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We Have Been killing Little Children For Ten Years Now
by James Glaser June 23, 2011 
America doesn't report our own troops being killed or wounded in Afghanistan any more, so there is little chance that we are going to hear about all the children and their mothers that we are killing. We did hear last weekend that we killed 24 civilians in Libya, and that some of them were infants, but try to remember back a few years ago. There was a time that we were hearing reports every couple of weeks about another Afghan wedding party that we massacred. I guess the Pentagon put a stop to reports like that, because you and I both know we haven't stopped the killing, and the Afghans have not stopped getting married. If you do think back to the beginning of the war, we were constantly killing civilians in dribs and drabs. Not a wholesale slaughter, but a pretty constant stream. Even if you kill, say 25 people a week with some big kills every so often, you have to remember that we have been killing civilians in Afghanistan for about 500 weeks now, and those numbers add up. We will never know how many children or the total of innocent civilians we have killed in Afghanistan. The Pentagon figured out that Americans don't back wars that cause large numbers of civilians to be killed. In the Vietnam War Americans knew we had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and it got people out in the street working to stop that war. Well, that isn't going to happen again, the Pentagon will make sure of that. Civilian deaths are a secret, and if you watch the reporting that we do have, the first thing the military does is deny they killed anyone, or they will say they killed only terrorists. Days or weeks later on, buried in the middle of the paper, you might see where the military admits they made a mistake, and they talk about paying off the loved ones of those we kill - like that makes everything all right. It looks like we are going to continue to kill and maim little children and their mothers in Afghanistan for years to come. Tonight there is a report that President Obama will soon announce that he is going to pull all of the 30,000 troops from his military surge in the next 18 months, but there is nothing about ending the war. We were pretty good at killing civilians before Obama's surge, and I an sure we will be just as good at that killing after his surge is over. Every invading army is good at killing innocent people, because they know none of their loved ones are any where around. They can shoot at anything or anyone and know that it is not going to be a somebody they care about. However, we are going to have thousands of our troops working through the guilt of killing innocent people for the rest of their lives. Killing children is never explained away, and it is never acceptable, no matter how it happens. |
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