According to the Australian television program that broke this story said, explicitly, that the bodies were burned for "hygienic reasons." The point was not desecration but rather the safe disposal of dead bodies.
This is a point the media is largely missing as they rush to see how many times they can tie the word "desecrate" into what happened.
The debatable point in all of this is not whether or not we should have burned the bodies (if the troops need to be rid of the rotting corpses of enemy combatants then burning seems like an efficient way to do that) but rather whether or not the psy-ops troops should have used the occasion to taunt the terrorists.
Some say this is not an effective tactic. They say, in fact, that it is largely counter-productive. I'm willing to listen to those arguments (though I largely disagree), but what is not acceptable is accusing our troops or war crimes or misdeeds.
At most, this is a tactical blunder. Nothing more.
Update:
Pictures of the bodies available here.
I found this one particularly interesting:
Look at the landscape. Hard, rocky ground. Not conducive to burial.
If burning is the most efficient and hygenic way for our troops to dispose of the enemy's dead than so be it. Its fine by me.
Update:
Jason Coleman:
What can we objectively say happened:
1) That allegedly (the video is still MIA, but I'm sure it will surface) American soldiers did the prudent and militarily accepted thing and burned bodies that were beginning to rot while they laid siege to an area where Taliban fighters were holed up.
2) That PsyOps operatives later arrived on the scene and tried to use localized events to affect a tactical advantage and flush out enemy troops so that they could be engaged and hopefully destroyed.
These two events ARE CONSISTENT with standard military practices and do not represent some grander evil scheme to "offend Islam", they DO NOT represent a "military atrocity" and they do not represent a "human rights abuse" as the articles and the Dateline piece would lead the reader to believe.
He has much, much more about the situation including some reflection on the source of all this, Stephen DuPont.
Read the whole thing.