to think that the soldier who shot dead those people should be handed over to the Afghan government?

[TheRhubarb]

I'm not sure what responses I will get here so let me just run through my thoughts on this.

He shot dead children and beat the women before shooting them too and dragging their bodies to a house, covering them with cushions and sticks and burning them.

If this had happened over here, we would try the murderer according to our own laws.
Even if the murderer had fled back to his own country, we would order his deportation.
Afghanistan have full UK and US support, so what does it say about our faith in their government if the US refuse to release the man into their custody?
Why is it one rule for us and another for them?

Many soldiers will now also die because of this man's act and amongst them might be British soldiers, so he will potentially be responsible for many more deaths yet by revenge acts.

The only way to appease the Afghan people and to show our trust in the government is surely to hand the perpetrator over to them? Only in that way can we hope to prevent revenge attacks.

Is one man's life - a murderers life at that - worth more than those of serving soldiers in the US and UK army?

I'm willing to listen to all opinions on this.

He is definitely a sick fuck.

He needs to be handed over to the Afghan people and dealt with there.

So twisted and sick

you know him personally, then, tea?

undoubtedly he's sick, yes. this could be any one of your sons. any of your lovely toddlers all grown up and off to join the military. you have no idea what he has been through, or which numpty decided he was still suitable to be given a gun and left for extended periods under immense stress.

i've never met him either.

but rational and balanced and good hearted young men can find themselves breaking under the strain and doing terrible terrible things.

and yes, some people are just mad, bad and dangerous to know.

but you don't know he's always been one of them, or if he's reacted in a tragic way after a long line of events.

none of us know.

the knee jerk reaction is of course that he is 'sick and twisted'. but i retain hope that most mners can dig deeper than that visceral reaction.

As in UK, Parliament and Government are not interchangeable synonyms. The Afghan Government is not requesting a trial in Afghanistan.

The Bland article reflects the sense of outrage well, but appears not well founded because he does not seem aware of UK law (Visiting Forces Act) which means that the US person would be returned to US for trial. There is no double standard.

I agree with everything you have said Rhubarb and of course he is a sick fuck but sadly he is not alone. The US army is full of people like him, red necks who have no respect for and commit awful atrocities against the civilians of countries they are stationed in. I have heard first hand about soldiers using human heads as footballs.
He should definately be tried by the Afghans.

Do you inow Osama Bin Laden personally madwomen or any 'terrorist'? Do you think they are sick fucks? Can you dig deeper than your viscéral reaction? Do you know what they've endured in their lives? Do you care?They are someone's babies, all grown up

Madwoman - would you be so understanding if it were your children that were massacered? Its irrelevant why he did it, the fact is he killed 16 innocent people in a brutal and horrific way.

Partyhats...could you be more offensive if you tried ! The man has been trained to kill, no doubt seen a friend murdered, he has lost it the plot whatever you call it, rather than seeing this coming the US military left him to it and he killed innocent kids :( they should hold themselves to blame for wading into a war which has fuck all to do with them, and then ruining the lives of the soldiers they send in to do they're dirty work !

So the soldier is just a killing machine then with no mind and morals of his own? What about the urinating on dead bodies and buring the koran, is that because the poor loves are under so much pressure as well? They signed up to fight in bloody wars not for flower arranging.

i can have tea with the midwife that gave my dd brain damage.

she didn't try to kill her on purpose. it doesn't alter the fact that my dd has a lifelong disability as a result of her actions. i can see beyond it. would i feel differently if they hadn't been able to revive her? dunno.

i'm not expecting the midwife to go to prison. i am expecting the pct to accept their part in the events on her behalf.

i did ponder a bit about the 'what id it were my children' line. i lived next door to an iraqi soldier and his family in wiltshire. right in the middle of the iraq conflict. it was faintly unreal watching our troops killing his friends and countrymen on the news, whilst being able to hear him and his family pottering about through the shared wall, probably watching the same news. believe me, it wouldn't have been too much of a stretch if it had triggered a catastrophe, and i did wonder about the potential.

but, y'know. you have to think about these things on a personal level and work your own way around them. if you are content to stop at 'scik fuck' then i'm not going to try and get you to go deeper.

This is not directed at anyone in particular, but I'd just like to add that the presence of troops in Afghanistan is nothing like when troops were in Iraq. It is a UN backed presence with forces from many, many nations. It is not "an illegal war".

Madwoman - I am sorry to hear about your experience you are a much more compassionate person than I am and I take my hat off to you, I wish you and your dd all the best.
I am content to stop at 'sick fuck' in this instance though as he did set out to kill those people in cold blood unlike your midwife who was negligent. Personally I am not convinced about the MH line anyway, I think his actions are more symptomatic of the endemic racist culture that exists within the US military that dehumanises muslims.

sure. it would have been perfectly understandable if my neighbour had gone berserk with a rifle and murdered half of the street, including my (then) 2yo, 4yo, and 6yo. and even i felt at the time that would have been a not totally unexpected response to the pressure he was under. even if it had been entirely sanctioned by the UN it would still have been an understandable response. he wouldn't have been a 'sick fuck'. it would have been a tragedy of unbelievable proportions, but largely the fault of the decision makers who saw no/ little risk. a tragedy for his family too. all purely theoretical, obv.

should also add that dh was given a 20% chance of survival after getting blown up. and the dc's godfather was also taken out by a roadside ied. these are just run of the mill military things though with no real civilian casualty, so not really part of the equation.

'the intimate history of killing' by joanna bourke is an interesting read for those who struggle with the 'dehumanised' aspects of soldiering that do come to light.

x-post.

It is, of course possible that he's a "sick fuck", but also that he could be a good bloke under intolerable pressure (were there any incidents involving US casualties just before?), and there could be institutional failings too (how the hell did he leave a camp, apparently alone and armed, in the middle of the night - at risk of capture himself: surely there should be measures to prevent this for their own safety?). There are so many unanswered questions at this stage. We simply do not have enough to go on.

i used the midwife thing as more of an example of a chain of events that point to one person's obvious 'guilt' but with a much lengthier catalogue of perpetrators, really. a lot of the negligence was down to lack of equipment (and funding), poor policies, and long hours. a lot like the military without the added pressure of being shot at. sure, she played her part, but sometimes incidents are inevitable when you look at the circumstances.

i feel really sorry for her, and for the trainee that she was supervising.

i fully expect the pct to protect her. if they abandoned her to the mercy of the court system when they had put her in the position they did, nothing at all would be resolved, and the same thing could happen again to any other midwife (and any other mother and baby).

the US have an absolute responsibility to deal with the soldier, and an absolute responsbility to check their policies to ensure it doesn't happen again. in exactly the same way that they have with any of the other atrocities that are from time to time reported (burning korans, etc).

but that does mean accepting their own part in the atrocity. not putting all the blame onto one man.

But the midwife didn't do it on purpose. It's not comparable. No one could have tea with someone who beat and shot their child and set fire to them

partyhats, really?

people don't join the military to go to war and kill. really. if that's the level of your 'debate' then you won't find a response here.

Ok-massive x post with everybody!

no. that's why i said i used it as an example of a chain of events, rather than a 'she/ he did it'. i see the entire agency as jointly responsible. you see one man.

it's just a different way of looking at things. i doubt that when he was in his right mind, he was set on rampaging and killing civilians. but you have to know what happened.

it's why i backed it up with my neighbour. i would absolutely have understood if he had flipped out. absolutely. and he wasn't even under fire.

I do understand your compassion and empathy for the man, for the circumstances that lead to him doing what he did

What makes me sick, is that level of understanding is not applied to people/actions of Afghan (or wherever).

I was trying to concoct a scenario to demonstrate the reverse - but you Iraqi neighbour is exactly that. I think you would be in a very very tiny minority of feeling any kind of compassion for him if he had gone on the rampage and killed children in the UK

i suspect you are right.

but since when did the fact of a majority dictate the 'right' response? we all have our own moral compass. (don't be getting all democratic on me )

every way you look at it, it's a tragedy.

I don't think people in the US will care much about his mental health.

I'm not sure how many people know that Timothy McVeigh, the man responsible for the Oklahoma City terrorist attack, which killed 168 people, was a Gulf War veteran who clearly (from his interviews) had a very bad case of untreated PTSD.

Interestingly, it seemed to stem from a 'break' in his dehumanisation training. He talked about being in the war and facing up to the fact that he would have to shoot at Iraqi soldiers -- and then having this epiphany where he realised that Iraqi soldier was just like him, following orders, and they were both victims of aggressive governments.

That was basically the beginning of his drift toward anti-government and right-wing ideologies, which ended in mass murder.

But this whole angle was really not talked about very much, and in the end he was put to death.

I also think that expecting Afghans to respect and accept the SOFA and other laws that require the soldier to be tried in America, at the same time that all the laws protecting Afghan civilians are routinely violated by both foreign and Afghan forces all the time, is a really big ask.

I know the US has little other choice, but I'm not sure they understand just how messed up it is.

My brother had PTSD. He tried to commit suicide once. He served in N.Ireland during the troubles and witnessed a policeman being blown to smithereens after his sniffer dog failed to detect the bomb that had been planted in the shed they were searching. When the bomb went off all the Irish men and women who had been watching from a nearby factory all whooped and applauded. He also saw friends being shot and killed and checkpoints and he discovered one of his friends hanging by the neck on Christmas Eve. These are just the things he has told us about, there is more he hasn't told us. He has not harmed anyone.

This issue about mental health annoys the fuck out of me. Yes people experience bad shit, but there are people on the ground who have had their families wiped out, who have seen horrific slaughtering of women and children and not all of them turn out to be killers either. It's like saying that an abused child will grow up to be an abuser themselves. It's nonsense.

How many of the WWI or WWII veterans go on killing sprees when they returned home?

Yes, there should be more help for soldiers who have served in these volatile countries. Both the UK and US forces are guilty of not taking mental health issues seriously enough. But I do not think for one minute that you can use mental health to justify the slaughter of men, women and children in their homes at the dead of night.

9 children. It doesn't even bear thinking about.

partyhats - I think your posts are pretty ignorant so please do not include me in them. Not all US soliders are rednecks are that's a highly offensive thing to say. You may want to package people up in your stereotypical pigeon hole but that's not the way I work.

The Afghan parliament yesterday demanded that the US soldier who killed 16 villagers should be put on public trial in Afghanistan, as the shooting spree sparked a new crisis in US-Afghan relations. ?We seriously demand and expect that the government of the United States punish the culprits and try them in a public trial before the people of Afghanistan,? the Lower House of Parliament said in statement.

So yes, they do want him tried in Afghanistan. Also, what counts as off-duty? If Archie Bland is right about this: "the US accepts that off-duty soldiers committing serious crimes should come under the jurisdiction of the local system." Then if that solider was classed as off-duty then why can't he stand trial in Afghanistan?

Bland is right though: "But the US is always talking about its respect for Afghan sovereignty; just as in Iraq, the prevailing rhetoric of the endgame is that for us to stand down, they must stand up. Here is a meaningful opportunity to demonstrate commitment to that principle, to pre-empt the Taliban's rhetoric ? and to prove that the expressions of sorrow that we've heard in recent days aren't merely designed with US interests in mind."

America's apology has not gone down well in Kabul where they are sick of hearing America apologise for soldiers pissing on dead bodies and burning the Koran - they can see little evidence of a sincere apology from where they are standing. Esp when Obama and Cameron can manage to put the atrocity to one side to attend a ball game the day after. You don't think Kabul noticed that? You don't think they have a media in Kabul?