Apocalypse Now. Lie follows lie in Afghan massacre: this was Nazi style genocide.

Robert Bales comes straight from the central casting book of stooges. Brains addled and cooked by three duty tours in Afghanistan, high as a kite on drugs, up to his neck in debt and fraud, serial groper, everything it seems but daylight bank robbery. What is he doing one ventures to ask in the US army dedicated to bring peace and enlightenment to the primitive peoples of Afghanistan, trapped in their Islamic darkness?

The answer is nothing. Bales is a victim, like the seventeen people including children sprayed with bullets one dark night in the Kandahar snake pit on the specious grounds they had something to do with a roadside bomb that earlier injured seven US soldiers.

The truth that dare not speak its name is Nazi-style retaliatory genocide.

In WW2, Germans troops repeatedly committed gross violations of the Geneva Conventions by inflicting collective punishment on civilians wherever and whenever partisans and similar forces attacked the invaders.

Granted it does not compare in scale with the Mai Lai affair of March 1968, in which US troops inflamed by Viet Cong attacks massacred between 400 and 500 villagers in a single crazed shooting spree. Most were high on barbituates, frightened stiff and wanted to go home. They hated the war and they came to hate too the very people they had been sent to supposedly protect.

This is exactly the same playbook which has just been repeated in the villages of Balandi and Alkozai, situated to the world in unknown subsistence territory deep in the Panjwai district of Kandahar. There is nothing in this remote dustbowl that is remotely worth fighting about. Yet the US erected a massive fortified camp just five hundred meters or so from those two communities who would bury their dead and loved ones without understanding why they were killed.

That is a terrible epitaph in itself.  But this is the real face of the grotesque and useless war that the United States and its supplicant NATO coalition has inflicted on Afghanistan.

Let us dispose of Robert Bales, 38, married, father of two children, decorated on previous tours, as the maddened nutcase who went on a freelance shooting spree because he fuelled up on too much hooch on a supposedly ‘dry’ base.

Numerous witnesses – who will be regarded as sub-humans because they are Muslims and therefore do not go to church on Sundays – have described at least ten American soldiers on a drunken rampage. One of them thoughtfully brought along a drum of gasoline to barbecue the remains of the people they knew that they were going to kill.

I mention this small detail because it speaks of forethought and at the very least, a considerable degree of planning and intent to commit a massacre.

Kandahar is not the kind of place where you step out for a stroll after supper. Any ‘NATO’ soldier who fancies stretching his legs outside the fortified encampment is taking a chance with his life. So we are asked to believe that the camp guards calmly let Bales and his companions walk out without as much as a by your leave ‘hey where the f*** do you think you are going.’

My contention is simple. Bales and his companions left Camp Belamby not, as now proclaimed, on some last minute winsome high-octane fuelled vengeance but a dedicated and clear intention to murder innocent people that was known and condoned by the ruling top brass in the camp.

Many accounts are now circulating on the Net (and even a few hints surfacing in the Mainstream media) that Camp Belamby suffers from what is known in the corporate world as ‘management problems.’  After ten years of fruitlessly trying to wear down the local invisible enemy, nerves wear out and it is no surprise that even the tough guys at the top start to see peculiar visions distilled in the bottom of the nightly whisky glass.

The US led invaders have now committed so many horrors in this land of coke and ancient men walking around in white nightshirts with the aid of walking sticks it can be readily understood that the board of directors at Camp Belamby collectively decided it was time to teach the locals a damned good lesson.

Apocalypse Now.

Bales and his band went forth in the convinced foreknowledge that they were on a death patrol licensed at the top. Everything that you read to the contrary is after-the-event scrubbing of the facts.  Pentagonia is now in a mad scramble to brand Robert Bales as a sole fruitcake, in the grand tradition of the Gladio brand that is owned and licensed by the North Atlantic ‘Peace Keeping’ Organization.

Remember that the Kandahar horror shot to the headlines in the same time frame that Mohamed Mehar, a small time crook, drifter and fantasist, was tailored for the killing of three French servicemen (of  North African origin) and a Jewish teacher, his two children and another infant at a school in Toulouse.

The US mainstream media is now gripped by a grand before-trial orgy of convicting Robert Bales, the man who before Kandahar was the original All American Hero, as a one-off exception to the holy US crusade to purify and de-Islamize Afghanistan.

No. Bales is himself the eighteenth victim of Kandahar, the patsy set up and schooled to instill fear and terror into the locals by shooting their men folk and kids against a wall.  There is no doubt that Bales is hardly the guy you willingly invite to dinner, that you would want your daughter to marry or expect to see tipping the preacher in church on Sundays.

He is a drop out, a fall-back, a dedicated problem finder, who went into the army to recover some position from the personal life crisis in which he found himself. How many such men with a similar profile are in the US army in Afghanistan today?  Surrounded by the blood and shattered lives of their compatriots, seemingly without end, nothing makes sense to such broken men..

One man, the commanding officer,  Lt. William Calley, was convicted for the infamous Mai Lai massacre. None of his platoon came under judgment, because they were only ‘obeying orders’, that famous creed of the Nazis .

If the top brass at Camp Belamby did not know that Bales and his helpers were outside the camp, barely 500 meters from the camp gates, killing innocent people amid screams and pleas for humanity, then what were they doing?  The  US top brass inside the camp knew this was an act of genocide and they now deny it.

Pentagonia must on no account admit that it has transferred Nazi precepts of genocide from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

Richard Cottrell