New documents on the death of Mike Spann

This is an interesting addition to a story that, for those who were willing to pay attention, was a major indication of how reckless the Bush administration was being in the particular approach it was taking to the "war on terror" as early as 2001: Detainee's Describe CIA Agent's Slaying by Richard Serrano Los Angeles Times 12/08/04.

This story is about the death of CIA agent Mike Spann.  He was said to be the first American killed in the Afghan War.  He was one of two CIA interrogators who were present when a riot started at the Mazar-i-Sharif prison (actually a fort being used as a prison) in Afghanistan in 2001 that eventually led to the revelation of the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, who managed to survive the US-British-Uzbek warlord bombardment of the prison that followed, that resulted in the deaths of most of the prisoners.  The incident reeked to high heaven.

Our Potemkin press corps were their usual lazy selves in pursuing the story, of course.  The Big Pundits couldn't be bothered to draw some fairly obvious conclusions.  But we can't entirely blame the press, because the mainstream press did report some pretty damning information at the time.  Congress should have been asking some tough questions about that whole prison incident, because the recklessness and disregard for law that became the Iraq War and the torture scandal were staring us in the face from that incident.  But Republicans were so eager to support Dear Leader Bush and the Democrats were so busy worshipping the idol of National Unity that they couldn't be bothered.

Serrano recalls the images that our version of a press corps settled on as the comfortable script for the story:

Spann's death and Lindh's capture unfolded as a national drama in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., with Spann hailed as a hero and Lindh vilified as a traitor.

I've always believed that Ashcroft's Justice Department copped a plea in the Lindh case because the Pentagon and the CIA wouldn't have wanted to undergo the scrutiny that a vigorous defense on Lindh's part would have brought to light.  Serrano writes:

No concrete details on the death emerged in the court case of John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban from Marin County, who had been interrogated by Spann shortly before the CIA agent died. The Afghan prisoners said Lindh shouted out around the time of the prison uprising that he was "an American and spoke English," in an attempt to escape harm from U.S. and anti-Taliban Northern Alliance forces. ...

But because Lindh never went to trial — instead pleading guilty to reduced charges in return for a 20-year sentence — complete details of the deadly Sunday at Mazar-i-Sharif have never emerged.

Serrano's story gives a glimpse of some elements that should have received much more public and Congressional attention at the time:

Another captive described the events of Nov. 25, 2001, in a prison courtyard near Mazar-i-Sharif somewhat differently. Taliban forces had been overcome by Northern Alliance troops at the fort, and Spann was accompanying the Northern Alliance.

"There was an explosion … from a grenade," the other detainee told the FBI. "The American male wearing jeans then ran away from the lines of prisoners. One of the prisoners ran after him. The American turned and fired his pistol, shooting the prisoner in the head. The guards above began firing into the courtyard."

Say what?  A grenade?  One of the suspicious aspects of the story is that the Uzbek forces of warlord Rashid Dostun that was in charge of the prison left it thinly guarded and hadn't screened the prisoners adequately for hidden weapons.  There were numerous indications that they intended to allow the possibility of a riot of some kind to break out in order to justify murdering the prisoners.  We may never know.  But the fact that interviews like this are available is the most interesting aspect of the article to me.  Maybe we will know a lot more about this eventually.

Four prisoners being held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were interviewed by the FBI. Their accounts describe Spann as wearing bluejeans, an AK-47 rifle slung over his back and a pistol on his hip, trying to interview Taliban captives — including Lindh — when he was attacked by a prisoner and shot him.

Since there is a videotape available of the two CIA agents moments before the riot began, we already knew that they were dressed in civilian clothing.  If this doesn't immediately sound unusual, it's worth remembering that the very thin reed of international legality on which the Bush administration's decision to treat the Guantanamo detainees as "enemy combatants," instead of as prisoners-of-war was based, was the fact that they were not wearing uniforms when captured.  Although our superpatriots saw fit to make Spann into a martyr, at a very minimum the judgment of he and his fellow agent in their actions that day is highly questionable.

The Mazar-i-Sharif prison story shouldn't disappear forever down the memory hole.  It's an example of a moment when some very wrong and destructive developments could have been exposed and corrected at an early point if the normal institutions vital to a democracy had functioned as they should have: a vigorous press, an inquisitive Congress, a responsible judiciary and an opposition party willing to act like one.

I'll add here that I supported the Afghan War at the time.  But the fact that I considered the war a necessary and justified thing didn't mean that I pretended everything that was happening was all right.  It wasn't.