Lewd Marine Video Spurs Global Outrage
A video purporting to show uniformed U.S. Marines joking as they urinate on the corpses of Taliban fighters is prompting outrage, promises of an investigation, but it wont likely derail peace talks between the the Afghan government and the militant group.
The Marine Corps said it was investigating the incident in light of the video, but had yet to verify the authenticity of the footage. But two military officials, speaking anonymously to Reuters, said the video, which surfaced Tuesday on YouTube and is likely to stir up anti-American sentiment in the region, did not appear to be fake.
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force condemned the actions depicted on the video, and said they “appear to have been conducted by a small group of U.S. individuals, who apparently are no longer serving in Afghanistan.”
On Wednesday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations sent a letter to U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, decrying the “apparent desecration of the dead as a violation of our nation’s military regulations and international law.”
Afghan officials and the Taliban have recently renewed peace talks.
Marc Grossman, the White House special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is expected to meet in the coming days with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. On the agenda is the creation of a Taliban political office in Qatar, and the transfer of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.
A Taliban spokesman called the video “barbaric,” but said it would not impact scheduled negotiations.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
