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How Much Is Your Loved One Worth?
by James Glaser May 10, 2007 BBC News May 8th, 2007 "I stand before you today, deeply, deeply ashamed and terribly sorry that Americans have killed and wounded innocent Afghan people," US army spokesman Col John Nicholson told reporters in Washington by video conference from Afghanistan. "The deaths and wounding of innocent Afghans at the hands of Americans is a stain on our honour and on the memory of the many Americans who have died defending Afghanistan and the Afghan people. "We made official apologies on the part of the US government and payments of about $2,000 for each death," he said, after US officials visited some of the families left bereaved by the incident. Not to be confused with the killing of 50 some Afghan civilians last week, or the killing of 21 Afghan civilians yesterday, Col. Nicholson was talking about the killing of 19 innocent Afghan civilians by the United States Marine Corps this last March. Somehow Washington and our military have come to believe that giving out a couple of grand for each death will make everything all right. At first I thought it strange that an Army Coronal would be the one apologizing for a Marine unit, but then I remembered right after this killing, the whole Marine unit involved was removed from the country. Think about if a foreign occupying army killed your mother or father, your sister or your brother, how about your child or even your best friend. Do you think two thousand dollars would make you forgive and forget? We think life is cheap in the Middle East and that some how killing is OK if you pay for that blood, but every time we kill somebody's loved one, we are making a life-time enemy, and in the last 60 years we have killed untold numbers. It seems kind of strange, but we seem to do all our killing in pitiful third world nations, where the blood price is low. |
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