Prime Minister Julia Gillard his dismissed claims made by the Afghan soldier who shot three Australian troops last year as untrue and propaganda.

In a Taliban video, Mohammed Roozi has boasted about the shooting, claiming he killed 12 Australians.

Roozi was a member of the Afghan National Army when he seriously injured the Australian soldiers as well as two Afghan soldiers in Oruzgan province.

Ms Gillard said the video was propaganda.

"The actual claims about the numbers of deaths of Australian soldiers aren't true in this propaganda video," she told reporters in the flood-stricken town of St George in Queensland today.

"But the fact that there's this disgusting anti-Australian soldier propaganda anywhere in the world is offensive to me and to all Australians."

The prime minister said the claims were designed to corrode trust

"Propaganda is used by people like that to get people like you (journalists) to ask these sorts of questions," she said.

"It's aimed at trust. That's exactly what it's aimed at.

"It's aimed at denting our will. Well, no amount of propaganda is going to dent our will to get this mission done."

In the video, Roozi said he wanted to kill foreigners and teach them a lesson.

He said he was a Muslim and did not accept foreigners working alongside him.

Roozi said that after he shot the troops, he joined the Taliban.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott echoed the prime minister's sentiments.

"I think Australians are entitled to be pretty disgusted at this conduct," Mr Abbott told reporters in Sydney.

"I think the fact that there was an element of betrayal in the deaths of these particular Australian soldiers adds an additional element of horror to it.

"But this is much more a comment on the malice of our enemies than it is on the merits of our cause."

Taliban Video Claims Untrue: Gillard

 

The merits of our cause?

Come-on Julia, pull the other one. Are you serious?

After Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, American troops pissing on the bodies of dead Taliban soldiers & now posing in front of SS symbols, do you really think we are able to claim the moral high ground?

It is you & the dope opposite you who have conspired to put our troops in harms way & it is your behaviour that most Australians are disgusted by.

You & your fellow-travellers are a disgrace & have succeeded only in bringing our country’s reputation into disrepute..

 

 

From TomDispatch: The Pentagon’s Afghan basing plans for prisons, drones, and black ops 
By Nick Turse | February 13, 2012
In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.
Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center — and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.
Nor is it an anomaly. Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating. In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan. Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.
The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields.
The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs), and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands.  “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication. “We’re transitioning… into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/blog/450-bases-and-its-not-over-yet/

 

KABUL — An American soldier walked off his base in a remote southern Afghan village shortly before dawn Sunday and opened fire on civilians inside their homes, killing at least 16, including nine children, Afghan officials said.

The shootings in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province appeared to mark the deadliest intentional attack on civilians by a U.S. soldier in the decade-long Afghanistan war. Although U.S. officials promptly detained the suspect, a staff sergeant, the incident seemed certain to stoke anti-American sentiment at a time of growing unease about the presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan and increasing pessimism among Americans about the U.S. mission here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-soldier-detained-after-opening-fire-on-afghans/2012/03/11/gIQAFFlW4R_story.html