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.
In previous posts in this series, I've discussed the information from documents released under the Freedom of Information Act describing information provided from prisoners at Guantanamo on the prison uprising at Qala-e-Gangi in 2001. In this post, I will continue that discussion based on other, published sources.
The interrogation of some of the prisoners, including Mike Spann interrogating "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, was videotaped by Afghan intelligence. The videotape ran until the time the granade exploded near the entrance to the basement setting off the uprising. Working with the videotape, Richard Mahoney in Getting Away With Murder (2004) describes the start of the uprising and the death of Mike Spann this way, in the context of discussing the trial of Lindh, which was ended with a plea bargain:
What happened on that terrible morning in Qala-e Janghi deserved an adversarial airing in court. It still does. The best evidence suggests the following: after the grenade attack killed the Northern Alliance guard, three hundred or so prisoners began streaming out of the entry to the pink building, overwhelming four other guards and grabbing their rifles. The audio reveals that an AK-47 began firing within four seconds of the grenade attack. This was Mike Spann s. He advanced toward the entryway at first firing single shots, several of which found targets, and then a short burst which found more. A little more than one minute after the first grenade explosion, he had expended his clip. Those who converged on him were the escaping cavalcade coming out of the pink building, not the prisoners, bound and kneeling on the ground. Most of those simply lay flat. John Walker Lindh, however, got to his feet and ran a short distance before being hit by a ricocheting bullet. Who fired this bullet from which direction is not ascertainable.
As the foreign Taliban bore down on Spann, he made no effort to run but instead shot two or three more of his attackers -with his 9 mm. before using it to club them. He was soon enveloped by a screaming mass of prisoners. One witness reported seeing him tackled and fall on his right side, at which point he was variously pummeled, kicked, and even bitten to unconsciousness by his attackers.
There was a report from US Special Forces that Spann had been torturedbefore being killed. Mahoney discounts this version based in part on the research of Johnny Spann. The elder Spann told to me in our phone interview that he had examined the autopsy photos of Mike's body and was satisfied that the Special Forces version - he mentioned in particular one from writer Robin Moore - was simply not correct. As Mahoney writes, "The fatal shots were fired into Mike Spann's head near the temples, exiting the back of his head. It is probably that he was executed by the foreign Taliban not long after they had taken over that part of the courtyard."
Mahoney also notes, "Johnny Spann remains the most credible and informed source regarding the circumstances of his son's death".
Journalist Mark Kukis did orginal research in Afghanistan for his 2003 book "My Heart Became Attached": The Strange Odyssey of John Walker Lindh. He gives the following account of the conversations in the basement among the prisoners the night before the prison uprising. Based on interviews with two Pakistanis who were there among the prisoners, Enamul Hak and Wahid Ahmad, Kukis concluded that there seemed to have been no consensus among the prisoners in general about fighting further. He describes the conversations as reported to him this way:
According to Hak and another Pakistani Talib in the basement that night, Wahid Ahmad, the group of four hundred was split. The Pakistanis were willing to chance a surrender deal in the hopes of being returned home, but the foreign fighters from Arab countries and elsewhere wanted to fight. The Pakistanis, for the most part, felt they had fairly good odds of being returned at some point across the nearby border and that they likely faced no troubles at home, because Pakistani authorities had long backed the Taliban.
The foreign fighters from other countries had no such hopes. Most came from lands where the Taliban and al-Qaida were loathed and affiliation with them would be punishable by death, or worse. Better to die a martyr at Qala-i-Jangi, some thought, than to be tortured and executed at home. The Uzbeks in particular seemed ready to take their chances fighting rather than remain in the hands of Dostum, who, himself an Uzbek, was said to take special delight in the torture of ethnic brethren who had chosen to fight against him.
According to Kukis' account, it was a group of Uzbeks who initiated the uprising:
Spann still had no idea Lindh was an American as a guard pulled Lindh to his feet and shoved him to an area with the other previously interrogated prisoners. And he didn't live long enough to find out what the rest of the world would soon know. The shorter of their two lives turned out to be Spann's.
Forgetting Lindh, Spann began interrogating other Taliban prisoners brought up from their basement cells. Northern Alliance guards continued searching, tethering, and lining up prisoners in the yard. About half an hour later, as Alliance guards called into the cellar for another prisoner, as many as half a dozen, mostly Uzbeks, suddenly rounded the steps, tossing grenades, yelling "Allah u Akbar!" The guards fired into the crush of prisoners charging up the stairs, but were soon overpowered as more men leapt up from behind them and fought towards the outside door. In a second, a revolt was on.
This gets to one of the still unanswered questions relating to the uprising: did John Walker Lindh know in advance that an uprising was planned? It's a question affecting the degree of Lindh's guilt. Lindh's attorneys argued that there was no evidence that he actually fought against Americans. But if he knew about a planned uprising and failed to warn his fellow Americans Spann and Tyson about it when he had the opportunity, then he would be directly complicit in Spann's death.
Mike's father Johnny is convinced that such was the case. And he made that argument to the judge in the Lindh case. At trial, the presiding judge T.S. Ellis III, found that the government had produced no evidence of prior knowledge by Lindh of the planned uprising, even while acknowledging that he shared that suspicion.
Mahoney quotes from Johnny Spann's statement to the court:
Mr. Lindh, the way I understand it, has admitted that he fought on the front lines of Takhar. Are we supposed to believe that any kind of an army would let somebody come and be a member of their army and be on the front lines, but never fire his weapon? That's a little bit hard to believe. . . .
We know that when they surrendered in Kunduz, that they were carrieddown through Mazar-e Sharif on trucks and carried down to Qala-e Janghi fortress. We also know - I don't think there's a doubt in anyone's mind, we saw it on TV, where John Walker Lindh appeared the next day. So we know that he was there the night before. We know that he, in fact, spent the night in the pink house [the basement]. .. And the reports are different but I am assuming that there were some four-hundred-plus prisoners in that building. Are we to believe that a person could spend the night in a building, that small of a building with four-hundred-plus prisoners - and a third of them never have been searched, a third of them still have their weapons, they still have their grenades under their head gear, underneath their slouchy clothes - are we to believe that those people spent the night there and they didn't talk about that? "We've got weapons. We've still got guns"? That's a little hard for me to believe too. And it's a little hard for the American people that talked to me to believe.
I thought that it was the responsibility of Americans that if you knew that there was something going to happen - and I realize that what you have already said, that evidently the court believes that Mr. Lindh didn't know there was going to be an uprising. It's hard for me to believe that.
Both Mahoney and Kukis argue that the evidence indicates that Lindh likely had knowledge of at least the possibility of an uprising. (I should note here that the legal standards for proof and the standards of evidence for historical research are not the same. I have not attempted to assess the legal case on that point, even at the time of Lindh's trial or since.)
Based on the accounts of the Pakistanis Hak and Ahmad as cited above, Kukis concludes that "Lindh knew of the revolt, a foresight that would make his culpable in Spann's death". But although he cites his information from Hak and Ahmad in support of that comment, their information as he cites in the passage quoted above does not directly say that Lindh knew about the revolt planning. Like Johnny Spann's statement to the judge, Kukis is convinced based on circumstantial evidence that Lindh must have known about the planning of the revolt:
I spent several weeks in Afghanistan in the spring of 2002 piecing together what had happened in Konduz and at Qala-i-Jangi, interviewing dozens of witnesses and survivors, even paying a visit to the basement. I also find it hard to believe that Lindh could have spent the hours he did in the cellar before the Qala-i-Jangi uprising and known nothing of the plot that ultimately killed Spann and hundreds of others. The scenario is at first plausible, but ultimately unbelievable: The confined space in the basement left enough room so that, potentially, members of a group at one end could talk among themselves without being overheard by others elsewhere in the hold. Clearly, there were a number of men speaking in Arabic plotting the revolt while Lindh was in the same space. Lindh maintains that he was not speaking with them and, therefore, knew nothing of the planned attack. However Lindh was speaking with someone in the basement, either in Arabic or English, as evidenced by his claims of overhearing rumors among the prisoners that Dostum's surrender deal still held. It s possible that the Arabic or English speakers with whom Lindh conversed at some point during the night either also knew nothing of the plans or perhaps didn't share the plot with him. Perhaps the prisoners Lindh talked to were part of a group outside the small ring of plotters.
He goes on to explain that the accounts by Hak and Ahmad about the conversations taking place among the prisoners just makes it hard to believe that Lindh had no knowledge at all about plots to have a revolt.
Mahoney cites Kukis' research and the testimony of a prisoner at Guantanamo, Abd al-Haribi, in concluding that there was sufficient evidence to charge Lindh with conspiracy to murder. As I said, I have made no attempt to evaulate the potential legal case. But al-Haribi's testimony may not be the most solid evidence. (I have no way of knowing of al-Haribi was one of the anonymous prisoners cited in a previous post). Mahoney writes of al-Haribi, who he says was one of three Pakistanis released from Guantanamo in June of 2003:
Al-Haribi said that he had told U.S. military interrogators that everyone in the basement had known that something was going to happen. Subsequent to his interrogation, al-Haribi tried to commit suicide and had, by his own admission, a nervous breakdown thereafter.
Once again, the legal limbo the Bush administration decided tocreate at Guantanamo, not least of which is the practice of torture, raises a huge question mark over evidence from prisoners there, whether being used in the legal or the historical sense.
My conclusion on the question of Lindh's prior knowledge is that given the circumstantial evidence, he probably had at least the prior knowledge that a revolt was being discussed. "Circumstantial" evidence is not the same as "weak" evidence. And it seems to me in this case the possibility is strong.
However, based on the evidence I have seen at this point, I couldn't say it was anything close to definitive. Like (presumably) most Americans, I have always found Lindh to be a very unsympathetic figure. But on the factual question of whether he knew about the revolt in advance, unless additional evidence comes to light, such as Lindh himself copping to having known about it, I couldn 't go beyond saying that his having prior knowledge seems highly likely but not definitively proven.
This is a big part of Richard Mahoney's criticism of the government's deficient prosecution of Lindh. This is a question that might have been resolved conclusively if it had been fully vetted at trial. But the fact that witnesses were being held under controversial conditions in Guantanamo, and that Lindh himself had been subject to a type of interrogation and physical treatment while in US custody that was open to serious challenge in court meant that the government felt the need to plead the case out rather than go through a full trial. Mahoney has further speculations about the reasons the government decided to go for the plea bargain, but the Lindh trial is not my focus in this series of posts.
Two excerpts from Mark Kukis' book are available online at Salon.com: John Walker Lindh's long, dark journey and The fall of John Walker Lindh.
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