Mercenaries Hung out to Dry: Afghan courts sentence former U.S. officers to 8 to 10 years in prison (link)
The Pentagon seems to have been directing these former special forces officers who just got sentenced to prison for torturing suspected terrorists in Afghanistan. But video taped conversations verifying this link have been pretty much ignored in the Afghan courts, and no attempt has been made to verify their authenticity. It looks like the pentagon has simply cut these intelligence operatives loose for fear of the liability they might bring upon higher ups. If this really is the case, and military operatives are being disowned by their superiors when they become inconvenient, it seems that the accompanying damage to the cohesiveness and trust among our intelligence units would be seriously compromised. Why aren't these cases being investigated more thoroughly, and why aren't U.S. courts involved? By the geneva convention, "mercenaries" of this sort are subject to local laws instead of the U.S. law that presided over abu graib, but that's no excuse for the U.S. to disown all responsibility if they were indeed providing assistance to the operative.