Afghan abuses caused by pure propaganda: Analyst

This file photo shows British troops in Afghanistan.

Press TV has interviewed Scott Bennett, a former US army psychological warfare officer and counter-terrorism analyst in San Francisco, about the British Royal Military Police launching an investigation into allegations that British soldiers mistreated civilians during the war in the Afghanistan.

Following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Do allegations like this come as a surprise to you and then something that actually did catch me off guard was the fact that this minister for the British Armed Forces Penny Mordaunt has called these investigations time-consuming and costly. So you have allegations of human rights abuses - something that can be potentially war crimes - and then okay, let’s disregard that, it is time-consuming and it costs a lot of money.

Bennett: Well it should not be a surprise of course because you have these bureaucrats in uniform who protect their policy advisors and their higher-ups because they want to continue in their rank, they want to continue in their job and they are doing everything they can to cover it up.

What is important to keep in mind is all of these abuses and any damage that may have been done against Afghan civilians was caused by a lot of false information from the very beginning to American and British and other soldiers. The instructions that came from higher command was pure propaganda and that is the Afghans and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden who have waged war against Britain and the United States of America through the 9/11 attacks. And subsequent intelligence information has revealed that to be completely false, a complete propaganda ploy to engineer an American-led invasion of the Middle East with a neo-conservative agenda of replacing the entire regimes and the civilizations or structures of the Middle East with a neo-conservative goal of transplanting capitalism and democracy.

Now that is all a fantasy, a dream and that dream has turned into a nightmare because now we see that that whole plan was chaotic at best and criminal at worse and the chickens are just coming home to roost. Now should there be an investigation? absolutely. Should soldiers be investigated for any criminal acts - rapes, killings, anything of a criminal nature? absolutely, but Tony Blair and George W. Bush and the neo-conservatives in Congress and the higher-ups in the Pentagon and MI5 and MI6, they are the first ones who should be investigated because the soldiers that are on the ground, they are given propaganda that naturally inflates them into a very hyper angry mode.

When you go to war, when you are put into training, you are brainwashed to see these indigenous people as your enemy. They have blown up buses in Britain, they have blown up buildings in the United States, so you need to go over and get it even. That creates a very hostile aggression in the soldier and that reacts with some of the war crimes that we see manifest. Now that can be repented of and there can be healing and forgiveness but it needs to be examined from the very beginning to look at who started a propaganda … and Tony Blair I think is the first one who is being pulled up.

You see now in the media, he is trying to backtrack and create these excuses of tactical mistakes. No, it was not a mistake. It was a planned operation. They planned this from the 1990s, triggered it in 2001 and we have just now discovered it some ten years later and the revelations are still coming and you see China and Russia and Iran sort of allying to say, ‘You will not go any further. You have destabilized Iraq, you have destabilized Libya and you are trying to get into Syria, you are not going to go any further with this agenda’ and they are starting to roll it back. So the first step of rolling it back is holding everybody accountable for what they did in the very beginning.

Press TV: And is that feasible? Can that happen?

Bennett: Well yes it can. I think you have a lot of military men that are standing up. They are very outraged that they were sent to war in the first place. They had no beef with the Afghani people. They had no anger against Iraq or Saddam Hussein. They have no anger against Iranians. They did not go to war and they did not join the military to go on this wild crusade. They joined the military to protect their mother and father and family and children and they were told a false propaganda lie that these people in Afghanistan and Iraq are waging war against the United States and Britain and western civilization and that was what caused them to join the military. That is what caused them to go over there and fight a war and that is what has caused some of them to be very bloodthirsty and ruthless and very cruel and in some cases murder civilians because they are very angry.

But that story, that narrative, that excuse was a complete psychological operation. It was a lie, it was propaganda and military men like myself, when we discovered it, when we finally put the pieces together, when we have come out of the dream and we stopped drinking the Kool-Aid, we are very upset about it. We are demanding our government officials investigated. We are demanding to hold them accountable …


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