US MARINES BURN TALIBAN BODIES

Well, here's a distasteful story--apparently marines in Aghanistan burned the dead bodies of two Taliban fighters and then taunted Afghani locals with the fact that their bodies were not handled according to Muslim ways.

Here's a direct excerpt from [http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1106AP_Australia_US_Afghanistan.html|an article] from SeattlePI.com that refers to Australian TV network, SBS:

The SBS television network broadcast video footage that purportedly showed U.S. soldiers burning the bodies of the suspected Taliban fighters in the hills outside the southern village of Gonbaz, near the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

The network said the footage was taken by a freelance journalist, Stephen Dupont, who told The Associated Press he was embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade of the U.S. Army earlier this month. Dupont said the burnings happened on Oct. 1.

In the footage, which was seen by the AP, two soldiers who spoke with American accents later read taunting messages that the SBS said were broadcast to the village, which was believed to be harboring Taliban soldiers.

Dupont said the soldiers responsible for the taunting messages were part of a U.S. Army psychological operations unit.

Now, the article goes on to say that Dupont claimed that the marines claimed that the bodies were burned for sanitary reasons. Couldn't they have been buried for hygiene reasons? Couldn't they followed Muslim beliefs in the process? OK, so they were Taliban and I assume trying to kill the marines, but why must we be as savage as our enemies? I thought we were supposed to be a Christian nation. What ever happen to "love thine enemy" or whatever?

Hell, whatever happened to just being decent people?

And what about the taunting of the local villagers? Here's more from the article about that:

Shortly after the bodies were burned, the soldiers from the psychological operations unit allegedly read out taunting messages about the act over a loudspeaker to the nearby village, according to a transcript of the program.

"Taliban, you are all cowardly dogs. You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to come down and retrieve their bodies," said one message read by a soldier, according to the transcript.

And a little more:

"They used that as a psychological warfare, I guess you'd call it. They used the fact that the Taliban were burned facing west (toward Mecca)," Dupont told SBS. "They deliberately wanted to incite that much anger from the Taliban so the Taliban could attack them ... . That's the only way they can find them."

Well, it sure is nice to know that the military of the most powerful nation in the world can't flush out a few religious extremists in a primitive village in Afghanistan without reducing themselves to schoolyard tactics!

Well, don't worry--it's all in the name of protecting our freedoms, right? Can't have some Taliban dudes getting away to possibly harbor terrorists in the future, right? So what if these tactics make our entire country look bad. It's not like these marines are the President getting oral sex in the oval office, right?

Oh and hey, didn't Bush say the Taliban had been vanquished?