Political alliances with anti-Taliban forces kept the Bush administration from investigating allegations of mass slaughter in November 2001 by Afghanistan soldiers under the command of warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was on the CIA payroll and later became military chief of staff for President Hamid Karzai. According to The New York Times, the Bush White House disregarded calls from the FBI, the State Department, the Red Cross and human rights groups to determine if hundreds, and possibly more than a thousand, Taliban fighters were either shot or left to die inside shipping containers after surrendering to Dostum’s forces. Earlier news reports of a possible mass grave in Dasht-i-Leili surfaced in 2002, but it was only last week that allegations arose of the Bush administration’s complicity in the cover up.