This post is one in a series on the lessons of the Afghan War. The posts are indexed in this post of 02/20/06.
There are two other factual points that are important in understanding the Qala-e-Gangi uprising.
One is the fact that General Dostum's forces had a dramatic warning as the prisoners were being taken into the Qala-e-Gangi fortress that some of them were armed and of a mind to continue fighting. Mark Kukis relates what happened, apparently based on the account of Sayed Damel, Gen. Dostum's security chief:
Kamel and a group of Alliance commanders watched nervously as the prisoners began to descend from the trucks. Things went wrong immediately. One of the first captives off the trucks strode over to the group of commanders, throwing himself at their feet, clutching an armed grenade to his chest. The prisoner looked up at the surprised men, cathcing their eyes for a moment before the blast. Kamel dove for cover and shouted for the others to do the same, but they moved too slowly. The grenade went off, killing two Alliance commanders, severely wounding a third, and tearing the suicide attacker's body nearly in half.
The blast set off a momentary panic, but quickly the Alliance guards regained control and began herding the captives into the basement hold of the pink building. Originally, they had planned to search each prisoner carefully before sending him into the cells, but the attack and the darkening skies forced the Alliance guards to drive the group en masse below ground, knowing then that many still carried arms. (my emphasis)
Among the Guantánamo prisoner interviews discussed in an earlier post, prisoner G-169 related his version of the incident (summarized by the FBI in third person):
Upon arriving at Mazar-e-Sharif, [redacted] explained that as each of the prisoners got off the trucks they were searched thoroughly by General DOSTUM's soldiers After [redacted] got off the truck he heard an explosion and realized that one of the soldiers blew himself up with a grenade. At this point, the soldiers did not conduct thorough searches of the pirsoners, insteadthey began hurrying the prisoners into the basement of the Qala-e-Jhangi prison
That quotation illustrates one of the problems of a summary as opposed to a verbatim transcript. If the FBI report is consistent in using "soldiers" for Dostum's (Northern Alliance) men and "prisoners" for the Taliban and Al Ansar fighters, then G-169's account would be that one of Dostum's soldiers blew himself up. Which, of course, G-169 may have thought if he wasn't watching the scene while it unfolded.
Richard Mahoney's account in Getting Away With Murder (2004) agrees with Kukis' about the grenade attack by one of the prisoners on Dostum's soldiers. Kukis and Mahoney also related that after the prisoners were placed in the basement, one of Dostum's men threw in a grenade which exploded, killing several prisoners.
The following morning, when the prisoners are brought out to be questioned by Mike Spann and Dave Tyson, Mahoney gives a sense of the level of distrust and fear in the air:
"Some [of the prisoners] feared they would be killed, but most wanted to kill, and then be killed." a Northern Alliance guard, Nqassum Daoudi, later commented. These were both homicidal and suicidal men - and Spann and Tyson should have known it.
It's not clear in the context what Mahoney means by the last comment, whether he means to say that Dostum's men or someone else should have warned the pair about that, or whether he is implying that the two CIA men were somehow careless. He continues:
What the CIA men sense about the men kneeling in front of them is not known. Dostum's soldiers, however, are murderously afraid of the prisoners. They propose to take over the interrogation. Security chief Mashal Azam says they should get rid of the press and begin shotting the prisoners, one by one, until they ferret out the Al-Qaeda individuals. These will be then handed over to the Americans. If that doesn't work, Azam ttells a German reporter, they'll do it the old way. He takes out a long, notched knife and points it in his anus. "We begin here".
Another fact to examine is what was said in the interrogations that were videotaped. In particular, the early speculation that the CIA men set off the uprising by their questioning focused on this exchange between Spann and Tyson. After attempting to question an unresponsive Lindh, Spann speaks to Tyson within the hearing of Lindh. From Mahoney's transcript in the book:
TYSON: OK. All right. We explained what the deal is to him.
SPANN: I was explaining to the guy that we just want to talk to him, find out what the story is.
TYSON (to Spann): The problem is he needs to decide if he wants to live or die - and die here. I mean he don't wanna die here, he's gonna die here cause this is where we're just gonna leave him ... he's gonna sit in prison the rest of his f***ing short life. It's his decision. We can only help those guys that want to talk to us. We can only get the Red Cross to help so many guys. (Now dismissively.) He had his chance.
Even though this was videotaped, the conditions weren't exactly those of a Hollywood studio. Kukis' transcript relays Tyson's words somewhat differently, though the substance and tone are the same:
"The problem is he needs to decide if he wants to live or die, and die here," Tyson said.."If he don't want to die here, he's gonna die here. We're just going to leave him, and he's going to f***ing sit in prison the rest of his f***ing short life. It's his decision, man. We can only help the guys that want to talk to us. We can only get the Red Cross to help so many guys. if they don't talk to us, we can't -"
A clip of this video is available at this Web site: FreeDocumentaries.org. It is part of a controversial documentary called "Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death". Click the "Watch Streaming Video of Producer Interview and Clips of Documentary" link to see it in RealVideo. At the 21:00 minute point, Amy Goodman is describing the scene in which Tyson says the words just quoted. She also notes it's hard to hear, and if the audio quality on that documentary is any measure, it's easy to see why transcripts would differ somewhat. This link isn't meant to indicate any particular opinion of the documentary itself; its account of the beginning of the uprising, which immediately follows the Tyson-Spann-Lindh clip, does not match with the account I've given in previous posts.
The early speculation on the uprising included the question of whether Spann and Tyson may have panicked the prisoners by making statements like this that sounded like death threats.
We now know, as related in the previous posts in this series, that some of the prisoners had planned an uprising during the preceding night in the basement. And the grenade explosion that began the uprising came from a group of Uzbek prisoners who had just emerged from the basement. So it's clear that whatever Spann and Tyson may have said, it wasn't their words to the prisoners that set off the uprising.
It may require some effort of imagination now to see why Tyson's words quoted above may have seemed like a reckless threat. Four years later - now that we know about the torture policy, the secret prisons, the kidnappings, a war justified by claims of "weapons of mass destruction" that turned out to be false - Tyson's words hardly seem more than tough talk.
Death threats, so far as I'm aware, are illegal for American interrogators to use. But was Tyson's comment a death threat? It certainly seems to be pushing the envelope. But in the context, where Dostum's men had been threatening to kill the Al Ansar prisoners, it could also be heard as saying, hey, you help us, we might be able to get you out of here.
It probably wasn't precisely "by the book". And I wouldn't want to try to defend his precise wording. But it seems to me that it would also be hard to argue that it was any kind of direct death threat. Given some of the horrible scenes we've seen from Abu Ghuraib and other deadly incidents that have been reliably reported, I wouldn't want to downplay the significance of violating the rules of interrogation or minimize the seriousness of wrongdoing in that context. There are way too many people doing those kinds of things already, including many who very much know better.
But, despite the early questions from human rights groups over this particular interchange, it's not at all clear to me in the circumstances that Tyson's statement was inappropriate. It was, after all, factually true that the Lindh and the other prisoners had good reason to fear for their lives from Dostum's men.
Mike Spann and Dave Tyson were there trying to get information rapidly on Al Qaeda. At that point, it would still have been possible to kill or capture a large number of the concentrated Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan. Whether or not they had been fully appraised of the grenade incidents the previous day, they knew they were taking some risk in interrogating the prisoners. Mike Spann died fighting the prisoners attacking him and Tyson and the Alliance guards, and was and is rightly regarded as a hero.
From my perspective, it's unfortunate that writers like Andrew Sullivan tried to rope Spann's image into a "cuture war" morality play. No doubt, the conflicting stories of Mike Spann and John Walker Lindh provide a dramatic coincidence in the way their lives briefly interacted. But Lindh had effectively no sympathizers in the US. And, despite the jingoistic rhetoric of the Andrew Sullivans, even opponents of a war (of which there were very few on the Afghan War in 2001) recognize the service and sacrifice of those who fight for their country. That sort of rhetorical posturing doesn't help anyone to understand what is actually going on in the wars we send our people to fight.
The next items in this series of posts may not come quite as quickly in succession as these have. But I wanted to start by discussing this incident, which in retrospect first raised some of the long-term concerns raised by the experience of the Afghan War. Which still continues today, despite its low profile in the mainstream press.
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