Friday, March 25, 2011

How a young US soldier triggered an abuse scandal in Afghanistan...


Smiling as he leaned over the young man's body, and using one hand to present his bloodied face to the camera, Corporal Jeremy Morlock celebrated the murder of an innocent Afghan civilian as if he had just bagged a magisterial moose from the wilds of his native Alaska.

Photos of the 23-year-old soldier treating a human being as if he were some sort of hunting trophy shocked the world when they were published last week by the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Even the US Army, an organisation not usually given to grovelling apology, described the images as "repugnant".

On Wednesday, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Seattle in Washington State, Morlock was sentenced to 24 years in a military prison, after pleading guilty to being part of a "kill squad" of junior soldiers who randomly murdered three unarmed locals, for sport, during a 12-month tour of Kandahar province, which ended last spring. More...

Don't miss:
  1. Yesterday Abu Ghraib, today Bradley Manning: who tomorrow?
  2. How many Afghan boys need to die to make the news?
  3. US soldier gets 60 days for killing Afghan civilians for sport. 60 days???
  4. 'I didn't think of Iraqis as humans'
  5. Ex-soldier returns medal in protest against war in Afghanistan... 

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