Image of the Day

the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his
opening statement to the tribunal
It is alleged that on the evening of March 10-11, 2012, US Army
Staff Sgt. Robert Bales left his base in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan,
fully armed and loaded, and murdered 16 civilians in a nearby village. At a
pretrial hearing, the prosecution stated that Sgt. Bales went from house to
house, firing his weapon with intent to kill. Children were shot through the
thighs or in the head. At one point during the massacre 11 bodies, mostly
women and children, were “put in a pile and put on fire.” The prosecutor
said that the carnage was so violent that when Sgt. Bales finally returned
to base, the blood of his victims had seeped all the way through his
uniform and down to his underwear.
Witnesses from the camp reported that Sgt. Bales, a decorated
veteran of four combat tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, had been upset over
an incident that occurred 2 days earlier, when an improvised explosive
device (IED) exploded, resulting in one US soldier losing the lower part of
a leg.
The murder of the local Afghans is the worst case of civilian
slaughter to be blamed on a single U.S. soldier since the Vietnam War. For
this hideous and blatant war crime, the prosecution is asking for the death
penalty.
A key component of US strategy in the Afghanistan / Pakistan
theatre, or “AfPak” as the area is commonly known, is drones. The
Pentagon has about 7,000 at its disposal, with not all of them being for
attack purposes. For several years now, a sustained targeted drone
campaign has been carried out in an effort to weaken the “insurgents” (i.e.
local Afghan resistance). It has been estimated that over the past decade
somewhere between 1,800 to 3,100 people have been killed in the region
by US drone strikes. And while the US government would argue that the
vast majority of these people were militant combatants, some estimates
show that for every “insurgent” killed, 10 civilians were also killed.
The US has taken the position that all of this is legal, with Attorney-
General Eric Holder arguing that the use of “technologically advanced
weapons” (i.e. drones) is based on “adherence to the law.” But Article 2(4)