'You want to wax this guy or what?'

[swag]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/09/you-guys-want-to-wax-this-guy-or-what.html


Posted by Amy Davidson


Which is more gruesome, in terms of images: photographs of the dismembered body parts of Afghans that American soldiers allegedly kept as trophies; or the video, above (via ABC News), of a nice looking young American soldier telling two investigators about how his unit killed an Afghan man for no reason at all? The photographs, which are known to exist, and which the Army has tried to keep out of the press, may be harder to look at; but the video is uglier.

The case, which I wrote about last week, is complicated in some ways—five soldiers are charged in the killings of three Afghan civilians, seven others are facing related charges, and there are disputes about who the ringleader was, who was pressured, and what role drugs or even brain injuries played—but in other ways it’s pretty straightforward. This is not a fog-of-war story, in which the line between a civilian and combatant is arguably blurry. Specialist Jeremy Morlock, the soldier in the video, says that the man was no threat and that the soldiers themselves rolled out a grenade to give them an excuse to shoot him, after one said,

You guys want to wax this guy, or what?

“Or what”: The parents of one soldier now facing charges, Adam Winfield, say that he told them (via Facebook) what was happening after the first of the three killings, and that he called it murder. They say that their son was scared to say anything and so they tried to warn the military themselves, but were ignored. If so, then the Army missed a chance to save two Afghan men from being killed and at least one American man from being a killer.


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