Veteran Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the initial story of the My Lai massacre and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, spoke to an audience at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva the week of April 22, 2010.

He said: 

"I'll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners, to those we capture in Afghanistan," Hersh said. "They're being executed on the battlefield. It's unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn't necessarily get reported. Things don't change.

"What they've done in the field now is, they tell the troops, you have to make a determination within a day or two or so whether or not the prisoners you have, the detainees, are Taliban," Hersh added. "You must extract whatever tactical intelligence you can get, as opposed to strategic, long-range intelligence, immediately. And if you cannot conclude they're Taliban, you must turn them free.

"What it means is, and I've been told this anecdotally by five or six different people, battlefield executions are taking place," he continued. "Well, if they can't prove they're Taliban, bam. If we don't do it ourselves, we turn them over to the nearby Afghan troops and by the time we walk three feet the bullets are flying. And that's going on now."

  He calls the evidence anecdotal, from five or six people; you can decide if it means anything.  I will say people talk to Sy at all levels, including government insiders, so I believe that these people told him this; and I hope his next column in the New Yorker has covers this.

  He also revealed that the revealed that the Bush administration had developed detailed plans for a strike against Iran; that won't come as a surprise to anyone...

  You may remember that he reported last year on an elite assassination ring that reported directly to Dick Cheney. 

  Raw Story has (bad and fuzzy) video from Geneva.

Sy's New Yorker contributor CV. (in case you need more ballast for his being a heavyweight)