Seven years ago, investigators for the Boston-based group Physicians for Human Rights discovered what appeared to be a mass grave in northern Afghanistan.
The bodies, they were told, were those of Taliban fighters who had been rounded up by Northern Alliance forces shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2001 and stuffed into metal shipping containers for transport to a nearby prison.
By the time they arrived, allegedly hundreds — perhaps thousands — were dead from suffocation, while others were shot by guards, and their bodies dumped in a field.
Susannah Sirkin, the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, joins Martin Savidge to discuss the Obama administration’s position on the case and the current state of the grave site in Afghanistan.
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07/24/2009 :: 02:19:20 PM
The Melancholy Poet Says:
Indeed!
But if the crimes occuring in the present
are in no way different, in nature, now…
from what has been, previously, informed
through the methods of formulas derived
by way of observations of the scenarios
produced by the self-preserving natures
of humans, often by the very means
of the crimes of the past…
then what does this say to the supposed
academic acceptabilities still composing the fundamental structures of the doctrines
in those who, apparently, say crimes are more politically unacceptable now yet which are
still rendered, nonetheless, no more obsolete
in the shadows of the words spoken, in the
confinements of the present, than they were
in the depths of all the varying
“double entendre’d” meanings, intricately, woven into the tapestries of the ravaged past?
Is the present “new” only because past history has rendered the present forgetfulnesses…
“superficially novel” even when
ancient history is,sometimes, remembered…
which still cannot render itself to any true length of duration toward a place of true, unemotionally involved, detachment…to prove
to all, beyond all shadows of any doubt: that, the present has been, in fact, no better
informed than the past…though many may protest that things “appear better” in some ways due to the kind of technological “modes” supposedly resulting in better precisions of causal events driving upon supposed effects describing
presumed upward evolutions of lengthy processes, necessarily…while prior history continues to trip over its short remembrances, sometimes falling, wounding the body, itself,
with occasional wars and individual strifes while, by means of its own bloody feet:
history dares to repeat the “old styles” of walking, even during our most acute observations
of present scenery, causing a certain limping to come about through the Years…though, perhaps, with new “shoes”, periodically being bought and worn…helping millions to see a reason to continue “travelling” across centuries of Time?