U.S. troops posed with body parts of Afghan bombers

[Hush]

U.S. troops posed with body parts of Afghan bombers

An American soldier says he released the photos to the Los Angeles Times to draw attention to the safety risk of a breakdown in leadership and discipline. The Army has started a criminal investigation.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 2601.story

No big deal, people pose with fish, deer, bear, moose...whats the problem.

[kalikraven]

I heard an explosion one day when I was in Afghanistan and I later found out it was a suicide bomber. My first thoughts were me hoping that none of my fellow troops were hurt or killed. We found out later that he killed two locals. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-573 ... -air-base/ . My personal opinion is screw them. Wrap the pieces of them in bacon and then bury them. They tried to kill my friends and coworkers and they could have damn well killed me. Unless you've BTDT then I think criticism is uncalled for...

[TROOPER]

What is BTDT?

[700PSS]

What is BTDT?

"Been there. Done that."

[continuity]

Meh, given the stage these guys are given to play on, IMHO it's a healthy release of the stress associated with the ordered duty. s--t that if repressed, would drive the sanest amongst us crazy. If they were making and wearing necklaces made out of the parts, that might be something different. Should have been dealt with by a Sergent level giving an ass chewing... for getting caught doing it.

As a side thought, it's disgusting that the desk driving cock suckers in the military community are leaping to smoke these guys. Dammit, I want our soldiers to have this kinda mindset. That's how I want them to view the enemy. I want them to be mentally ambivalent about the end result of destroying those trying to kill them.

It's no different than cops laughing and making jokes on the scene of a gruesome suicide/murder/crime. It happens. I've done it. Keeps us sane. Really. (WTF is sane anyway?) No where near as intense environment, but the same idea. Just need to keep the audience selective.

Now I'm rambling. Not trying to offend anyone.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

[silencertalk]

I have not BTDT, that I think making your superiors be on TV having to explain this and giving the enemy propaganda material is a terribly bad idea and incredibly bad judgement.

[driver6814]

OH COME ON NOW,

Boys will be boys

[arbullet]

I was in Desert Storm and I'd be surprised if most guys don't have photos of the dead. This was before the internet and digital cameras. You could get the photos developed in Bahrain and there would be thousands of photos forsale.

[doubloon]

I believe they were taking the initiative to capture images for posters to distribute in an effort to identify the remains of the valiant warriors and notify the next of kin. These guys were really going beyond the call of duty and now they're being punished for it.

[ick]

6,000 years of fixation in warfare isn't going to stop because we have a liberal progressive commander in chief. What does the LA Times expect? That this kind of thing wasn't going on before this? That this kind of thing would stop happening? That by publishing it… future behaviors will change?

Of all the things our armed forces "do".... the enemy probably actually understands this behavior more than anything else. For a part of the world that celebrates battle victories by dragging the bodies of dead marines through the city.... for a citizenry that hangs burnt bodies of western mercenaries off of bridges... a culture of thousands of years impaling dead bodies and heads on pikes to "send messages"... this story seems pretty naive.

[silencertalk]

Think of how upset we got over those bridge photos.

[Blaubart]

There's a big difference between taking a picture of a corpse, or posing with a corpse, and doing the things they did to our soldiers in the bridge incident. HUGE!

The worst picture I personally witnessed was from Desert Storm from the highway of death. Guys from the unit I was stationed in after the war had pictures they'd taken of a guy laying in the street. Desert Storm was right around the time of Pepsi's "Gotta have it" ad campaign. So when these guys saw a dead guy on the street that was in a position that made it look like he was reaching out his arm to grab something that he was looking at, they put a Pepsi can just out of his reach and snapped a picture. Then they took another picture from further back that showed the guy had been blown in two, and his hips and legs were missing. Everthing below his stomach was somewhere else.

IMO - That was somewhat disrespectful, but not the same as dragging a corpse through the street, sodomizing it with sticks, pissing and shiiting on it, hanging it from a bridge and burning it. Not even close...

[continuity]

... a culture of thousands of years impaling dead bodies and heads on pikes to "send messages"... this story seems pretty naive.

This brotha is truth. And we think we're so advanced and civilized that this kinda stuff is... unwarranted. Bleah.

Think of how upset we got over those bridge photos.

Upset? These guys were casualties of the activities they were being paid for. Especially as mercenaries. No matter that they were on "our side", they succumbed to the risk that they signed up for. For my part it served as notice to trade my ipod and cool flashlight for a couple more magazines and as many grenades that I could put my hands on.

If you wear the 1* signature, odds are that the * is, sooner or later, gonna come home to roost. And as a note, that is the very same perspective the enemy realizes.

Am I making sense?

[Crosshair]

Quite a few people in that regions think they're still fighting the Soviet Union, which is why our foreign policy is stupid as it creates the enemies we want to defeat. Stupid leaders with stupid worldviews throwing our solders lives away and now they think we are dumb enough to let them go ahead with invading Iran for the same reasons we invaded Iraq?.