Source:
NYTimes.COMWASHINGTON — After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.
American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation — sought by officials from the F.B.I., the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups — because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the C.I.A. and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said. They said the United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official.
“At the White House, nobody said no to an investigation, but nobody ever said yes, either,” said Pierre Prosper, the former American ambassador for war crimes issues. “The first reaction of everybody there was, ‘Oh, this is a sensitive issue; this is a touchy issue politically.’ ”
<snip>
Survivors and witnesses told The New York Times and Newsweek in 2002 that over a three-day period, Taliban prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.
Read more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/world/asia/11afghan.html?hp
The NY Times is now reporting war crimes as war crimes, instead of justifying them? I knew about this incident way before the NY Times ever reported it, because I go to journalist sites, not government propaganda sites.
Here's an example, different incident, but same pro-NeoCon propoganda:
As for the New York Times, its own report on the Mazar-i-Sharif killings not only suggested that the Taliban victims were to blame for their own deaths, but justified future massacres in advance. The Times wrote: “The incident seems certain to deepen the distrust the Northern Alliance feels as it takes control of hundreds, and potentially thousands, of Taliban soldiers.”http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/afgh-n27.shtml