Dasht-i-Leili Massacre - Obama Calls For Probe in 2009

Obama Calls For Probe in 2009

On July 10, 2009, an article on the massacre by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James Risen appeared in the New York Times. Risen stated that human rights groups' estimates of the total number of victims "ranged from several hundred to several thousand" and that U.S. officials had "repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode". Questioned about the article by Anderson Cooper of CNN during a trip to Africa, United States President Barack Obama was reported to have "ordered national security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001."

Excerpts from Doran's documentary Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death were broadcast on Democracy Now! on 13 July 2009, with images from the documentary shown on the programme's website. The programme, which featured James Risen and Susannah Sirkin, Deputy Director of Physicians for Human Rights, claimed that "at least 2,000" prisoners of war had perished in the massacre. Sirkin confirmed the claims made in Afghan Massacre: The Convoy of Death that eyewitnesses who had come forward with information on the incident had been tortured and killed, and stated that a FOIA document showed that the "U.S. government and, apparently, intelligence agency – it's a three-letter word that’s redacted of an intelligence branch of the U.S. government in the FOIA – they knew and reported that eyewitnesses to this massacre had been killed and tortured."

Risen commented in the programme that in writing his article he "tried not to get caught up in something that I think in the past has slowed down some of the efforts by journalists to look into this. I think in the past one of the mistakes some journalists made was to try and prove a direct involvement by the U.S. personnel in the massacre itself. I frankly don't believe that any U.S. military personnel were involved in the massacre. And, you know, U.S. Special Forces troops who were traveling with Dostum have long maintained that they knew nothing about this. And, you know, so I tried not to go down that road." He added that "the investigation should focus rather on what happened afterwards in the Bush administration."

A New York Times editorial on July 14, 2009 called the Bush administration's refusal to investigate a "sordid legacy". Noting that Dostum was "on the C.I.A. payroll and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in the early days of the war", the editorial asked President Obama to "to order a full investigation into the massacre. The site must be guarded and witnesses protected." Edward S. Herman, writing in Z Magazine, commented that this renewed interest by the New York Times in the massacre, after a 7-year silence on the matter, was rather late in coming and coincided with Dostum's restoration to a position of power in Afghanistan prior to the August 2009 elections, in a move that the U.S. administration disapproved of. Herman said that the New York Times had essentially looked whichever way the current U.S. administration had wanted it to look for the best part of a decade, and that this was also "part of the sordid legacy of the New York Times."

On July 17, 2009, in an article published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Dostum, recently reappointed to his government job by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, again described Doran's film as a "fake story", saying that the whole number of prisoners of war captured by his troops was less than the number Doran's film claimed had been killed, and denying there could have been any abuse of prisoners. Dostum's column was sharply criticised by human rights groups. In a rebuttal published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in parallel to Dostum's piece, Sam Zarifi, the Asia-Pacific director for Amnesty International and a human rights investigator in Afghanistan in 2002, stated that "investigations carried out shortly after the alleged killings by highly experienced and respected forensic analysts from Physicians for Human Rights established the presence of recently deceased human remains at Dasht-e Leili and suggested that they were the victims of homicide."

In December 2009 Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) renewed its call for the Obama administration’s Department of Justice to investigate why the Bush administration impeded an FBI criminal probe in the wake of the July 10, 2009 front page article in The New York Times. On December 26, 2009, the Asian Tribune published the full transcript of a video interview given by the officials of Physicians for Human Rights, detailing nearly eight years of advocacy and investigation.