search on the board you can probably find him replying to allegations of this nonsense (he personally posts under the username “RYP”). I’ll try to find more concrete info on it when I have the time.

22

I know nothing about this film, and I hope to god it is proven to be fraudulent. I have family over in Iraq right now, and both of them have the utmost respect for human life. Neither of them could ever be a part of this, but there are a lot of sick people out there who could, I’m sure.

One thing though, is that there seems to be a trend these days away from objective journalism, so a lot of important things that happen get brushed under the rug because it would piss off the sponsors. A perfect example of this is the networks reporting the results of “reality shows” (a bit of an oxymoron I think) as if it is REAL news! I don’t give a flying FUCK whether or not some bachelor likes one pathetic husband hunter over another, and I resent that I am forced to keep up to date with it when I deliberately avoid the shows themselves. I don’t care if some fat-ass wins “American Idol”, and I don’t care who wins the million dollars in “Survivor.” It insults my intelligence to have some lame video game-like graphics to illustrate military maneuvers. Another more poignant case of flagrant disregard for journalistic ethics is the stories of Jessica Lynch and Jayson Blair.

[quote]For the past two weeks, a major news story has concerned news stories written by Jayson Blair and published in The New York Times. Blair’s behavior was a major breach of basic journalistic ethics and a huge embarassment for the Times’ management at the editorial level. Blair plagiarized stories from other newspapers, made up things that didn’t take place, and pretended to be in lots of other places when he was really holed up in Brooklyn. There’s a rumor that he now has a lucrative book contract and will benefit from his misdeeds, despite his deserved pariah status.

There’s another story that hasn’t gotten quite the same attention. It broke last week (I think that’s when) on BBC, and shortly afterwards I heard it on NPR. Today (May 23) a story by Robert Scheer of the LA Times was widely syndicated. It concerns the story put out last month by several national press services about the capture of Pfc. Jessica Lynch by Iraqi forces and her subsequent heroic rescue by American soldiers. According to this story, Lynch was involved in a gun battle with Iraqis in which she was wounded by bullets several times and also stabbed. Taken to an Iraqi hospital she and her injuries were completely ignored by doctors. A guard slapped her, this incident was observed by an Iraqi lawyer, who then informed American authorities of her whereabouts, thus leading to her dramatic capture.

The problem with this story is that very little of it is true. Lynch was in an automobile accident. She was neither shot nor stabbed. Doctors in the Iraqi hospital treated her for broken bones and an ankle injury, then tried to turn her over to American forces, two days before the “capture.” As for that Iraqi lawyer, he is now in the US, under political asylum and unavailable for interviews, although HarperCollins, the publishing house owned by Rupert Murdoch (who also owns the Fox tv network that hawked the phony story about Lynch), has given him a half-million $ book contract.

What Blair did was inexcusable. But it also is echoed in the lies promulgated by elements of American officialdom and their supporters in the media business.
Note well. We got the truth from the BBC, which is an agency of the British government. We got lies from some of our officials and their cronies in some of our supposedly independent news organizations.

I seem to recall that there was once a European dictator who said people were so stupid that if you told them lies that were big enough and told them often enough, the lies would be much more effective than the truth.[/quote]

The point to this quote is that journalistic intregrity has been comprimised. Many of you are saying “don’t believe everything you read.” I agree, and I would encourage you to take your own advice.

23

Thanks for the link Damici (RYP’s bks look fascinating- I’m going to buy one soon).
I did a search on his forum and found some discussion on the Afghan issue. Pelton definitely refutes Doran’s (producer of the film) claims of 3,000 killed, but does admit that around 250 prisoners did suffocate in the containers. He also says he DID meet Doran at Dostum’s guesthouse.

Who is telling the truth? I don’t know. Its possible that neither know the full story too. Its just impossible to say.

Sure its possible, even likely that Doran has an agenda, same as Pelton may too (by working for CNN I would think he has bosses with an interest in not pissing of the military).

I think its important to remember that Doran never claims the SFs killed the prisoners themselves, but that they did nothing to stop Dostum’s men from killing them.

In any case it seems that at the LEAST Dostum’s men had caused the deaths of hundreds, and that US Special Forces didn’t seem to do much about it.

Also troubling are comments I found from members of the UN Human Rights Commission who have seen the site, and then later this story seems to have dissapeared- to which I found comments that the Pentagon had “forced” the UN to back off it.
The truth? Once again who knows…

A real mess to be sure, but one that should at the very least call into question how issues are (or are not) presented in the media.

24

Any story suggesting that Dostum commited a massacre is hardly far fetched if you’ve ever observed any of the news and history in afganastan. From soviet times through the present, he has had a reputation as quite possibly the nastiest figure in the whole theater. He also has switched sides quite a number of times, whenever convinient, starting as pro-soviet, and managing to end up in the short-lived pro-american camp. He has a penchant for massacres and rather frequently exlempary torture and executions. If you want to bring morals and ethics into the analysis, it is absolutely morally repugnant that the US would ally itself with him. This was a case of convienience based on the theory that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. I havn’t read the story, but I have no reason to doubt one bit that Dostum engaged in massacres during the reconquest of afganastan, it would certainly fit his predominant patern.

25

I really need to proofread next time. I make so many sloppy errors and it makes me look like such an ass. I don’t need the spelling and grammer for that, I think I manage enough of that on my own. Oh well.

26

I keep reading “U.S.-allied Afghan soldiers” committed the acts, but nothing about US troops themselves. They are said to be “complicit”, but what does that mean, they did not get in a firefight with US allies to stop it?. Would they even have been able to do anything but get themselves killed and end the alliance as well?

Secondly, every time US troops has committed an act like this, the troops themselves were the ones to bring it out. In Mai Lai, the ones who refused to take part were the ones. In Korea, which was investigated and determined to be an accident/panic by the troops, again it was the troops themselves that brought it out into the light.

That is why conspiracies never work, these are real people just like us, they feel guilt and desire to do good just like us. It is ridiculous that people assume because you’re in the military you are capable of an atrocity. Out of my military friends I don’t know any, my father was in Marine special ops in Nam and he didn’t know any.

The atrocities the different factions in Afghanistan have committed are well documented and go back over 10 years of shelling civilians, killing women and children, etc. They do that there and it is nothing new. There is not much a handful of our troops embedded with much larger Afghan forces could do to stop them.

27

Kuri,

No one disputes the fact that Dostum’s guys did this, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The exact number that ended up killed is in dispute, but no one really disputes that it happened. BUT, to say that US Special Forces who, as Pelton has explained, were much too busy at the moment with other things, like the fort situation in Mazar-i-Sharif, at the time, had a hand in it, or even so much as KNEW what was going on is a HUGE stretch of conjecture on the part of someone with an AGENDA. By claiming that, at the least, “US Special Forces didn’t seem to do much about it,” you are inherently implying that they knew what was going on – not just that prisoners were being transported by truck, but that they were suffocating in the process. I call that a gross stretch, seeing that there is no evidence of that fact that they had any idea what was happening to the prisoners in those trucks.

If you don’t think Doran has an agenda, look into his background. VERY anti-American. Pelton refutes the responsibility of the US guys with such force that, although I don’t have the time to quote him here, he’s quite convincing. And he will be the first to tell you he DOESN’T work for CNN – he just does freelance stuff, and if CNN or the BBC or anyone else wants to here what he’s up to, they can work something out.

28

I have to confess something… In the post 9/11 months, if I had a bunch of prisoners who were a part of the gang that did this and celebrated when the towers came down, I may have done even worse than what they did. I think it was Diesel who talked about torturing a member of AQ – peeling his scalp off while he was still conscious… That is starting to get there.

Only problem with that is, even if they deserved it, I would have to live with what I did to another human being along with those images in my head for as long as I live. Lets just say that I think that kind of stuff can be justified sometimes, but I am just glad that it doesn’t have to be me to do the dirty work.