[Peace-discuss] Fw: [socialistdiscussion] Did US Forces Watch Afghan Massacre?

[unionyes]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Richard Mellor 
To: 444_discussion at topica.com 
Sent: Thursday, July 23, 2009 4:25 PM
Subject: [socialistdiscussion] Did US Forces Watch Afghan Massacre?


  Published on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 by Salon.com

Did US Forces Watch Afghan Massacre?
Afghan detainees allege that Americans witnessed 
a mass killing -- a charge the New York Times 
chose not to report

by Mark Benjamin

It has long been known that soon after the 
American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, 
hundreds or thousands of Taliban prisoners who 
had surrendered in the city of Kunduz were herded 
into metal containers and suffocated or shot, 
allegedly under orders from an Afghan warlord. As 
Newsweek reported in August 2002, the bodies were 
then piled into mass graves in Dasht-e-Leili, 
Afghanistan, near Shibarghan.

Earlier this month, Pulitzer Prize-winning New 
York Times reporter James Risen advanced the 
story, revealing that the United States had 
resisted any war crimes investigation into the 
massacre, despite learning from Dell Spry, the 
lead FBI agent at Guantánamo Bay following the 
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, that many Afghan 
detainees were telling similar stories of a mass 
killing. Spry directed interviews of detainees by 
FBI agents at Guantánamo Bay, and compiled 
allegations made by the detainees.

[In April 2002, Physicians for Human Rights 
forensic experts dug a test trench as part of a 
preliminary investigation for the UN at the 
Dasht-e-Leili mass grave site near Sheberghan, 
Afghanistan, and exposed 15 bodies. See more info 
at afghanmassgrave.org (Physicians for Human 
Rights)]In April 2002, Physicians for Human 
Rights forensic experts dug a test trench as part 
of a preliminary investigation for the UN at the 
Dasht-e-Leili mass grave site near Sheberghan, 
Afghanistan, and exposed 15 bodies. See more info 
at afghanmassgrave.org (Physicians for Human 
Rights)

But what the Times did not report was that many 
of those same detainees also alleged to Spry's 
interviewers that U.S. personnel were present 
during the massacre, a potentially explosive 
allegation that, if true, might further explain 
American resistance to a war crimes probe of the 
deaths. In an exclusive interview, Spry told 
Salon that he informed Risen about the additional 
allegation that U.S. forces were present. Risen 
confirmed to Salon that Spry told him of the 
allegations, but said he did not publish them, in 
part, because he didn't believe them.

In late 2001, according to initial media reports 
on the massacre, Afghan warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid 
Dostum ordered hundreds and perhaps thousands of 
Taliban prisoners who had surrendered in the city 
of Kunduz into metal shipping containers. They 
were given little food and water over a three-day 
period and transported to a prison outside 
Shibarghan. They licked perspiration off one 
another to stay alive. Many suffocated. Others 
died when guards fired pell-mell into the 
containers. Murder by metal shipping container is 
apparently the mass killing technique of choice 
among some warlords in Afghanistan.

Risen's story in the Times earlier this month 
said the slaughter "may have been the most 
significant mass killing in Afghanistan after the 
2001 American-led invasion." The Times added that 
American officials resisted a war crimes 
investigation because the warlord who allegedly 
orchestrated the mass killing, Dostum, was a paid 
CIA asset who had worked closely with U.S. 
Special Forces. At the time of the killings, 
Dostum was working hand-in-glove with soldiers 
from the Army's 5th Special Forces Group. During 
that phase of the war in Afghanistan, small 
numbers of Special Forces soldiers typically 
accompanied much larger numbers of U.S.-allied 
Northern Alliance forces on the battlefield.

That article showed that Spry assembled accounts 
from roughly 10 prisoners who said they had 
survived the massacre and later ended up at 
Guantánamo. Those prisoners described being 
"stacked like cordwood" in the shipping 
containers while the mass killing occurred.

The paper showed that Spry sent the information 
up his chain of command. A senior FBI official 
halted a subsequent investigation. The military 
also evinced little interest. Former Deputy 
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz apparently 
told another defense official at the time that 
the United States wasn't going to go after Dostum 
for the deaths, because he was a valuable asset.

What the Times did not say was that these 
Guantánamo prisoners also said that U.S. 
personnel were present during the massacre. "The 
allegation was that U.S. forces were present 
while Dostum's troops were herding these people 
into these containers," Spry, now retired from 
the FBI and working as an FBI consultant, told 
Salon. "They were out rounding up alleged Taliban 
and insurgent folks."

Spry said that at the time of the interviews not 
long after the invasion of Afghanistan he found 
the detainees' claims of a massacre "plausible," 
since the detainees separately told similar 
stories. Spry thought an investigation seemed 
warranted. He found the claims of the involvement 
of U.S. personnel, however, more specious, mostly 
because he doubted that Americans would 
participate in or stand by passively during a 
massacre. "I did not believe that then and I do 
not believe that now," he said about the alleged 
involvement of U.S. personnel.

One of the reasons he pushed for an investigation 
of the alleged massacre, Spry said, was that the 
United States could both fulfill its obligations 
to look into war crimes and prove false any 
allegations of American involvement.

Risen said he cut the allegations from his story 
because of space concerns, because he could not 
prove them, and because he did not believe them. 
That Spry did not believe them either contributed 
to his lack of confidence in the charges. "I just 
felt like the whole issue of potential U.S. 
involvement in the massacre could not be proven 
and was not conclusive. Frankly, I don't believe 
it and it detracts from the rest of the story. It 
had been a stumbling block for this story for 
some time."

The detainees told Spry's interviewers of a 
harrowing situation. One detainee described being 
moved by truck just prior to being stuffed into 
one of the shipping containers, according to an 
investigative document obtained by Salon (and 
published here). The truck stopped and he saw 
"one big, tall, caucasian, American looking man 
who was wearing blue jeans," the detainee 
reported, according to a U.S. Criminal 
Investigative Task Force report. "The man was 
taking pictures of the trucks and the occupants," 
the detainee added.

The detainee, whose name is blacked out, said the 
truck drove for a while and then backed up to a 
shipping container and 100 men were forced 
inside. He described hearing screaming and 
banging on the sides of the container, blacking 
out from lack of air, and waking up next to a 
dead man with green foam on his mouth. People 
rubbed clothes against the ceiling to capture 
condensation. Around 24 hours later, he and 
roughly 20 other survivors were let out. The rest 
died. The detainee heard later that the dead and 
very weak were "put into a big hole and buried."

Meanwhile, Dostum's name surfaced this week in a 
video of Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, the U.S. Army 
soldier taken hostage by the Taliban three weeks 
ago. A voice off-camera hammers Dostum, "who had 
hands in organized crime and lootings and mass 
murders in the north of Afghanistan." The voice 
then asks Bergdahl, "Does your government tell 
you that you support human rights criminals in 
Afghanistan and you spill your blood for these 
people?"

"No," Bergdahl responds. "Our government does not 
inform us of any of these details."
Copyright ©2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

-- 
"Capitalism teaches the people the moral 
conceptions of cannibalism are the strong 
devouring the weak; its theory of the world of 
men and women is that of a glorified pig-trough 
where the biggest swine gets the most swill." 
-James Connolly 1910.

Richard Mellor
AFSCME Local 444 retired
Oakland CA
http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/unionguy510
http://www.clnews.org



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