New York Times: Bush Team Discouraged Probe of Mass Taliban Deaths
A U.S. newspaper reports the Bush administration repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the 2001 mass killings of Taliban prisoners by the militia of an American-backed warlord.
The New York Times reports the FBI, State Department and Red Cross pushed for a probe, but the White House failed to act because the warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, was being paid by the CIA at the time of the killings.
[The Bush Administration’s Cover-Up of the Dasht-e-Leili Massacre - Physicians for Human Rights blog]
Dostum and his fighters are accused of killing hundreds, and perhaps thousands of Taliban prisoners who surrendered after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Authorities believe the bodies were placed in a mass grave found in Dasht-e-Leili in 2002.
The report says the Bush White House was also worried about undermining U.S.-backed Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who named Dostum to his defense team.
The U.S.-based Physicians for Human Rights called for a criminal probe into the alleged massacre Friday.
The group says it has obtained U.S. government documents that show as many as 2,000 Taliban fighters were suffocated in container trucks by Dostum's forces and buried in the Dasht-e-Leili desert in November of 2001. [Voice of America News]
4 Comments
I am waiting for the day George Bush get investigated for War crimes and Crime against Humanity (may not happen in my life time), He is criminal who has created the fight against terror slogan and buried human rights in order to preserve American superiority..
If you watch that video, it says that Afghanis put the Taliban POWS (who suffocated) in the trucks. If American troops had put the POWS into a truck like that, there would have been an investigation. So Bush is only guilty of a cover-up. He (Bush) did not issue the orders specifically. In the Sri Lankan case, however, Mahinda is directly responsible for the detention camps. He is responsible for the 20,000 Tamils who were killed in the "final battle" and the 10,000 LTTE cadres being held at random locations and being subject to all forms of brutality.
Is anyone surprised, we should all know by now that human rights and the investigation of such violations are strictly limited to China and third world countries. The West has the ultimate arbiter of 'human rights' have a self granted veto right to request or follow through any such investigations.
In this respect presidnet Obama, Bush, Clinton and their equivalents in the EU an UK are basically telling the world 'DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO' knowing full well they break the same laws they wish to uphold on a daily basis.
Gamini,
The difference being that the press in the West does an admirable job reporting and exposing such violations by their governments and the governments responses aren't to call the press traitors, intimidate witnesses or attempt to brush things under the carpet.
It is essential for any true democracy to have a system of checks and balances to hold government responsible and accountable. We are far from that in Sri Lanka today.