U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has expressed “total dismay” at a video appearing to show U.S. Marines urinating on the bloodied corpses of several Taliban fighters.
The 40-second footage, which was posted on YouTube and other websites, features four men in combat gear standing over the three corpses with their genitals exposed as they relieve themselves. The men can be heard joking.
“I want to express my total dismay at the story concerning our Marines, who I have the highest respect and admiration for,” Clinton said at a joint news conference with Algerian Foreign Minister Mourad Medelci in Washington, DC on Thursday.
Clinton said “the deplorable behavior” portrayed in the video “is absolutely inconsistent with American values, with the standards of behavior that we expect from our military personnel and the vast, vast military personnel, particularly our Marines, hold themselves to.”
According to U.S. media, the Marines who appear in the video have been identified as members of a sniper team deployed to Helmand Province from early 2011 until August of 2011.
An investigation is being conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), the Navy's worldwide law enforcement body.
Some 20,000 Marines are deployed in Afghanistan, mostly in Kandahar and Helmand provinces in the south of the war-ravaged country. The United States and its NATO allies have 130,000 troops fighting the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.
