US Army ‘Kill Team’ photo scandal

From Uruknet

US Army ‘kill team’ in Afghanistan posed with photos of murdered civilians

Commanders in Afghanistan are bracing themselves for possible riots and public fury triggered by the publication of “trophy” photographs of US soldiers posing with the dead bodies of defenceless Afghan civilians they killed.

Senior officials at Nato’s International Security Assistance Force in Kabul have compared the pictures published by the German news weekly Der Spiegel to the images of US soldiers abusing prisoners in Abu Ghraib in Iraq which sparked waves of anti-US protests around the world.

They fear that the pictures could be even more damaging as they show the aftermath of the deliberate murders of Afghan civilians by a rogue US Stryker tank unit that operated in the southern province of Kandahar last year.

Some of the activities of the self-styled “kill team” are already public, with 12 men currently on trial in Seattle for their role in the killing of three civilians.

Five of the soldiers are on trial for pre-meditated murder, after they staged killings to make it look like they were defending themselves from Taliban attacks.

Other charges include the mutilation of corpses, the possession of images of human casualties and drug abuse. . . (more)

http://uruknet.net/?p=m76043&hd=&size=1&l=e

The Der Spiegel website doesn’t seem to have the photos up now. Their photo display on the story has standard file photos. FireDogLake has links to a few pictures —

http://news.firedoglake.com/2011/03/21/another-abu-ghraib-photos-of-army-kill-team-in-afghanistan-released/

… here are some of the thousands of photos reportedly taken by this gang of murderers while in US uniform:

UPDATE:

Rolling Stone has more [GRAPHIC] images –
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/photos/the-kill-team-photos-20110327

CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles gets a free pass on terrorist activities

And the DoJ is searching high and low for ecology activists who interfere with clear cutting by multinational corporations…. =sigh=

Accused of killing 73 in an airline bombing, Luis Posada Carriles charged with immigration violations, not terrorism.

…. On October 6, 1976 a bomb exploded on Cubana Airlines flight 455, blowing it out of the sky and into the waters off Barbados, killing everyone on board, including Fernandez’s father, the captain of Cuba’s national fencing team.

Posada, 82, a Cuban-born Venezuelan-citizen, was considered the mastermind— a CIA-trained explosives expert who would stop at nothing in his personal vendetta against Cuban president Fidel Castro. Planned in Venezuela, the attack killed mostly Cuban nationals.

“The terrorist activities of Posada Carriles are part of the [current US court] indictment, but they are not what he is being prosecuted for,” said José Pertierra, a Cuban-born Washington lawyer who is representing Venezuela’s interests at the trial. “He is only being prosecuted for lying about them [attacks]… to an immigration judge in a naturalisation hearing.” — (more)

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/01/2011112104142751917.html