Maine Owl

Caution: graphic details of a mass killing


In this lengthy segment from Democracy Now! for July 13, 2009, an extended excerpt from Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death by Irish filmmaker Jamie Doran is included. The description of what happened to perhaps 2000 prisoners of an Afghan warlord and U.S. ally, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who were packed into shipping containers near Mazāri Sharīf in November 2001 is chilling and sickening.

General Dostum was closely allied with U.S. Special Forces during the first U.S.-Afghan war in the Fall of 2001. That was interesting considering he had been closely allied with the Soviet Union during its occupation of Afghanistan two decades ago.

I won't rehash the story of how Dostum massacred the prisoners, told very capably on Democracy Now! yesterday, HERE. But I will say that it's quite instructive that now all of a sudden there is some interest in this and how the U.S. war was fought during November 2001. It's a prime example of how a horrendous story of conduct of war even can hit a mainstream outlet in the U.S. yet still be deep-sixed by disinterest if the White House wants it that way.

In August 2002, Newsweek printed the explosive cover story, "The Death Convoy Of Afghanistan", by Babak Dehghanpisheh, John Barry, and Roy Gutman that led, "Witness Reports And The Probing Of A Mass Grave Point To War Crimes. Does The United States Have Any Responsibility For The Atrocities Of Its Allies?" The overall media response less than one year after 9/11 was a big yawn.

Perhaps the U.S. public mood at the time was none too sympathetic towards people of the Middle East and South Asia who are seen as irreconcilable hostiles. Even today, some commenters at an ABC News blog entry on the new probe into the killings may share the feelings of "Dan," who wrote,

...I have no problem with Dostum killing a couple of thousand Taliban fighters. If they were still alive, we'd either be fighting them in Afghanistan or arguing about what to do with them (as we're now doing with respect to the Guantanimo detainees). I remember reading about this in '02, thinking, "just as well". We'd probably have been better off if even more Taliban fighters had been eh "massacred". There is no reforming religious fanatics. ...

This kind of comment is pretty typical in America. The thinking goes something like this--we were wronged by bad people who fill a whole section of the world so it doesn't matter what we do over there, just so we kill and kill and kill and kill as much as possible in order to protect ourselves. You'll see this kind of thinking used again and again.

The investigation of the Convoy Massacre ordered by President Obama? As Glen Greenwald has written about the Obama approach, there seemingly is no transgression of law that politically is worth doing anything about. Obama is afraid of the jingoist consensus reflected in the attitudes described above. So like Greenwald, I'll believe there is justice when I see it.