American war crimes.

Is shooting at the enemy a war crime? Or pissing on their rotting remains?

I find it just hilarious how much press and outrage this gets.

It's easy to forget those corpses pissed on are the corpses of people who behead and stone adulteresses, bomb civilian gatherings, kill teachers and destroy schools so girls cannot have an education, abduct, torture and behead aid workers and private contracters. Yeah. I didn't shed a tear for them.

Was it unproffesional? Yes. Should it have happened? No. Do I honestly care about the corpses of those people? Not one jot.

No dead human being deserves to be treated that way. If US marine disrespects the dead the same way the terrorists do, what difference lies in their principles then?

Really? You're honestly making that argument?

You think pissing on a corpse makes them as bad as the people that intentionally target civilians? That stone women and men for being seen together if they're not married? It makes themk as bad as the people who kill men for teaching girls to read and write? It makes them as bad as the people that use women and children as human shields?

If you think pissing on a corpse is equal to those crimes then you sir, have one seriously ****ed up moral compass.

Your problem is that you are looking at morals relatively. The point is, urinating on someone is never right, whether they are dead or alive. Having the thoughts to urinate on someone is never right. The soldiers are bad people, or more correctly, they committed a morally wrong act.


There can be no excuse. It is always wrong to do that, and there can be no justification. The fact that terrorists are bad does not in any way negate the badness of urinating on someone.

The soldiers should face the full force of the law. All humans are human and while these terrorists may not be deserving of respect, they should still be accorded said respect, or morally the soldiers cannot claim any moral superiority.

They say, let those without sin be the first to throw stones. These soldiers most assuredly were not without sin, certainly no longer, and they should repent. I'm not religious, but my moral convictions are strong, and those soldiers have absolutely no defence.

Yes, what they did was wrong. Although not to any great extent, in my opinion. Yes, they should face some sort of disciplinary action. But I find the moral outrage laughable. As if this is some great crime, when it just isn't. Relativley or objectivley. Had those people been alive, then it would be a different matter, but they are corpses. Enemy corpses. I can see why those Marines did what they did. The people they are fighting are insidious, they follow no rules of combat and generally are scum.

But with all that in mind, I do not condone their action or defend it, I just think we need to keep a perspective on things.

And please, everyone commits morally wrong acts. I'm sure you do, you can't expect soldiers to be super human

It was a most vile act. You do not need to be superhuman to realise urinating on another human is depraved and unacceptable. Listing the many crimes of their adversaries does not make it any less depraved. It is most definitely a crime. I would expect such behaviour from beasts, not apparently moral and disciplined elite soldiers of in their eyes 'the greatest free nation in the history of men' or whatever patriotic rubbish the american military comes out with.

I will repeat again. The crimes of their opponents does not mean they did not commit a crime and it does not diminish the moral wrong they committed.

There is now evidence to suggest Donald Rumsfeld may have ordered children to be raped and sodomized in front of their parents for information.

These abuses have been documented on tape, in graphic pics and some have even gone to jail for it. Not Rumsfeld though.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/07/14/38300/-Kids-sodomized-at-Abu-Ghraib,-Pentagon-has-the-videos-Hersh

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/iraq/abughraib/151108.pdf

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/08/iraq/main616338.shtml

The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking. The US Government is the most dangerous terror organisation in the world.

Was just browsing fb and I saw this article, obviously written by some american soldier. It is related to the urination video which was posted here a couple of days back.
One interesting point that he raised is that we find the urinating offending but not the killing. Have we developed immunity to war crimes?

Do you think the world should allow US to continue with this.

http://apps.facebook.com/theguardian/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/13/us-marines-video-urination-war-crime

edit- thread title is: American War Crimes.

So you think it's ok to rape 14 year old boys?

You are a danger to society.

But you seem to totally reject any premise of mitigation due to the crimes of those indivuals to whom the corpses belong. There are a myriad of mitigating cirumstances for the soldiers. And as I have said, the act is not permissable, they should be punished, but to take moral outrage to the extremes, to even imply that they are on the same level as the enemy, is quite frankly, retarded beyond belief.

soldiers shooting enemy combatants in the war on terror, whats the problem with that?

As for the urinating on - its a bit classless, but what does it matter really - they were dead terrorists/extremist combatants. I seem to recall al quada forces draggin some american corpes on the back of cars in iraq in the early days of the war - didnt see anyone get charged for that.