Still, With The Cover-Ups

By Steve Hynd

This kind of thing makes me wish McChrystal could be recalled to duty, only so that he can be court-martialled, busted to private and fired again:

The follow-up investigation of a botched Special Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12 that killed two government officials and three women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Apr. 5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid.

That implied that the U.S. investigators would finally do what they had failed to do in the original investigation - interview the eyewitnesses. But three eyewitnesses who had claimed to see U.S. troops digging bullets of the bodies of three women told IPS they were never contacted by U.S. investigators.

...But the father and mother of an 18-year-old girl who died from wounds inflicted by the raiders and the brother of the police officer and the prosecutor killed in the raid all said in interviews with IPS last week that they had never been contacted by U.S. investigators about what they had seen that night. All three gave testimony to the Afghan investigators.

In an interview with IPS, Mohammed Tahir, the father of Gulalai, the 18-year old girl who was killed in the raid, said, "I saw them taking out the bullets from bodies of my daughter and others."

Tahir said that he and as many as seven other eyewitnesses had told interior ministry investigators about the attempted cover-up they had seen. But he insisted, "We have never been interviewed by the U.S. military."

Mohammed Saber, the brother of the two men killed in the raid - Commander Dawood, the head of intelligence for a district in Paktia province, and Saranwal Zahir, a prosecutor - said he had not been interviewed by any U.S. investigator either. Saber told IPS, "The Americans were taking out the bullets from the bodies of the dead with knives and with other equipment that they always have."

Saber said the U.S. soldiers refused to let relatives of the victims go to help them as they lay bleeding to death. Saber said he and other eyewitnesses were taken to a U.S. base and detained for three nights and four days.

Sabz Paree, the 18-year-old woman's mother, also denied being interviewed by U.S. investigators. "I saw everything," she told IPS. "The Americans had knives and were taking out the bullets from her."

In response to a request for comment on the denials by the three family members that they or other eyewitnesses had been interviewed by the U.S. investigator, Breasseale wrote in an e-mail, "All available family members who offered themselves up to take part in the investigator's questions when he was there were interviewed during his visit(s)."

Breasseale said the name of the Army colonel in charge of the investigation would not be made public for reasons of "privacy". He acknowledged in an e-mail before McChrystal was relieved of duty, however, that the officer was under McChrystal's "operational control", although he was not at the time he was appointed and during the investigation.

Great work from Gareth Porter and Ahmad Walid Fazly and I'm bitterly disappointed that it's being roundly ignored in the U.S., where apparently the debate over whether Saint General Petraeus should be given his fifth star is more important.