[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by sailor *
**Here’s what Amnesty International has to say, and I agree wholeheartedly:
Maybe we should put Amnesty International in charge of guarding prisoners. I’m sure they would do a great job of subduing armed uprisings.
***Originally posted by aegypt ***
**
We don’t have a lot of details yet. But everything I’ve read points to an armed uprising. Yes, the Geneva Convention says you must respect someone’s surrender. It also says that you can’t surrender and then turn around and start fighting again.
Now it would have been just fine and dandy if we could have called time-out and asked each individual prisoner whether they wanted to participate in the riot or not. But that’s pretty tough to do when you are being shot at. By rioting with automatic weapons, the prisoners returned to a combatant status and pretty much lost their chance at getting out alive. A war crime? Maybe by some definition, but I personally don’t expect a rag-tag group like the Northern Alliance to accept someone’s surrender twice.
War is personal. The Taliban prisoners were given a chance. They rioted, killing NA soldiers. Those NA soldiers not killed are now really pissed off, since they’ve lost comrades and had their gesture of accepting surrender thrown back in their faces. Thus, they probably didn’t think about things like “oh, some of these guys may not want to fight” or “maybe we could just kill some and let the rest surrender.” They think, “you bastards, see if we give you another chance.” Don’t like it? That’s fine. But it’s war, and no one ever said it was pretty.
Everyone’s a critic cause it’s easy. Even better when you can get paid to make broad criticisms on scant information of an event you didn’t witness.
I personally can’t see how this could possibly be a simple massacre of unarmed prisoners, given that the battle is still going on as we speak, several days later. If the prisoners were unarmed and were massacred, they how can they still be fighting?
The fact is that we have very little control over the Northern Alliance. In fact, just about the only control we have over them is the hope that if they behave they will get a big slice of the millions dollars of aid that will be shipped in after the war is over.
They are not our clients, they are not our proxies, they are not trained by us, they are not controlled by us, they do not take orders from us. They are not analgous to South Vietnamese troops during the Vietnam war. The only reason they are cooperating with us is because we hate the Taliban and they hate the Taliban. They are shooting at the Taliban and we want the Taliban to be shot at. We are bombing the Taliban and they want the Taliban to be bombed.
Why is it so hard to understand that the Northern Alliance can be murderous psychopaths but that we will cooperate with them anyway as long as they help us kill the Taliban and al Qaida? They are murderers, but useful murderers. After the war, perhaps someday Afghanistan will have some sort of legal system, and perhaps fewer people will be massacred. But the war has to be won first.
All we can do is try not let the worst members of the Northern Alliance get much of our give-away goodies after the war.
Looks like we all owe aegypt an apology. Clearly, the entire episode was an American conspiracy.
Interestingly, it appears the plan to kill Taleban in a godforsaken prison in Afghanistan was hatched well before September 11. Hmmm…any light to shed on that, aegypt?
[sub]Note, please, the few paragraphs beginning “Despite his confused state, Hamid also gave Newsweek what may be the most complete account to date of the prisoners’ uprising on Sunday morning, Nov. 25…”[/sub]
Damn straight aegypt owes us an apology for spreading those lies, er, utterly unsubstantiated conjectures, as bearing any resemblance to the truth.
Today’s Dallas Morning News printed a story from the New York Times. Presumably, it’s still on their site, for anybody who has an account and wants to look it up. Like johnson’s MSNBC link, it features the story of one of the approximately 80 prisoners who survived the uprising. (As always, the fact that 20% of the prisoners not only survivied what was allegedly a cold-blooded execution, but were still permitted to surrender, will quickly be taken into account as part of the conspiracy theory. :rolleyes: )
The NYT story is about Abdul Jabar, a 26-year-old from Uzbekistan. The story leaves no doubt whatsoever that the prison uprising was exactly what the Northern Alliance and the U.S. said it was all along:
Apologies from everyone in this thread who asserted or speculated to the contrary will be forthcoming shortly, right?
And according to this,, aegypt was labelled “an anti-American peace-freak” in this thread. I could’ve sworn he was being labelled a delusional conspiracy theorist- sorry about the confusion.