Were 3,000 Afghans Murdered As U.S. Troops Stood By?
“I’ve asked my national security team to…collect the facts,” President Obama told CNN. Then, he said, “we’ll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all the facts together.”
Probably.
Such was Obama’s tepid reaction to a New York Times cover story about an alleged “mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.”
Obama sounds so reasonable. Doesn’t he always? But his reaction to the massacre in the Dasht-i-Leili desert is nothing more than the latest case of his administration refusing to investigate a Bush-era war crime.
There are two things Obama doesn’t want you to know about Dasht-i-Leili. First, the political class and U.S. state-controlled media have sat on this story for six to seven years. Second, U.S. troops are accused of participating in the atrocities, which involved 12 times as many murders as My Lai.
The last major battle for northern Afghanistan took place in the city of Kunduz. After a weeks-long siege marked by treachery—at one point, the Taliban pretended to surrender, then turned their weapons on advancing Northern Alliance solders—at least 8,000 Taliban POWs fell under the control of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord with a long record of exceptional brutality.
I described what happened next in my column dated January 28, 2003:
“Five thousand of the 8,000 prisoners made the trip to Sheberghan prison in the backs of open-air Soviet-era pick-up trucks…They stopped and commandeered private container trucks to transport the other 3,000 prisoners. ‘It was awful,’ Irfan Azgar Ali, a survivor of the trip, told England’s Guardian newspaper. ‘They crammed us into sealed shipping containers. We had no water for 20 hours. We banged on the side of the container. There was no air and it was very hot. There were 300 of us in my container. By the time we arrived in Sheberghan, only ten of us were alive.’
“One Afghan trucker, forced to drive one such container, says that the prisoners began to beg for air. Northern Alliance commanders ‘told us to stop the trucks, and we came down. After that, they shot into the containers [to make air holes]. Blood came pouring out. They were screaming inside.’ Another driver in the convoy estimates that an average of 150 to 160 people died in each container.”
According to Scottish filmmaker Jamie Doran, the butchery continued for three days.
Doran’s documentary about these events, “Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death,” was shown in 50 countries but couldn’t get a U.S. release by a media wallowing in the amped-up pseudo-patriotism that marked 2002. Doran’s film broke the story. (You can watch it online at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8763367484184611493.) My column brought it to a mainstream American audience:
“When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan,” I wrote in 2003, “the bodies of the dead tumbled out. A 12-man U.S. Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, guarded the prison’s front gates…’ Everything was under the control of the American commanders,’ a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran in the film. American troops searched the bodies for Al Qaeda identification cards. But, says another driver, ‘Some of [the prisoners] were alive. They were shot’ while ‘maybe 30 or 40’ American soldiers watched.”
The Northern Alliance witness told Doran that American commanders advised him to “get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken.” Indeed, satellite photos reveal that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government dispatched bulldozers to the mass grave site in 2006 and removed most of the bodies.
World’s Most Dangerous Places writer Robert Young Pelton, a colleague who (like me) was in and around Kunduz in November 2001, denies that Dostum’s men or U.S. Special Forces killed more than a few hundred Taliban prisoners. However, the U.S. government started receiving firsthand accounts of the events at Dasht-i-Leili in early 2002. According to the Times “Dell Spry, the FBI’s senior representative at…Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, heard accounts of the deaths from agents he supervised there. Separately, 10 or so prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been ‘stacked like cordwood’ in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive, Mr. Spry recalled.”
“At the very least,” Doran says now, “American forces and CIA personnel stood by and did nothing…But if numerous witnesses are to be believed, their involvement went much further than that.” Will Obama hold them accountable? Not unless we insist.
COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL
15 Comments.
Winning hearts and minds.
so glad we pay half our taxes to military
I realize that we're supposed to respect POWs and not violate the "rules of war". But . . . . increasingly, I just don't care. When you have an enemy who doesn't adhere to those laws, it hopelessly cripples you if you choose to obey them. That's just common sense.
Fuck the Taliban and fuck how ever many thousands of POWs they executed. I hope they're burning in Hell as I type this.
I have more important things to worry about then the executions of these sons of bitches.
What we saw in 2002 was not "amped-up pseudo-patriotism." It was plain and simple patriotism, which becomes ugly and dangerous when a nation state has a surplus of weapons–and no fear of reprisal.
I hated that liberal bumper-sticker dissent is patriotic. No. Wrong. Cheering on "your" troops while they smash the "enemy" is patriotic. That's what patriotism is. And that's one reason why Obama is reluctant to peruse prosecution any of these crimes.
Internationalism is the only progressive way forward, Ted. We need a shift in thinking, and I can do without patriotic pandering in your piece…
Not easy finding a site that will play the documentary, but eventually located one on google. Forensic anthropologists are still digging up mass graves from WWII atrocities in Eastern Europe. Humans are a macrocosm of microscopic life and death. Something always needs to kill or eat something else. We are different only in that we have written languages and use them to tell filthy lies about religious bullshit and mass murders. We are no better than pond scum. The kindly, peaceful, fund-raising folks at NPR and PBS can take that and shove it up their powdered poop chutes. And Bush and his entire staff of war criminals, ass-kissers and faux-wives can shove the Washington Monument up their collective asses, too. The human race doesn't deserve to survive. You GO, Global Warming. Come on! Burn us up! How about an unfriendly asteroid to top it all off?
Grouchy,
Internationalism is pretending that free trade with a communist country is possible. Internationalism holds that we should not try to achieve balance of trade, even if we lose ownership of our country and our right of self determination with it. Patriotism is taking reasonable steps to prevent things like this from happening.
The example I gave may have been off topic, but the point stands. The nation state is the basic unit of world politics. To want what is good for your nation state is patriotic and noble. To want to sacrifice the interests of your nation state for others in the name of internatiolism is evil. To expect the citizens of other nation states to sacrifice their own interests in the name of internationalism is asinine.
The Bushies indeed hijacked the notion of patriotism. Supporting Iraq and Afganistan is not patriotic because these wars do not serve the national interests of the United States. Peace must be secured through rational self interest of independent nations. Bush and friends made this peace impossible by acting irrationally. This is unfortuanate, but a just peace cannot be obtained some catagorical imperative of "internationalism" either.
LOL. Anonymous (6:41 am), you win the Misanthrope of the Week Award. Yet I confess I have the same feelings on a daily basis.
It's asinine to talk about protecting the "national interests of the United States."
There is no such thing.
For example: explain to me how Exxon-Mobile can share any of my interests. Or any of the interests of the people who live in my neighborhood.
Orwell understood this truth: when a nation goes to war, it's not against any foreign enemy, but against its own population.
p.s. It's also asinine to talk about "free trade." That doesn't exist either.
This just in 10 seconds after my last post:
President Obama said Friday he would nominate Robert Hormats, a vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International, to a top economic position at the State Department. Mr. Hormats, 66, will be under secretary of state for economic, energy and agricultural affairs. He was deputy trade representative from 1979 through 1981 and held other posts at the State Department throughout his career. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, said in a speech on Wednesday that she hoped to make economic policy and trade a larger part of United States diplomacy.
How is that Pelton, a man who has no reason to lie about his own experiences in Afghanistan as some of them are very well documented (he did interview John Walker Lindh in the Afghani prison where they found him), who completely disagrees with Doran, receive one small paragraph at the end of the rant?
And why is it that in every article I can find, there is no proof of US involvement at all, including the very words of Doran from 2002, that said: "I have absolutely no evidence that American troops were involved in the shooting that took place in the desert." So Pelton and Doran say there was no proof. And Doran has at least one incident where another documentary of his, "Guinea Pig Kids" was deemed to be erroneous and misleading (from the Guardian: "The BBC has apologised after admitting that a documentary about the testing of HIV drugs on children contained "serious breaches" of its editorial guidelines on accuracy and impartiality.").
But apparently Ted isn't worried about that…
I worry about accuracy. Suffice it to say that I saw the mass grave at Dasht-i-Leili and talked to witnesses I deemed credible.
Even the Special Forces unit in question admits that hundreds of Talibs were murdered by Dostum. Further, they admit they were there when it happened. They had a legal obligation to try to stop the massacre, and they didn't. These facts are not in dispute.
Grouchy said…
What we saw in 2002 was not "amped-up pseudo-patriotism." It was plain and simple patriotism. . .”
Both of these notions are utterly wrong. Patriotism is analytic — it is a desire for the best for everyone who happens to be a member of one group. The desire to murder a bunch of people overseas doesn’t make one any sort of patriotic — it’s just a desire to murder. It should be obvious that these notions don’t make any fucking sense: consider — given that I’m an American citizen, how does murdering an Iraqi child help me?
The phenomenon alluded to is nationalism, which is where one deep-kisses the asshole of each authority figure one can get into humping distance thereof. Arguing that such is patriotism is not significantly different than arguing a sexually and violently abusive father is parenting his child. Both phenomenon are perversions of a virtuous relationship.
No One of Consequence,
I disagree.
Patriotism is just nationalism in its dormant form. And nationalism is jingoism waiting to happen.
The idea that a person can belong to a group called "Americans" is ridiculous. A country of 300 million is too large and diverse for one to have any meaningful relationship with.
Sociology, anthropology and biology tell us that humans are wired to exist in communities of not more than 300. Any relationship you have with a larger group is abstract and easily manipulated by power structures who want to advance the interests of their controlling clique.
Our world is increasingly interconnected and our biosphere will not contain its collapse to borders. We are all people, everywhere, in Tanzania, Iraq and Iowa, and patriotism obscures this fact.
It's time to discard the outmoded and dangerous idea that patriotism does anybody any good.
And another thought:
You ask, "given that I'm an American citizen, how does murdering an Iraqi child help me?"
It doesn't. But those security procedures might increase the profit margins of Haliburton, Xe Services LLC (nee Blackwater), etc.
Supporting "our" troops is "our patriotic duty." It greatly benefits certain industries and powerful individuals, but it's not in our interest, nor in the general interest of humanity or the biosphere…
Patriotism is just nationalism in its dormant form. And nationalism is jingoism waiting to happen.
Do you have even a single dictionary definition to back that ridiculous claim up? I say ridiculous because Grouchy’s reductionism here makes it impossible for me to contemplate what any words relating to actions concerning a government actually mean. They’re all mush.
The idea that a person can belong to a group called "Americans" is ridiculous.
WTF? No it’s not. That idea is ridiculous. There are 6.5 BILLION persons belonging to a group called “humanity.” I believe Grouchy has fallen into some sort of size-related fallacy here. Just because large groups have a diversity of some interests does not mean that a) they lack ANY common characteristics and b) they, or a supermajority of them, fail to share ANY common interests. Either of these things would be an absurdity on their own; they are simply as wacky as Warner Bros. cartoon physics when put together.
A country of 300 million is too large and diverse for one to have any meaningful relationship with.
I have absolutely no idea what is meant by “meaningful relationship,” but it sounds like it will mean what Grouchy means it to mean, so I won’t inquire further. I can simply point out that whatever a “meaningful relationship” is, it is not necessary criteria to describe individuals as part of a group. Whatever the hell is meant by “meaningful relationship,” it is logical that I don’t have one with the rest of the planet. (This follows since Grouchy claims that I don’t have one with the citizens of the U.S. and they comprise some part of Earth’s population.) I, nevertheless, share a species with other humans. The relationship thing doesn’t come up.
Any relationship you have with a larger group is abstract and easily manipulated by power structures who want to advance the interests of their controlling clique.
This is simply wrong. It is quite simple to manipulate groups below 300 persons as described in that sentence. (See also the Salem Witch Trials and, oh, any small town in the U.S.) There is absolutely no human relationship invulnerable to corruption. So I think Grouchy’s claim is that Meaningful Community = Legitimate Social Construct, and so a country of 350 million can’t be a Legitimate Social Construct. That’s absurd for the reasons stated above and because governments and countries aren’t communities (unless they’re absurdly tiny), but political entities binding communities together. And we’ve had such social structures for over a hundred thousand years now: there’s no evidence that these political structures are anathema to human nature. (You can argue that humans cannot build substantive communities of several million people, but that’s quite irrelevant since governments and countries aren’t communities and it’s foolish to say they are.)
By Grouchy’s logic, it is impossible to love one’s children AND value the lives of other children. Patriotism, at its most basic, is a benign desire for the health and happiness of persons bound up in one’s immediate political system. If that compassion negates compassion for others outside that system, then compassion itself is garbage; compassion becomes a vice. This is nuts. More importantly, there are countless individuals whose lives and practices are completely at variance with Grouchy’s weird definitions. Neither commonly-accepted definitions of patriotism and nationalism, nor the behavior of persons regarded as having public virtue, fit with those definitions.