The video, which was posted on YouTube and other websites, shows four men in camouflage Marine combat uniforms urinating on three corpses. One of them jokes: “Have a nice day, buddy.” Another makes a lewd joke.

At the Pentagon, Captain John Kirby said the defense department was “deeply troubled” by the video.

“Whoever it is, and whatever the circumstances – which we know is under investigation – it is egregious behavior and unacceptable for a member of the military,” said Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.

US Troops Defile Dead Afghans on Camera

Videos Shows U.S. Marines Urinating On Dead Taliban Fighters

   A still image taken January 11, 2012 from an undated YouTube video shows what is believed to be US
   Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan.

The US military has been prosecuting soldiers from the Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade on charges of murdering unarmed Afghan civilians while deployed in Kandahar province in 2010.

On January 15th, 2010, U.S. soldiers in Bravo Company stationed near Kandahar executed an unarmed Afghan boy named Gul Mudin in the village of La Mohammad Kalay. Reports by soldiers at the scene indicate that Mudin was about 15 years old. According to sworn statements, two soldiers – Cpl. Jeremy Morlock and Pfc. Andrew Holmes ? staged the killing to make it look like they had been under attack. Ordering the boy to stand still, they crouched behind a mud wall, tossed a grenade at him and opened fire from close range.

These soldiers routinely collected errant weapons and planted them on the bodies of unarmed civilians they killed, in order to frame their victim as enemy combatants. The presence of a “drop weapon” virtually guaranteed that a shooting would be considered a legitimate kill.

Photographs published in March by two magazines – Der Spiegel and Rolling Stone – showed soldiers posing with the bloodied corpse of the Afghan boy they had just killed. The images can be seen below:

Following the routine Army procedure required after every battlefield death, the soldiers cut off the dead boy’s clothes and stripped him naked to check for identifying tattoos. Here they are shown scanning his iris and fingerprints, using a portable biometric scanner.

The soldiers also took photographs of themselves celebrating their kill. In the photos, Morlock grins and gives a thumbs-up sign as he poses with Mudin’s body. Note that the boy’s right pinky finger appears to have been severed. Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs reportedly used a pair of razor-sharp medic’s shears to cut off the finger, which he presented to Holmes as a trophy for killing his first Afghan.

Holmes poses with Mudin’s body. According to a fellow soldier, Holmes took to carrying Mudin’s severed finger with him in a zip-lock bag. “He wanted to keep the finger forever and wanted to dry it out,” one of his friends would later report. “He was proud of his finger.”

Before the military found itself short of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, Capt. Jeremy Morlock was the kind of bad-news kid who the Army might have passed on. He grew up not far from Sarah Palin in Wasilla, Alaska; his sister hung out with Bristol, and Morlock played hockey against Track. Back in those days, it seemed like he was constantly in trouble: getting drunk and into fights, driving without a license, leaving the scene of a serious car accident.

Even after he joined the Army, Morlock continued to get into trouble. In 2009, a month before he deployed to Afghanistan, he was charged with disorderly conduct after burning his wife with a cigarette. After he arrived in Afghanistan, he did any drug he could get his hands on: opium, hash, Ambien, amitriptyline, flexeril, phenergan, codeine, trazodone.

The photos collected by soldiers included many shots of local children, often filed alongside images of bloody casualties. At one point, soldiers in 3rd Platoon talked about throwing candy out of a Stryker vehicle as they drove through a village and shooting the children who came running to pick up the sweets.

According to one soldier, members of 3rd Platoon also talked about a scenario in which they “would throw candy out in front and in the rear of the Stryker; the Stryker would then run the children over.”

Gibbs allegedly used a pair of medic’s shears to cut off the finger of at least two Afghan civilians murdered by members of his platoon.

In the process of suppressing the photographs, the Army may also have been trying to keep secret evidence that the killings of civilians went beyond a few men in 3rd Platoon. In this image, the bodies of two Afghan men have been tied together, their hands bound, and placed alongside a road.

MORE WAR CRIMES COMMITTED BY U.S. SOLDIERS

1. Pictures & Videos: ‘Death Zone’ — How U.S. soldiers turned a night-time airstrike into a chilling ‘music video’
2. The Haditha Killings — U.S. Marines committed WAR CRIMES of unfathomable proportions!
3. American soldiers torturing (Lynching) Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison
4. Mr. President Bush — ‘You are a War Criminal who belongs in Guantanamo Prison’

5. War Crimes Committed by the United States in Iraq and Mechanisms for Accountability