Well, who was it that recently tricked women with Down's Syndrome into blowing up themselves and a bunch of civilians? Was that "militants"?
Probably US troops. Wouldn't be the first time.
"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.
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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."
"The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh" published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1970
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 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.
"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.
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In the words of Pfc. William Bezanson, “To me, the greatest guilt that any man can suffer is that he died without a good reason. And to me, Vietnam is not a good enough reason. Not when we’re destroying the Vietnamese land, property and populace. We’re destroying the very moral fiber of this country at the same time.”
Drawn from across the spectrum of military units and ranks, the young servicemen, most only in their early to mid-20s at the time, describe in detail the burning of villages, the massacre of civilians, the rape and torture, including live evisceration, of villagers, the tossing of prisoners from helicopters, and the collection of human ears as trophies. As one soldier admits, “the more ears, the more beers.”
Their purpose in describing their acts was to establish that such crimes were widespread and indeed endemic to the Vietnam War itself. Details of the My Lai massacre in March 1968, in which 500 villagers were machine-gunned and the village razed, had finally surfaced in the American press, causing popular revulsion and increased antiwar sentiment. Attempting to contain the damage, the courts-martial of a handful of GIs and their commanding officer for the massacre at My Lai had finally gotten underway in November 1970. The guilty verdict for Lt. William Calley and the acquittal of his commanding officer, Ernest Medina, would be handed down the same month as the Winter Soldier Investigation.
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Standard Operating Procedure.
Would you want these men around your family?
