Newsweek Cover Special Report: 'The War Crimes of Afghanistan' America's Afghan Allies Asphyxiated Hundreds of Surrendering Taliban Prisoners En Route to Jail, Transporting Them in Sealed Cargo Containers; Bodies Buried in Mass Grave ---- Witnesses Say U.S

Newsweek Cover Special Report: 'The War Crimes of Afghanistan' America's Afghan Allies Asphyxiated Hundreds of Surrendering Taliban Prisoners En Route to Jail, Transporting Them in Sealed Cargo Containers; Bodies Buried in Mass Grave ---- Witnesses Say U.S

		NEWSWEEK The August 26 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, Aug. 19) has an exclusive Special Report: "The War Crimes of Afghanistan: In November, America's Afghan Allies Suffocated Hundreds of Surrendering Taliban Prisoners in Sealed Cargo Containers. Where Were U.S. Forces?" Plus: The Western White House; Who's to blame for the economic downturn; a radical solution to save baseball; and Hairspray, the musical. (PRNewsFoto)[MT] NEW YORK, NY USA

NEW YORK, Aug. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Last November, America's Afghan allies asphyxiated hundreds of surrendering Taliban prisoners by transporting them in sealed cargo containers en route to a prison in Northern Afghanistan and they buried them in a mass grave, according to reports by human rights organizations and eyewitness accounts. Newsweek's extensive inquiries of prisoners, truckdrivers, Afghan militiamen and local villagers, including interviews with survivors who licked and chewed each other's skin to stay alive, suggest also that many hundreds of people died. And while nothing that Newsweek learned suggests that American forces had advance knowledge of the killings, witnessed the prisoners being stuffed into the unventilated trucks, or were in a position to prevent that, they were in the area of the prison at the time the containers were delivered, although probably not when they were opened, report National Security Correspondent John Barry, Special Correspondent Babak Dehghanpisheh, and Diplomatic Correspondent Roy Gutman in the Aug. 26 issue (on newsstands Mon., Aug. 19). (Photo: NewsCom: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20020818/NYSU002) And a confidential U.N. memorandum, parts of which were made available to Newsweek, says that the findings of the investigation into the mass graves "are sufficient to justify a full-fledged criminal investigation." The memo says that based on "information collected," the site "contains bodies of Taliban POW's who died of suffocation during transfer from Konduz to Sheberghan." A witness quoted in the report puts the death toll at 960. Yet the report also raises urgent questions. "Considering the political sensitivity of this case and related protection concerns, it is strongly recommended that all activities relevant to this case be brought to a halt until a decision is made concerning the final goal of the exercise: criminal trial, truth commission, other, etc." Reports of the mass grave and the container deaths began to emerge in December and human rights organizations started investigating shortly after that. Evidence of the grave was found at Dasht-e-Leili, a 15-minute drive from the Northern Alliance prison at Sheberghan, in Northern Afghanistan. Forensic anthropologist Bill Haglund began investigating and dug a trial trench a couple of yards long. He found 15 corpses. "They were relatively fresh bodies: the flesh was still on the bones," he recalls. "They were scantily clad, which was consistent with reports that [before they died] they had been in a very hot place." A colleague of Haglund performed an autopsy on three of the corpses and found that they were all young men and their bodies showed "no overt trauma"-no gunshot wounds, no blows from blunt instruments. This, too, Haglund says, is "consistent" with the survivors' stories of death by asphyxiation. It's not yet known how many bodies are buried there. "The only thing we know is that it's a very large site," says a U.N. official privy to the investigation, and there was "a high density of bodies in the trial trench." Other sources who have investigated the killings aren't surprised. "I can say with confidence that more than a thousand people died in the containers," says Aziz ur Rahman Razekh, director of the Afghan Organization of Human Rights. The dead of Dasht-e-Leili are one of the dirty little secrets of the Afghan war. The killings illustrate the problems America will face if it opts to fight wars by proxy, as the U.S. did in Afghanistan, using small numbers of U.S. Special Forces calling in airpower to support local fighters on the ground. It also raises questions about the responsibility Americans have for the conduct of allies who may have no interest in applying protections of the Geneva Conventions. The benefit of fighting a proxy-style war in Afghanistan was victory on the cheap-cheap, at any rate, in American blood. The cost, Newsweek's investigation has established, is that American forces were working intimately with "allies" who committed what could well qualify as war crimes. The close involvement of American soldiers with Northern Alliance General Abdul Rashid Dostum, whose forces allegedly carried out the killings, can only make an investigation all the more sensitive. "The issue nobody wants to discuss is the involvement of U.S. forces," says Jennifer Leaning, professor at Harvard School of Public Health and one of the trio of Physicans for Human Rights investigators who pushed their way into Sheberghan to investigate the allegations. "U.S. forces were in the area at the time. What did the U.S. know and when and where-and what did they do about it?" In November, after the fall of Konduz, Taliban and Qaeda forces surrendered in a negotiated deal that took two to three days to hammer out. Gen. Dostum, along with another Northern Alliance Commander and dozens of American Special Forces troops were at Yerganak, a desert spot about five miles west of Konduz, to monitor the surrender of prisoners, which was to formally start on November 25. Many of the prisoners, a mix of Afghans, Pakistanis, Arabs and Chechens, were transported in open trucks and pickups from Yerganak to an old fort in Qala Zeini, which lies on the road between Mazar-e-Sharif and Sheberghan, the site of the prison. Once at the fort, Northern Alliance soldiers ordered the prisoners down from the trucks and stripped them of their turbans, caps and vests. Then they herded the captives into the cargo containers, as many as 200 to a truck, according to witnesses. The transfer of prisoners in containers continued for days. According to one driver, Mohammed (not his real name), on the morning of November 29, a convoy of 13 container trucks set out from Qala Zeini. By the time the trucks arrived at Sheberghan prison, many of the prisoners were quiet. Mohammed was the driver of the second truck in line, but he got down from his cab and walked into the prison courtyard as the doors of the lead truck were opened. Of the 200 or so who had been loaded into the sealed container not quite 24 hours before, none had survived. "They opened the doors and the dead bodies spilled out like fish," says Mohammed. "All their clothes were ripped and wet." Mohammed says all 176 prisoners inside his truck survived because he had disobeyed orders and punched holes in the sides, so the prisoners could breathe. Newsweek reports that the small group of American Special Forces soldiers who were on the scene at Sheberghan at the time of the prisoner transfer seemed more focused with prison security, and preventing an uprising such as the bloody outbreak that had happened days earlier in the prison fort at Qala Jangi. The unit most directly involved in the prisoner surrender was the 595 A-team, part of the Fifth Special Forces Group based at Fort Campbell, Ky. 595 members had been with Gen. Dostum at the surrender negotiations, and then again at the actual surrender at Yerganak. Over the three days that the first convoys of dead were arriving Sheberghan, Special Forces troops were in the area. There was also a separate, four-man U.S. intelligence team at the prison, doing first selections of Qaeda suspects for further questioning. The soldiers surely heard stories of deaths in the containers, but may have thought them exaggerated. They also may have believed that the dead were war casualties, or wounded prisoners who, among thousands, simply didn't survive the rugged journey from the surrender point to the prison. But it's also true that Pentagon spokesmen have obfuscated when faced with questions on the subject. Officials across the administration did not respond to repeated requests by Newsweek for a detailed accounting of U.S. activities in the Konduz, Mazar-e-Sharif and Sheberghan areas at the time in question, and Defense Department spokespersons have made statements that are false. In fact, a senior Defense Department official, speaking to Newsweek on background, said the Pentagon asked the commander of the Fifth Special Forces Group to look into the reports of container deaths. That commander, Col. John Mulholland, reported back that the A-team knew that numbers, perhaps even large numbers, of Taliban prisoners had died on the journey to Sheberghan. But the Special Forces believed that these deaths had occurred from wounds or disease. Newsweek put this account to Col. Mulholland through the public- affairs office of the Special Operations Command, but got no response by the time Newsweek went to press. A widening circle of organizations and individuals know, in broad terms, what happened after the fall of Konduz. The Red Cross has questioned survivors and compiled a report about the events, and a pair of UN investigators were present when Haglund dug his trial trench across the Dasht- e-Leili gravesite. After questioning local witness, they, too, compiled a report. But until now, the American military has not conducted a full-fledged investigation, nor has it been asked to participate in one by other agencies. U.N. sources say that their inquiries have not implicated U.S. forces. Publicly, the Pentagon has kept its distance. At the end of January, DOD officials were told by PHR of the discovery of what appeared to be a recent mass grave. In late February, officials at the Pentagon and the State Department were given confidential copies of the first formal report compiled by Haglund and his colleagues at Physicians for Human Rights. Consistently, however, the Pentagon has responded that the Central Command investigated and found that U.S. troops know nothing of any killings-that the Pentagon indeed has no reason to believe there were killings. In June, DOD spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan said that Central Command had questioned individually the forces in Afghanistan "several months ago": "Central Command looked into it and found no evidence of participation or knowledge or presence. Our guys weren't there, didn't watch and didn't know about it-if indeed anything like that happened." A DOD statement a week later was emphatic: "No US troops were present anywhere near that site in Nov. US troops were present in the December/January timeframe when the mass graves were discovered." (Read Newsweek's news releases at http://www.Newsweek.MSNBC.com. Click "Pressroom.")