Bush Admin. covered up Afghan massacre

[FourScore]

NYT front page: Bush Admin. covered up Afghan massacre
by jhutson
Fri Jul 10, 2009 at 01:23:40 PM PDT

The New York Times is reporting new evidence that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into an alleged massacre of as many as 2,000 prisoners in Afghanistan. This major investigative piece, now available online and slated for the front page of the July 11 print edition, represents the culmination of nearly eight years of investigation by Physicians for Human Rights, where I serve as Chief Communications Officer.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has issued a call for a criminal probe in the wake of a major New York Times story with new evidence that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan in 2002.

PHR is calling for the Department of Justice to investigate why the Bush Administration impeded an FBI criminal probe of the alleged Dasht-e-Leili massacre.

According to US government documents obtained by PHR, as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban fighters were reportedly suffocated in container trucks by Afghan forces operating jointly with the US in November 2001. The bodies were reportedly buried in mass graves in the Dasht-e-Leili desert near Sheberghan, Afghanistan. Notorious Afghan warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was reportedly on the CIA payroll, is allegedly responsible for the massacre.

Physicians for Human Rights, which shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, first documented the existence of the alleged mass grave in January 2002 and since then:

• Advocated for witnesses to be protected, the mass grave site to be secured, and for a full and impartial investigation;

• Conducted preliminary forensic investigations -- including exposing 15 remains and conducting three autopsies -- under UN auspices at Dasht-e-Leili;

• Successfully sued for compliance with a PHR Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the release of US government documents that reveal US intelligence knowledge of the magnitude of the alleged crime and awareness of the execution and torture of witnesses to the incidents;

• Helped identify the US chain of command likely responsible for impeding federal investigations into the alleged massacre;

• Discovered and reported on alleged tampering of the site; and

• Requested satellite image analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that appears to demonstrate that tampering occurred soon after PHR filed its FOIA request in June 2006.

"Physicians for Human Rights went to investigate inhumane conditions at a prison in northern Afghanistan, but what we found was much worse," stated Susannah Sirkin, PHR Deputy Director. "Our researchers documented an apparent mass grave site with reportedly thousands of bodies of captured prisoners who were suffocated to death in trucks. That was 2002; seven years later, we still seek answers about what exactly happened and who was involved."

Senior Bush Administration officials impeded investigations by the FBI and the State Department, and the Defense Department apparently never conducted a full inquiry, the New York Times reports in the story for the July 11 print edition by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter James Risen...

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/7/10/752122/-NYT-front-page:-Bush-Admin.-covered-up-Afghan-massacre

[FourScore]

1. Why in the world would somebody UNRECOMMEND this thread?

Odd. I think it would be better if we could see the names of those unrecommending.

[Enthusiast]

2. We have a bunch of GOP operatives

on DU. If that is not perfectly clear by now it soon will be.

And, if this travesty did happen as suggested do you believe the Obama Administration will hold anyone accountable?

Again, why did we loath the Nazis? They wore different helmets. They marched funny. They spoke German, so did my ancestors. They had an abiding love of malted grain beverages, me too. It was the behavior of the Nazis we hated. The cruelty, the torture and killing of unarmed prisoners. Just something to think about.

[SpiralHawk]

4. Paid anti-democracy Totalitarian Republicon Trolls hate truth

The k and the r - prosecute xCommander AWOL Bush and Dickie 'Five Military Deferments' Cheney and the rest of the chickenhawk Republicon 'leadership' that lied and lied and lied to the citizens of the USA, and the world

[Enthusiast]

9. SpiralHawk, if you were writing

a book, a work of fiction, with some real bad actors in it, something along the lines of Pulp Fiction, you could use those assholes for characters and they would be perfect.

[slay]

20. This is the huge problem with UNRECOMMENDING - allows for sabotage by

Freepers, or just people who like to be mean, or people on this board who don't like you. I wish I could un-recommend the idea of un-recommending. Doh. :shrug:

[FourScore]

3. kick

[Fumesucker]

5. We need to look forward...

Dwelling on the past will only divide us.

I hope I don't need *really* need to add the :sarcasm: tag to this.

[Mari333]

6. will they ever be held accountable for anything??????!!

[Fumesucker]

7. I'll be shocked if they are.. n/t

[Mari333]

8. by not being held accountable....by not being investigated

legitimizes their crimes. absolutely legitimizes every despicable act they did...and sets a PRECEDENT for every idiotic mofo who is in office to do the same damned thing..
god my blood pressure keeps going up every day they get away with it...over 1 million men women and children murdered for nothing...4000 soldiers murdered for nothing..countless lives ruined, maimed, for nothing..
and they sit there living off of OUR tax dollars.

[slipslidingaway]

10. "UPDATE 1 Obama Administration officials told the Associated Press on Friday night ...

that they had no grounds to investigate the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners of war who allegedly were massacred by U.S.-backed forces. These officials claim they lack legal grounds to probe these alleged war crimes because, the AP reports, "only foreigners were involved and the alleged killings occurred in a foreign country."

Physicians for Human Rights is preparing a rebuttal of this ill-considered argument."


There was a documentary about this, Amy Goodman did a story and a year or two ago it was reported that evidence was being removed, I know I posted the story here at the time.

In edit - the story about tampering with the mass grave site was from Dec. 2008.

http://www.truthout.org/121308Y

[slipslidingaway]

11. “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death”

http://www.democracynow.org/2003/5/23/afghan_massacre_the_convoy_of_death

Afghan Massacre: Eyewitnesses Testify that US Troops Were Complicit in the Massacre of up to 3,000 Taliban Prisoners During the Afghan War
http://i3.democracynow.org/2004/5/20/afghan_massacre_eyewitnesses_testify_that_us


UN Confirms Afghan Mass Grave Site Disturbed
Friday 12 December 2008

http://www.truthout.org/121308Y

" Kabul, Afghanistan - The U.N. confirmed Friday that a mass grave in northern Afghanistan has been disturbed, raising the possibility that evidence supporting allegations of a massacre seven years ago may have been removed.

The Dasht-e-Leili grave site holds as many as 2,000 bodies of Taliban prisoners who died in transit after surrendering during one of the regime's last stands in November 2001, according to a State Department report from 2002.

McClatchy Newspapers first reported the tampering with the grave site on Thursday.

"We can confirm that the site at Dasht-e-Leili has been disturbed," said Dan McNorton, a spokesman for the U.N. mission in Afghanistan. He declined to say how or when the site had changed, saying that details would be available in an upcoming report..."



http://www.afghanwomensmission.org/news/index.php?articleID=29

"...AMY GOODMAN: What about warlords?

SONALI KOLHATKAR: Warlords is the most important problem in Afghanistan today. Everybody I met talked about how they were really happy the Taliban was gone, and then they said, well, now we've got these warlords who are ideologically the same as the Taliban. They're just less organized. And the U.S. has backed these warlords, some of them since the '70s in the fight against the Soviets, and they empowered them at a time when the Afghan people just did not want them around. Instead of undermining them, Hamid Karzai has actually put them into positions of power. Ismail Khan, is now the Minister of Energy and he is an extremely fundamentalist warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, the war criminal whose forces were implicated in the massacre of Taliban soldiers, remember that documentary, Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death? Well, his forces were the men implicated in that massacre of thousands of Taliban. He is now the Army Chief of Staff and Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, called Karzai's moves “wise.” So, the Afghan people are extremely dismayed, because they voted for Karzai on the platform that he would not compromise with warlords. Their hopes are being dashed, and the warlords, I think its important for us to understand, give the United States an extremely good excuse to stay in Afghanistan. The Afghan people are tolerating foreign troops, because they see them as an antidote to the warlords. So the U.S. continues to allow warlords to flourish, empowers them, pushes the Karzai government to keep them in power, because it means that the U.S. can stay there for the long haul..."

[slipslidingaway]

12. Google video link....

50 minutes

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8763367484184611493

I believe some of the witnesses are already dead.

[usregimechange]

13. bomb drops

[NNN0LHI]

14. Ever see Rashid Dostum's swimming pool Bush paid for with your Afghan reconstruction tax dollars?

http://cursor.org/stories/afghaniscam.html



Dostum's newly completed private swimming pool

AfghaniScam:

Livin' Large Inside Karzai's Reconstruction Bubble

by Marc W. Herold
Departments of Economics and Women's Studies
Whittemore School of Business & Economics
University of New Hampshire

POSTED SEPTEMBER 24, 2003 --

In mid 2003, Domenic Medley, the British author of Kabul's first tourist guidebook since 1972, noted that aside from opium production, which has soared since the Taliban were tossed-out by U.S. bombs, serving foreigners is "the only real economy."1

"Even though the British didn't call it a conquest, they were there in support of the shah - just as we're in support of Karzai - the Afghans realized this was a conquest, this was an occupation for all practical purposes....the thing that we have over the British is airpower. We won't have an army wiped out in the passes."2

-- Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban, Peter Tanner {De Capo Press, 2002}

A favorite U.S-supported warlord, General Rashid Dostum is, of course famous for his mansions in the north. In 2002, Dostum added an indoor swimming pool to one of them, which he inaugurated in a midnight swim with some of his U.S. Special Operations Forces buddies of A-Team Tiger 02, who helped him re-capture Mazar on November 9, 2001.

Dostum's Jamiat militia thugs control the border checkpoint with Uzbekistan at Hayratan and plunder millions in customs revenues.27 Even the Karzai-appointed Planning Minister complained that a person lucky enough to find a job as a government employee will earn $30 to $50 a month, but well-connected persons involved in "reconstruction" can get their hands on as much as $ 15,000 a month.

[chill_wind]

15. AfghaniScam. Good descriptor.

eom

[slipslidingaway]

16. A bit elaborate for my tastes, thanks for the picture n/t

[peacetalksforall]

17. It's very simple - think of retaliation. Should Moslems

ever retaliate against the U.S., they know that not all of the U.S. ordered this or condoned it.

Or any of our other crimes and war crimees. (While it can be said that gettting our kids to commit crimes makes it a war crime, while other crimes are just plain crimes - getting Blackwater involved, receiving kick backs from partners in construction of palaces or schools, or even paying $40.00 each for monogrammed towels.)

If any retaliating Moslems were smart they wouldn't try to to kill everyone in the U.S., they would go after the people most directly involved. If the U.S. doesn't figure out who is directly involved and who supported them in the acts (and not just this massacre), then they will have to figure it out for themselves and anything can happen, including retaliation against people who refused to investigate their own.

Not simple? Convoluted? Then let's start to exlore how we tell the people of Afghanistan that we are sorry for the massacres?

Still not working - do we just tell them that we will try hard to make sure it never happens again?

No?

Do we continue to go around bragging about being the greatest nation in the world? Do we tell people that because we value democracy so much that we can't help ourselves - that we have to bring democracy anyway we can?

Do we let the world court take charge? That would reveal plenty about us - that we intended to get away with it and won't admit anything and may send in our best to say defend and tell everyone how innocent we are or that we have figured out a new way to get around it legally.

Do we just admit that we are imperialists and say TOUGH!

The best way is the same way we treat crime - we bring it OUR courts and we don't play games and we don't pay off judges and we don't 'suicide' witnesses and whistleblowers.

We have to put an end to acts of terror starting with our own citizens - starting with acts of terror by us. Acts of terror for earth resources. Acts of terror for generating hate and creating enemies as an act, a pretense for declaring a war.

The leaders and military and barons and media and corporations and reverends, mullahs, rabbis and foundtaions and bankers must be stopped - all who wish to own and control us, our earth, our sky.

[Torn_Scorned_Ignored]

18. July 11, 2009 NYT (graphic)

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/asia/11afghan.html?_r=1&hp

[mopinko]

19. so, did anyone get a medal for this? dostum

is a savage. an absolute savage. but he was our savage. or maybe we were his is more like it.
what we did in afghanistan was to go in and add our smart bombs to their old conflicts. the warlords told us where to bomb, and we bombed. the warlords told us what they wanted, and we ordered it up for them.

if you have a strong stomach, and want to read the prettied up version (which still takes a strong stomach.) http://www.amazon.com/Horse-Soldiers-Extraordinary-Victory-Afghanistan/dp/1416580514

[slipslidingaway]

21. McClatchy story from Dec 2008 about evidence being removed...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/57649.html

As possible Afghan war-crimes evidence removed, U.S. silent

By Tom Lasseter | McClatchy Newspapers

"DASHT-E LEILI, Afghanistan — Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who'd surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum's headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum's militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum's men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.

Earlier this year, bulldozers returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert..."


Posted here...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=6040922&mesg_id=6040922

[lsewpershad]

22. What will it take

Mr Attorney General for you to thoroughly ivestigate and prosecute these criminals??????

[wantoutnow]

23. K and R

wait till they find out what happened in Falluja. I had a friend who served in Iraq. He told me they literally carpet bombed the place. Men, women, children, animals, etc. Everything. And there is video and pictures of it. You wont see them just like the torture photos wont come out. Too many people are very very complicit in war crimes and they know it.