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"I don't know if they fired any rounds," he said. "If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralise the individual. You don't have to be fired upon to fire back."
He admitted that the original statement had been "poorly worded" but said "to people who see a lot of dead bodies" the women had appeared at the time to have been dead for several hours.
Starkey reports that the Americans offered the distraught family $2000 per victim of the botched raid. But as the mother of the slain brothers, Bibi Sabsparie, told him bitterly, "There's no value on human life. They killed our family, then they came and brought us money. Money won't bring our family back."
So once again, we have a massacre (in a night-time raid that occurred two weeks after the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, ordered an end to the practice because of the number of errors and civilian deaths, and the bad public relations such raids cause among Afghans), with no coverage by the US media.
Meanwhile, Starkey says that even in the UK, his stories have been ignored by the rest of the British media, and that his own efforts to get at the truth have begun causing problems with the US-led military command in Afghanistan.
As he told one reader who had written him to congratulate him on his work:
Word in Kabul is that NATO are turning their wrath on me, personally, and about to release a rebuttal. All of a sudden it's a daunting prospect and more than ever I feel what it must be like to be churned through the military machine. It's good to know people appreciate it. I've also had emails from the victims' family, which is heartening.
It is not easy to be an honest reporter in wartime, where sycophancy and blind patriotism are what is demanded. Sadly, the US media are taking the easy way out, accepting the rules of being embedded, which require them to submit articles for censorship, to avoid being critical and to play the game, in return for getting easy human interest stories to send back to the readers and viewers back home.
That's not journalism. It's PR. It ought to be labeled as such.
Extra!Also ignored by theTimesand most of the rest of the US corporate media was ahistoric decisionby a federal judge in Chicago on March 4 to compel former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to respond to charges by to US torture victims that Rumsfeld authorized their torture by US forces at Camp Cropper in Iraq. The two men, David Vance and Nathan Ertel, were whistleblowers against the private security (mercenary) firm that had hired them, claiming it was secretly providing arms to insurgents. Instead of getting the firm investigated, they were arrested by US troops and held--and tortured, they claim--for three months, before being released without charge and sent home to the US.
Their attorney, Mike Kanovitz of Chicago's Loevy & Loevy, correctly calls the quashing of Rumsfeld's effort to have the suit against him thrown out, "pretty historic"--a former secretary of defense is being accused of authorizing the torture of American citizens and will have to answer the charge in a federal court--but you wouldn't know it from the response of the US mainstream media, which has been...nothing.
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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-area journalist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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