US Said to Have Averted Inquiry Into '01 Afghan Mass Killings --Prisoners brought from Afghanistan reported that they had been "stacked like cordwood" in shipping containers and had to lick the perspiration off one another to survive. 11 Jul 2009 After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush regime officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations. American officials had been reluctant to pursue an investigation because the warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001... Thousands of prisoners were stuffed into closed metal shipping containers and given no food or water; many suffocated while being trucked to the prison. Other prisoners were killed when guards shot into the containers. The bodies were said to have been buried in a mass grave in Dasht-i-Laili, a stretch of desert just outside Shibarghan.
Supermax prison blocked Obama books requested by detainee --Officials at the Florence, Colorado supermax prison deemed the bestsellers 'potentially detrimental to national security' 10 Jul 2009 He has been president of the United States for 172 days, yet it appears that Barack Obama is still deemed capable of producing writing that is "potentially detrimental to national security". That peculiar judgement was made following a request by a high-security prisoner to read Obama's two bestselling books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The plea was made by Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who is being held at a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Abu Ali, a US citizen, was found guilty on 25 November of helping al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate the then US president [sic] George Bush.
