CIA death squads killing with "impunity" in Afghanistan

A United Nations investigator released a preliminary report last week citing widespread civilian deaths in Afghanistan, often at the hands of unaccountable units led by the CIA or other foreign intelligence agencies.

The investigator is Philip Alston, a New York University professor serving as the Special Rapporteur of the United Nations Human Rights Council on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary execution. His report provides a partial glimpse into the illegal actions of intelligence agencies

Philip Alston is John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law. He was appointed UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions in July 2004. For 2005-06 he is Chairperson of the Coordinating Committee for all of the Human Rights Special Procedures of the UN Commission on Human Rights. He has long been active in the field of human rights, as an adviser to groups such as Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists, as a founding Board Member of Physicians for Human Rights, and as Chairperson of the Board of the Center for Economic and Social Rights. As a UN official in the early 1980s he worked on the drafting of the UN Convention against Torture, and he has since written extensively on international human rights institutions and procedures, including those dealing with questions of extrajudicial executions.
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