On August 16, General Abdul Rashid Dostum — who is widely reported to be partly responsible for the massacre and for a subsequent cover-up — returned to Kabul to campaign for the re-election of President Hamid Karzai in the August 20 elections. It is widely reported that President Karzai has offered General Dostum a government post in exchange for his support.
“Real and lasting peace in Afghanistan will be made possible by strengthening the rule of law and ending the culture of impunity,” stated PHR CEO Frank Donaghue.
“Letting General Dostum return to any position of power before there is a thorough and transparent investigation into whether or to what extent he may have been involved in the alleged 2001 massacre, will be seen by the Afghan people as confirmation that warlords like Dostum have impunity for their crimes,” continued Donaghue. “General Dostum has admitted that these prisoners surrendered jointly to US special forces and to Northern Alliance troops under his command. As Physicians for Human Rights has said for 7 years since the organization’s experts discovered the alleged mass grave, the site must be secured, witnesses must be protected, and Afghanistan must join the international community in probing how these prisoners died and why General Dostum and the Bush administration reportedly impeded investigation into these alleged war crimes. PHR looks forward to appropriate action from President Obama after he receives a report from his national security team, whom he ordered to gather all the facts and report to him on whether the international laws of war were violated.”
“Not only is General Dostum alleged to have committed the original war crime; he is also reportedly responsible for serious tampering with evidence,” stated PHR Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin. “A Physicians for Human Rights forensic expert in 2008, working under the auspices of the UN, discovered that large pits have been dug in the area of Dasht-e-Leili where bodies are suspected to be buried. Analysis of satellite images performed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science at PHR’s request, shows the apparent presence of heavy earth-moving equipment at the site in August 2006. McClatchy Newspapers reported on December 11, 2008 that according to witnesses, General Dostum and his commanders “have taken all the bones and thrown them into the river.” And, according to US Government documents that PHR uncovered in 2006, witnesses to this incident were “tortured, killed, or simply disappeared.”
“Afghanistan must work with the international community to ensure appropriate protection of the site and any remaining physical evidence, as well as the safety of any witnesses,” said Donaghue. “These would be necessary steps toward fulfilling President Obama’s mandate to collect all available information about the alleged war crimes and the reported cover-up.”
Posted on Friday, Jul 17, 2009 at 12:28 pm by Ben Greenberg
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Physicians for Human Rights Says His Denial Flies in the Face of Documentation
Media Contact:
Jonathan Hutson
jhutson [at] phrusa [dot] com
Cell: +1-857-919-5130
Cambridge, MA – “The facts gathered in the Dasht-e-Leili mass grave case contradict General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s statement of July 17,” stated Physicians for Human Rights Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin. “He denies that the alleged massacre of as many as 2,000 surrendered Taliban prisoners ever occurred. By claiming that the allegations are politically motivated, Dostum is clearly trying to distract focus from the substantial documentation collected over seven years of investigation by Physicians for Human Rights, the UN, and award-winning investigative journalists.”
“Dostum makes a significant admission by confirming in his statement that Taliban prisoners surrendered jointly to US forces and to US-allied Afghan forces in November 2001 outside Konduz, Afghanistan,” stated Nathaniel Raymond, Physicians for Human Rights’ lead researcher on the Dasht-e-Leili case.
“Furthermore,” said Raymond, “Dostum’s blanket denial should be seen in the context of clear indications of evidence-tampering at the Dasht-e-Leili site where bodies are suspected to be buried, and the fact that at least four witnesses in this case have been tortured, killed or disappeared.”
“Physicians for Human Rights applauds the US State Department’s reported efforts to ensure that Dostum not return from exile in Turkey to assume a position of power in Afghanistan,” stated Sirkin. “However, a full, formal and transparent investigation into the allegations against Dostum and the evidence that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal probes into the case must be launched by the US and Afghanistan. Witnesses must be protected and the Dasht-e-Leili site must be secured.”
Towards the end of the interview, Risen and Sirkin each provide some interesting elaborations on the information that appeared in The Times.
In The Times, Risen noted:
While a dozen or so bodies were examined and several were autopsied, a full exhumation was never performed, and human rights groups are concerned that evidence has been destroyed. In 2008, a medical forensics team working with the United Nations discovered excavations that suggested the mass grave had been moved. Satellite photos obtained by The Times show that the site was disturbed even earlier, in 2006.
Today, Susannah Sirkin elaborated:
Physicians for Human Rights has repeatedly called for protection of that site. There has never been any kind of protection, even though President Karzai and others have promised that they would investigate the site and protect it.
What we now know is, first of all, in 2008, one of our forensic scientists was able to go up to the area and noticed that there were very large holes in the area. This was reported by McClatchy in December 2008.
What we now know from satellite imagery that appears in James Risen’s New York Times piece, and that has been provided by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is that in 2006 there are photos with not much area destroyed, but maybe one large hole. And then a few months later, we see pictures of images that are very consistent with large earthmoving equipment. Within a month of that picture, we see a very large hole right at the area where what appears to be a backhoe and a dump truck on the site. So it looks as though, actually, within a month of Physicians for Human Rights filing a Freedom of Information Act request to get what the US government knew, all branches knew, about the Dasht-e-Leili massacre, the site has been dramatically damaged.
Risen’s Times article discussed how the first attempted investigation into the Dasht-e-Leili massacre was via the FBI:
Dell Spry, the F.B.I.’s senior representative at the detainee prison 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. They told similar accounts of suffocations and shootings, he said. A declassified F.B.I. report, dated January 2003, confirms that the detainees provided such accounts.
Mr. Spry, who is now an F.B.I. consultant, said he did not believe the stories because he knew that Al Qaeda trained members to fabricate tales about mistreatment. Still, the veteran agent said he thought the agency should investigate the reports “so they could be debunked.”
But a senior official at F.B.I. headquarters, whom Mr. Spry declined to identify, told him to drop the matter, saying it was not part of his mission and it would be up to the American military to investigate.
“I was disappointed because I believed that, true or untrue, we had to be in front of this story, because someday it may turn out to be a problem,” Mr. Spry said.
Today, Risen said further:
[Spry] told me that during those times that he kept getting these—the agents who worked for him were interrogating and questioning detainees and that he kept getting this pattern of reports from the detainees all talking about surviving this massacre. And he said that they would volunteer this information to the FBI agents. And that, so he felt—he really didn’t think—at first he didn’t believe the stories, because he thought that—he’d been told that al-Qaeda tried to, you know, fabricate stories of torture and abuse as part of their training. And so, he didn’t believe it, although when he began to hear all of these, he thought it would be important for the US to at least investigate the allegations so that they could be debunked. Or else, if they didn’t try to investigate it, then this story would still—it would hang out there, and the US would pay the price in its reputation eventually.
What he said was that he passed—he wrote up what the FBI call 302 reports, which are, you know, reports of an interview with someone, and that he got word back from FBI headquarters to drop the issue. And he was told that it was not his mission at Guantánamo to investigate a potential—you know, a massacre in Afghanistan. And instead, he should be focused on his role as looking for, you know, evidence to be used in trials of detainees and also for evidence—intelligence on possible future attacks against the US.
What he told me was he understood it wasn’t part of his mission, but thought that, still, it was something that should be looked into, and he was disappointed that the FBI didn’t want to look into it. They told him that this was something for the Pentagon to look into. But as I said, it turns out that the Pentagon never really did look into it.
Risen concluded the interview saying:
It’s very unclear what US personnel knew at the time. And I think the investigation should focus rather on what happened afterwards in the Bush administration.
Posted on Sunday, Jul 12, 2009 at 2:41 pm by Ben Greenberg
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact:
Jonathan Hutson
jhutson [at] phrusa [dot] com
Cell: +1-857-919-5130
Physicians 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.
The comments to Anderson Cooper were aired on CNN on Sunday as it promoted excerpts from Cooper’s exclusive interview with the President in Ghana that will air in full at 10 PM Eastern on Monday, July 13. Cooper raised new evidence from a New York Times report by James Risen that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into an alleged massacre of as many as 2,000 prisoners in Afghanistan. The excerpts from the interview as transcribed by Physicians for Human Rights follow at the end of this press release.
“Physicians for Human Rights praises President Obama for ordering his national security team to collect all the facts in the Dasht-e-Leili massacre and apparent US cover-up,” said Physicians for Human Rights Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin.
“Since Physicians for Human Rights discovered the mass grave in January 2002, we have been gathering the facts on the initial incident and the alleged cover-up of it through forensic investigation, legal action against the Bush Administration, and documentation of the chain of command,” said Nathaniel Raymond, PHR’s lead researcher in the case. “We stand ready to provide these facts to the president’s national security team and to Congress. President Obama is right to say that US and Afghan violations of the laws of war must be investigated. If the Obama Administration finds that criminal wrongdoing occurred in this case, those responsible – whether American or Afghan officials – must be prosecuted. Additionally, reports that Attorney General Eric Holder is considering appointing a prosecutor to pursue violations related to detainee abuse is a welcome and long-awaited first step to restoring our nation’s commitment to the rule of law,” said Raymond, who also directs PHR’s Campaign Against Torture.
“The White House should support the appointment of a criminal prosecutor to investigate the US use of torture as well as the creation of a commission of inquiry to gather all the facts of this dark chapter,” concluded Raymond.
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.
###
Excerpt from CNN interview:
ANDERSON COOPER: And now it seems clear that the Bush Administration resisted efforts to pursue investigations of an Afghan warlord named General Dostum, who was on the CIA payroll. It’s now come out, there were hundreds of Taliban prisoners under his care who got killed…
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Right.
ANDERSON COOPER: …some were suffocated in a steel container, others were shot, possibly buried in mass graves. Would you support — would you call for — an investigation into possible war crimes in Afghanistan?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah, the indications that this had not been properly investigated just recently was brought to my attention. So what I’ve asked my national security team to do is to collect the facts for me that are known. And we’ll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all the facts gathered up.
ANDERSON COOPER: But you wouldn’t resist categorically an investigation?
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think that, you know, there are responsibilities that all nations have even in war. And if it appears that our conduct in some way supported violations of the laws of war, then I think that, you know, we have to know about that.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. PHR was founded in 1986 on the idea that health professionals, with their specialized skills, ethical commitments, and credible voices, are uniquely positioned to investigate the health consequences of human rights violations and work to stop them. PHR mobilizes health professionals to advance health, dignity and justice and promotes the right to health for all. PHR has documented the systematic use of psychological and physical torture by US personnel against detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram airbase and elsewhere.
PHR’s International Forensic Program (IFP) has conducted forensic assessments and investigations of human rights abuses, crimes against humanity and genocide in many countries. IFP is dedicated to providing independent forensic expertise to document and collect evidence of human rights violations and of violations of international humanitarian law. Since the 1980s, PHR has mobilized forensic scientists and other experts worldwide to respond to inquiries by governments, organizations, families and individuals.
Editors, please note:
To access and use a new, online video by PHR (War Crimes and the White House: The Bush Administration’s Cover-Up of the Dasht-e-Leili Massacre), and to obtain high-resolution photos courtesy of Physicians for Human Rights, please see our Get the Facts page.
Physicians for Human Rights 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.
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.
Posted on Friday, Jul 10, 2009 at 11:26 pm by Ben Greenberg
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact:
Jonathan Hutson
jhutson [at] phrusa [dot] com
Cell: +1-857-919-5130
Cambridge, MA – Obama Administration officials stated Friday, as reported by Lara Jakes of the Associated Press, that they had no grounds to investigate the 2001 deaths of Taliban prisoners of war who allegedly were killed by U.S.-backed forces. In their statement, these officials claim that they lack legal grounds to probe these alleged war crimes because “only foreigners were involved and the alleged killings occurred in a foreign country.”
The officials’ comments came in response to a New York Times report by James Risen that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into an alleged massacre of as many as 2,000 prisoners in Afghanistan.
“For US Government officials to claim that there is no legal basis to investigate this well-documented mass atrocity is absurd,” stated Physicians for Human Rights Deputy Director Susannah Sirkin. “US military and intelligence personnel were operating jointly and accepted the surrender of the prisoners jointly with General Dostum’s forces in northern Afghanistan. The Obama Administration has a legal obligation to determine what US officials knew, where US personnel were, what involvement they had, and the actions of US allies during and after the massacre. These questions, nearly eight years later, remain unanswered.”
“Furthermore,” added Nathaniel Raymond, PHR’s lead researcher on the Dasht-e-Leili case, “The New York Times has shown that the Bush Administration engaged in a coordinated effort to prevent this alleged war crime from ever being investigated. Under the Geneva Conventions, the cover-up of a war crime can itself constitute a war crime.”
Posted on Friday, Jul 10, 2009 at 3:58 pm by Ben Greenberg
Media Contact:
Jonathan Hutson
+1-857-919-5130 (mobile)
jhutson [at] phrusa [dot] org
Human rights group that discovered the mass grave and sued for release of government documents is available for comment.
Cambridge, MA — Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has issued a call for a criminal probe in the wake of a major New York Times story with new evidence that the Bush Administration impeded at least three federal investigations into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan in 2002.
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.
Physicians for Human Rights, which shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize, first documented the existence of the alleged mass grave in January 2002 and since then:
Advocated for witnesses to be protected, the mass grave site to be secured, and for a full and impartial investigation;
Conducted preliminary forensic investigations — including exposing 15 remains and conducting three autopsies — under UN auspices at Dasht-e-Leili;
Successfully sued for compliance with a PHR Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the release of US government documents that reveal US intelligence knowledge of the magnitude of the alleged crime and awareness of the execution and torture of witnesses to the incidents;
Helped identify the US chain of command likely responsible for impeding federal investigations into the alleged massacre;
Discovered and reported on alleged tampering of the site; and
Requested satellite image analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) that appears to demonstrate that tampering occurred soon after PHR filed its FOIA request in June 2006.
“Physicians for Human Rights went to investigate inhumane conditions at a prison in northern Afghanistan, but what we found was much worse,” stated Susannah Sirkin, PHR Deputy Director. “Our researchers documented an apparent mass grave site with reportedly thousands of bodies of captured prisoners who were suffocated to death in trucks. That was 2002; seven years later, we still seek answers about what exactly happened and who was involved.”
Senior Bush Administration officials impeded investigations by the FBI and the State Department, and the Defense Department apparently never conducted a full inquiry, the New York Times reports in the story for the July 11 print edition by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter James Risen.
“The Bush Administration’s disregard for the rule of law and the Geneva Conventions led to torture of prisoners in Guantánamo and many other secret places,” noted Nathaniel Raymond, PHR’s lead researcher on Dasht-e-Leili. “Contrary to the legal opinions of the previous Department of Justice, the principles of the Geneva Conventions are non-negotiable, as is their enforcement. President Obama must open a full and transparent criminal probe and prosecute any US officials found to have broken the law.”
Sirkin added, “President Obama must set a different course by signaling publicly that in all of its operations anywhere in the world, the US and its allies will respect the Geneva Conventions and safeguard the rights of prisoners of war, as well as all captured combatants and detainees to be treated humanely.”
“The State Department’s statement to the New York Times that suspected war crimes should be thoroughly investigated indicates a move towards full accountability,” added Raymond. “We stand ready to aid the US government in investigating this massacre. It is time for the cover-up to end.”
PHR reiterated its call on the Government of Afghanistan, which has jurisdiction over the alleged mass grave site, to:
Secure the area with the assistance of ISAF (International Security Assistance Force-Afghanistan);
Protect witnesses to the initial incident and the ensuing tampering; and
Ensure a full investigation of remaining evidence at the site, including the tracing of the substantial amount of soil that appears to have been removed in 2006.
“Gravesites have been tampered with, evidence has been destroyed, and witnesses have been tortured and killed,” stressed Sirkin. “The Dasht-e-Leili mass grave site must finally be secured, all surviving witnesses must be protected, and the Government of Afghanistan, in coordination with the UN and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), must at last allow a full investigation to go forward.”
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. PHR was founded in 1986 on the idea that health professionals, with their specialized skills, ethical commitments, and credible voices, are uniquely positioned to investigate the health consequences of human rights violations and work to stop them. PHR mobilizes health professionals to advance health, dignity and justice and promotes the right to health for all. PHR has documented the systematic use of psychological and physical torture by US personnel against detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram airbase and elsewhere.
PHR’s International Forensic Program (IFP) has conducted forensic assessments and investigations of human rights abuses, crimes against humanity and genocide in many countries. IFP is dedicated to providing independent forensic expertise to document and collect evidence of human rights violations and of violations of international humanitarian law. Since the 1980s, PHR has mobilized forensic scientists and other experts worldwide to respond to inquiries by governments, organizations, families and individuals.
Editors, please note:
To access and use a new, online video by PHR (“War Crimes and the White House: The Bush Administration’s Cover-Up of the Dasht-e-Leili Massacre”), and to obtain high-resolution photos courtesy of Physicians for Human Rights, please visit the Videos page.
In November 2001, as many as 2,000 Taliban prisoners are believed to have been killed in container trucks by US-allied Afghan troops and buried in a mass grave in Dasht-e Leili, Afghanistan. These Afghan troops were operating jointly with American forces, who were allegedly present at the scene of the crime. PHR investigators discovered the mass grave in 2002. (More...)
Subscribe (RSS)
Follow PHR on Twitter