Afghanistan: US executions revealed

May 22, 2010
Issue 

US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh told an audience at a journalism conference in April that American soldiers are now executing prisoners in Afghanistan, a May 12 Rawstory.com article said.

Hersh helped break the story that US jailers were torturing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In 1969, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre by US forces in Afghanistan.

At the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva, Hersh said US forces are engaged in “battlefield executions”.

He said: “I'll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan.

“They’re being executed on the battlefield ... I’ve been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place. Well, if they can't prove [those detained are] Taliban, bam.

“If we don't do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that's going on now.”

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