As President Barack Obama prepares to send some 21,000 more U.S. troops into Afghanistan, anger is rising in the western province of Farah, the scene of a U.S. bombing massacre that may have killed as many as 130 Afghans, including 13 members of one family. At least six houses were bombed and among the dead and wounded are women and children. As of this writing reports indicate some people remain buried in rubble. The U.S. airstrikes happened on Monday and Tuesday. Just hours after Obama met with U.S.-backed president Hamid Karzai Wednesday, hundreds of Afghans -- perhaps as many as 2,000 -- poured into the streets of the provincial capital, chanting "Death to America." The protesters demanded a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

In Washington, Karzai said he and the U.S. occupation forces should operate from a "higher platform of morality," saying, "We must be conducting this war as better human beings," and recognize that "force won't buy you obedience." And yet, his security forces opened fire on the demonstrators, reportedly wounding five people.

The U.S. airstrikes hit villages in two areas of Farah province on Monday night and Tuesday. The extent of the deaths only came to public light because local people brought 20-30 corpses to the provincial capital. If the estimates of 130 dead are confirmed, it would reportedly be the single largest number of deaths caused by a U.S. bombing since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. While Secretary of State Hillary Clinton initially "apologized" Wednesday for the civilian deaths and Obama reportedly conveyed similar sentiments to Karzai when they met in person, later in the day Clinton's spokesperson, Robert Wood, framed her apology as being based on preliminary information and, according to AP, said they "were offered as a gesture, before all the facts of the incident are known." By day's end, the Pentagon was seeking to blame the Taliban for "staging" the massacre to blame it on the U.S. Last night, NBC News's Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski said military sources told him Taliban fighters used grenades to kill three families to "stage" a massacre and then blame it on the U.S.

As the AP reported, "it would be the first time the Taliban has used grenades in this way."

While the Pentagon spins its story, the International Committee of the Red Cross has stated bluntly that U.S. airstrikes hit civilian houses and revealed that an ICRC counterpart in the Red Crescent was among the dead. "We know that those killed included an Afghan Red Crescent volunteer and 13 members of his family who had been sheltering from fighting in a house that was bombed in an air strike," said the ICRC's head of delegation in Kabul, Reto Stocker. "We are deeply concerned by these events. Tribal elders in the villages called the ICRC during the fighting to report civilian casualties and ask for help. As soon as we heard of the attacks we contacted all sides to warn them that there were civilians and injured people in the area."