Mass Graves & War Crimes?

Newsweek has apparently picked up the sniff of rotting corpses and started investigating the reports of mass graves near Dasht-e Leili in Afghanistan. Still, they find no evidence of direct US complicity in a war crime:

Nothing that Newsweek learned suggests that American forces had advance knowledge of the killings, witnessed the prisoners being stuffed into the unventilated trucks or were in a position to prevent that. They were in the area of the prison at the time the containers were delivered, although probably not when they were opened. The small group of Special Forces soldiers were more focused at the time on prison security, and preventing an uprising such as the bloody outbreak that had happened days earlier in the prison fort at Qala Jangi. The soldiers surely heard stories of deaths in the containers, but may have thought them exaggerated. They also may have believed that the dead were war casualties, or wounded prisoners who, among thousands of their comrades, simply didn’t survive the rugged journey from the surrender point to the prison.

Even though...

Pentagon spokesmen have obfuscated when faced with questions on the subject. Officials across the administration did not respond to repeated requests by Newsweek for a detailed accounting of U.S. activities in the Konduz, Mazar-e Sharif and Sheberghan areas at the time in question, and Defense Department spokespersons have made statements that are false.

Interestingly, this Newsweek report mentions nothing about Jamie Doran's documentary film, Massacre in Mazar, which broke the container/war crime story in Europe back in June. Physicians for Human Rights follows up the Newsweek story, here.

Update: According to the WSWS, the Newsweek exposé whitewashes the US role in the massacre.

Update II: Massacre in Mazar is available for viewing, here.