The Bush Administration's Cover-Up of the Dasht-e-Leili MassacrePhysicians for Human Rights (PHR) has issued a call for a criminal probe in the wake of a major New York Times story by James Risen with new evidence that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan in 2002. ("U.S. Inaction Seen After Taliban P.O.W.s Died" - NYTimes)
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.
This video, detailing nearly eight years of advocacy and investigation by Physicians for Human Rights, explores the events surrounding the massacre and subsequent cover-up.
Featuring Physicians for Human Rights' CEO Frank Donaghue, Campaign Against Torture Director Nathaniel Raymond, and Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin. Written, directed, and narrated by Jared Voss.
For more information and to sign our petition calling for Attorney General Eric Holder to let the FBI do its job, visit Afghan Mass Grave.
UpDate: 7.12.09President Obama Orders National Security Team To Investigate Dasht-e-Leili Massacre and Alleged Cover-UpPhysicians for Human Rights Hails the President's Commitment after Pressing for Accountability for Seven Years
Cambridge, MA – President Obama told CNN's Anderson Cooper that he has directed his national security team to look into the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners who allegedly were massacred by US-backed forces in Afghanistan. The President stated that the government needs to find out whether actions by the US contributed to possible war crimes........
January 9, 2008
Phil Donahue's Body of War
Why Picket the New York Times in DC on Friday?
By RUSSELL MOKHIBER
Well, it has to do with a movie I just saw.
It's called Body of War.
It was produced by Phil Donahue.
The star of the movie is a young man named Tomas Young.
He's an Iraq war vet.
Young had been on duty in Iraq a mere five days when he was hit by a bullet under his collar bone.
The bullet shattered his spine.
And now he's paralyzed from the chest down.
The movie is about his daily struggle to live.
It's about his wife and mother, who care for him.
And its about the politicians who sent him to Iraq.
I watched the movie last night at home in West Virginia with my wife and my two boys--aged 10 and 13.
I'm not sure what effect the movie had on the boys.
It held their attention for the full 87 minutes.
The bottom line lesson from Tomas Young--don't make impetuous decisions --about attacking another country or signing up for the military.
The boys were quiet afterwards. The older one picked up a book and read into the night. The younger one went straight to bed.
In the past, we have talked about Iraq war. We have talked about the possibility of a draft.
The boys see the pictures of dead American soldiers in the newspaper.
But this is the first time they've seen a documentary on the real life effects of the Iraq war.
And it wasn't easy for anyone.
This movie links the suffering of this one young man--25-year old Tomas Young of Kansas City, Missouri--directly to the votes of our politicians.
The Senators who voted for it--including John Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton--come off as scripted stooges for President Bush.
Mr. Kerry--aye.
Mrs. Clinton--aye.
Mr. Edwards--aye.
One of the heros of the movie is our own Senator, Robert Byrd, who opposed the war from the beginning.
He was one of 23 Senators who voted against the war resolution in October 2002.
Thousands have died since.
Tens of thousands have been wounded.
Wounded.
It means not being able to walk.
It means not being able to cough, because you have lost control of your stomach muscles.
It means having your mother shove a catheter into your penis so that you can pee.
"Don't worry, Tomas, I've had your pee on my hands before," the mother says to Tomas.
It means taking a slew of medications every day--anti-nausea drugs, painkillers, blood thinners, anti-depressants--that's just the beginning of the list.
It means struggling against incredible odds to keep together your marriage.
It means traveling across the country to speak out against the illegal war that put you in the wheelchair.
It means holding accountable those who put us in this mess.
On January 22, 2008, Donahue will find out whether or not his movie will be nominated for an Academy Award.
If it is nominated, this will help Donahue line up a distribution deal.
Right now, he's traveling the country showing the film to college audiences.
"I discovered a great American in Tomas Young, a warrior turned anti-warrior, a voice of courage rising above the war drums," Donahue writes on his web site. "To all the main-streamers in the press who supported the invasion of Iraq, to the pundits who continue to talk tough while other people's kids die, to all the merry warriors who recruited Jesus to assist them in this massive foreign policy blunder--I have a soldier for you."
Eddie Vedder wrote two original songs for the movie. As the credits roll, we hear Vedder's voice:
I speak for a man who gave for this land
took a bullet in the back for his pay
spilled his blood in the dirt and the dust
and he's come back to say
That what he has seen is hard to believe
and it does no good to just pray
he asks of us to stand, and we must
end this war today
Which brings me to this Friday, January 11, 2008 at 12 noon.
In honor of Tomas Young, there will be a protest in front of the New York Times Washington office at 1627 I St NW (Farragut West Metro stop).
Why the New York Times?
Because the Times recently signed on William Kristol as a columnist. Kristol was the lead pundit cheerleader for war--with Iraq, with Lebanon and now with Iran.
As Donahue said--to the pundits who continue to talk tough while other people's kids die--I have a soldier for you.
Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.
View the Trailer of "Body of War"
Those of us who served in 'Nam, or really any insurgent conflict, and anybody else who were paying attention understand the Government Propaganda used to make things look rosier than the reality on the ground.
One of the most blatant is "The Body Count". Used to show success, in 'enemy kills', and used to show success in the citizens feelings security because of actions by an occupying force or a puppet government.
Real Honesty is not a popular tool of propaganda!
Newsweek and the New York Times are carrying articles about the returning Iraqi's to Baghdad, looking deeper into the reasons why, reasons anyone paying real attention already understand.
In the Newsweek article called There’s No Place Like … Iraq?
We find this subtitle:
Actually, yes. Refugees are returning—but it's tough to resettle them without worsening sectarian divisions.
Why are some returning, and they actually are, is it because of how Secure? Baghdad has become, or are other reasons in play.
Dawood (he won't risk the use of his full name) is a 33-year-old IT engineer, but he couldn't find work outside Iraq. His Lebanese visa ran out, and Canada refused his asylum application. So a few weeks ago, practically broke, he returned to Baghdad. His old district is torn by an ongoing Shia-Sunni turf war, but Dawood says he feels safe in the family's new, mainly Shia area.
Syria, the region's last country that offered free access to Iraqis, has cracked down on new entries and forbidden Iraqis to hold jobs. "They put a stamp in your passport that says NO WORK," Dawood says. Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt enforce similar bans.
The money is about enough to fix all the broken windows, but it won't begin to replace the furniture that was looted in their absence. Besides, the house is a triplex. Hamoud's in-laws used to have the other two units, now occupied by Sunni fugitives from Shiite-led ethnic cleansing in the Jihad neighborhood. Hamoud says when her husband asked them to leave, they refused, saying: "If you get the people out of our house in Jihad, we'll go back there."
It closes with a little girls wish to return to her real home and that her father not leave again:
"She told me to promise not to leave again, but until now I don't promise," says Dawood. "We don't know what life will bring."
The New York Times looks a little deeper into the 'body count' of the returning Iraqi's.
The Politics of Tallying the Number of Iraqis Who Return Home
The description of the scope of the return, however, appears to have been massaged by politics. Returnees have essentially become a currency of progress.
Under intense pressure to show results after months of political stalemate, the government has continued to publicize figures that exaggerate the movement back to Iraq and Iraqis’ confidence that the current lull in violence can be sustained.
They admit to just 'counting the bodies':
“We didn’t ask them if they were displaced and neither did the Interior Ministry,”
The UN though dug abit further:
A United Nations survey released last week, of 110 Iraqi families leaving Syria, also seemed to dispute the contentions of officials in Iraq that people are returning primarily because they feel safer.
The survey found that 46 percent were leaving because they could not afford to stay; 25 percent said they fell victim to a stricter Syrian visa policy; and only 14 percent said they were returning because they had heard about improved security.
Furthermore, people are still leaving their homes — 28,017 were internally displaced in October, according to the latest United Nations figures. In all, the United Nations estimates that 2.4 million Iraqis are still internally displaced, with many occupying someone else’s home.
We are getting a number of reports of how we are creating alliances with once insugents, fighting us and each other, by training and paying them to rid their area's of al Qaeda of Iraq.
What are we really doing?
To my view of those reports, added to the reports, reading between the lines of the returning Iraqi's, it seems we are training and arming Militia's that are now protecting their ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, that we allowed, in Baghdad and other cities, as well as pockets of Iraq outside of the cities controlled by the verious sect tribes of Sunni and Shiite.
I fail to see where 'The Surge' main objective is being realized, a functioning Iraqi Government, and especially one creating their own security for the country we destroyed.
We tore open, and destroyed, 'Pandora's Box' of Iraq. The Iraqi's still want All Foreign Troops out of their Country, a Country where these sects, despite what our Allie Saddam did to many lived and worked together, married and had children, were friends, lived side by side.
Can they be brought back together by Buying them off, Nope!
Will these militia's we are creating join forces to really bring about a more secure Iraq, a Big Question!
Or will they once again revert back, or have they really left that, to the Killing and Maiming of each other, and the occupying militaries, in order to keep their own ethnically cleansed area's safe for their own????
By FRANK RICH
“BUSH lies” doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.
“This government does not torture people.” Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of “torture” is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.
Still, the drill remains the same. The administration gives its alibi (Abu Ghraib was just a few bad apples). A few members of Congress squawk. The debate is labeled “politics.” We turn the page.
Call me cynical, but when Laura Bush spoke up last week about the human rights atrocities in Burma, it seemed less an act of selfless humanitarianism than another administration maneuver to change the subject from its own abuses.
But we must also examine our own responsibility for the hideous acts committed in our name in a war where we have now fought longer than we did in the one that put Verschärfte Vernehmung on the map.
Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.
“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an M.I.T. physicist whose interrogation of Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, took place over a chessboard. George Frenkel, 87, recalled that he “never laid hands on anyone” in his many interrogations, adding, “I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”
SNIP: Read the rest here
