'Ignore The Rapists': US Commanders Tell Soldiers in Afghanistan To Ignore Afghan Allies Who Rape Boys

Soldiers are instructed that boy rape is "part of the culture" of Afghanistan's male adults

In a "tradition" called bacha bazi (boy play) boys are turned into sex slaves and forced to dress as girls and dance. One US Army captain was relieved of command after he beat an Afghan militia commander who had a boy chained to his bed. (Screen capture from YouTube video)

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN
In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

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Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

After the beating, the Army relieved Captain Quinn of his command and pulled him from Afghanistan. He has since left the military.

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America's 'Special Trained Anti-ISIS' Fighters Proving to be Especially Useless — Either Getting Captured or Deserting

A U.S. soldier, left, shows a Peshmerga fighter which way to face his "weapon,"
during training near Kirkuk, Iraq, on June 14, 2010.(US Army)

By LUIS MARTINEZ
Many of the Syrian rebels trained by the United States to fight ISIS are unaccounted for in the northern part of the country and some have been found in Turkey, a U.S. official said Thursday.

News about the uncertainty of their whereabouts came a week after the rebels were attacked by 50 fighters from the rival al-Nusra Front, a rebel group affiliated with al Qaeda. At least one of the U.S.-trained rebels was killed and others were wounded before the attack was repelled by U.S. airstrikes.

The Pentagon said earlier this week that President Obama had authorized airstrikes to defend the rebels, even from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The U.S. must rely on the 54 rebels, known as the New Syrian Forces, to report their movements since they fall under the U.S. chain of command, Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said earlier Thursday. He said they have the means to communicate with the U.S. military, but that it didn't mean they provided regular updates about their positions.

Davis added that tracking them was made difficult by current combat conditions in northern Syria.

The small group of rebels recently began operating after becoming the first graduates of a U.S. program that plans to train and equip as many as 5,400 moderate Syrian opposition forces to fight ISIS.

But the $500 million training program for the rebels has been slow to begin because of a vigorous vetting program intended to ensure that potential recruits will not join other extremist groups or fight the Assad regime. So far, the Pentagon has spent $42 million to start up the program.

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Chemical Weapons Tested on 60,000 African Americans by the United States

The US now officially admits to conducting human experiments with mustard gas and other chemical weapons on 60,000 African Americans, as well as Japanese and Puerto Rican people. This is in addition to other human experiments the US carried out on African Americans, Guatemalans, Marshall Islanders, whom mainstream US culture referred to as “savages.“

Rollins Edwards is a young soldier in 1945 at Clark Air Force
Base in the Philippines. (Courtesy Rollins Edwards)

By Caitlin Dickerson
As a young U.S. Army soldier during World War II, Rollins Edwards knew better than to refuse an assignment.

When officers led him and a dozen others into a wooden gas chamber and locked the door, he didn't complain. None of them did. Then, a mixture of mustard gas and a similar agent called lewisite was piped inside.

"It felt like you were on fire," recalls Edwards, now 93 years old. "Guys started screaming and hollering and trying to break out. And then some of the guys fainted. And finally they opened the door and let us out, and the guys were just, they were in bad shape."


Edwards was one of 60,000 enlisted men enrolled in a once-secret government program — formally declassified in 1993 — to test mustard gas and other chemical agents on American troops. But there was a specific reason he was chosen: Edwards is African-American.

"They said we were being tested to see what effect these gases would have on black skins," Edwards says.

An NPR investigation has found evidence that Edwards' experience was not unique. While the Pentagon admitted decades ago that it used American troops as test subjects in experiments with mustard gas, until now, officials have never spoken about the tests that grouped subjects by race.

For the first time, NPR tracked down some of the men used in the race-based experiments. And it wasn't just African-Americans. Japanese-Americans were used as test subjects, serving as proxies for the enemy so scientists could explore how mustard gas and other chemicals might affect Japanese troops. Puerto Rican soldiers were also singled out.
White enlisted men were used as scientific control groups. Their reactions were used to establish what was "normal," and then compared to the minority troops.

All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren't recorded on the subjects' official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn't tell doctors what happened to them.

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How The Army Ostracized Me For My Own Hair: Bigoted or Brainwashed? — Some Think 'Natural' African American Hair is 'Militant' or 'Unkempt'

Left: Kristie Mitchell today. Right: Kristie’s natural locs during her time in the Army.

(Photo by Kristie Mitchell)

By Kristie Mitchell, MD
The Wear and Appearance of Army Uniforms and Insignia covers every aspect of soldiers’ grooming and appearance — from fingernail length to tattoos. Last month, the Army proposed updates to this regulation that scrutinize African American female hairstyles more than ever before. Previously AR 670-1 only briefly commented on uniquely African American hair styles. It banned “dreadlocks” for being “unkempt, twisted, matted…hair”. While cornrows were authorized as long as “conservative”.

Now, greater numbers of African American women are allowing their hair to remain natural, and the proposed regulation microanalyzes these hair styles (braids, twists, cornrows, and locs) and effectively eliminates many of the natural styles African American service women have been wearing for years.

I am an African American woman, a Psychiatrist, and a former US Army Major, and I am dismayed by this.

When I read the regulation and endured words like “unkempt” and “matted” used to define my natural hair, I was reminded of the pain and humiliation I, too, endured five years ago before I voluntarily departed the Army. Since then I’ve enjoyed the simple dignity of wearing my natural hair to work in a neat and professional manner...

In the midst of [the Iraq] war, while I was doctoring in a combat zone, a lower ranking soldier identified my locs as “dreadlocked” and therefore, by Army definition “unkempt and matted” hair. He notified my supervisor who gave me an official (though somewhat apologetic) reprimand for not meeting hygiene standards. The bitter irony was not only did my hair fit all the required professionalism standards, but it was very easy to keep clean and neat.

After the reprimand, I made one futile attempt to hide my locs by covering them with a wig (an authorized option). But this was too distracting, and with temperatures soaring to 140 degrees daily, one could imagine that option did not last long. So I conceded. I cut off my locs. I returned to the neutral state where no natural hair was acceptable natural hair. But the peace was uneasy, to say the least.


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Synthetic Terrorism: Elite US Troops Trained to Use Backpack Nukes

Backpack Nuke (Photo from National Atomic Museum)

By RT Television
Skiing down a mountain and into a battlefield with a nuclear bomb strapped to your back seems like something you’d see only in a James Bond movie, but that’s just one of the things the US elite military personnel were trained to do during the Cold War.

In a detailed report by Foreign Policy, the publication chronicles the creation of the Special Atomic Demolition Munition (SAMD), a portable nuclear weapon that could be carried into battlefield by a single solider. During the Cold War’s final 25 years, Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces were trained to carry these “backpack nukes” beyond enemy lines where, if necessary, they'd be used to destroy valuable infrastructure and keep opposing forces at bay.


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The Buffalo Soldier Mutiny in Houston, Texas - 1917

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Photographs and newspaper clippings concerning the Buffalo Soldier Mutiny of 1917.

By the time the U.S. entered World War I, black soldiers and white Texas civilians had a history of hostile relations dating back more than fifty years. At Camp Logan, men with the Third Battalion of the Twenty-fourth U.S. Infantry faced increasing harassment from Houston authorities.

On August 23, 1917, a rumor reached the camp that Corporal Charles Baltimore had been killed for interfering with the detention and interrogation of a black woman by Houston police; in fact, Baltimore had been beaten but survived and was later released.

Mutiny On The Bayou:
A Dramatic Presentation On The Buffalo Soldier Mutiny

Reacting to the rumor and to racial discrimination, about 150 black troops marched for two hours through Houston. As local whites armed themselves, a violent confrontation ensued that claimed the lives of four black soldiers and fifteen local residents, and wounded a dozen others. The soldiers’ leader, Sergeant Vida Henry, killed himself after the death of a national guardsman whom the troops had mistaken for a policeman. The group subsequently fell into disarray and the violence dissipated.

Trailer: Buffalo Soldier Mutiny Houston 1917 -
An American Tragedy

In November, the largest court-martial in U.S. military history convened at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to try sixty-three soldiers from the Third Battalion. Thirteen of the convicted men were executed by hanging on December 11.

The following year, two additional courts-martial were held and another sixteen sentenced to hang. Responding to pressure from black leaders, President Woodrow Wilson commuted the death sentences of ten of the condemned men. In total, nearly sixty soldiers received life imprisonment for their roles in the affair.

The Houston Mutiny anticipated the “Red Summer” riots of 1919 in which many African American servicemen retaliated against white mistreatment.

The names of the executed soldiers:
Sgt. William C. Nesbitt

Corp. Larsen J. Brown

Corp. James Wheatley

Corp. Jesse Moore

Corp. Charles W. Baltimore

Pvt. William Brackenridge

Pvt. Thomas C. Hawkins

Pvt. Carlos Snodgrass

Pvt. Ira B. Davis

Pvt. James Divine

Pvt. Frank Johnson

Pvt. Rosley W. Young

Pvt. Pat MacWharter

The sentence was carried out without appeal, the time and place only announced after the men had already hanged but evidently witnessed by the NEW YORK TIMES reporter who wrote that “the negroes, dressed in their regular uniforms, displayed neither bravado nor fear. They rode to the execution singing a hymn, but the singing was as that of soldiers on the march.”


SOURCE: Robert V. Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976)