Online today at Rolling Stone, and in the current print issue on newsstands: “The Kill Team,” Mark Boal’s feature on a group of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan who are accused of murdering innocent civilians, mutilating their corpses, and taking “trophy photos” of the bodies. How and why did their officers fail to stop them? Includes gruesome and explict war crime photos censored by the Pentagon.
Photo (pixelated by us): “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.”
Update: Michael Yon has seen some of the same material, and disagrees strongly with Boal’s conclusions, calling the story “bullshit.”