Battlefield executions in Afghanistan, Seymour Hersh reports

The following is one of the headlines from today's Democracy Now program, which you can access at: http://www.democracynow.org/2010/5/12/headlines#7.


Hersh: US Carrying Out “Battlefield Executions” in Afghanistan

In other news from Afghanistan, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh says US forces are carrying out battlefield executions of prisoners in Afghanistan. Hersh made the comment during a discussion at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva. In 2004 Hersh broke the story about the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

Seymour Hersh: "And the purpose of my [Abu Ghraib] stories was to take it out of the field into the White House, and where it—you know, it’s not that the President or the Secretary of Defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, or Bush or Cheney—it’s not that they knew what happened in Abu Ghraib. It’s that they had allowed this kind of activity to happen. And 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, I mean, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They’re being executed on the battlefield. It’s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn’t necessarily get reported. And things don’t change.”

Seymour Hersh went on to say that he had been told about the battlefield executions by five or six different people.