Remember in July when CNN's Anderson Cooper cornered me and I promised to investigate the mass graves of Taliban prisoners reportedly executed by General Dostum, one of President Hamid Karzai's running mates?
Well, the election is over; like it or not Karzai is still our man in Afghanistan, the mass graves were bulldozed long ago, and let's just say don't hold your breath waiting for the results of my investigation.
Actually, making this war crimes thing go away will be a test of the strength and maturity of the Karzai administration in his new term. We're training him to follow American rules. So don't worry, it's all good.
I wouldn't worry about Anderson Cooper following up with one of his "Keeping Them Honest" segments either. CNN erases Anderson every 36 hours.
And the thing is, I have the feeling that there were some pretty heavy security things going down when witnesses saw those thousands of Taliban prisoners variously suffocated in container trucks, shot to death, and buried alive back in 2001 while General Dostum was being paid to help us.
To get to the point, now the Afghans who killed all those people have their national security to think about. Some of the tactics they may have used are secret and need to remain secret. They may have to be used again, and if they become public that interferes with security and becomes a potential threat to the fledgling Afghan state we're helping Karzai and General Dostum build.
My understanding is, Karzai will make exactly the same argument to the Afghan courts that my Justice Department has made in US federal court this week, and quite a few times this year in cases of prisoner abuse, illegal surveillance and so on in the US: What happened to those people involves national security secrets, and any investigation or legal case probing war crimes, torture, spying, kidnapping or murder by Bush or Cheney or Karzai or Dostum or me could reveal those secrets and jeopardize Afghan or US national security. So any such case must be dismissed at the president's request.
My hands are tied of course (I mean metaphorically, not like the folks in the photos of the graves). It's Karzai's decision. He's practically the elected president. And if there's one thing we must be sensitive to, it's the sovereignty of countries our armies are occupying.
You know my feelings about this. War crimes trials are divisive, and we don't want them disrupting either country when we have so many important things to solve. It's not like the families of the Taliban people whose murders we funded and covered up would consider vengeful retaliation, or take their hard feelings out on US troops. We've got to look forward, not back.
I knew you'd understand.
Coda: Before I had a chance to post this, another federal court proved that I'm on the right track. Maher Arar - the innocent Canadian who was grabbed in JFK airport, tortured in a grave-like cell for a year and was eventually given an apology and $10 million by the Canadians for their role in his kidnapping - just had his lawsuit against his US kidnappers dismissed in federal court on state secret national security grounds! Sure, the 4 dissenting justices say that by arguing that Arar should also have provided the names of his torturers, the ruling "means government miscreants may avoid liability altogether through the simple expedient of wearing hoods while inflicting injury"; and that "when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay." But we didn't have to pay Arar a dime, admit what we did, or even apologize! So it's a win-win-win, and we're setting an example Karzai and leaders of other aspiring democracies will surely follow.
We're telling the world just what kind of country the US really is, and even skeptics would agree it's something George W. Bush could never have achieved.