"About 3:30 a.m., the official said, a surveillance camera spotted Bales returning to the base, and the search team found him just outside the compound."
The NY Times, quoting Afghan Gen. Abdul Hameed, the corps commander for the Afghan National Army in Kandahar, reported:
"When American commanders became aware that a soldier was missing, they first checked sleeping quarters, toilets and the kitchen area before organizing a patrol to look outside the compound, General Hameed said. But before the patrol left, a high-powered infrared camera on a small blimp spotted Sergeant Bales nearby."
Salon.com's Morley reports an "unnamed senior U.S. official' telling the New York Times: "When it all comes out, it will be a combination of stress, alcohol and domestic issues," leaving aside the question of how the senior official already knows how it will all "come out."
Morley writes:
"The passing admission that two other soldiers face disciplinary action for drinking with Bales on the night of the massacre might cast doubt on the notion that no one else knew what Bales was going to do. Army spokeswoman Lt. Col Amy Hannah said in telephone interview that she could not confirm the Times' account. "I am not aware of any releases of information" about other soldiers facing disciplinary action, Hannah said. If the U.S. official's remarks to the Times were accurate, then the Army is refraining from disclosing how many soldiers are under investigation.
Then there is conflicting eyewitness testimony. In this CNN video, one man describes the actions of a group in carrying out the killings. "They took him my uncle out of the room and shot him," he says. "They came to this room and martyred all the children." But one boy seen on the tape says there was only a single gunman. Still other witnesses pointed out a place outside the home, where they said they found footprints of more than one U.S. soldier.
Journalists seeking to clarify the question have been thwarted. In Afghanistan, Pajhaowk Afghan News reports that Lewis Boone, the public affairs director for coalition forces, declined to answer questions about the massacre, saying that a joint Afghan-ISAF team was investigating the killings. As the Seattle Times noted yesterday, the Army has been struggling "to regulate information on the Afghanistan suspect."
The laugh for the day in Morley's report comes when Ryan Evans, who worked with ISAF in Afghanistan and is now a research fellow at the Center for National Policy in Washington, said he thought "a cover up is very unlikely." Now why would anyone think that, after Lt. Col. Daniel Davis just told us in a major report on Afghanistan that:
"We seem significantly challenged to tell the truth in almost any situation."
And in a fascinating McClatchy report, Karzai's lead investigator seems to differ with the president's conclusion of more than one shooter, but then apparently contradicts himself.
KABUL, Afghanistan -- The chief Afghan investigator in last month's slayings of 17 civilians says there's strong evidence that only one killer was involved, a view that puts him at odds with Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai.
....Afghan army chief Gen. Sher Mohammad Karimi, whom Karzai sent to Kandahar to investigate the massacre, told McClatchy that two survivors he interviewed offered credible accounts that the killings were the act of a lone person.
"They told me the same thing," Karimi said. "They both said there was (only) one individual who came to their house."
....At a meeting at the presidential palace with relatives of the victims days after the massacre, Karzai openly questioned the U.S. account of a lone gunman. The president pointed to one relative and said: "In his family, in four rooms people were killed -- children and women were killed -- and then they were all brought together in one room and then set on fire. That, one man cannot do."
Karimi said he returned to Kabul to deliver his interim report but the villagers had spoken to Karzai before he did.
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