Censored 2012 by Mickey Huff Read Free Book Online Page A

addition, the extrajudicial execution of US citizens by the United States government also violates the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution mandating that no person ‘be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.’ ”
    There has been no correlation drawn by corporate media between the US policy of presidential assassinations and the on-ground troop engagement in outrageous human rights violations, which was made public when the German magazine
Der Spiegel
released images of smiling US soldiers kneeling next to naked children they had just massacred. The soldiers not only took the village children’s lives but also ripped out their teeth and fingertips as keepsakes, and took pictures of themselves holding the dead bodies up by their hair. Jeremy Morlock, one of the soldiers in that group who participated in these incidents, has agreed to negotiate his declaration against his colleagues and superiors, to reduce his sentence for the murders. This group of soldiers referred to themselves as “Team Death.”
    Luke Mogelson from the
New York Times
covered the trial of Jeremy Morlock on May 1, 2011:
    In a military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., 22-year-old Jeremy Morlock confessed to participating in the premeditated murder of Mullah Allah Dad, as well as the murders of two other Afghan civilians. In exchange for his agreement to testify against four other soldiers charged in the crimes, including the supposed ringleader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the government reduced Morlock’s mandatory life sentence to 24 years, with the possibility of parole after approximately 8. The rest of the accused, who are still awaiting trial, contest the allegations against them.
    The story that has been told so far—by Morlock in his confession and by various publications that relied heavily on the more sensational accusations from interviews hastily conducted by Army special agents in Afghanistan—is a fairly straightforward one: a sociopath joined the platoon and persuaded a handful of impressionable subordinates to join him in sport killing as opportunities arose. There may indeed be truth to this, though several soldiers in the platoon give a more complicated account. Certainly it’s a useful narrative, strategically and psychologically, for various parties trying to make sense of the murders—parents at a loss to explain their sons’ involvement and lawyers advocating their clients’ innocence and a military invested in a version of events that contains and cauterizes the problem. 8
    While the tragic events of “Team Death” received widespread coverage in world news, most US coverage focused on the individuals as rogue deviants and included official apologies from the US military.
    Additionally, Afghan civilian deaths are usually reported in the US corporate media as isolated incidents, and/or mistakes. A comprehensive evaluation of the human and environmental costs of the war in Afghanistan is mostly ignored by the corporate media.
    Afghan civilians are facing the deadliest period since the US-led invasion began more than nine years ago. According to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor, at least 2,421 civilians were killed in Afghanistan last year, and more than 3,270 civilians were injured inconflict-related security incidents. This means that, every day, 6–7 noncombatants were killed and 8–9 were wounded in the war. In addition to the casualties, hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes, or deprived of health care, education services, and livelihood opportunities due to war, affected in various ways by the intensified armed violence in 2010.
    Armed opposition groups were blamed for 63 percent of the total reported civilian deaths, US/NATO forces for 21 percent, pro-government Afghan forces for 12 percent, and about 4 percent could not be attributed to an identifiable armed group and were labeled “unknown” in the report. Improvised explosive