OT - US Soldier kills 16 Civilians in Afghanistan

[Raellus]

I am not sure how decrying an unlawful killing (i.e. war crime) equates to hating America/Americans. I am an American. Should I be defending or justifying this obvious war crime? Would that be the right, proper, patriotic thing to do? I don't think so. I think the patriotic thing to do here is to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again. That requires an intellectually honest assessment of what happened. You can't solve a problem unless you acknowledge that it exists. It's not easy. I don't want to believe that a fellow American did something like this but it's pretty darn clear that one did. That said, I think that 99% of our service men and women are good, decent, brave, hard working individuals and I am not going to let this relatively isolated incident color my perception of our armed forces in general.

I really don't understand why some of my fellow Americans are, at best, minimizing the heinousness of this incident, or, at worst, defending it. This behavior certainly doesn't help others' perception of what Americans are like. Defending an act like this makes us look like the barbarians.

I don't like where this discussion is going. It's unfortunate that most of our forum's traffic is dedicated to these sorts of "debates". I'm considering discussing with my fellow moderators the possibility of banning these types of controversial OT threads. As an American, I value my freedom of speech. On the other hand, the raison de etre of this forum is discussing T2K and that does not appear to be happening in threads like these. If anything, we're chasing off current and potential members.

Please don't make us lock this thread.