Rotters, Washington DC 19 January 2012
By: your correspondent Bill the Butcher
Today, in a packed news conference, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta made a startling disclosure: that the infamous video of US Marines urinating on what appeared to be Taliban corpses was nothing of the sort.
“It’s true, of course, that those were men of the 3rd battalion, 2nd Marines, and that the episode happened in Afghanistan,” he said, “and it is true that the video depicts those men urinating on Taliban men lying on the ground. But it is absolutely not true that this video depicts any desecration of Taliban corpses.
“After minutes of intensive inquiries amongst the personnel of the battalion, the truth has come to light: that instead of attempting to desecrate the corpses of dead jihadists, those brave American warriors were going out of their way to perform an errand of mercy.
“The facts are these: that the Taliban were not dead, but were in intense agony from jellyfish stings. As is well known, the venom of many jellyfishes is highly acidic and urine has been used, by no less a celebrity than Thor Heyerdahl, as an emergency first-aid measure to neutralise that acid. Instead of thinking of their own safety, our brave Marines went beyond the call of duty to help these ragheads…I mean, Taliban…recover from those stings by applying their urine on them, even in the middle of the battlefield with bullets flying all around.
“It’s even more of a sacrifice on their part when you realise that these brave men had been saving up their urine for a party after returning to base, when they were to have taught some grateful Afghan women they had liberated from the clutches of the Taliban the meaning of the term ‘golden shower’. Those Afghan ladies will unfortunately have to wait for another opportunity to complete their education on that point.
“Meanwhile, investigations are underway to find out the identity of the traitorous scum who posted that video on the internet. He, or she, is undoubtedly a terrorist sympathiser and will be imprisoned without trial or else, if that is unfeasible, taken out by drone strike. The President will tolerate no treason of this kind, which is designed to undermine the morale of our brave men and women in uniform.”
To incredulous queries from correspondents asking how the Taliban could have been stung by jellyfish in mountainous, landlocked Afghanistan, Mr Panetta had this to say:
“As you know, the President has declared the war in Afghanistan to be the Good War. The Taliban and the Al Qaeda are in cahoots, and continue to cooperate closely to this day, planning strikes meant to overthrow and destroy Israel and the United States. The President’s commitment to the security of Israel is second to none, and he is determined to make sure that Israel’s right to self-defence is not compromised. That is why we will keep fighting in Afghanistan, if need be, another thousand years.
“We have strong intelligence input proving that the Taliban are regularly sending men down to the bottom of the Arabian Sea to confer with the corpse of Osama bin Laden. Those Taliban were, according to our intelligence inputs, among the latest batch of emissaries to the Al Qaeda terrorist who was executed by the President last year. They must have been stung by jellyfish while under water.
“Unfortunately,” he continued, “the Taliban failed to survive their jellyfish stings – in fact they died while first aid was still being administered in the form of urine – but the Marines continued to administer the urine because they are well aware of religious sensibilities and know well that the Islamic injunction is to wash the bodies of the dead before burial. Afghanistan, as we all know, is a horrible, dry land – nothing like these lovely United States that God has declared to be the greatest nation in the world – and water is a rarity. Therefore, those Marines were doing a social service by washing those dead jihadists with urine, which my doctor assures me is sterile and is far better than any other water those terrorist fucks…uh, Taliban…would have been washed with otherwise, if at all.
“All in all, those brave warriors deserve our commendation, not our condemnation, and for their courage and self-sacrifice, I have accordingly personally recommended them for the Congressional Medal of Honour.”
Meanwhile, in response to this information proving that the Al Qaeda and the Taliban continue their cooperation, President Obama announced that the United States would immediately impose an additional round of sanctions on 1083 Iranian entities, including fishermen and cashew-nut sellers, and demanded that Europe and Japan follow suit. He also announced that the US would begin the construction of an additional ten aircraft carrier groups in order to protect US interests overseas and to stop any future underwater meetings between Osama bin Laden’s corpse and Taliban men.
While these measures failed to satisfy his Republican opponents, who demanded an immediate attack on Iran, conservative commentators such as Pamela Geller and Ann Coulter declared that Obama’s policies had made US Marines too “soft hearted” for their own good, and that they should have made no attempt to help the Taliban. “Those Muslim jihadist terrorists want to overthrow the United States,” Geller wrote. “They deserve anything they get – except first aid or washing. Get the Traitor Out of the White House Now!”
Speaking outside the gates of the White House, self-professed liberal atheist and president of the Association of Worshippers of Obama the Lord (AWOL), Barb Bummer, popularly known as Aunt Barbara, announced that her organisation would redouble its efforts to secure his re-election and that it would petition the Nobel Prize Committee to award the President not just a second Nobel Peace Prize but also the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Medicine and Economics. “He is a man so superior,” she said, “that he deserves every single prize the human race has ever invented!”
Meanwhile, in an Afghan village, a farmer called Majid Khan, speaking to your correspondent in a one-to-one interview, said that the three men in the video were civilians and not Taliban at all, and in response to what he called the “desecration” of their corpses, he would dig out his old AK 47 from the anti-Soviet jihad and join in the resistance movement. “They killed three young men of my village,” he said, “and befouled their bodies. Three hundred will now take up arms against them.”
Osama bin Laden’s corpse could not be reached for comment.
L. A. Breaux 
Subversify Staff
Great article, Bill. It’s high time that people see this for what it really is, a selfless humanitarian effort. Why, those ragheads don’t even have a good Christian education. Someone has to show them how to behave selflessly like a Christian.
Thank you so very much for this enlightening commentary on Afghanistan’s customs, and the treacherous under water dealings of Bin Laden’s corpse. I knew there had to be a good reason why America’s spotless military personnel would consider it appropriate to piss on the dead.
LOL! I love this piece – maybe you can do another article in which the U.S. government claims that it didn’t kill nearly 3,000 people on 9/11: that the false flag operation, intended to simply scare the public as a practical joke, went horribly awry when the Twin Towers decided not to go along with the gag and collapsed by their own will power.
Az, I think Mark Wahlberg has pretty much sewn up the satire part for now when he claimed he’d have single handedly destroyed the “terrorists” if he’d been on one of the flights.
@ Bill,
I had to go look that one up (as I don’t pay much attention to what goes on in Hollywood) and it’s clear from his statements that he knows nothing about what really happened – it wasn’t “terrorists” on the planes that brought the towers down, some one packed thermite explosives at key structual points and preformed a controlled demolishion (something 19 regular people can’t do – I suspect the CIA did it because of their history of “dirty tricks”).
From the days of Rome, soldiers are supposed to be taught honor and to value human life. They are taught that their destiny may be to die in battle: death being their duty and glory. They are responsible for training and discipline; not vulgar wanton disregard for human life. This is why they wear decorations with great pride when marching. Throughout history, soldiers are taught there are penalties for cowardice – decimation. So why do we view soldiers with so little esteem, now?
Leon Pannetta can go F himself with this disrespectful idea that all soldiers are classless morons who lack honor.
As the mother of a soldier who served in Iraq, I feel that urinating on a corpse is the definition of a lack of honor. It is not something most soldiers would be taught to do or find amusing.
I’ll be the first to admit I oppose war; even with a son who serves. I cannot tell you how much angst I feel over having my own son belong to something that I oppose. But I do know the reasons my son joined the military; and it had to do with his perceptions of honor; not vulgarity and stupidity. And for Pannetta (who bought his way into politics to begin with) to assume that soldiers lack any type of honor, is an insult to the men and women who serve this country and other countries, including Afghanistan!
Soldiers are supposed to be taught honor and to value human life; which sounds odd when you acknowledge that they are killing machines for war. But the idea of going to war is to stand up for the supposed values of a country. Any self respecting soldier would not value the idea of desecrating another soldier — even if they were soldiers with an opposing view. Why? because soldiers are supposed to be taught the value of honoring their opponent, even when disagreeing with their ideas. That doesn’t mean they stop killing them. It means they respect the opponent’s courage to fight against them; and treat them with honor, even in capture.
@ Jennefer,
I know a few former soldiers that I trained with when I joined my militia and can tell you that these people do have a sense of honor – but ask any of them if the army itself has a sense of honor and they will tell you different: as far as the brass is concerned, the values they claim to espouse are just a means to sell themselves to the public and gain new recruits – that its commitment to the warrior virtues stops at lipservice.
I’m not casting judgement on any individual members of the state’s military (your son included here), but the institution they serve is rotten to the core…
Gotta hand it to you, Bill – this one was outta the park.
I am, however, gonna play Captain Obvious here.
As outraged as we all should be by this, we’ve been building to this event here in America for some time. First, we did away with universal conscription (it proved very unpopular during Vietnam, so a bunch of higher-end brass in the Pentagon came up with the idea of a volunteer army). What this did was to ensure that the recruits for the Empire’s new legions would come either from the most economically disenfranchised, or the reddest of Red States.
In other words, the elites of America (and everyone else who could somehow afford a future for their children) would be relying on a tribe of protoFascists and broke-assed kids to do their dirty work.
Some years ago, I wrote a piece about the atrocities of Abu Gharaib and the looting of Baghdad by Iraqi civilians, aided and abetted by U.S. Marines (you might remember the film aired by Al Jazeera, in which they interviewed a U.S. Marine Colonel who said, “These people deserve their little party.”) I was taken to task by a newly-returned Marine, fresh from the killing-fields and euphoric over having ‘got-‘r’-dun’ for G.W. Bush – he said, “Remember, asshole – I didn’t put this uniform on for you – I put it on for me, and mine.”
I replied that this was the scariest thing I’d seen in print in over ten years.
Nope – we shouldn’t be surprised at this at all.
More recently, the U.S. Army put one of their own in prison for life for murdering Afghan civilians and cutting off fingers as ‘trophies’ (sort of reminds me of that scene at the end of the street-battle in “Gangs of New York” – ‘…ears and noses are the trophies of the day….’).
We’ve already created more enemies than we can kill. We’ve created a society of haves and have-nots, where the have-nots are accorded no other option than to send their sons and daughters to places like Afghanistan with orders to kill anyone who looks dangerous, all in the name of ‘defending freedom’.
None of them have the first foggy idea what real freedom is; what it looks like, or why it’s worth their lives. They’ve no idea how their government is really run, and they have no clue what’s going to happen to them when they get home. Most of them couldn’t find the place where they’re fighting on a map if you handed it to them right-side-up.
What they do know is that they were sent to a place which looks like Hell, with the fire out, to do the worst things possible, and that their ‘reward’ will be to come home to a country where they can’t find a job.
It’s not a big leap to see that these people are going to come home mean. Mean, and unemployed. That’s a dangerous combination, as Rome learned – they established colonies in the provinces to house retired veterans, as it was too dangerous to keep a bunch of people within the borders of Roman Italy who were all-too-used to solving problems en bloc.
We don’t have the option of farming-out our veterans. We’re going to have to try to assimilate them.
And I’m more than a bit uneasy about it, myself – it’s a short mental distance from pissing on Afghans to pissing on American civilians.
-W
@ W.D. Noble,
That’s a very negative view of things – sure the vets will have difficulty finding work (as did many of my associates) and yes they are used to solving their problems via the use of force, but I think this is exactly what people hoping for any real change (not just half-assed “reforms” that leave power centralized for a new master to take control) to come about: quite simply, the state must die and people like the disillusioned vets are the ones most motivated to tear this construct to shreds – to kill the present world in order for a new one to be born from the ashes…
“An honorable war killing is an illusion, a lie.”
Agreed, we do not live in some sort of Golden Arthurian tale here. Nobody is out there killing truly bad/evil guys; nor avenging a blood debt. They are “just following orders”.
Azazel,
I think we agree on that. I value the soldiers. The brass and policy makers completely disgust me.
W.D. Noble,
The vulgar comment by the Marine, “Remember, asshole – I didn’t put this uniform on for you – I put it on for me, and mine.”
To which you replied, “that this was the scariest thing I’d seen in print in over ten years.” is classic.
That we have completely overlooked the basic tenants of ethical treatment of soldiers, tells more about our lack of ethics than anything else. I would be shamed if my son lost his sense of ethics and pride in his family and acted like these bastards have! I am proud that my son has a sense of ethics and pride. I am proud that he approaches these hideous wars with this ingrained in him.
None of this is about killing. The Afghan soldiers were already dead. This is about conducting ourselves in the world as if we have pride in our values. It is about “following orders” with decorum, not with vulgarity.
I can easily walk through life by representing myself and my family with a complete lack of respect. Or, I can choose to walk through life by representing myself and my family with honor.
These endless wars demand our soldiers kill others. This is as damaging to our soldiers who return with PTSD and other disorders as it is to the soldiers on the other side. But we do not have to lose the idea of honor during this process and to dishonor a man who died fighting for his country.
As for the comment that “An honorable war killing is an illusion, a lie,” I couldn’t disagree more.
I’m not defending these wars. I find them dishonest.
But not every war is dishonest. Some things are worth fighting for and in turn, if a person gives their life fighting for their principles as these Afghani soldiers most likely did, then they should be given respect for having that much courage. And when we remove honor from the battleground you are left with nothing of value. Because without principles then you have nothing to defend.
That goes for our OCCUPY movements as well as many wars that were fought for human rights.
Jennifer, we don’t even know these dead Afghans were actually Taliban. There are no weapons, no indication that they were. They could be random civilians murdered as the Iraqis were in Haditha or some other Afghans were recently in order to take body parts as trophies. Not that that makes a difference to their treatment, of course :/