Yesterday morning — earlier on the same day that WikiLeaks released the video of U.S. pilots indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians from an Apache helicopter — Glenn Greenwald put up a long, meticulously documented piece about another unlawful killing — this one in Afghanistan, and much more recently: just under two months ago. Here is the first paragraph:
On February 12 of this year, U.S. forces entered a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan and, after surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager). The Pentagon then issued a statement claiming that (a) the dead males were “insurgents” or terrorists, (b) the bodies of the three women had been found by U.S. forces bound and gagged inside the home, and (c) suggested that the women had already been killed by the time the U.S. had arrived, likely the victim of “honor killings” by the Taliban militants killed in the attack.
Glenn uses this event as Exhibit A for his argument that the U.S. media plays a specific role in shaping Americans’ perceptions of what goes on in Afghanistan — to the detriment of the truth and journalistic integrity:
Although numerous witnesses on the scene as well as local investigators vehemently disputed the Pentagon’s version, and insisted that all of the dead (including the women) were civilians and were killed by U.S. forces, the American media largely adopted the Pentagon’s version, often without any questions. But enough evidence has now emerged disproving those claims such that the Pentagon was forced yesterday to admit that their original version was totally false and that it was U.S. troops who killed the women:
After initially denying involvement or any cover-up in the deaths of three Afghan women during a badly bungled American Special Operations assault in February, the American-led military command in Kabul admitted late on Sunday that its forces had, in fact, killed the women during the nighttime raid.
[…]
What is clear — yet again — is how completely misinformed and propagandized Americans continue to be by the American media, which constantly “reports” on crucial events in Afghanistan by doing nothing more than mindlessly and unquestioningly passing along U.S. government claims as though they are fact. Here, for instance, is how the Paktia incident was “reported” by CNN on February 12:
Note how the headline states as fact that the women were dead as the result of an “honor killing.” The entire CNN article does nothing but repeat what an “unnamed senior military official said” about the incident[.] …
There’s much more, and you are unlikely to read anything more important today.
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