Most likely you heard about the suicide bombing of a CIA base in Afghanistan last week that killed seven CIA agents. It turns out that the bomber was being recruited by the CIA, which explains how he got through so many checkpoints.
There were the usual mentioning of outrage and sadness in the American media, but there was an almost complete lack of mentioning what had happened in Afghanistan just days earlier.
"The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village, in Narang District of the eastern province of Kunar, and took 10 people from 3 homes, 8 of them school students in grades 6, 9 and 10, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead," said the statement from the president’s office.
"They gathered eight school students from two compounds and put them in one room and shot them with small arms," said the delegation’s leader, Asadullah Wafa, a senior adviser to Mr. Karzai and a former governor of Kunar.
The delegation visited the school that the boys attended and spoke to the principal, who told them: " ‘All of them are students in my school and they were here until late afternoon and were present in their classes,’ " Mr. Wafa said.
"In total 10 were killed; eight were school students and one was an elderly man," he said.
Executing children is a war crime. The NATO flat out denies the accusations, including claiming that the victims weren't students, but they have two things working against them.
One of those things is an independent investigation by the U.N.
The United Nations special representative to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, in a statement released Thursday, cautioned that the facts were in dispute, but said that the organization’s own preliminary investigation had corroborated some aspects of the version given by local people to the Afghan government.
"Based on our initial investigation, eight of those killed were students enrolled in local schools," the statement said.
President Karsai's office is escalating the rhetoric.
The new statement said that the international forces had "martyred 10 young men in two rooms of a house although there was no armed resistance."
The statement called on the international troops to turn over "those responsible for the deaths."
However, the chances of these American military personnel, if guilty, seeing justice is slim. The reason I say that involves the second issue of the day: lack of credibility.
The reason I say that involves events in Iraq.
Iraqis on Friday reacted with disbelief, anger and bitter resignation to news that criminal charges in the United States had been dismissed against Blackwater security guards who opened fire on unarmed Iraqi civilians in 2007 in a fusillade that left 17 dead.
"What are we — not human?" asked Abdul Wahab Adul Khader, a 34-year-old bank employee and one of at least 20 people wounded in the melee. "Why do they have the right to kill people? Is our blood so cheap? For America, the land of justice and law, what does it mean to let criminals go?"
The case against the Blackwater criminals didn't get thrown out because the murderers were innocent. It got thrown out because the Bush/DOJ deliberately botched the prosecution.
If our military contractors can literally get away with murder, how can we possibly win a guerrilla war in Asia? They will hate us forever.
The Afghans have taken to burning effigies of Obama.
Hundreds of university students blocked main roads in Jalalabad, capital of eastern Nangahar province, to protest the alleged deaths of 10 civilians, mostly school children, in a Western military operation on Saturday.
"The government must prevent such unilateral operations otherwise we will take guns instead of pens and fight against them (foreign forces)," students from the University of Nangahar's education faculty said in a statement.
The protesters torched a US flag and an effigy of US President Barack Obama in a public square in central Jalalabad, before dispersing.