[Marxism] Afghanistan: the truth, but not the whole truth

[Eli Stephens <elishastephens@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Links and formatting in the 
original:http://lefti.blogspot.com/2008_12_01_archive.html#3680618731045928318

In 2001, a massacre was carried out in Afghanistan, in which militiamen
loyal to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S.
ally in ousting the Taliban regime, killed somewhere between 2,000 and
3,000 Taliban (and alleged Taliban) prisoners. Today,
McClatchy's Tom Lasseter breaks the important story that Dostum has
recently returned with bulldozers and trucks to dig up the mass graves
from that massacre, removing the bodies to hide the evidence (and
presumably to make war crimes prosecutions more difficult), with the
silence, if not the complicity, of NATO, the UN, and the United States.
Unfortunately,
Lasseter's account completely omits the more important complicity - the
complicity of the United States in the massacre itself (over and above
its implicit complicity by having invaded Afghanistan and started the
war in the first place, of course). As established by 2003
by Irish filmmaker Jamie Doran in his film "Afghan Massacre: The Convoy
of Death," U.S. Special Forces helped direct the operation of the
massacre, and stood by as the Afghan militiamen slaughtered the Taliban
prisoners (you can watch the film here).
Others higher up in the U.S. military and government have played their
part since then, by covering up both the massacre itself and the U.S.
involvement with it. The corporate media have played their part by
refusing to broadcast or discuss Doran's film.
It's true that
this complicity hasn't been established in a court of law. That's not
accidental of course - one of the people researching the film was
almost beaten to death when he tried to obtain video evidence of US
Special Forces’ complicity. But nevertheless, the evidence is strong
and public, and proper reporting of the whole truth would have noted the 
existence of "serious allegations" of U.S. complicity.
The truth is good, but the whole truth is always better.


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