By John Laforge

January 01, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -     NATO’s and the US military’s desecration of corpses, attacks on wedding parties, mosques, hospitals and market places — along with the bombing of allied troops, torture of prisoners, and their notoriously unaccountable drone warfare — are a few of the alliance’s more infamous outrages in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia.

Twenty years’ worth of “unintended” or “collateral” damage hasn’t created friends in the war zones:

+ On April 23, 1999, NATO rocketed the central studio of Radio Televisija Srbije (RTS), the state-owned broadcasting corporation in Belgrade, destroying the building. Sixteen civilian employees of RTS were killed and 16 wounded. Amnesty International concluded the attack was a war crime.

+ In a Feb. 12, 2010 atrocity that was kept secret until March 13, US Special Forces killed a teenage girl, a pregnant mother of 10, a pregnant mother of 6, a police officer and his brother, and were accused of then trying to cover-up the killings by digging bullets out of the victims’ bodies, washing the wounds with alcohol and lying to superior officers.

+ While bombing Libya in March 2011, NATO refused to aid a group of 72 migrants adrift in the Mediterranean Sea. Only nine people on board survived. The refusal was condemned as criminal by the Council of Europe.

+ On Nov. 26, 2011, NATO jets bombed and rocketed an allied Pakistani military base for two hours, killing 26 Pakistani soldiers and wounding dozens more. NATO refuses to apologize.

Allies have reacted angrily. Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai gave his “last” warning against NATO’s bombing of Afghan homes on May 31, 2011, saying, “If they continue their attacks on our houses … history shows what Afghans do with trespassers and with occupiers.” On March 20, 2012, Pakistani lawmakers demanded an end to all NATO/CIA drone strikes against their territory. The drone attacks continue, and newspapers repeatedly remind readers of the self-defeating hopelessness of using atrocities to fight a tactic or to enforce US military occupation.