But Allah had some other plan
A secret not revealed
Now they're dragging me back
With my head in a sack
To the land of the infidel
- Steve Earle, "John Walker's Blues"
This is an informative article by reporter Richard Serrano on the case of John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban": Prison Interrogators' Gloves Came Off Before Abu Ghraib Los Angeles Times 06/09/04.
I wasn't surprised in 2002 when our Christian zealot Attorney General allowed Lindh, who was captured while fighting for the Taliban's army in Afghanistan, to "cop a plea" and settle for 20 years in federal prison. One might think that it wouldn't be too hard to get a guilty verdict at trial against an American citizen caught fighting for the army of an enemy country in active combat with the US.
Torture gulag open for business
The problem was that a trial would have brought out some uncomfortable facts about how the US and its Afghan allies were treating prisoners, about how the CIA was conductng interrogation and about who was authorizing the specific treatment Lindh was receiving in Afghanistan in what we now know was the beginnings of the torture gulag.
In the intensity of the war fever that prevailed form the 9/11/2001 attacks until June of 2003, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld could get away with sneering at the Geneva Conventions as just "some convention" that he didn't care if our Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) were following when it came to murdering prisoners-of-war in cold blood. The American press, the Congress and most of the public was indifferent.
But Lindh, traitor though he may have been in the eyes of the world, was an educated, articulate white guy from the United States. And his lead attorney, James Brosnahan, had been a prosecutor in the Iran-Contra cases. He knew than most about the kind rogue foreign-policy operation that Iran-Contra represents, and that characterizes the most important foreign policy initiatives of the Bush team. He knew which buttons to push. And he knew however much Bush and Ashcroft may have been tempted to go the distance with a trial, that the Pentagon and the CIA wouldn't want the dark side of their conduct in the Afghan War held up to the cold light of day and examined carefully in a trial that would be carefully covered by the national press. Our "press corps" may not do well on war; celebrity trials they understand.
Knowing what we now know about torture in Abu Ghuraib and Guantanamo and at what high levels it was authorized and directed, Brosnahan's advocacy of his client looks in retrospect like matter-of-fact descriptions of everyday practice in the Bush-and-Rummy gulag. In a Time interview dated 01/26/02, Brosnahan gave us an early glimpse into the gulag (my emphasis):
In an interview with TIME, Brosnahan suggested that the U.S. was breaking with widely accepted international norms in its treatment of Lindh. "My opinion is, I should have been allowed to see him in December," Brosnahan told TIME. Brosnahan says he was unfairly kept away from his client for 54 days. "I think our government is playing with dynamite. He has the right to counsel under the Geneva Convention."
Lindh was captured as part a group of Taliban troops taken by the forces of Uzbek warlord Rashid Dostum, one of our Northern Alliance allies known for being a particularly brutal commander in a world of brutal commanders, in November, 2001. They were transferred to a prison fortress at Qala-e-Ganghi near the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, where most of them were killed as part of the suppression of a prison revolt that broke out. A badly wounded, starving Lindh was one of the few that survived the revolt.
The Serrano article recounts Lindh's experiences at the hands of his fellow Americans. He was held for weeks in a large metal container, where he was often kept naked and strapped to a stretcher. He was deprived of food and sleep and his interrogators threatened to kill him. They even took photographs of themselves posing with their naked, wounded prisoner. He was denied counsel, and not old for weeks that his parents had retained counsel on his behalf. Serrano's report cites documents indicating that directions to torture Lindh came from the Office of Defense Secretary DonaldRumsfeld:
After AmericanTaliban recruit John Walker Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, the office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed military intelligence officers to "take the gloves off" in interrogating him.
The instructions from Rumsfeld's legal counsel in late 2001, contained in previously undisclosed government documents, are the earliest known evidence that the Bush administration was willing to test the limits of how far it could go legally to extract information from suspected terrorists. ...
What happened to Lindh, who was stripped and humiliated by his captors, foreshadowed the type of abuse documented in photographs of American soldiers tormenting Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. ...
The documents, read to The Times by two sources critical of how the government handled the Lindh case, show that after an Army intelligence officer began to question Lindh, a Navy admiral told the intelligence officer that "the secretary of Defense's counsel has authorized him to 'take the gloves off' and ask whatever he wanted."
Lindh was being questioned while he was propped up naked and tied to a stretcher in interrogation sessions that went on for days, according to court papers.
In the early stages, his responses were cabled to Washington hourly, the new documents show.
The torturers justify their sadism, of course, by arguing that they were urgently trying to secure information to prevent new terrorist attacks on Americans. But the torturers didn't get any information from Lindh on any impending attacks. And it was quickly evident to them that Lindh was a foolishly devout American who was part of the Taliban government army, not some hardened al-Qaeda operative who had inside access to Osama bin Laden's plans.
This is one of the reasons Ashcroft decided to let Lindh plead out. If this information had been aired at trial in 2002, and Brosnahan would have been able to get much of it into the public trial record, Congress and the public would have been confronted with the fact that senior Pentagon officials, both civilian and uniformed, were breaking the law on torture in a serious - and systematic - way:
One Army intelligence officer said in the documents that he had been advised that "instructions had come from higher headquarters" for interrogators to coordinate with military lawyers about Lindh.
"After the first hour of interrogation, [the interrogator] gave the admiral in charge of Mazar-i-Sharif a summary of what the interrogators had collected up to that point," the documents say. "The admiral told him at that point that the secretary of Defense's counsel has authorized him to 'take the gloves off' and ask whatever he wanted."
The Army intelligence officer responded that if a "criminal investigator" wanted to later question Lindh, "that was fine."
But in the meantime, the officer said, he was "interested in tactical information. He was in the business of collecting [intelligence] information, not in the business of Mirandizing."
The officer did ask to be faxed a Miranda form, according to the documents, "but he never got it. He never gave Lindh a Miranda warning."
Keep in mind that Lindh's trial would have gotten under way in late summer 2003. This was the time when the propaganda push for invading Iraq was ramping up. The Bush administration would be seeking a blank check for war from Congress, and attempting to gain foreign allies for its invasion.
Having information like this being publicly aired and scruntinized at the same time wouldn't have been helpful for the drive to war. The Republican media echo-chamber and our prostrate mainstream press corps would have tried to minimize it. But, like I said, sensational trials are something the media understands. They couldn't have kept away from it.
The LA Times piece recalls also that a condition of Lindh's plea bargain was that he would not bring up his treatment while he was in captivity in Afghanistan.
CIA Misconduct
The Serrano LA Times article also mentions the death of Mike Spann, who was reportedly the first American death in the Afghan War, and who was lionized as a hero by President Bush. Mike Spann and another agent called Dave Tyson in the Serrano article actually touched off the prison rebellion by their questioning of prisoners there.
Lindh was one of the prisoners they interrogated, not realizing at the time he was an American. And they did it on video, a video sequence that would have become familiar TV viewing if a Lindh trial had proceeded. It shows Spann and Tyson threatening to kill the prisoner if he refuses to cooperate.
Apart from its relevance to the Lindh trial, it raised questions about just how the prison revolt started. At best, these two guys coming in to a prison they had good reason to know was poorly guarded, full of prisoners that Dostum and his lieutenants had repeatedly, openly and publicly threatened to murder, and they're questioning prisoners and threatening to kill them. You have to question their judgment, at minimum.
And it may seem an obscure point, but Spann and Tyson were not in uniform. Trivial as that may appear, the fact that the Taliban troops didn't have a clearly identifiable uniform was the very, very thin fig leaf that the Bush administration used publicly to justify not applying the provisions of the Geneva Conventions to the Guantanamo captives. We know now, of course, that Ashcroft and Rummy had adopted a theory of presidential power that says the president can set aside any law, treaty or provision of the Constitution he finds inconvenient.
US Troops and the Northern Alliance
Back when Rummy was on TV in 2001 sneering at the Geneva Conventions, in response to a question about the Northern Alliance murdering prisoners, he said in response to the same question that he didn't have "even the slightest problem in working with the Northern Alliance" (my emphasis) despite the fact that some of them were murdering war criminals.
Stephen Biddle of the Army War College prepared an important early analysis of the early phase of the Afghan War for the Army's Strategic Studies Institute: Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy (Nov 2002;*.pdf file). The main focus of the paper is the practical implications of the Afghan experience for current ideas of defense "transformation," in which the Army would rely on much smaller numbers of troops in war than previously.
But the paper is interesting in other ways, as well. It is based in part on classified accounts from Afghan veterans that in the Army Military History Institute's archive. And he also describes alevel of US participation that was much more intense than one could have determined from the news reports and official statements at the time, though some reports certainly hinted at this at the time.
His focus on that reality is mainly to emphasize that, though the Northern Alliance warlord forces did well against the poorly-trained Taliban troops, they required direct American involvement to hold their own against the far better-prepared al-Qaeda cadres, and even then al-Qaeda put up a tough fight in the battles. Biddle also mentions how the prison revolt in which Lindh was captured was suppressed:
In the Qala-e-Gangi fortress uprising,the renegade prisoners were quickly driven out of the above-ground prison yard and isolated in a handful of small underground chambers whose locations and perimeter were well-known. These were then pounded by allied airpower:entire ammunition payloads of multiple AC-130 gunships and no fewer than seven 2,000-pound JDAMs were expended against this tiny area.
"Alled" in this case means American and British. Since Lindh was imprisoned and initially interrogated here, this action would have inevitably come under closer scrutiny in a trial. American and British troops bombing a prison-fortress to suppress a prison revolt, lilling all the prisoners-of-war there, would have led to more questions about just how how "slight" Bush and Rummy may have thought the problems of killing POWs really was.
The desriptions of the military campaigns make it clear that Special Forces assistance in reconaissance and close coordinate of American tactical firepower with the Northern Alliance infantry were important parts of the military campaign. For instance:
By the December fighting along Highway 4 south of Kandahar, ... concealed al Qaeda defensive positions among a series of culverts and in burned-out vehicle hulks alongside the road remained wholly undetected by any friendly element until their fire drove back an AMF (Afghan Military Forces —our Northern and Southern Alliance allies) advance. An al Qaeda counterattack in the same sector using a system of wadis for cover approached undetected to within 100-200 meters of AMF and American SOF [Special Forces] positions along the highway before opening fire on friendly forces.
The following description of Operation Anaconda gives an idea of how critical the intimate American involvement was:
In Operation ANACONDA, well-prepared al Qaeda positions survived repeated aerial attack by U.S.PGMs. On Objective Ginger, for example, American infantry inadvertently disembarked from their assault helicopters almost on top of an unseen al Qaeda position on March 2; after being pinned down for much of the day,they were extracted that night.American troops then spent much of the next 10 days fighting their way back toward the Ginger hilltop from more secure landing zones well to the north. In the meantime,American aircraft pounded the hill. Yet in spite of over a week of sustained heavy bombing,al Qaeda positions on Ginger survived to fire upon U.S.infantry when the latter finally reached and overran the objective. One dug-in al Qaeda command post was found surrounded by no fewer than five JDAM craters, yet its garrison survived and resisted until they were overrun by U.S.infantry.
Biddle's argues that the wide-spread impression that the American role in Afghanistan was primarily to provide assistance to capable local forces in the Northern Alliance is misleading. This example shows how closely involved the US was in giving tactical direction to the AMF (Northern Alliance) warlords in battle:
At Bai Beche on November 5, for example, the dug-in al Qaeda defenders refused to withdraw in spite of over 2 days of heavy American air strikes.To dislodge them, Dostum’s AMF cavalry was ordered to charge the position. The first attempt was driven back. The American SOF [Special Forces] attached to Dostum’s forces observed this reverse and began calling renewed airstrikes against the al Qaeda positions in anticipation that Dostum would eventually order a second assault. In the process, however, a SOF warning order to the cavalry to prepare for another push was mistaken by the cavalry as a command to launch the assault, with the result that the cavalry began its attack much sooner than intended. The surprised Americans watched the Afghan cavalry break cover and begin their advance just as a series of laser-guided bombs had been released from American aircraft in response to the SOF calls for air support. The SOF commander reported that he was convinced they had just caused a friendly fire incident: the bomb release and the AMF cavalry advance were way too close together for official doctrinal limits, and the air strike would never have been ordered if the SOF had known that the cavalry was then jumping off for the second assault. As it happened, the bombs landed seconds before the cavalry arrived on the position. In fact,the cavalry galloped through the enormous cloud of smoke and dust that was still hanging in the air after the explosions, emerging behind the enemy defenses before their garrison knew what was happening. The defenders, seeing Dostum’s cavalry to their rear, abandoned their positions in an attempt to avoid encirclement.
There was nothing wrong with the fact that the US forces were intimately involved. The Afghan War was a legitimately and necessary military response to the 9/11 attacks, in which the Taliban government of Afghanistan had played a key supporting role as the chief state ally of al-Qaeda. And the Northern Alliance, though out of power, was recognized by the US, the United Nations and all but three other nations of the world as the legitimate, legal government of Afghanistan.
But the examples I quoted from Biddle's paper show the extent to which the American forces were calling the shots (literally) and giving precise tactical direction to Northern Alliance forces in the Afghan War.
So did they know that our allied warlords like Dostum were deliberately murdering prisoners-of-war in large numbers? You can bet that some of them did. And in light of the recent revelations, including Serrano's about the Defense Department direction at the time on torturing Lindh, Rumseld's comment in early December 2001, in direct response to a question about these murders, that he didn't have "even the slightest problem in working with the Northern Alliance" takes on an even more sinister tone, if that is possible.
Conclusion
Torture in the gulag, it now appears, started in 2001. It will be left to those investigating and prosecuting war crimes to determine exactly when the directions were given and by whom. But it certainly appears by November, 2001, the conscious practice of waging war by discarding the requirements of American and international law had begun. And not just as a matter of isolated incidents, or inevitable excesses in the heat of combat, but in a systematic way as a matter of policy.
In the current climate of debate over the Iraq War, I'll mention again that I supported the Afghan War. [01/07/06 - I've corrected that sentence; it previously read that I supported the Iraq War, which I did not. I did support the Afghan War, though, which is what I meant to write.] The initial combat could have been handled without the torture and murder of prisoners. But I also operate on the assumption that if I'm going to be saying out loud that I support a particular war, that I should also be conscious of the actual consequences of the war.
War is not a sport. It's systematic killing. It can't be approched like a football game. The fact that so many Americans, including many in Congress, were willing to do so for so many months is now coming back on our heads. It didn't have to be this way.
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