Revisiting the Massacre

Sadly, this seems like a good time to bring up an earlier horrible story that nobody wanted to hear about. Were U.S. troops in Afghanistan complicit in a massacre?

June 15, 2002

Irish documentarian Jamie Doran says he has evidence of American complicity in a massacre in Afghanistan, and he’s been showing his rough footage to European leaders in the hope of preventing a coverup.

Doran, who worked at the BBC for more than seven years and has made documentaries about human rights abuses throughout the world, screened 20 minutes of his unfinished feature documentary, “Massacre at Mazar,” to the European parliament and the German parliament on Wednesday. After witnessing the screening, Andrew McEntee, former head of Amnesty International in the U.K., called for an independent investigation.

Doran has yet to release the footage to the public because he says his eyewitnesses’ identities need to be obscured for their own protection. But Doran felt he had to get some of the information out immediately because the mass graves he secretly filmed are in danger of being tampered with, which would make an independent inquiry into his film’s allegations of Northern Alliance and American war crimes impossible.

According to Doran, of the approximately 8,000 Taliban prisoners taken after the fall of Kunduz in late November 2001 to Gen. Rashid Dostum, around 5,000 are unaccounted for. He says he’s filmed eyewitnesses testifying that many of those prisoners suffocated in the metal containers used to transport them between Qala-I-Zeini fortress and Sherberghan prison, and that Northern Alliance troops fired into the containers, killing and wounding other prisoners. One witness claims that an American officer ordered the bodies dumped in the desert of Dasht-I-Leili, and that living people were taken there as well and executed. Furthermore, Doran says he has witnesses claiming to have seen American special-forces soldiers torturing prisoners who made it to Sherberghan.

I remember hearing about this film on “Democracy Now” some months ago. It could not find distribution in the US and no television station would air it. It has been seen all over the world, however, including the CBC in Canada, (which also has a lot of links to various stories and resources on this story.)

Here’s an article about it from the Global Policy Forum:

When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan, 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 and, according to witnesses, controlled the facility in the hopes of picking key prisoners for interrogation and possible transportation to Guant?namo Bay. (This is how Lindh was singled out.) “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.

Members of ODA 595, interviewed for the PBS program “Frontline” on August 2, 2002, confirm their presence at Sheberghan but cagily deny participating in war crimes. “The prisoners were being treated the exact same way as Dostum’s forces were,” said master sergeant “Paul.” “I didn’t see any atrocities, but I easily could have. Some prisoners may have died because they were sick or ill, and Dostum’s forces just couldn’t give them any care because they didn’t have it.” But even General Dostum admits 200 such deaths. And the Northern Alliance soldier quoted above says U.S. troops masterminded the cover-up”: “The Americans told the Sheberghan people to get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken.”

These ODA 595 Special Forces guys freely admitted being very close to General Dostum and his troops. But, they had to leave right after the massacre at Mazer al Sharif:

Yeah we eh, we were ordered out quite rapidly and without General Dostum’s knowledge. He was out of town and we got word that we were to be quickly ex-filled, to brief Mr. Rumsfeld.

We have no idea what really happened here, but there is ample evidence that the massacre itself took place. Whether Americans were involved remains unknown.

And, while this is a war crime, there is a distinction between what happened in Afghanistan to these suspected Taliban fighters and the Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib — the most obvious being that we invaded Iraq, unprovoked, on the basis of lies about “grave and gathering” threats, lies about ties to terrorists and the increasingly surreal and threadbare claim of liberation. Nonetheless, war crimes are war crimes and this was a particularly horrifying one.

And regardless of any righteousness of cause, it is the policy of “gloves off” that Bush and his testosterone addled advisors begat right after 9/11 that led inexorably to the sickening display at Abu Ghraib. There is a direct line from Mazar al Sharif to Gitmo to arcane arguments about habeus corpus before the Supreme Court to Abu Ghraib and it began with the puerile warcry that afternoon on top of Ground Zero when our president called for bloodlust instead of strength and wisdom.

I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon.

With that level of statesmanship and leadership, what did we expect?