...On Sept. 4, German forces in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan called in a U.S. air strike on two fuel tankers that had been captured by "anti-coalition forces" (ACF).
German officials knew that there was a crowd of civilians around the tankers helping themselves to a windfall of free fuel, but they called in the air strike anyway. This was a clear violation of the laws of war, which prohibit attacking civilians even when there are believed to be combatants amongst them. In the aftermath of the attack, it was found that 142 people had been killed, and that the great majority of them were civilians.
General Wolfgang Schneiderhan, the Chief of Staff of the German Army, and Franz Josef Jung, who was the Defense Minister at the time, were both forced to resign, and Peter Wichert, the junior civilian official who approved the air strike, was suspended.
An obvious question must occur to Americans reading this tragic story. We know that thousands of U.S. air strikes have killed tens or even hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why has no U.S. general or defense secretary resigned over any of those incidents?
In other ways, the stories in the press have followed the same pattern. They begin with denials and assertions that only combatants were targeted and killed. Then there are investigations, and eventually U.S. officials admit that they killed large numbers of civilians, although the figure acknowledged is always less than that cited in reports by U.N. or local officials.
But nobody is court martialed, and nobody resigns. We've all seen this story repeated dozens of times since 2001.http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/12/02-12
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