Tag: Afghanistan

You’d think the apparent desecration of Taliban corpses by United States Marines in Afghanistan would be indefensible, that the notion that someone would piss on a dead body would be so foreign to all of our consciences that this would not be an issue.

You would be wrong. This is a post to Facebook that I just came across:

am so sick of this shit with the Marines who urinated on their enemy. Hey stupid go visit a VA hospital sometime and look at the condition of some of our retuning soldiers. Did it ever occur to you that we might not be such a target if other people feared us? GO USA!!!!!!

To sum things up: Pissing on a corpse shows how powerful we are and apparently has military utility. Bizarre.

I’ll leave it to Cara Palmer, on Neon Tommy, — who calls the footage “utterly deplorable” — to explain things to my Facebook friend:

The thoughtless action and comments of the Marines depicted in the video is not only disrespectful, but it is also inhumane. The devaluation of another human being, dead or alive, in such a manner, even and especially in wartime, reflects badly on the character of those committing the act. Certain standards of behavior must be met, standards these particular Marines were far from meeting.

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The hope that yesterday’s release of thousands of documents on the Afghanistan war, documents that cast our misguided effort there into much starker relief than before, would alter policy proved very quickly to be baseless. Congress voted, as it has since the beginning of the war, to approve supplemental war funding, ensuring that the war will continue.

The revelations in the Wikileaks papers — described briefly here and here by The New York Times — should have been as damaging as those contained in the Pentagon Papers If documents describing a corrupt Pakistani intelligence service that had ties to the Taliban, failures on the ground and a sketchy rationale behind the war did not temper Congress and the administration’s commitment to the war, then I’m not sure what can.

At least Rush Holt, Frank Pallone and Donald Payne voted against the supplemental — but what about the other 10 members of the Congressional delegation?

• Send me an e-mail.
• Read poetry at The Subterranean.
• Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.