RACE RELATIONS BLOG: Friday, October 21, 2005

Friday, October 21, 2005

Australian TV Says Shows Footage of Taliban Burning (Video)


Australian television broadcast on Wednesday footage of what it said was U.S. soldiers burning two dead Taliban fighters as they faced Mecca and using the charred and smoking corpses in a propaganda campaign in southern Afghanistan

The television report said U.S. soldiers burned the bodies for hygienic reasons but then a U.S. psychological operations unit broadcast a propaganda message on loudspeakers to Taliban fighters, taunting them to retrieve their dead and fight.
In Washington, the U.S. Defense Department expressed concern over the report and promised that it would be "aggressively investigated."
"These are very serious allegations and, if true, very troublesome," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told Reuters.

Footage showed two U.S. soldiers reading two messages from a notebook that they said had earlier been broadcast.
"Attention Taliban you are cowardly dogs," read the first soldier, identified as psyops specialist Sgt. Jim Baker.
"You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burned. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be."
The other unidentified soldier read a second message, part of which said: "You attack and run away like women. You call yourself Talibs but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion, and you bring shame upon your family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are."