Afghan War: Our Afghan allies

If the United States had anything resembling the "liberal press" that the Oxycontin crowd raves about endlessly, this would have been front-page news for days over the last week:

US Afghan allies committed massacre Observer (UK) 03/21/04

Dramatic corroboration of the massacre of Afghan prisoners by the US-backed Northern Alliance at the start of the war in 2001 was last night provided by American pathologists commissioned to investigate the claims by the UN.

A vivid account of the slaughter was provided to The Observer last week by three Britons who were released from the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba more than two years after they were first seized in Afghanistan. They told how they narrowly escaped the massacre before being handed over to American forces and flown to Guantanamo Bay.

Forensic anthropologist William Haglund, who earlier led inquiries into mass graves in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka and Sierra Leone, told The Observer how he dug into an area of recently disturbed desert soil outside the town of Shebargan, and exhumed 15 bodies, a tiny sample, he said, of what may be a very large total.

Thanks to the cold and arid climate, they were well enough preserved to carry out autopsies. Haglund's conclusion 'that they died from suffocation' exactly corroborates the stories told by the Guantanamo detainees in last week's Observer .

I believed and still believe the Afghan War was necessary. It's hard to see how anyone who was following the news reports closely even in 2001 couldn't help but be sickened by reports of atrocities like the one discussed in that article. (Hard to see, but I know a lot of people just plain didn't care.)