[Cerek]

I found this particular portion to be somewhat confusing...

About 9 o'clock that night, a group of Afghan police arrived at Gardez Civil Hospital. Dr. Aziz Ulraham, who was on duty that night, told me that the police demanded an ambulance to pick up a body from the American compound. When no ambulance driver could be found, the soldiers began hitting and beating the frightened physicians with rifle butts.

Why does the description of these men suddenly switch to "soldiers" when it says they started beating the physicians with rifle butts?

Maybe it is just an oversight, or maybe Afghan police are also soldiers in the Afghan army. But a casual reading would make the reader think it was the American soldiers that beat the doctors. After all, the article had already repeated several times that the prisoners were beaten by the American soldiers and it listed specific details of the beatings - including the prisoners being beaten with rifle butts when they were taken into custody.

So it is very easy for your mind to create an implied link and add the beating of the hospital staff to the list of abuses aready attributed to the Special Forces unit.

Again, it could be an innocent error on the part of the author, but I actually had to re-read that section a couple of times to clarify what it was saying. Because the first time I read it, I thought it was implying that the Americans were the ones that beat the doctors, so I had to go back a couple of paragraphs to see if the article mentioned the Americans going to the hospital with the Afghan police.

I agree with Azred that the story seems to have verifiable merit. But I also noticed a great many of the authors sources were anonymous or were listed in general terms instead of specific ones.

Maybe that's common practice. The article is fairly long to begin with, and maybe there just wasn't room to provide a detailed list of his sources. But it still throws up a little red flag in my opinion.

I'm not denying the events happened, but it makes me wonder if the author isn't claiming to have more sources than he actually did in order to add extra credibility to the account.

Either way, the military definitely needs to conduct an in-depth investigation to determine what abuses may have taken place and to decide what punishment would be appropriate for those responsible.