The Devil's Daughter

During the first five months of last year, a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan went on a shooting spree, killing at least four unarmed civilians and mutilating several of the corpses. The “kill team” – members of the 5th Stryker Brigade stationed near Kandahar – took scores of photos chronicling their kills and their time in Afghanistan. Even before the war crimes became public, the Pentagon went to extraordinary measures to suppress the photos, launching a massive effort to find every file and pull the pictures out of circulation before they could touch off a scandal on the scale of Abu Ghraib.

The images – more than 150 of which have been obtained by Rolling Stone – portray a front-line culture among U.S. troops in which killing innocent civilians is seen as a cause for celebration.

I have never cried over a picture before. This is just….. terrible. I have seen the exact same look that is on that soldiers face a hundred times on a hundred different hunters that come through my town each year. That’s a human being they just shot, not a bird or a deer. How can anybody be HAPPY about that?

(via socialistscum)