As Washington attempts to limit the damage done by the now-infamous YouTube video which apparently depicts US marines urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters, critics say such actions are the inevitable outcome of an unjustified war.
As US defense secretary Leon Panetta condemned the footage "in the strongest possible terms," Afghan President Hamid Karzai released a statement on Thursday calling the alleged desecration of the dead bodies "completely inhumane."
With Karzai imploring the US military to punish those responsible, Panetta promised "those found to have engaged in such conduct will be held accountable to the fullest extent."
The Pentagon further stated it was still in the process of identifying the four soldiers who mockingly urinated on the slain fighters while a fifth one stood back and filmed the incident.
But while the Pentagon attempts to fight off claims that there are systemic problems in the American military, David Swanson, author and campaigner at rootsaction.org, told RT the latest scandal is not an isolated incident.
"This is not a group of four or five sociopaths who somehow made it through screening and got into deployment in the service of the United States. This is the result of the inevitable training that is necessary to get men and women to take part in a war that is not defensive, that has no reasonable moral or legal justification."
In fact, Swanson argues that scandals like this can actually lead people to overlook greater injustices being committed.
"My outrage in particular is in the fact that these soldiers have apparently murdered these people and the scandal is that they are urinating on them. The hatred that is necessary to get people to do such a thing is necessary to motivate soldiers to fight in a war that has no other credible rationale. The war itself is an atrocity, and so we pick out these particular atrocities and we get outraged. But we don't look at the underlying fact, and we end up with this incredibly bizarre phenomenon of being upset that someone is peeing on a body that he has killed."
I had an American Army Captain chat with me through email about some of the things that went on there. He told me he knew of a time when American soldiers used the head of an Iraqi civilian or soldier as a soccer ball and batted it back and forth between them.
This is nothing new in war and if the soldiers came clean, it would take 100 years to hear all of their stories. This is what they have to come back here to their country and face, their atrocities inside their minds and souls. No wonder there is an extremely high rate of suicide on the American military, from the top down. What secrets do they hold? And when they see what it was all about, they realize it was for nothing, just emptiness. America has "created" by its actions, more terrorists and hatred for their country than they can ever imagine.
What shame to them!
@Mike - Your comment is appreciated - by me at least. Wanted to say this. The guys pissing on corpses were just 'unlucky' enough to be caught. Judging by comments on various sites it looks like the MAJORITY of Americans think there's nothing wrong with what they did and it's just 'war'. NO - Afghanistan is not and was not at 'war'. This is an occupation after an invasion where atrocities by the invaders continue till this day. People conveniently forget this fact.