US troops told ‘to be witnesses’ for Christ in Afghanistan
Published: May 4, 2009
Updated 1 year ago
A video broadcast on Al Jazeera shows US troops stationed in Afghanistan being advised by a chaplain ‘to be witnesses’ for Christ.
“The U.S. military denied Monday it has allowed soldiers to try to convert Afghans to Christianity, after a television network showed pictures of soldiers with bibles translated into local languages,” Reuters reports.
More from Reuters:
General Order Number 1 from the U.S. military’s Central Command forbids active duty troops — including all those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan — from trying to convert people to their religion, considered a crime in many Muslim countries.
Qatar-based Al Jazeera television showed footage of a church service at Bagram, the main U.S. base north of the Afghan capital Kabul, in which soldiers had a stack of bibles in the local languages, Pashtu and Dari.
A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: “The special forces guys — they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down.”
But a U.S. military spokeswoman, Major Jennifer Willis, said the comments from the sermon were taken out of context and chaplains were told to make clear to soldiers that they could not proselytize while serving.
She said the bibles had been mailed to a soldier by a church back home in the United States and were never distributed “as far as we know.”
From the Al Jazeera report:
The footage, shot about a year ago by Brian Hughes, a documentary maker and former member of the US military who spent several days in Bagram near Kabul, was obtained by Al Jazeera’s James Bays, who has covered Afghanistan extensively.
In other footage captured at Bagram, Sergeant Jon Watt, a soldier set to become a military chaplain, said during a Bible study class: “I also want to praise God because my church collected some money to get bibles for Afghanistan. They came and sent the money out.”
It is not clear that the Bibles were distributed to Afghans, but Hughes said that none of the people he recorded in a series of sermons and Bible study classes appeared to able to speak Pashto or Dari.
Hughes said: “The only reason they would have these documents there was to distribute them to the Afghan people and I knew it was wrong, and I knew that filming it … documenting it would be important.”
At The Huffington Post, author Jeremy Scahill notes that “the center of this evangelical operation is at the huge US base at Bagram, one of the main sites used by the US military to torture and indefinitely detain prisoners.”
Scahill adds, “This is certainly not the first scandal where US military forces or officials have been caught on tape promoting an evangelical Christian agenda. Perhaps the most high-profile case involved Lieut. Gen. William Boykin, who was a Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Bush. Boykin was part of Donald Rumsfeld’s inner circle at the Pentagon where he was placed in charge of hunting ‘high-value targets.’ Boykin was one of the key U.S. officials in establishing what critics alleged was death-squad-type activity in Iraq.”
This video is from Al Jazeera, broadcast May 3, 2009.
Download video via RawReplay.com
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If they were not distributed, then no one would mind showing the purchase order for them (showing how many were created), then accounting for every single one while making sure they were sent back to the U.S.?
THIS is why they hate us. christians just can’t stop fucking with people; no better than the terrorists that attack us.
Liars: ” In one recorded sermon, Lieutenant-Colonel Gary Hensley, the chief of the US military chaplains in Afghanistan, tells soldiers that, as followers of Jesus Christ, they all have a responsibility “to be witnesses for him”.
“The special forces guys - they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down,” he says.
“Get the hound of heaven after them, so we get them into the kingdom. That’s what we do, that’s our business.”
Why do we need chaplains anyway? As for why they attack us, read the Quran.
Plenty of Muslims that read the Quran aren’t out to kill us. Just like many of the xtians that read the bible don’t kill in the name of their god..
But start pissing all over the rights of the xtians, or do things they don’t approve of, and you find a different flavor. Say, those that want to make homosexuality a crime? some say punishable by death?
Fanatics are fanatics, but decent folks defending their religion happens when you directly seek to impinge their rights.
Soldiers aren’t that smart anyway, which explains why they’re soldiers.
watch this. i think it captures the gist in a more entertaining and straight to the point kinda way. Mao said the OPIATE of the masses. So did Maynard James Keenan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QncIE_HD8_c
Comvert ‘em or murder’em! It’s the Christian way! Nothing is so good for Constantines church as a bloody war. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
Christianity is the most dangerous cult in America; we certainly don’t want to be exporting it.
Outrage!
It’s bad enough the Christians go and f**k with people via “humanitarian” groups. It’s unconscionable to allow this in the military. These guys should get immediate dishonorable discharge and possible court marshal for conspiracy to violate ethics code number one. Get them out of Afghanistan immediately before they get somebody killed.
Are we back to the “kill a commie for Christ” garbage? Did they bury Joe McCarthy with a mule?
As far as being told not to proselytize, it’s “God’s Law versus man’s law”, to fundamentalists, and they give lip service to obeying the law and sneak around back to practice “God’s Law” which they believe tells them to forcibly inject their mental virus into vulnerable minds. They believe God sent them to Iraq/Afghanistan/etc. for a purpose, which is to infect others with their mental virus. And, to not carry out that purpose goes against God’s law.
Eight years of George W. Bush has brought us layers upon layers of destruction — financial, judicial, ecological, you name it. This is just another example of the shit storm that is Dubya. It isn’t enough to destroy the military by overextending it and throwing it into an illegal war. No, they throw fundi-Christian yahoos into the mix to really show America at its Best - preaching to all them heathen Muslims as they shoot their families.
If I believed in anything like the Judeo-Christian concept of ‘god’ I would suggest that Dubya belongs in the Lake of Fire, being forever abused by “Dick” Cheney.
But alas, I don’t believe in that shit.
But I’d settle for the 2 of them, and their cohorts, spending the rest of their natural lives in (1) a federal penitentiary or (2) a prison of The Hague’s choosing.
The elections of 2000 ushered in a new dark age, Now eight years later it is shaping up quite nicely just as its predecessor with torture, insane religious zealotry, bigotry and murder. These are the horsemen of the apocalypse, unbridled and financially subsidized by a Pentagon out of control and driven mad by fear. Another aspect of the Bush legacy that will haunt us for decades and poison the future.
Whoops! Better hide the old bibles until the press goes away.
Secret Crusaders gotta know when to lay low…