I found this story on BoingBoing earlier today. It refers to a documentary by a BBC filmmaker about alleged U.S. complicity in a Northern Alliance massacre of Taliban prisoners shortly after the Mazar-e-Sharif prison uprising in late 2001. The documentary is a little heavy handed and clearly anti-U.S., but, if it’s true, should be investigated and reported. It has aired in Canada and other european nations, but not here. This article alleges a quote from a state department official to the filmmaker that the they would never allow the U.S. press to run the story. I find this difficult to believe, but I also can’t seem to find any mention of the incident by any of the major U.S. news organizations myself. In light of the prison abuses that have come out over the past few weeks, I’m guessing this might get a little more consideration?
The whole situation underscores a couple of things to me:
- It’s becoming increasingly more difficult for any government to cover up incidents like this, even with a complicit media. This is one of the great things about the Internet. I doubt very many Americans would have heard the story otherwise.
- I’m more than a little concerned that we haven’t heard about it. Clearly, it’s news in other parts of the world and, even if it were false, it still shapes the perception of America in other countries.
- If there were a “liberal media bias”, I’d think that they’d be all over this story, especially now.
- The comments that the U.N. and others want to conduct an investigation, but can’t because of security issues further underscores to me that we’ve dropped the ball there and moved on to other things (*cough* Iraq *cough*) before finishing the job.
EDIT: Apparently, the August 26th, 2002 edition of Newsweek did a cover story on this, but I can’t seem to find a free version online. The CBC page linked earlier also points to a couple of Salon articles. I’m still surprised that I haven’t seen a connection with the events at Abu Ghraib.