U.S. Atrocities
A historical review
The present day massacres committed by the stooges of Zionism acting under the flag of the military of the United States of America, are in the Western medias rarely exposed, and if so never taken into a historical context.
If the Western medias are forced to tell of U.S. misconduct and evident war crimes they are usually labelled a rare cases of "collateral damage" and the medias will say that they were unintended and "tragic mistakes".
But the U.S. military is a force that has over a century long history of racist war crimes, crimes highlighted by the nuclear bombings of the civilian Japanese population centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and U.S. Airforce´s massive carpet bombing of civilians in the agrarian state of Vietnam in the 1960´s and 1970´s.
Thus one shouldn´t be surprised when seeing the extent of the same military´s carnage in more recent years, against civilian populations of countries like Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.
They just follow a historical logic.
In the US armed forces the racist Jews of the Zionist Movement have found an army of mercenaries who - like them - share a contempt for the laws of warfare and the respect of basic Human Rights.
The Philippine-American War
The Philippine-American War
The Philippine-American War started on February 4, 1899 and was officially proclaimed by President Roosevelt to have ended on July 4, 1902.
The Philippine-American War was a war of attrition. The Americans identified their objective as the capture of Emilio Aguinaldo, the President of the fledging Philippine Republic. They initially perceived conquest and pacification as dependent on the fall of the Aguinaldo government. Because of their superiority in weapons, they also believed that the war would be short and swift in their favor. But the Americans were shocked at the courage and tenacity of the Filipinos who dragged the Americans into several years of battle.
In 1899, because of their firepower, the US forces under General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas) were able to "break out" of Manila and begin moving into the interior, aided in particular by heavy shelling from naval vessels. Dewey's artillery destroyed the area where the Filipinos were entrenched, causing heavy casualties (3000 that first day). It also caused a British observer to say that "this is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery." As they moved through the suburbs, homes were vandalized and looted (a letter home from a soldier reads "the house I had at Santa Ana had five pianos. I couldn't take them, so I put a big grand piano put of a second-story window.").
The american Newspaaper Chicago Tribune commented the fighting deaths that occurred the night the Philippine-American War began:
"The slaughter at Manila was necessary, but not glorious. The entire American population justifies the conduct of its army at Manila because only by a crushing repulse of the Filipinos could our position be made secure. We are the trustees of civilization and peace throughout the islands."
US troops continued to spread outward from Manila, taking the small towns and cities as they went. On the way, the soldiers (many of whom did not want to be there and some suffering from sicknesses common in the area) inflicted heavy casualties on the Filipinos; sometimes killing prisoners (if taken at all). Houses and buildings were burned. One soldier stated that he had "with his own hand set fire to over fifty houses of Filipinos after the victory at Caloocan. Women and children were wounded" (note: after the victory). In many cases, between the fighting and fleeing, towns were left without any inhabitants. Said of the battle referred to in the last quote: "Caloocan was supposed to contain 17,000 inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native."
Town after town seemed to fall under the US control. And with it came the carnage. After shelling Malabon, the soldiers "went in and killed every native we met, men, women, children." On the other hand, it went both ways as the Filipinos were sometimes known to hack up the soldiers with their bolos (whether they would have resorted to doing so with innocent noncombatants is an interesting question).
The Filipinos waged a guerrilla warfare which was suitable for the country’s terrain and their limited firearms. Many of them were peasants by day and revolutionaries by night. They were sustained in their struggle by the unrelenting support of entire towns. Even if the American flag was displayed in the town and the local elite officials publicly acknowledged support to the United States, it did not matter since the guerrillas received food, supplies, and shelter from the people. It was dangerous for an American to stray away from the U.S. garrison lest he be hacked to death by the guerrillas and their sympathizers.
Towards the end of 1900, the Americans declared martial law. To combat guerrilla warfare, they launched a scorched-earth "pacification" campaign. Every Filipino, whom the Americans called "nigger", was viewed as an enemy regardless of whether he or she took up arms. Entire towns were held responsible for the actions of guerrillas. Mere objection to the Americans was termed treason. Villages sympathetic to the guerrilla were burned and people indiscriminately killed. Torture was systematically used to elicit information from suspected guerrillas or their symphatizers. One form of torture was the "water cure" treatment where the victim was forced to drink excessive amounts of water after which he was stomped on the stomach. These atrocities were widely known since the U.S. War Department imposed a blanket censorship, but American soldiers wrote to their families and relatives in the U.S. and related their activities. Some of these letters were eventually published in American local newspapers, thus highlighting the brutality of these "pacification" campaigns.
Part of the strategy was the introduction of "reconcentration", a policy of hauling an entire population into concentration camps to flush out the guerrillas among them and to cut their material support to the resistance movement. In the process of reconcentration, whole towns suffered from starvation and disease. Villagers were taken from their sources of livelihood and were not decently fed. Worse, living conditions were less than adequate, with people confined in overcrowded camps without proper sanitation. Camps then became breeding grounds for the spread of deadly diseases such as cholera.
Major General Franklin Bell wanted to break the resistance movement of the Batangueno Filipino General Miguel Malvar. The Batanguenos were forcibly brought into reconcentration camps. Everything outside the camp was confiscated or destroyed, and anyone caught outside was automatically deemed a guerrilla. In Batangas, casualties as a result of fighting and reconcentration surpassed 100,000.
On Sept. 28 1901 Filipino guerillas infiltrated the town of Balangiga, Samar, attacking American troops at their breakfast table and killing 54.
Afte the succesfull attack on American soldiers at Balangiga in 1901, due to the public demand in the U.S. for retaliation, President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the pacification of Samar. And in six months, General “Jake” Smith transformed Balangiga into a “howling wilderness.” He ordered his men to kill anybody capable of carrying arms, including ten-year-old boys.
Smith particularly ordered Major Littleton Waller to punish the people of Samar for the deaths of the American troops. His orders were: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn, the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.”
"Kill every one over ten." - Gen. Jacob H. Smith
Criminals Because They Were Born Ten Years Before We Took the Philippines.
Editorial cartoon from the New York Evening Journal, May 5, 1902.
Battered, worn, and subjected to policies specifically targeting their civilian supporters, Filipino commanders finally surrendered one by one, though active fighting went on until 1902 and sporadic outbreaks of violence continued until 1907. By the end of the war 5000 American lives had been lost, more than the combined casualty tolls of he Spanish-American and Mexican American wars. Filipino casualties are impossible to determine, but estimates range from 250,000 to over 1,000,000.
WW II - USA at war against Japan
Whole-page picture from the biggest American weekly LIFE Magazine. This "Picture of the Week" shows a beautiful blonde, 20 year old Natalie Nickerson from Phoenix, Arizona. She sits by her desk with pen in hand, dreamingly contemplating the skull of a killed Japanese that was sent to her by her American Navy lieutenant boyfriend.
The text reads:
"Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her.When he said goodby two years ago to Natalie Nickerson, 20 a war worker of Phoenix, Ariz., a big, handsome Navy lieutenant promised her a Jap. Last week Natalie received a human skull, autographed by her lieutenant and 13 friends, and inscribed: "This is a good Jap - a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach." Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo. The armed forces disapprove strongly of this sort of thing."
- LIFE MAGAZINE, 5/22/44 p.35 "Picture of the Week"
The LIFE statement that "the armed forces disapprove strongly of this sort of thing" seems merely a lie.
United States:
"We boiled the flesh off enemy skulls""Japanese skulls were much-envied trophies among U.S. Marines in the Pacific theater during World War II. The practice of collecting them apparently began after the bloody conflict on Guadalcanal, when the troops set up the skulls as ornaments or totems atop poles as a type of warning. The Marines boiled the skulls and then used lye to remove any residual flesh so they would be suitable as souvenirs. U.S. sailors cleaned their trophy skulls by putting them in nets and dragging them behind their vessels. Winfield Townley Scott wrote a wartime poem, 'The U.S. Sailor with the Japanese Skull" that detailed the entire technique of preserving the headskull as a souvenir. In 1943 Life magazine published the picture of a U.S. sailor's girlfriend contemplating a Japanese skull sent to her as a gift - with a note written on the top of the skull. Referring to this practice, Edward L. Jones, a U.S. war correspondent in the Pacific wrote in the February 1946 Atlantic Magazine, "We boiled the flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter-openers." On occasion, these "Japanese trophy skulls" have confused police when they have turned up during murder investigations. It has been reported that when the remains of Japanese soldiers were repatriated from the Mariana Islands in 1984, sixty percent were missing their skulls."Source:
Kenneth V. Iserson, M.D., "Death to Dust: What happens to Dead Bodies?", Galen Press, Ltd. Tucson, AZ. 1994. p.382.
***
Here follows som revealing excerpts from "The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh" published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1970
This book by the world famous aviator Charles A. Lindbergh who participated in the airwar against the Japanese in WW II, contains some insights into the racist crimes committed by the U.S. military, a military now serving the needs of Zionism and its Sharons, Wolfowitzs and Perles.
Excerpts:
p.998
"Judge not that ye be not judged." It is not the Germans alone, or the Japs, but the men of all nations to whom this war has brought shame and degradation.
pp.996-997
Where had I seen starvation like that before? It was on Biak Island, too. ...the Japanese prisoners ...so starved that they could not stand to walk, thinner even than this Pole. Oh, we had not starved them in a prison camp like the Germans. We had been too "civilized," too clever for that. We had let them starve themselves in the jungle (their own fault) by simply not accepting their surrender. ... It was only necessary to shoot a few men advancing to surrender with their hands in the air. ("You can't trust a Jap to surrender. He'll throw a grenade at you. The only way is to kill him right now.") Or one could be more blunt about it and shout to an enemy emissary, as our infantry officers boasted of doing at the west caves, "Get back in there and fight it out, you sons of bitches."
p.997
A long line of such incidents parades before my mind: the story of our Marines firing on unarmed Japanese survivors who swam ashore on the beach at Midway; the accounts of our machine-gunning prisoners on a Hollandia airstrip; of the Australians pushing captured Japanese soldiers out of the transport planes which were taking them south over the New Guinea mountains ("the Aussies reported them as committing hara-kiri or 'resisting'"); of the shinbones cut, for letter openers and pen trays, from newly killed Japanese bodies on Noemfoor; of the young pilot who was "going to cream that Jap hospital one of these days"; of American soldiers poking through the mouths of Japanese corpses for gold-filled teeth ("the infantry's favorite occupation"); of Jap heads buried in ant-hills "to get them clean for souvenirs"; of bodies bulldozed to the road-side and dumped by the hundreds into shallow, unmarked graves ...to the approval of thousands of Americans who claim to stand for high, civilized ideals.
p.997
As far back as one can go in history, these atrocities have been going on, not only in Germany with its Dachaus and its Buchenwalds and its Camp Doras, but in Russia, in the Pacific, in the riotings and lynchings at home, in the less-publicized uprisings in Central and South America, the cruelties of China, a few years ago in Spain, in pogroms of the past, the burning of witches in New England, tearing people apart on the English racks, burnings at the stake for the benefit of Christ and God.
I look down at the pit of ashes....This, I realize, is not a thing confined to any nation or to any people. What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific.
p.881
One prisoner was taken, according to the first report; but an infantry colonel told me later that no prisoners were taken at all. "Our boys just don't take prisoners."
p.882
Some of the bodies had been so badly torn apart that there were only fragments left. And as one of the officers with me said, "I see that the infantry have been up to their favorite occupation", i.e., knocking out all teeth that contain gold fillings for souvenirs.
p.884
One of them had apparently been used for a hospital. One of the bodies on the floor was still lying, partially covered, on a stretcher. This is the cave where the Japs reportedly tried to surrender and were told by our troops to "get the hell back in and fight it out."
p.906
They often bring back the thigh bones from the Japs they kill and make pen holders and paper knives and such things out of them.
p.880
What is courage for us is fanaticism for him. We hold his examples of atrocity screamingly to the heavens while we cover up our own and condone them as just retribution for his acts.
I stand looking at the patch of scorched jungle, at the dark spots in the cliffs which mark the caves where the Japanese troops have taken cover. In that burned area, hidden under the surface of the ground, is the utmost suffering - hunger, despair, men dead and dying of wounds, carrying on for a country they love and for a cause in which they believe, not daring to surrender even if they wished to, because they know only too well that our soldiers would shoot them on sight even if they came out with their hands above their heads.
p.919
Before the bodies in the hollow were "bulldozed over," the officer said, a number of our Marines went in among them, searching through their pockets and prodding around in their mouths for gold-filled teeth. Some of the Marines, he said, had a little sack in which they collected teeth with gold fillings. The officer said he had seen a number of Japanese bodies from which an ear or a nose had been cut off. "Our boys cut them off to show their friends in fun, or to dry and take back to the States when they go. We found one Marine with a Japanese head. He was trying to get the ants to clean the flesh off the skull, but the odor got so bad we had to take it away from him." It is the same story everywhere I go.
p.996
It seemed impossible that men - civilized men - could degenerate to such a level. Yet they had. ...it was we, Americans, who had done such things, we who claimed to stand for something different. We, who claimed that the German was defiling humanity in his treatment of the Jew, were doing the same thing in our treatment of the Jap. "They really are lower than beasts. Every one of 'em ought to be exterminated." How many times I heard that statement made by American officers in the Pacific! "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
A sample of official US anti-Japanese propaganda from WW II
with racist stereotypes and saying that the Japanese should be "wiped out".
For more on this, read and see pics: Skulls, Ears, Noses, And Other Morbid “Trophies” Americans Took From Dead Japanese In WWII
USA in Somalia 1993
US massacred 1,000 Somalis
Revealed: how trapped soldiers fired indiscriminately on crowds and used corpses as shields
By Richard Dowden in Kampala
Reprinted from The Observer, UK newspaper, Thurs. March 22, 1998
As president Bill Clinton begins a six- country tour of Africa today, new evidence has emerged of how trapped United States troops indiscriminately fired on crowds of Somalis in Mogadishu in 1993, killing more than 1,000 - five times the 'official' number.
In a dramatic new account of the battle in central Mogadishu, collated from hours of interviews with American and Somali survivors, Mark Bowden of the Philadelphia Inquirer has revealed that US troops abandoned their rules of engagement - to fire only when threatened by fire - and shot down every Somali they saw, including women and children.
It happened 10 months after US marines landed as part of a humanitarian effort to feed starving Somalis cut off by the civil war. On the afternoon of 3 October 1993, a hot sleepy Sunday in Mogadishu, a group of 40 Delta Force, Special Forces and about 75 Rangers set off to try to capture Somali leaders supporting General Mohammed Farah Aideed, the Mogadishu warlord, who were meeting in a house near the centre of town.
According to Bowden's account, US troops took hostages and murdered wounded Somalis and a prisoner. They also used the bodies of Somalis as barricades. Bowden also reveals that, far from the official version of the mission (that it was not intended to kill anyone) helicopter gunships began the ill-fated raid by firing anti-tank missiles into houses.
While Canada, Italy and Belgium all held inquiries into the excesses of their troops in Somalia and even put some of them on trial, the US has never held any public investigation or reprimanded any of its commanders or troops although Les Aspin, the then US Defence Secretary, resigned some time afterwards. Yet compared with what the Americans did that night, the excesses of other national forces were child's play. The revelations of the Mogadishu massacre come barely a week after America finally laid to rest the ghosts of the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam by awarding a medal to the officer who exposed the atrocity.
Bowden's account, now available on the Internet and to be published as a book in the autumn, threatens to start a new controversy in the US military. Despite the debacle, the commander of the mission, Major-General William F. Garrison, took full responsibility for what happened, describing it as 'a success', while US personnel who died were all given medals, as were many of the survivors. Other key players were promoted.
At the time, the world's media concentrated on dramatic television footage of the naked bodies of US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, and the drama of a helicopter pilot taken hostage. The Somali dead were a sideshow, a bland figure, estimated at about 200.
Bowden, however, quotes Ambassador Robert Oakley, the US special representative to Somalia, as saying that more than 1,000 Somalis were killed. The incident occurred after the US-led peacekeeping force had handed over to a multinational United Nations force under the command of a Turkish General, Cevic Bir.
Neither he, nor the UN Special Representative in Somalia, a retired US Admiral, Jonathan Howe, had been informed about the Delta Force raid. Nor was the UN consulted when the US military decided to hunt down Gen Aideed.
Backed by 17 helicopter gunships, they stormed the building where the Somali leaders were meeting and took 24 prisoners. They planned to drive the three miles back to the US base but could not get out of the area. First one and then another Blackhawk helicopter was shot down. Without a back-up force the convoy ended up going in circles, trapped by hundreds of Somali gunmen firing AK47s and rocket grenades from rooftops or moving with the crowds.
Eventually it had to be rescued by units from Pakistan and Malaysia. But by that time they had been involved in their biggest fire-fight since the Vietnam War and their discipline and organisation had disintegrated.
Bowden describes the convoy trying to escape from the maze of streets in which it was hit by a hail of rockets and bullets at every corner: 'Some of the vehicles were almost out of ammunition. They had expended thousands of rounds. The back ends of the remaining trucks and Humvees in the lost convoy were slick with blood. Chunks of viscera clung to floors and inner walls.
"The second Humvee in line was dragging an axle and was being pushed from behind by the five-ton truck behind it. Another Humvee had three flat tyres and two dozen bullet holes.
"Seal Sgt Howard Wasdin, who had been shot in both legs, had his legs draped up over the dash and stretched out on the hood. Yet another Humvee had a grenade hole in the side and four flat tyres. "They were shooting at everything now. They had abandoned their new mission (to rescue the downed helicopter pilots). Now they were fighting just to stay alive as the convoy wandered into one ambush after another, trying to find its way back to base."
Dale Sizemore, a young Ranger, describes "blasting at everything they saw. Rules of engagement were off." Sizemore saw young boys, seven and eight-year-olds, some with weapons, some without. He shot them all.
In one incident Rangers took a family hostage. When one of the women started screaming at the Americans she was shot dead.
In another incident a Somali prisoner was allegedly shot dead when he refused to stop praying out loud. Another was clubbed into silence. The killer is not identified.
____________________________________________________________________
A short comment on the US massacre in Mogadishu
The US 1993 massacre of Somalis was detailed in Mark Bowdens book "Black Hawk Down" (Bantam Press, 1999), a book that made quite a stir at that time.
After the events of 9/11-2001 the US military needed a morale booster and the US military-propaganda-machine - in total collaboration with Hollywood - decided to disarm this war crime, by making a movie about it.
Thus Ridley Scott’s film version Black Hawk Down is nothing but a cover up of this de facto massacre.
The primary value of Scott’s film for the military and political leaders is ideological. Black Hawk Down is an exercise in the manipulation of mass consciousness. Scott is attempting to change the public perception of what happened in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993.
The character of Scott’s film is indicated by the welcome it got from an audience of Zionist politicians and military top brass when it premiered in Washington. Deputy Secretary of Defense and Zionist Jew Paul Wolfowitz declared Black Hawk Down to be a “powerful film.” His fellow film enthusiasts included Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Army Secretary Tom White, and Iran-Contra plotter Oliver North.
Unlike his earlier film G.I. Jane, Black Hawk Down received the full co-operation of the US military. The actors went through a period of intensive training at Fort Bragg and were, Scott proudly declared, “traumatised” by the time they arrived in Morocco for the start of filming.
To get that kind of co-operation Scott had to allow the military a veto over every aspect of the film. As a result, Black Hawk Down is not a genuine artistic exploration of the experience of US intervention in Somalia, but a blatant glorification of US militarism.
The filmmakers, the politicians and the US military who backed it hope that for those who see Black Hawk Down the sanitised, choreographed violence of Scott’s film will become the image of the October 1993 incident they remember.
What then really happened in Mogadishu and what is Scott’s film hiding?
In the weeks leading up to October 3, the US Rangers had earned themselves the enmity of the civilian population of Mogadishu. Three times a day Black Hawks would harass the city’s residents flying along the streets below roof level before soaring back up to hundreds of feet in the air. This activity was popular with the Rangers who told Bowden it was like riding a roller coaster. Sometimes they would hover low over flimsy shacks blowing them apart, or over a crowded market place tearing people’s clothes from their bodies or even ripping babies out of their mothers’ arms, in a practice the pilots called “rotor washing.”
Even before October 3 the US military were casually brutal about the number of dead and injured among the Somalis, whom they referred to contemptuously as “Sammys” or “Skinnies.” They regularly lobbed mortar shells into the city from the UN compound. They hit hospitals and homes killing an unknown number of civilians. No attempt was even made to count the number of casualties when troops opened fire on crowds.
In particular, the film omits entirely the event that explains why US troops were met with such ferocity on the streets of Mogadishu on October 3.
The single action that did more than any other to cement Somali hostility and to unite the different clan factions in Mogadishu against the Americans was the massacre of a meeting of Habr Gedir clan elders on July 12, 1993.
The clan meeting was held at the house of an Aidid official to discuss peace proposals Admiral Howe had put to them the previous day, when the gathering suddenly was attacked by US Cobra attack choppers opening fire with TOW missiles and 20 mm cannons and with US ground troops finishing off the wounded.
The Washington Post described the event as a "slaughter" in which "a half-dozen Cobras" pumped sixteen TOW missiles and two thousand rounds of cannon fire into the gathering of elders, intellectuals, poets and religious leaders, "first blowing away the stairwell to prevent anyone from escaping."
The brutality of the attack not only unified the Habr Gedir clan behind Aidid but also recruited other clans in a desire for revenge. For Somalis, the firefight featured in the film was payback time for this massacre, known as Bloody Monday.
When the mission on October 3 went wrong the US troops found themselves in a situation that was largely of their own making. Bowden is very candid about the extent of civilian casualties on October 3. He describes how the American troops opened fire on civilians as they put it “mowing down whole crowds of Sammies,” laughing when they blew a woman apart. He also admits that they took women and children hostage. Scott’s film does not show the hostages and pays no attention to civilian casualties.
Somalis (or 'skinnies' as they are called in the film) are slaughtered by the score, in anonymous waves, in Black Hawk Down - just like Red Indians, Zulus and other fuzzy-wuzzies were mown down by Hollywood in the earlier days of empire.
US military operations in Afghanistan
Civilian catastrophe as US bombs Afghan wedding
- Witnesses say attack lasted 2 hours
- Pentagon: 'One bomb went astray'
The Guardian, July 1, 2002
An Afghan man lifts the head of a child who along with 11 other civilians died during US air raids in Kabul on October 28, 2001, witnesses said a man and his seven children were killed when a bomb crashed through their home. (AP photo) US helicopter gunships and jets today fired on an Afghan wedding, killing or injuring at least 250 civilians, witnesses and hospital officials said.
The attack occurred in the village of Kakarak in Uruzgan province, in the south of the country, where special forces and other coalition troops were searching for remaining al-Qaida and Taliban fighters.
One survivor, Abdul Qayyum, told reporters at a Kandahar hospital that the attack began shortly after midnight and continued for more than two hours until US special forces ground troops moved into the area.
"The Americans came and asked me 'who fired on the helicopters', and I said 'I don't know' and one of the soldiers wanted to tie my hands but someone said he is an old man and out of the respect they didn't," he said.
Afghans often fire weapons during weddings in celebration.
Hospital officials said a number of wounded were being brought to Kandahar. Most of the dead and injured were women and children.
"We have many children who are injured and who have no family," nurse Mohammed Nadir said. "Their families are gone. The villagers brought these children and they have no parents. Everyone says that their parents are dead."
The top US general leading the coalition campaign in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-General Dan McNeill, said a more thorough investigation was needed. "I believe there's 48 dead and 117 wounded," McNeill told a joint press conference with Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah while emphasising that the figures were those of Afghan investigators.
Dawn, July 7, 2002 Another nurse, Sher Mohammed, said he heard that scores were dead and injured.
At Bagram air base north of Kabul, the US military spokesman, Colonel Roger King, said an AC-130 gunship, a B-52 bomber and other aircraft joined the attack after coalition ground forces came under fire.
"Right now there are a lot of different opinions as to what happened," Col King said. He said US investigators would be sent to the area.
In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said a coalition air reconnaissance patrol that was flying over Uruzgan province reported coming under anti-aircraft artillery fire.
Other coalition aircraft opened fire on the target and at least one bomb went astray.
The UN report had put the death toll at 80, compared to 48 deaths cited by the Afghan government.
The Independent, July 31, 2002 The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was not immediately clear where the "errant" bomb hit. He said the Pentagon was aware of reports from Afghanistan of civilian casualties in Uruzgan province but it was unclear whether they were caused by the stray US bomb or by falling anti-aircraft artillery.
The Guardian, July 3, 2002:
"In one village, there was a wedding party... a whole family of 25 people. No single person was left alive. This is the extent of the damage," he said.US forces killed 15 people in the same province in January in a firefight which they later admitted was "ill-advised".
'Cruel' Americans stormed homes, filmed naked women: villagers
ABC (Australian), July 7, 2002
US soldiers stormed the homes of Afghan villagers after they were bombed in a US air-raid last weekend and barred people from treating their wounded relatives, outraged Afghans say"First they bombed the womenfolk, killing them like animals, then they stormed into the houses and tied the hands of men and women," Mohammad Anwar said at Kakrakai village in central Uruzgan province's Dehrawad district.
"It was cruelty - after bombing the area, the US forces rushed to that house, cordoned it off and refused to let the people help the victims or take them away for treatment," he said.
Anwar was pointing to the home of his brother Sharif, who was hosting a huge pre-wedding party for his son on the night of June 30 when US airships strafed Karkrakai and surrounding villages.
Sharif, who risked the wrath of the Taliban to keep Afghan President Hamid Karzai alive during his daring mission into then-Taliban-ruled central Afghanistan last October, was killed.
So were Anwar's wife, Sharif's wife and four children.
The groom-to-be son survived because he was confined to a separate house as local wedding tradition decrees.
The US-led coalition commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Dan McNeil, announced that according to Afghan officials, 48 people had been killed.
The slaughter of at least 45 civilians by US warplanes in a raid in central Uruzgan province on Monday has prompted the first anti-US demonstration in Kabul. Around 200 Afghans, many of them women clad in traditional burqas, marched through the street bringing mid-morning traffic to a halt on Wednesday, to protest against the rising toll of civilian casualties. Most of the dead and injured in the latest incident were women and young children who were guests at a wedding celebration in the small village of Kakarak.
The protest is just the tip of the iceberg. Ongoing US bombing and search-and-destroy operations in rural towns and villages along with a contemptuous indifference to the rising toll of civilian casualties has generated widespread hostility, anger and opposition to the American presence.
Uruzgan provincial governor Jan Mohammed Khan, who was himself appointed by the US-backed regime in Kabul, demanded that the US military hand over the “spies” who had provided the information that led to the air attack on Kakarak. “If Americans don’t stop killing civilians, there will be a holy war against them in my province... This has to stop, or people will fight Americans just like they did Russians [in the 1980s].
Another Kabul resident, Sahibad, who lost two of his own children during a US bombing raid in October told a reporter for the EurasiaNet website: “When I heard about the bombing in Uruzgan, I thought the day I lost my kids had returned. My heart bleeds for the families who now have to dig through the rubble for their loved ones, like I did. The people that are supposed to be helping us are hurting us. We don’t want to start hating Americans, but if they keep making mistakes like this, we have no choice... Why do they use bombs, it is such an inaccurate way of getting the enemy. One slip of the hand and you could kill hundreds or thousands of people.”
Ahmed Jawad, a doctor at Mirwais Hospital, told the International Herald Tribune: “We heard that this is a computerised war, and we have seen on television that the American warplanes can pick out objects as close as four millimetres from the ground. How can they mistake a wedding party for an attack?”
Amillah, 35, added: “If there were Taliban or Arabs in the area, they would never have let us make such a wedding party. They did not allow people to make music or beat drums; they said it was not Islamic.” A farmer, Abdul Bari, 30, who was comforting his heavily-bandaged, six-year-old nephew, Ghulam, said: “Fifteen people from my home are dead. My wife, my brother, everyone is dead. We don’t know why the Americans hate us.” Doctors at the Mirwais hospital explained that Ghulam, who lost both his parents in the raid, almost died of his injuries as well. Ma’amoor Abdul Qayyum, a retired local official, said he saw his 11-year-old son die in front of him. “The Americans have destroyed us. We have neither seen Al Qaeda nor Taliban but they bombed us. What did we do wrong?”
World Socialist Web Site, July 6, 2002 Anwar, a senior Karzai-appointed military commander in neighbouring Kandahar province, says the toll would have been less if the troops storming his brother's home had allowed relatives to tend to the victims.
"Had people been allowed to take these injured to the hospital more and more lives would have been saved," he said as he received bereaved villagers in the local mosque.
"Many of the injured with broken arms and broken legs died due to loss of blood.
"Until seven or eight o'clock in the morning the Americans did not allow anyone to help the injured and to cover the bodies.
"Most of their clothes had been burnt off [in the attack].
"They kept filming and photographing the naked women," he said.
Anwar says he had no answers for the questions of his stunned people.
"The people are asking, 'is the result of the support we have extended to the Americans? This is humiliation. Our women were disgraced'," he said.
The United States, in Afghanistan seeking remnants of the former hardline Islamic Taliban regime and its Al Qaeda allies has insisted that coalition aircraft had attacked only after they were fired on.
It began air strikes against Al Qaeda and the now-ousted Taliban in October last year, after the September 11 terror attacks in the United States blamed on Al Qaeda.
Anti-American rage gripped the nearby villages of Shatoghai, Siasung and Mazar, also hit in the US bombardment.
"One day God will give us the strength and we will fight them," Haji Wali said, whose home in Shatoghai was attacked.
"Even during the Russian's occupation (1979-1989) there was never such a sustained bombing of the area.
"We are weak and they are oppressing us," he said.
He trashed attempts at compensation, saying Coalition forces had offered the villagers' tents.
"They want to please us by providing us with four tents," Wali said. "Is two or four tents worth the price of our lives?"
"Would the Americans forgive us if we killed two Americans and give them two tents in return?
"The Taliban used to lock us in jail but they would not bomb us and dishonour our women," he said.
Jamal Khatun lost her son, 13, and grandsons Rehmat and Nabi, both four, in the strike on Siasung village.
"We were asleep on the verandah when the bombs hit, we had no idea what was happening," she said as she clutched the blood-soaked clothes of her dead son and grandchildren.
Rozi Khan says a child was killed and eight people injured in her village of Mazar.
"We migrated here to escape drought, why was our house targeted?" Khan said.
UN keeps damning report on Afghan massacre secretThe Independent, July 31, 2002
By David Usborne in New York
The United Nations went into abrupt reverse yesterday and said it no longer intended to release a report compiled by a team of UN officials who visited the site where a US warplane attacked a wedding party in Afghanistan on 1 July.The change of tack by the UN was apparently the result of pressure from within its own hierarchy, particularly in Afghanistan itself, and from the US not to release the report that allegedly contradicts claims made by the US about the circumstances of the attack.
The controversy first erupted on Monday when it emerged that a first draft of the report written by the UN fact-finding team featured a number of potentially embarrassing allegations. They included the charge that the US had under-reported the numbers of people who had died and US soldiers had removed evidence from the site, suggesting a cover-up.
A UN spokesman said on Monday that a final draft would be made public within 24 hours. That had all changed by yesterday morning, however. Instead, a statement from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said the report would remain an internal document and would be shown only to the Afghan and American governments.
The row came as Kabul released fresh details of a bombing attack that was foiled when a man driving a car loaded with explosives was arrested in the capital on Monday. Officials said the man was a foreigner, which often means Arab or Pakistani in local parlance. By all accounts, the plot, if successful, could have been devastatingly effective. The plotter had allegedly planned to detonate himself and the car in an attack either on the president, Hamid Karzai, his top officials or on foreign targets such as the US embassy or the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force.
The Toyota was packed with large quantities of TNT and C4 explosives that could have caused widespread damage.
It would have been detonated by wires connected to two extra car batteries. "He mentioned Karzai as one of his natural targets," Amruallah Salhi, an Afghan security official, said of the suspect. "What we have gathered indicates he was a suicide bomber."
Though it was thwarted, the plot highlights the vulnerability of the new Afghan leadership.
In the statement, the UN Assistance Mission said: "The United Nations was not involved in either an inquiry or an investigation but simply responding to humanitarian needs as it does everywhere in the world." Sources confirmed the UN report had put the death toll at 80, compared to 48 deaths cited by the Afghan government. The Pentagon said it found only five graves there.
* The White House has set up an office devoted to improving the United States' image. The Office on Global Communications was unveiled yesterday just as a New York-based institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, urged Mr Bush to fix "America's shaky image abroad" before negative sentiment undercuts US interests.
Find out more facts and figures on the Zionist "US" war in Afghanistan on the
web site of Professor Marc W. Herold
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