By: Greg Mitchell Tom Lasseter, the renowned Iraq war correspondent, has been breaking stories from Afghanistan and other areas since taking the post of Moscow bureau chief for McClatchy. This past week he reported on the digging up of a mass grave in Afghanistan, which possibly included the remains of 2000 prisoners, hindering any chance of proving that war crimes were committed.
American officials, he wrote, for starters, claimed that the alleged war crimes by the warlord Dostum "are a matter for the Afghan authorities. But the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and depends on American and NATO troops to fight a growing Taliban insurgency that now operates in most of Afghanistan and all but surrounds Kabul, the capital.
"However, the fact that U.S. special forces and CIA operatives were working closely with Dostum in late 2001, when the killings took place, has fueled suspicions that the warlord got a free pass."
The report goes on from there (see link below).
Lasseter told E&P today, in describing the extraordinary piece, ?Given the tough national economy, and profoundly hard times for the newspaper industry, I have a lot of respect for the fact that McClatchy keeps sending reporters to places like Afghanistan to work on these kinds of stories.
"As with the Guantanamo package that ran earlier this year, there was no guarantee that I would get the story, and it?s not an easy, or cheap, reporting trip. But with all of the complexities of U.S. interests abroad, I think it is really important that we, and other news organizations, stay committed to foreign coverage.?
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/57649.html
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