Originally posted by StSanta:
Hm, the US don't know what to do with the POW's from foreign nations in Afghanistan. Rumsfeldt is on record saying that it'd be a good thing if they were all dead.
Like it or not, not all of the POW's were in the revolt. Rather indiscriminate use of firepower will kill a lot of those.
Killing of legitimate POW's who aren't resisting, who are bound, is generally not a very civil thing to do.
The rest of the arguments are really straw men: build them up and knock 'em down: it doesn't change the facts about gunning down bound POW's.
I sincerely hope that Americans in general do not condone the killing of POW's.
Santa,
I agree with you about the idea of shooting bound prisoners. I have had a bad feeling about us using a "hands off" approach with the NA operations. I also realise that being to deeply involved will spiral us into a deeper conflict than we want.
I think we should have taken a more involved position on the subject of POW's. The whole damn thing at the prison is the result of ill or untrained forces trying to manage a POW center. Had there been a better than cursory visual search of the POW's there wouldn't have been many if ANY firearms on the inside. Failure to actively search the prisoners made it possible for them to have a substantial number of arms AND ammunition to carry out an attempted prison break.
U.S. troops are tought the 5 "S"'s for POW's. The are, Search, Secure, Silence, Segregate and Speed to the rear. The idea is to reduce the hazard to friendly troops, maintain positive control over the prisoners and get usefull information from them within the bounds of the Geneva Convention guidelines.
It seems obvious, at this preliminary stage, that the prisoners were NOT dealt with according to these steps. Had they been, there would have been no large resistance with weapons and no need to "repacify" prisoners.
Final note. Until we have an independant assessment, and maybe not even then, we won't know WHO was responsible for the deaths of the bound prisoners. This may have been carried out by the prisoners (the ones doing the armed revolt) themselves as a "lesson" to any who might cooperate with their captors. Depending on who we may have had in the area, we may never get an accurate asessment.
As for blur, his words are meaningless.
[ 12-01-2001: Message edited by: Maverick ]
[ 12-01-2001: Message edited by: Maverick ]