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THE Bersih rallies have quickly established themselves as something of a ritual in Malaysia’s political calendar. The script goes something like this: thousands of protesters declare that they are going to march through Kuala Lumpur to demand electoral reform; a twitchy government and protest leaders spend days haggling over a suitable venue; the protest goes ahead in defiance of police demands; violence ensues, hundreds are arrested; government issues some apologies; everyone goes home. The only significant variant is the political impact. Last year it was huge—this year it will probably be very little.
Bersih means “clean” in Malay, and the Bersih movement is made up of a coalition of NGOs and civil-rights organisations that want the electoral system cleaned up so as to allow all parties a fair chance of winning elections. At the moment many claim that the electoral system is heavily rigged in favour of the ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional (BN), which has been in power continually ever since the country’s independence from Britain began in 1957. The Bersih rallies have thus become inextricably linked to the cause of the opposition, led by Anwar Ibrahim.
The Bersih 3.0 rally on April 28th certainly attracted more people than last year’s version, perhaps as many as 80,000 (although the police put the figure at about half of that). As there will almost certainly be a general election in the coming months, perhaps the high level of interest wasn’t that surprising. But by comparison last year’s rally, despite a relatively smaller number of protesters, achieved a terrific political impact.
At the time the government of Najib Razak badly mishandled the whole situation. Thousands of riot police were captured by video cameras and smart-phones laying into the unarmed protesters in order to disperse them; water cannon were fired into a hospital and more than 1,600 people were arrested. The use of state violence was a huge embarrassment to the government, confirming in many peoples’ minds the impression that the prime minister was indeed a repressive ogre of Malay nationalism and not the reforming liberal that he had claimed.
Stung by widespread criticism in the international press, Mr Najib’s government was forced to apologise for much of its behaviour. Subsequently it repealed a slew of outdated and repressive laws to win back its reforming credentials. A parliamentary committee was also set up to look into proposals for electoral reform. In all, a clear victory to Bersih.
This year it was more of a score-draw. Certainly, towards the end of the rally there was another eruption of violence, and the police were once again seen deploying water cannon and tear gas against the demonstrators. They arrested more than 400 of them. Once again there were reports of police brutality, and once again the prime minister had some quick explaining to do. This time Mr Najib felt obliged to apologise personally to a local reporter who had been beaten up by the police (he was one of several). Once again, these ugly scenes do little to bolster Mr Najib’s claims to be a different kind of reform-minded leader.
However, this year there were problems on the Bersih side too. Some protesters attacked and overturned a police car and it seems that about 20 police officers were wounded. This, of course, played into the government’s hands, allowing Mr Najib to claim that “The police were victims. They became targets and were beaten.” The leader of Bersih, Ambiga Sreenevasan, conceded that some people will think that “the rally had gone wrong” because of the unruly behaviour of a few protesters. The violence may even tarnish the broader movement for democratic reform, a bit. And Mr Anwar had some explaining of his own to do. He was caught on video near one of the police barricades talking to one of his colleagues; critics allege that he was inciting supporters to push aside the barriers. Mr Anwar himself says this is nonsense.
Either way, it is clear that Bersih won’t be able to dominate the moral high ground—at least not on the score of one weekend’s theatrics—as they did last year. The campaign for electoral reform goes on, but Mr Najib emerges from this year’s fracas with his reformist credentials essentially intact, not much worse for the wear.
source: http://aimanamani.wordpress.com
After my little brother, Ahmad Ali posted his blog posts on Bersih 3.0, he had received a number of comments from Bersih supporters disagreeing with him. But of course, that is expected since not everyone sees eye to eye with each other on everything. We all have our own opinions, and we are free to voice it out as long as we say it politely and willing to respect the opinions of others too. The comments are nicely written, explaining in detail why they do not agree with him. They are being polite and assertive; as how it should be in a healthy discussion. I find it interesting to how he answered them and that among others helps him to think beyond his age.
On the other hand, my little sister received two shocking comments from a reader of her blog. What my sister did was simply stating her point of view on this whole affair but as the result, she was labelled as a ‘typical BN’ and was insulted further by the accusation that she was paid by the Barisan Nasional(BN). The question now is what happened to the ‘freedom of speech’ the Bersih 3.0 demonstrators were fighting for? They wanted the press freedom in the mainstream media (meaning the freedom of speech) but the very person who went to the street fighting for freedom of speech insulted my sister just because of her different opinion. If they believe that ‘freedom of speech’ is only about agreeing with what they think is right, then they are what they claimed how the BN government is.
I used to have very high respects for the oppositions leaders and supported the first Bersih but the current events changed my mind. Now I do not understand what Bersih and the oppositions are really fighting for. And what happened during and after Bersih 3.0, including the attitudes of the Bersih 3.0′s demonstrators makes me even wonder what their true intentions are. Clean and free election and press freedom? I was sad to read an article in one of the main alternative media entitled, ‘Kereta polis meluru laju, langgar peserta BERSIH’, which twisted the incident while everyone (who cares to find the truth) can clearly see that the man (as shown in the picture of the article) jumped up onto the car to attack the car and he was not hit by the car as reported. Since that article was from a media which was regarded as unbiased and ‘clean’ by Bersih and the oppositions; their supporters just swallowed the story and refuse to watch various videos on YouTube (maybe claiming those videos has been edited by BN) to see how the accident really happened. Even a demonstrator who was near the Dataran Merdeka during the incident would says that, “I was there” hence I know what really happened- even though the accident happened in front of Sogo. If this is an example of press freedom that they are fighting for, then they are just as bad as how they claimed BN to be. Please listen to Micheal Jackson’s ‘Man In The Mirror’, first look at our faults and changed before telling others to do so. As my little brother wrote in his post, Bersih 3.0 Violence – The End Justifies The Means? two wrongs don’t make a right.
On my previous post I had included a video of Mr. Benji Lim’s outburst in the middle of a press conference. It is clear that he was trying to voice out his opinion that the Bersih 3.0 demonstration had been ‘hijacked’ by the oppositions who turned it into a political event and endangered the lives of the demonstrators. What happened to him after the outburst? He had been forced out of the press conference by two men clearly against his will for his last words were, “I am a citizen too”. Again, what had happened to the ‘freedom of speech’ that they are fighting for? And I wonder what will they say if the same incident happens during the prime minister’s press conference?
Freedom of speech means that everybody is free to say what ever they want to say; hence we cannot dictate others to say what we want them to say. So it seems like the ‘press freedom’ that Bersih is fighting for is nothing about the freedom of speech but it is all about reporting what ever they wish, no matter if it is a white lie as long as it is them who lie. Thus, I think that a complete freedom (in all aspect of our life) would only result in anarchy and chaos. There need to be rules to guide us, so that we’ll always be on the right path. Of course, the person who commented on my sister’s blog may claim that it is her right to accuse and insult anyone. And soon smokers would be demanding to smoke in the ‘non-smoking’ areas. And someone may say that this article must be written by another ‘typical BN’ 
The writer, Aiman Amani says: I am 17 and among my hobbies are sketching, writing, collecting stamps, coins, bank notes, stickers and seashells. And my blog is where I write about myself, things that goes on around me or things that I wish to share with everyone
source: http://aeshahadlina.wordpress.com
I received two comments for my post, ‘Bersih 3.0… A peaceful demonstration?’ saying:
were you there AA … why are you lying about things you did not see….everything was peaceful until police started gassing people…peaceful marchers….you are typical BN …just put your side of pictures on the media…LIARS..I was there. The police were the thugs.”
“Tell us why a police car ran into the crowd …a boy has been warded because of this….how dare you twist the story…how much did they pay you?”
Please read: ‘We would have stayed peaceful if they haven’t sprayed us-Bersih 3.0 supporters.’ I wrote the above post to answer the above comments with video showing what happened before and after the incident.
Those comments really caught my attention. I am not a Barisan Nasional (BN) member; infact I am not even a BN’s supporter (after what happened, nor am I a Pakatan Rakyat’s supporter, either). I did not write the article (or any other articles) on BN’s instruction. I am just writing my point of view about the demonstration as a peace loving citizen of Malaysia. So, why should BN pay me? It is sad that there are people who sacrificed their time, comfort and safety to join a street demonstration to fight for a clean and free election when they actually do not understand what is freedom of speech. Now it makes me wonder, what exactly are the demonstrators demonstrating for?
The police were the thugs???
I also want a clean and fair election, even though I am not eligible to vote at 14 years old. Bersih is free to fight for a good cause but my complain is, why must they held a street demonstrations and disobey the law? And after looking at how the crowd provoked the police on the night before the event, I asked myself if all the demonstrators really wanted Bersih 3.0 rally to be peaceful?Please read: ‘Bersih 3.0:In Videos-Police Brutality/Video Keganasan Polis?’
I was accused as a ‘typical BN’. So, for some of the Bersih 3.0 violent street rally demonstrators, those who do not agree with them are the ‘typical BN’ or paid by BN. And anyone who is sensible enough not to support the violant acts done by the demonstrators are BN supporters? Even my little brother understands that, ‘matlamat tidak akan menghalalkan cara’, Please read his blog post: Bersih 3.0 Violence – The End Justifies The Means? Odd… I thought that they are demonstrating for a fair and clean election and not for ‘Anti-Barisan Nasional’. Or are BN’s member right when they claim that Bersih 3.0 is actually the oppossitions’ rally?
Now, what did those plants do to justify their conditions after the event? Are they supporting BN or did they help BN and SPR to cheat in the past elections? Or maybe they are PDRM’s agents who provoked the demonstrators that started the riot; I wonder….
A fair and clean election means no cheating during the elections. If they claim that BN cheated in the pasts elections, so why did the opposition party that was accused to cheat in their own party elections by their own members and ex-leaders was also leading the rally? If the PR leads the country, can we be sure that all the elections are clean and free? But for some Bersih demonstrators, no other political party cheats but BN; so those who were not satisfied were paid by BN…….
So what exactly is Bersih 3.0 demonstration was all about? A fight for a clean and fair election… or was it an ‘Anti-Barisan Nasional’ demonstration?
Please click here for more pictures of the Bersih 3.0 street rally…
The writer, Aeshah Adlina, 14, says: I was born on the 6th of November. I have 4 siblings. I am the second in my family. I live in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I am currently home-schooling. My favourite colours are pink, lavender and celeste. My hobbies are writing stories, reading books, and collecting stamps. I like to eat chili con carne very much.
source: http://aimanamani.wordpress.com
Bersih 3.0 was promised to be a peaceful rally but things turned ugly when the protesters went violent, broke the rules and even acted brutally towards the police. As the dust began to settle, a new question sparked, who is to be blamed?
The protesters blamed the police for the the unrest caused. They claimed that the police violent act of spraying water and shooting tear gas to the crowd sparked anger among them thus caused them to retaliate with force. But according to several videos posted on the internet, the police only shot after the protesters broke the barricades. Isn’t it what the police should have done, control the crowd and keep them from getting out of control? Surely the PDRM (Royal Malaysian Police) do not want to be blame if things got really out of control like what happened in London between 6th to 10th August 2011.
Let us look back at what the DAP vice-chairman Senator Tunku Abdul Aziz Tunku Ibrahim had mentioned in a news conference before the rally took place, by not using the locations offered by the police, the leaders of the rally were “encouraging the people to break the law” – The Star Online (DAP vice-chairman against rally (Update)) 26th April 2012.
Or is there any possibility that the violence is actually intended? The leaders of the rally claimed that they condemn the act of the protesters who broke the barriers blocking the road to Dataran Merdeka. But did they mean it? The opposition leader, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim had been caught on video communicating with PKR deputy president, Azmin Ali and another man (who some had claimed to recognise him as a PKR Seremban member) using hand gestures just before the man pushed the metal gate blocking the road. Does this suggest that the two PKR leaders instigated the crowd to go against the police? Please watch the video below:
Even if (as the both PKR leaders claimed) they didn’t instigated the breach, why couldn’t Anwar, as the leader, use the megaphone to call back his people? Why wasn’t there any such effort made? And why did he left the scene at that critical moment? If he knew the police would act violently, why didn’t he step down and protect his people? Why did he let his supporters down and let them walked into danger by themselves? No wonder Mr. Benji Lim expressed his anger during the PKR press conference yesterday.
Had they really wanted to organise a peaceful assembly, why couldn’t they agree with the police and settle for a stadium? In a stadium, it is much easier to control a large crowd and there is a less chances of starting violence within the assembly. With the crowd being led away from public roads and private buildings, tourists would not be scared off and this would not disrupt the sales of the shops around the city area as well; thus causing less unrest and possible damage caused. Why are they insisting on using the Dataran Medeka when the police rejects their request for their own safety? Or do they has hidden plans as been said, debated and discussed around the social media.
As a free citizen of a peaceful, democratic country, I wouldn’t want my country to be ruled by unruly mobs who would in the end cause insecurity as what happened in Egypt, Libya and several more during the Arab Spring.
The writer, Aiman Amani says: I am 17 and among my hobbies are sketching, writing, collecting stamps, coins, bank notes, stickers and seashells. And my blog is where I write about myself, things that goes on around me or things that I wish to share with everyone
Pelajar Malaysia tajaan MARA, Asyraf Haziq, diserang dan dirompak di Barking, London. Dia keluar untuk membeli juadah berbuka puasa.
Beliau kini dirawat di Royal London Hospital untuk pembedahan rahang.
Rakyat Malaysia mengiringi doa untuk beliau dan keselamatan rakyat Malaysia yang lain.
MARA-Sponsored Student Injured In London Riots
BANGI, Aug 9 (Bernama) — A MARA-sponsored accountancy student was injured during riots in North London Monday.
Rural and Regional Development Minister Datuk Seri Mohd Shafie Apdal, however, said the Selangor-born student, Asyraf Hazlan, in his 20s, only sustained jaw injury and was currently being treated at the Royal London Hospital.
“The student was not involved in the riots, but was attacked by a group of rioters when trying to get out of a subway train. He was heading to North London to break fast with a friend when the incident occurred.
“He was also beaten and robbed but was later taken to hospital where he would probably undergo a minor surgery,” he told reporters after breaking fast with the ministry’s staff at the Institute for Rural Advancement (Infra) here Tuesday.
Mohd Shafie said Asyraf’s family had also been informed about the incident.
The minister said MARA had also taken precautionary measures to relocate its students from the high-risk areas to Leicester Square to ensure their safety.
– BERNAMA
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk
In 1998, aged 17, my son John Walker Lindh travelled to Yemen to study Islam and learn Arabic. In April 2001 he went to Afghanistan. Then 9/11 happened. He was captured by US troops, tortured, and jailed for 20 years, an innocent victim of America’s ‘war on terror’.
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Frank Lindh - The Observer, Sunday 10 July 2011
John Walker Lindh following his capture by US troops in December 2001. Photograph: Getty Images
John Phillip Walker Lindh, my son, was raised a Roman Catholic, but con he was 16 years old. He has an older brother and a younger sister. John is scholarly and devout, devoted to his family, and blessed with a powerful intellect, a curious mind, and a wry sense of humour.
Labelled by the American government as “Detainee 001″ in the “war on terror”, John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Indiana. He has been a prisoner of the American government since 1 December 2001, less than three months after the terror attacks of 9/11.
John is entirely innocent of any involvement in the terror attacks, or any allegiance to terrorism. That is not disputed by the American government. Indeed, all accusations of terrorism against John were dropped by the government in a plea bargain, which in turn was approved by the US district court in which the case was brought.
Despite its proud history as a stable constitutional democracy, the US has, for 10 years, been affected by post-traumatic shock, following the horrific events of 11 September 2001. I can find no other explanation for the barbaric mistreatment and continued detention of a gentle young man like John Lindh.
John Walker Lindh, aged 15, with his father, Frank, on a family holiday, 1996. Photograph courtesy of Lindh family
John is blessed with a calm and curious nature. As a child, he was more sceptical than our other two children about such things as Santa Claus. When he was 12 years old, he saw the film Malcolm X, and was moved by its depiction of the pilgrims in Mecca. He began to explore Islam and, four years later, decided to convert.
What attracted John to Islam, I think, was the simplicity of its beliefs, and the authenticity of its source documents – the Qur’an and Hadith. It appealed to his intellect as well as his heart. To me and to John’s mother, his conversion was a positive development and certainly not a source of worry. I once told him I felt he had always been a Muslim, and only needed to find Islam in order to discover this in himself. He remained the loving son and brother he had always been. There was never a breach of any kind between us.
John had always been a good student, but his study habits improved after his conversion. He immersed himself in Islamic literature, and quickly came to the conclusion that he needed to learn Arabic in order to continue his studies.
In 1998, at the age of 17, John left home in California and travelled to Sana’a, the ancient capital of Yemen, where he embarked on a rigorous course of study. He was determined not only to become fluent in Arabic, but also to pursue an education in the old traditions of Islam. He returned home briefly in 1999, and then returned to Yemen in February 2000, just before his 19th birthday. John’s mother and I supported him, emotionally and financially. He remained in close contact with us and with his sister and brother while overseas.
In September 2000, John told me he intended to continue his studies in Pakistan, focusing on Arabic grammar and Qur’an memorisation. I wrote back: “I trust your judgment and hope you have a wonderful adventure.” He arrived in Pakistan in November 2000 and enrolled in a Qur’an memorisation programme in a madrasa.
John’s letters home showed passionate enthusiasm for both Yemen and Pakistan. He loved the cultures he discovered in both countries. He was a Muslim in a Muslim world.
In late April 2001, John wrote to me and his mother, saying he planned to go into the mountains to escape the oppressive summer heat. We had no further contact from him for seven months. Unbeknown to us, he crossed the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, with the intent of volunteering for service in the Afghan army under the control of the Taliban government.
John’s mother and I grew increasingly worried as the summer passed. John had warned us that there might be gaps in his contact with us, as there were no internet cafes in the mountains of Pakistan from which to send emails. But we did not anticipate such a complete lapse in correspondence from him. We also never guessed he was in Afghanistan rather than Pakistan. John’s mother, especially, was frantic with worry as the months passed with no word from him.
At that time, the Taliban governed most of Afghanistan, and were engaged in a long-running civil war against a Russian-backed insurgency known euphemistically as the Northern Alliance. John was quickly accepted as a volunteer soldier, and received two months of infantry training in a Taliban military camp before being dispatched to the front lines.
Rohan Gunaratna, an international terrorism expert and author of the book Inside Al-Qaeda: Global Network of Terror, conducted a lengthy interview with John, and prepared a written report for the American court to which John was brought for trial. Gunaratna is an expert consultant to the US government itself on terrorism matters. “Those who, like Mr Lindh, merely fought the Northern Alliance,” he wrote, “cannot be deemed terrorists. Their motivation was to serve and to protect suffering Muslims in Afghanistan, not to kill civilians.”
John described his motivation in similar terms. “I felt,” he later explained to the court, “that I had an obligation to assist what I perceived to be an Islamic liberation movement against the warlords who were occupying several provinces in northern Afghanistan. I had learned from books, articles and individuals with first-hand experience of numerous atrocities committed by the Northern Alliance against civilians. I had heard reports of massacres, child rape, torture and castration.”
To the western world, and to me as John’s father after I learned where he had been, this was misplaced idealism. John’s decision to volunteer for the army of Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban was rash, and failed to take into account the Taliban’s mistreatment of its own citizens. But his assessment of the Northern Alliance warlords was neither exaggerated nor inaccurate. The brutal human rights violations committed by the Northern Alliance were thoroughly documented in the US department of state’s annual human rights reports throughout the 90s. They did indeed include massacres, rape (of both women and children), torture and castration.
John’s impulse was to help. In doing so, he was responding not only to his own conscience, but to a central tenet of the Islamic faith, which calls upon able-bodied young men to defend innocent Muslim civilians from attack, through military service if necessary. This is not “terrorism” at all, but precisely its opposite.
From the time of the Soviet invasion in 1979, tens of thousands of young Muslim men from all over the world had volunteered, as John did, for military service in Afghanistan. It was comparable to the influx of young volunteer soldiers in support of the republic of Spain during the Spanish civil war.
These young soldiers performed heroically in the defeat of the Soviet Union. Their cause was openly supported by the American government itself, particularly during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who took office two weeks before John’s birth in early 1981.
In March 1982, President Reagan declared: “Every country and every people has a stake in the Afghan resistance, for the freedom fighters of Afghanistan are defending principles of independence and freedom that form the basis of global security and stability.” In March 1983, he cited “the Afghan freedom fighters” as “an example to all the world of the invincibility of the ideals we in this country hold most dear, the ideals of freedom and independence”. In a March 1985 speech, he said: “They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help… They are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers and the brave men and women of the French resistance. We cannot turn away from them.”
Given the history of US involvement in Afghanistan, it would seem absurd to suggest that John Lindh was being disloyal to America when he went into Afghanistan in 2001 and joined the army there. If the march of history could be arrested in the spring or summer of 2001, John’s odyssey might be regarded as quixotic and unusual for a young American, but not in the least bit sinister, and certainly not criminal in nature. In fact, John’s concern about the suffering of people in Afghanistan was shared by his own government. On 21 July 2000, for example, the US department of state issued a “fact sheet” that reported that the US was “the largest single donor of humanitarian aid to the Afghan people”.
The US also provided substantial economic assistance directly to the Taliban government. In May 2001, for example, the American government under President George W Bush announced a grant of $43m to the Taliban government for opium eradication. Secretary of State Colin Powell personally announced the grant himself in a press release and pledged: “We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans.” The New York Times called this “a first, cautious step toward reducing the isolation of the Taliban” by the new Bush administration.
This is not to suggest the US was entirely friendly with the Taliban. In 1999, President Clinton placed the Taliban government under economic sanctions as a consequence of its human rights violations, particularly against women. But there were no hostilities between the US and the Taliban, and by 2001 relations were improving.
In his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell describes a nightmarish world of perpetual war, in which two massive nations, Oceania and Eastasia, are aligned against a third nation state known as Eurasia. The alliance between Oceania and Eastasia ends, and Eastasia then begins fighting alongside Eurasia against Oceania. In what Orwell famously called “doublethink”, the population of Oceania then is taught to believe “we have always been at war with Eastasia”.
Something eerily similar happened in the US after 9/11. Thirty years of American policy abruptly changed and America swung to the opposite side. The Taliban became our enemy. “They have always been our enemy” is what people in America came to believe.
In October 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan and aligned itself with the Northern Alliance in order to oust the Taliban government. Colin Powell’s April press release was quietly removed from the state department’s website.
In early September 2001, days before the 9/11 attacks, John arrived at his military post in the province of Takhar in the far north-eastern corner of Afghanistan, near the border of Tajikistan. This was the frontline in the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. John was issued with a rifle and two hand grenades – standard issue for an infantry soldier. He performed sentry duty and did some cooking for the Taliban troops. He never used his weapons. He served with a number of other foreign volunteer soldiers. They were called Ansar, an Arabic term meaning “helpers”.
The training camp in Afghanistan where the Ansar received their infantry training was funded by Osama bin Laden, who also visited the camp on a regular basis. He was regarded by the volunteer soldiers as a hero in the struggle against the Soviet Union. These soldiers did not suspect Bin Laden’s involvement in planning the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out in secret. John himself sat through speeches by Bin Laden in the camp on two occasions, and actually met Bin Laden on the second such occasion. John has said he found him unimpressive.
After 9/11, America’s intelligence agencies came under intense scrutiny for their failure to anticipate and prevent the attacks, and their apparent inability to track down Osama bin Laden. It is a curious fact of history that John Lindh, an idealistic 20-year-old Californian, suspecting nothing of bin Laden’s connections to terrorism, was able without difficulty to meet this notorious figure in the summer of 2001. Why American intelligence agents were unable to do so remains unexplained. John himself did not believe he was encountering a terrorist. John knew only that bin Laden had been generous in funding the military camp, and he was able to discern that Bin Laden was not a legitimate scholar or leader in the traditions of Islam.
The American invasion of Afghanistan commenced in October 2001. Few American troops were deployed in the northern reaches of Afghanistan. The Americans relied on Northern Alliance forces as their proxy, combined with aerial bombing, to displace the Taliban forces.
The front between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in Takhar where John was stationed quickly dissolved after the bombing commenced. Taliban troops fled in panicked retreat to Kunduz. They marched without stop for two days, covering a distance of 50 miles of harsh, desert terrain. The conditions were hellish. The Northern Alliance troops killed all stragglers who fell behind, often castrating them before killing them.
The soldiers at Kunduz who wished to surrender faced a terrible dilemma. For years it had been the practice of the Northern Alliance to torture and murder prisoners of war. These crimes were legendary and well known to both the Taliban soldiers and the US government.
John’s lawyers later obtained from the American government an unclassified cable sent from the US embassy in Kunduz on 20 November 2001, to Colin Powell and the joint chiefs of staff. The cable was labelled “priority”. It bore the subject line: “Kunduz representatives appeal for a bombing halt during surrender negotiations.” It said that, according to local authorities in Kunduz, Taliban soldiers trapped in Kunduz “wanted to surrender to someone who would not kill them”. This was described as a “sticking point” in the surrender negotiations. The Taliban, according to the cable, had “proposed surrendering to the US or the UN”. The cable confirmed that the American authorities had informed their counterparts in Kunduz that “neither was a realistic option and suggested that they seek the [Red Cross's] involvement if they had not done so already”.
On 21 November 2001, the regional Taliban military leader, Mullah Fazel Mazloom, entered into face-to-face surrender negotiations with General Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance. The pact was destined not to end well. Dostum was a notorious figure who had served as an officer in the Soviet occupation government. Troops under Dostum’s command were believed responsible for the mass execution of an alleged 2,000 Taliban prisoners captured near Mazar-i-Sharif in 1997. The New Yorker magazine has referred to Dostum as “perhaps Afghanistan’s most notorious warlord”, a man who is “viewed by most human rights organisations as among the worst war criminals in the country”.
Nonetheless, a bargain was reached in which Dostum demanded and received a large cash payment, then agreed to grant approximately 400 disarmed Taliban soldiers safe passage through Dostum-controlled territory to the city of Herat. John, in haggard condition after the march through Takhar, was among those 400 troops.
The Taliban soldiers had no sooner laid down their arms when Dostum breached the agreement. Instead of the safe passage they had been promised, the soldiers were loaded into trucks and diverted to the ancient Qala-i-Jangi fortress on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif. As the prisoners were being unloaded in the courtyard, John heard a loud explosion when one of the prisoners detonated a grenade that he had concealed. Two of Dostum’s men were killed in the blast.
Dostum’s soldiers quickly regained control, but they were infuriated. The prisoners were crowded into the basement of a sturdy, pink Soviet-built classroom building adjacent to a horse pasture. The “pink building”, as it became known, was at the centre of the events that unfolded over the next seven days. It was dark in the basement rooms into which the 400 men were crowded. To retaliate for the earlier attack, Dostum’s men dropped a grenade down an air duct that wounded or killed several prisoners, narrowly missing John, who spent the night crouched in a corner unable to sleep.
The next morning, Sunday 25 November, was sunny and warm at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress. Video footage shows a seemingly calm scene as the prisoners, with arms tied behind backs, are led out of the basement and made to kneel in rows in the horse pasture beside the pink building. The main sound on the film is the chirping of hundreds of birds. Dostum’s men were rough. Some prisoners were kicked and beaten with sticks. John was hit in the back of the head and nearly knocked unconscious. Nonetheless, he hoped they would be released for the agreed upon journey to Herat.
Although there were no US or British troops at the fortress that morning, two American intelligence agents were present, dressed in civilian clothes. They circulated among the prisoners, occasionally giving instructions to Dostum’s guards. One of them, Dave Tyson, was dressed in a long Afghan shirt and carried a large gun and a video camera. The other, Johnny “Mike” Spann, a former marine, was dressed in a black shirt and jeans. He was also armed. As they moved among the prisoners, they singled out captives for interrogation. They never identified themselves as American agents, and so they appeared to John and the other prisoners to be mercenaries working directly for General Dostum.
John was spotted and removed from the body of prisoners for questioning. The moment was recorded on video and later seen by millions on television.
In the video, John sits mutely on the ground as he is questioned about his nationality.
“Irish? Ireland?” Spann asks.
John remains silent.
“Who brought you here?… You believe in what you are doing that much, you’re willing to be killed here?”
Still no reply.
John Walker Lindh at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress on 3 December 2001, awaiting treatment from the Red Cross, having been captured by US forces. Photograph: James Hill/Getty Images
Tyson to Spann [for John's benefit]: “The problem is, he’s got to decide if he wants to live or die, and die here. We’re just going to leave him, and he’s going to [expletive] sit in prison the rest of his [expletive] short life. It’s his decision, man. We can only help the guys who want to talk to us. We can only get the Red Cross to help so many guys.”
I think it was apparent that Spann and Tyson were American agents, but because they were in the company of Dostum’s forces, unaccompanied by American troops, it clearly was not safe for John to talk to them. They meant business when they said John might be killed by Dostum, and that the Red Cross could only “help so many guys”. John was in extreme peril at that moment, and he knew it.
John was then returned to the main body of prisoners, while others were still being brought out of the basement and forced to kneel in the horse pasture. Then, suddenly, there was an explosion at the entrance to the basement, shouts were heard, and two prisoners grabbed the guards’ weapons. According to Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s account: “It was then… that Spann ‘did a Rambo’. As the remaining guards ran away, Spann flung himself to the ground and began raking the courtyard and its prisoners with automatic fire. Five or six prisoners jumped on him, and he disappeared beneath a heap of bodies.”
Spann’s body was later recovered by US special forces troops. He was the first American to die in combat in the American–Afghan war. He was buried with full military honours at Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington.
As soon as the uprising began, the Northern Alliance guards turned their weapons on the 400 bound prisoners, killing or severely wounding scores of them. Some prisoners tried to stand and run; they were gunned down. It was a slaughter. John tried to run, but he was shot in the right thigh and fell to the ground. For the next 12 hours he lay motionless, pretending to be dead.
There were two groups of Taliban prisoners in the fortress: those who chose to fight and those who hunkered down in the basement of the pink building and tried to survive. John was in the latter group. The prisoners who fought put up a fierce resistance, looting buildings for weapons and ammunition, firing from windows, rooftops, and ditches. Using a satellite phone, Dave Tyson, who had just seen his colleague killed, telephoned the US embassy in Tashkent, shouting: “We have lost control. Send in helicopters and troops.” US air controllers stationed outside the fortress walls called in air strikes, which struck with devastating impact inside the fortress.
More air raids were staged the next day, Monday, when a massive 2,000lb bomb was dropped. It missed its intended target, the pink building, and hit Dostum’s soldiers. This “friendly fire” incident brought an end to the air strikes. For John and the other Taliban soldiers holed up in the basement of the pink building, the percussive effect of the bomb shook them to their bones and left them trembling.
By Wednesday, the last of the resisting Taliban fighters had been killed, and Dostum’s soldiers were once again in full control of the fortress. Luke Harding was allowed into the compound along with some other journalists, and he found a horrific scene: “We had expected slaughter, but I was unprepared for its hellish scale… It was hard to take it all in. The dead and various parts of the dead… turned up wherever you looked: in thickets of willows and poplars; in waterlogged ditches; in storage rooms piled with ammunition boxes.” Harding observed that many of the Taliban prisoners had died with their hands tied behind their backs.
On Wednesday and Thursday, Dostum’s troops engaged in a sustained effort to kill the Taliban survivors who remained in the basement of the pink building, which they were afraid to enter themselves. More grenades were dropped down the air ducts and RPGs were fired directly into the basement. John received shrapnel wounds in his shoulder, back, ankle and calf, in addition to the bullet still lodged in his thigh. At one point, fuel was poured down the air ducts and a fire was ignited in which some fuel-drenched prisoners were burned to death. John, choking on the black smoke, lost consciousness. He awoke with the taste of gasoline in his mouth and loud explosions in the hall, as more rockets and grenades ricocheted through the basement.
On Friday, Dostum’s troops tried yet another tactic. They flooded the basement with cold water. Unable to stand on his own, John braced himself on a stick and a fellow soldier for the next 24 hours to avoid drowning in the waist-deep water, which was full of blood and waste. The next morning no one inside the fortress thought it possible that anyone was still alive in the pink building, but 86 of the prisoners had managed to survive the week-long ordeal. One of them was John Lindh.
On Saturday 1 December, the Red Cross arrived at the fortress and the survivors, who for several days had been trying to surrender, were finally allowed to exit the basement. When they emerged into the bright sunlight, they encountered a confusing horde of journalists, Red Cross workers, Dostum’s soldiers, and British and American troops.
That evening John and the other survivors were taken to a prison hospital in Sheberghan. Although wet and cold from the flooding of the basement, they were transported in open bed trucks in the frigid night air. At Sheberghan, John was carried on a stretcher and set down in a small room with approximately 15 other prisoners. CNN correspondent Robert Pelton came in accompanied by a US special forces soldier and a cameraman. Despite John’s protests, Pelton persisted in filming John and asking questions as an American medical officer administered morphine intravenously. By the time he departed a short time later, Pelton had captured on videotape an interview in which John said that his “heart had become attached” to the Taliban, that every Muslim aspired to become a shahid, or martyr, and that he had attended a training camp funded by Osama bin Laden.
The CNN interview became a sensation in the US. By mid-December, virtually every newspaper in America was running front-page stories about the American Taliban, and the broadcast media were saturated with features and commentary about John. Here was a “traitor” who had “fought against America” and aligned himself with the 11 September terrorists. Newsweek magazine published an issue with John’s photograph on the cover, under the caption “American Taliban”.
Beginning in early December, President Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney, members of the cabinet and other officials then embarked on a series of truly extraordinary public statements about John, referring to him repeatedly as an “al-Qaida fighter”, a terrorist and a traitor. I think it fair to say there has never been a case quite like this in the history of the US, in which officials at the highest levels of the government made such prejudicial statements about an individual citizen who had not yet been charged with any crime.
I will offer only a small sample of these statements. In an interview at the White House on 21 December 2001, President Bush said John was “the first American al-Qaida fighter that we have captured”. Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defence, told reporters at a press briefing that John had been “captured by US forces with an AK-47 in his hands”. Colin Powell, secretary of state, said John had “brought shame upon his family”. Rudy Giuliani, New York mayor, remarked: “I believe the death penalty is the appropriate remedy to consider.”
John Ashcroft, the US attorney general, staged two televised press conferences in which he accused John of attacking the US. “Americans who love their country do not dedicate themselves to killing Americans,” he declared.
A federal judge took the unusual step of writing to the New York Timescriticising the attorney general for violating “Justice Department guidelines on the release of information related to criminal proceedings that are intended to ensure that a defendant is not prejudiced when such an announcement is made”.
Even the ultra-conservative National Review thought Ashcroft had gone too far in making such prejudicial comments about a pending prosecution. It criticised the comments as “inappropriate” and “gratuitous”, stating that in the future “it would be better for the attorney general simply to announce the facts of the indictments, and to avoid extra comments which might unintentionally imperil successful prosecutions”.
I am a lawyer, trained in the law, with more than 25 years of experience. Never have I seen or read about a case in which a person accused of a crime was so conspicuously deprived of what we call “the presumption of innocence”. On the contrary, my son was presumed guilty, not only by government officials but by the entire mainstream journalism and media establishment in America. It was – and still is – widely reported in America that John Lindh is a “terrorist” who fought against the US.
Our lives back home were completely upturned by the sudden and pervasive notoriety of John’s case. We found ourselves dodging television cameras and reporters. In the first couple of days after John’s capture, I appeared on several news programmes in an effort to explain who John was and to ask for mercy. My sense of privacy and anonymity were at least temporarily destroyed.
All of us in John’s family also were wracked with anxiety about John’s own physical and emotional wellbeing. We had no source of information about John from within the government itself. They were holding our son incommunicado, even as President Bush and other officials made repeated statements about him. Anything we were able to learn about John came from the news media, not from the government.
Happily, our neighbours, friends, co-workers and even strangers in California were uniformly warm and supportive towards me, John’s mother and our other children. One Sunday, on my way to church, a friendly stranger stopped his car and shouted to me: “How’s John?”
Another enormous source of comfort to us came from James Brosnahan, a distinguished and courageous trial lawyer in San Francisco who agreed to represent John. On 3 December, Brosnahan took up his case, and from that day forward we had a valiant defender in him and the other lawyers who worked on the defence team. It felt as if a protective shield had been constructed around John and all of us in the family.
Once John was in the custody of the US military, the US government had to decide what to do with him. The FBI has estimated that during the 90s as many as 2,000 American citizens travelled to Muslim lands to take up arms voluntarily, and that as many as 400 American Muslims received training in military camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. None of these American citizens was indicted, or labelled as traitor and terrorist. They were simply ignored by their government, which made no attempt to interfere with their travel. But the 9/11 attacks changed everything, and it was the timing of John’s capture that contributed to his fate. It soon became apparent to me that, rather than simply repatriate my wounded son, the government was intent on prosecuting him as a “terrorist”.
In the days and weeks that followed, John endured abuse from the US military that exceeded the bounds of what any civilised nation should tolerate, even in time of war. Donald Rumsfeld directly ordered the military to “take the gloves off” in questioning John.
John Walker Lindh’s father, Frank, and mother, Marilyn, outside the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, 2002. Photograph: Hillery Smith Garrison/AP
On 7 December, wounded and still suffering from the effects of the trauma at Qala-i-Jangi, John was flown to Camp Rhino, a US marine base approximately 70 miles south of Kandahar. There he was taunted and threatened, stripped of his clothing, and bound naked to a stretcher with duct tape wrapped around his chest, arms, and ankles. Even before he got to Camp Rhino, John’s wrists and ankles were bound with plastic restraints that caused severe pain and left permanent scars – sure proof of torture. Still blindfolded, he was locked in an unheated metal shipping container that sat on the desert floor. He shivered uncontrollably in the bitter cold. Soldiers outside pounded on the sides, threatening to kill him.After two days in these circumstances, John was removed from the shipping container and taken into a building at Camp Rhino. When his blindfold was removed, John found himself in front of a man who identified himself as an FBI agent and then read from an advice-of-rights form. When the agent reached the part that concerned right to counsel, he said: “Of course, there are no lawyers here.” John was not told his mother and I had retained an attorney for him who was ready and willing to travel to Afghanistan. Worried that he would be returned to the shipping container if he did not sign the form, John signed the waiver.
A lengthy interrogation followed, after which US military personnel put John back in the metal shipping container, although this time his leg restraints were loosened and he was no longer bound by duct tape or blindfolded. On 14 December, he was placed on board the USS Peleliu, where navy physicians observed that he was suffering from dehydration, hypothermia, and frostbite, and that he could not walk. On 15 December, the bullet was finally removed from his leg in a surgical procedure – more than two weeks after he had been transferred to the custody of the US military. The doctor who removed the bullet later told John’s lawyers there had been little or no healing of the wound, which he attributed to malnutrition and cold.
In June 2002, Newsweek obtained copies of internal email messages from the justice department’s ethics office commenting on the Lindh case as the events were unfolding in December 2001. The office specifically warned in advance against the interrogation tactics the FBI used at Camp Rhino, and concluded that the interrogation of John without his lawyer present would be unlawful and unethical. This advice was ignored by the FBI agent who conducted the interrogation.
Interestingly, in an 10 December email, one of the justice department ethics lawyers noted: “At present, we have no knowledge that he did anything other than join the Taliban.”
The government brought 10 counts against John in its overblown indictment. “If convicted of these charges,” attorney general Ashcroft boasted, “Walker Lindh could receive multiple life sentences, six additional 10-year sentences, plus 30 years.” The most serious count was a charge of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the death of Mike Spann. The charge was groundless: the prisoner uprising at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress had been spontaneous and John was also a victim, not a participant.
John arrived back in the US on 23 January 2002 in chains aboard a military plane that landed at Washington Dulles International airport. The government selected Dulles so they could bring charges against John in northern Virginia, near the Pentagon (one of the 9/11 targets), where hostility against John was assured. He was flown by helicopter to the Alexandria City Jail. John’s mother and I tried to visit him that night, along with the lawyers we had retained for him, but we were turned away. We finally were able to see our son the next morning in a holding cell on the first floor of the US courthouse. His lawyers met him only briefly before his first appearance in the court that morning.
The case of United States of America v John Philip Walker Lindh was set for trial before Judge T S Ellis III. On 24 January, the judge announced he was setting a trial date for late August. We were horrified, as this would ensure that John would be on trial on the first anniversary of 9/11. It would be hard to conceive of a more prejudicial circumstance for a criminal defendant, especially in the wake of the intemperate statements attorney general Ashcroft had made in his two press conferences.
John’s lawyers filed a motion to “suppress” the statements that had been extracted him under duress at Camp Rhino. A hearing was scheduled in July 2001, which would have included testimony by John and others about the brutality he had suffered at the hands of US soldiers. On the eve of the hearing, the government prosecutors approached John’s attorneys and negotiated a plea agreement. It was apparent they did not want evidence of John’s torture to be introduced in court.
In the plea agreement John acknowledged that by serving as a soldier in Afghanistan he had violated the anti-Taliban economic sanctions imposed by President Clinton and extended by President Bush. This was, as John’s lawyer pointed out, a “regulatory infraction”. John also agreed to a “weapons charge”, which was used to enhance his prison sentence. In particular, he acknowledged that he had carried a rifle and two grenades while serving as a soldier in the Taliban army. All of the other counts in the indictment were dropped by the government, including the terrorism charges the attorney general had so strongly emphasised and the charge of conspiracy to commit murder in the death of Mike Spann.
At the insistence of defence secretary Rumsfeld, the plea agreement also included a clause in which John relinquished his claims of torture.
The punishment in the plea agreement was by any measure harsh: 20 years of imprisonment, commencing on 1 December 2001, the day John came into the hands of US forces in Afghanistan. The prosecutors told John’s attorneys that the White House insisted on the lengthy sentence, and that they could not negotiate downward.
On 4 October 2002, the judge approved the plea agreement as “just and reasonable” and sentenced John to prison. Before the sentence was pronounced, John was allowed to read a prepared statement, which provided a moment of intense drama in the crowded courtroom. He spoke with strong emotion. He explained why he had gone to Afghanistan to help the Taliban in their fight with the Northern Alliance, saying it arose from his compassion for the suffering of ordinary people who had been subjected to atrocities committed by the Northern Alliance. He explained that when he went to Afghanistan he “saw the war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance as a continuation of the war between the mujahideen and the Soviets”.
John strongly condemned terrorism. “I went to Afghanistan with the intention of fighting against terrorism and oppression.” He had acted, he said, out of a sense of religious duty and he condemned terrorism as being “completely against Islam”. He said: “I have never supported terrorism in any form and never would.”
After a brief recess, the judge granted a request by John Spann, the father of Mike Spann, to address the court and express his dissatisfaction with the plea agreement. He began by saying that he, his family, and many other people believed that John had played a role in the killing of Mike Spann. Judge Ellis interrupted and said: “Let me be clear about that. The government has no evidence of that.” Spann responded: “I understand.” The judge politely explained that the “suspicions, the inferences you draw from the facts are not enough to warrant a jury conviction”. He said that Mike Spann had died a hero, and that among the things he died for was the principle that “we don’t convict people in the absence of proof beyond a reasonable doubt”.
Osama bin Laden is dead. John Lindh, now 30 years old, remains in prison. He spends most of his time pursuing his study of the Qur’an and Islamic scholarship. He also reads widely in a variety of nonfiction subjects, especially history and politics. He remains a devout Muslim.
As a father, I am grateful that John survived his ordeal, and I am pleased that he maintains his good-natured disposition. I am especially proud of the dignity he displayed throughout his ordeal overseas and in court.
Other than his lawyers, the only visitors John has been permitted during all his years in prison are those of us in his immediate family. We treasure these visits. We are not allowed any sort of physical contact with John, and are kept separated from him by a glass partition. We must speak via telephones, and everything we say is monitored and recorded by a government agent who sits in an adjoining room. Despite these constraints, our conversations are free-flowing and punctuated with humour.
A commentator at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University called this “a petty prosecution” that was “unworthy of a great country”. But it was more than petty, in my view; it was brutally inhumane.
My hope and prayer is that at some point rational, fair-minded officials in the American government will see the wisdom in releasing John from prison, rather than making him serve the entire 20-year sentence. His continued incarceration serves no good purpose. Releasing John from prison would help restore America’s image in the world, and particularly among Muslim people, as a humane country committed to the rule of law.
The author has donated the fee for this article to charity.
http://news.yahoo.com
Culturally Clueless and Politically Tonedeaf, U.S. Gave Bin Laden the Martyrdom He Craved
NEW YORK–The assassination of Osama bin Laden was masterfully orchestrated to appeal to American media consumers. But it will play poorly overseas.
President Obama’s Sunday evening announcement, timed to fill Monday’s papers with a sickening orgy of gleeful triumph but little information, prompted bipartisan high-fives and hoots all around. “U-S-A! U-S-A!” chanted a mob of drunken oafs in front of the White House. Blending the low satire of two Bush-era classic send-ups of a nation allergic to self-reflection, “Team America: World Police” and “Idiocracy,” they set the tone for a week or a month or whatever of troop-praising, God-blessing-America, frat-boy self-backslapping. “So that’s what success looks like,” wrote New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley in the paper’s special ten-page “The Death of Bin Laden” pull-out section.
Success for Obama, certainly. He’ll see a much-needed bump in the polls. But it won’t last. Eventually the unemployed will wonder why the president devotes so many resources to killing one man but so little to them.
On the geopolitical front, the CIA’s ballyhooed Bin Laden takedown operation couldn’t possibly have been handled any worse. The War on Terror, if it ever existed, is a war for the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims.
Remember?
It’s about them. Not us.
“Bin Laden wanted to die as a martyr. In this sense, his wish was obliged,” notes Stephen Diamond in Psychology Today.
You betcha.
Nothing was more important to Osama than to be seen as a brave soldier in an epic clash of civilizations. Claims that he hardly saw combat during the anti-Soviet resistance of the 1980s hurt him. The soft son of a Saudi billionaire and a former mother’s boy, Osama wanted to prove himself.
This past weekend, thanks to Navy SEALs, he did. He went out in a blaze of glory, like Scarface. His status as a martyr, as a legend of jihad, is assured.
Yet another screw-up for the U.S., which fell into Bin Laden’s trap after 9/11. To Al Qaeda and other Islamist groups, the United States and the West is enemy #2. Their biggest foe is pro-American Muslim dictators and autocrats, and the apathy and indifference among Muslims that allows them to remain in power.
As with most actions carried out by small terrorist groups against enemies with superior manpower and weaponry, the operations attributed to Bin Laden–the bombings of the U.S. embassies in east Africa in 1998 and the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and 9/11–were intended to provoke the U.S. into overreacting, thus exposing it as the monster he said it was. The invasions of two Muslim countries, Guantánamo, torture, Abu Ghraib, the secret prisons and disappearances and all the rest neatly fit into Osama Bin Laden’s narrative, proving his point more succinctly than a zillion fatwas faxed into Al Jazeera.
Everything about Bin Laden’s killing squares with the jihadi narrative.
The operation violated the sovereignty of a Muslim country, a constant complaint of radical jihadis. Armed commandos lawlessly invaded Pakistan. Infidel soldiers shot up a house and crashed a helicopter down the street from a military academy. Pakistanis see American drone planes buzzing around overhead, invading their airspace without the thinnest veneer of legality; American missiles blow up houses indiscriminately. Taking out Bin Laden without asking Pakistan’s government for permission is an act of war to which the country’s poverty permits no response. It’s yet another humiliation, another triumph of might over right.
Much will be made of the disrespectful treatment of Bin Laden’s body.
In an echo of Bush’s selection of Guantánamo as a extraterritorial not-U.S.-not-foreign no man’s land, the Obama Administration claimed that it buried Bin Laden at sea because it couldn’t find a country to accept his body within the required 24 hours after death, and to avoid the possibility that his grave would become a shrine for Muslim extremists. However, Bin Laden’s Wahhabi sect of Islam allows neither shrines nor burial at sea.
Of course, few Americans care about respecting Muslim religious sensibilities. So this decision went over well in the States. Countless editorial cartoons depicted sharks feasting on the carcass of the Bogeyman of the Twin Towers.
But it will inflame Muslim purists. Worse than that, dumping Osama into the Indian Ocean feeds an image the United States would be smart to shake, of a superpower hell-bent on occupying Muslim lands, stealing their oil and trashing their religion.
On the hearts-and-minds front, Americans’ chest-thumping is a PR disaster.
“Rot in Hell,” blared the headline of the New York Daily News. “Justice has been done,” pundits and politicians claimed–a strange endorsement of extrajudicial assassination by a nation based on the rule of law.
“Triumphalism and unapologetic patriotism are in order,” wrote Eugene Robinson for The Washington Post. “We got the son of a bitch.”
Classy.
Islam teaches combatants to respect their enemies. The death of an opponent is tragic, sometimes a tragic necessity, but never trivial, never a subject for joking. A vanquished enemy should be dispatched quickly, presumably to be chastised by Allah for his wickedness in the afterlife, but he is never to be mocked. A Muslim should not enjoy war or combat, nor gloat when victorious. When the powerful crush the weak, as was the case with the U.S. killing of Bin Laden, dancing around like a beefy hunk of steroids spiking the football at the touchdown line makes one look small.
It also makes us look dumb. As anyone not drunk on bloodlust knows, the worst thing that could have happened to Osama Bin Laden would have been arrest followed by a fair trial.
(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)
Here is an excellent commentary on the “Ground Zero Mosque” made by Keith Theodore Olbermann during Monday (16 August 2010) night’s edition of “Countdown” on MSNBC. A must watch video (click here to view at Youtube).
As commented by Sidi Mas’ud Khan: “One of his best in relation to a Muslim issue.”
This is the article from Huffinton News on Olbermann commentary:
The “Ground Zero Mosque” is many things, but it is neither at ground zero nor is it really a mosque.
So argued Keith Olbermann during Monday night’s edition of “Countdown” on MSNBC.
In a Special Comment lasting twelve minutes, the commentator ripped into the case being made by critics of the Cordoba House. The proposed Muslim community center would be located two blocks away from the site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed on September 11, 2001 by Islamic extremists.
The thought of building the new facility — which would include a two-story prayer center — so close to the site of America’s worst terrorist attack, one perpetrated by followers of Islam, has been unsettling to a wide range of public figures, from Sarah Palin to Harry Reid. But it has also inspired people like Olbermann and others who hope to encourage religious worship that doesn’t resemble the extremism behind al Qaeda.
Olbermann opened his monologue by reciting from “First They Came…,” a poem that many attribute to Pastor Martin Niemöller. He went on to question Newt Gingrich’s grasp of history and the significance of Cordoba, Spain. And he didn’t exactly stop there.
previous related articles:
… after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001
Wikileaks documents suggest that incidences of the Taliban firing on US aircraft have been suppressed from public record. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-AhadThe legendary ability of small, shoulder-born missile launchers to transform the fortunes of otherwise crudely armed insurgents is one of the most alarming threats to emerge from the Wikileaks archive.
Soviet troops discovered in 1986 when the CIA decided to put heat-seeking Stinger missiles into the hands of the otherwise low-tech Afghan resistance, such weapons can make life impossible for modern armies.
A US soldier checks machine-gun sights at an outpost near Camp Tillman, Afghanistan, in October 2006 after rockets were fired into the base near the Pakistan border. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
As depicted in the Tom Hank’s film Charlie Wilson’s War, bearded warriors were able to stand on hilltops and blast the dreaded Russian attack helicopters out of the sky, ultimately forcing them to fly far higher, to much less effect.
That image still haunts Nato commanders who are all too aware of how much they rely on thousands of transport planes, helicopters and drone surveillance craft to kill insurgents from the air and move troops around an increasingly hostile theatre of war.
It has long been the international coalition’s claim that whilst the Taliban might try to acquire technology capable of shooting down aircraft they had failed to do so, and were unlikely to ever succeed.
Nonetheless, the risk is taken extremely seriously and the sight of distraction flares blasting out of the side of military helicopters are a regular sight in the skies above Afghanistan. The countermeasures, designed to confuse the heat seeking cone of the missile, are so sensitively calibrated they can be easily set off by a false alarm. But according to the WikiLeaks documents, there have been several cases of insurgents firing on US aircraft, all of which have been suppressed from the public record.
In May 2007 a US Chinook was hit by a missile in Helmand after it had departed from the Kajaki base in the north of the province, killing everyone on board, although the US claimed it had been downed by lucky shot from a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) which has no heat seeking capability.
The previous month the crew of a British Chinook had reported a missile flying 50ft past the aircraft before exploding. In July 2007, the crew of a C-130 transport plane reported that they had seen a rocket fly past them whilst they were refuelling at 11,000 feet. That event was actually reported by British journalist Tom Coghlan who quoted a military spokesman who said any such incidents were classified and could not be commented on.
An official at HQ ISAF said he too was unable to comment on any incident involving anti-aircraft missiles.
It is not clear why the coalition is so reluctant to publicly admit the risks posed to coalition aircraft by missiles.
British defence officials said there was no evidence of weapons bigger than RPGs being fired at helicopters, but insurgents are making greater efforts to shoot down helicopters, which they believe have great propaganda value for them.
“There is much greater focus on carefully coordinated attacks on helicopters by RPGs [rocket propelled grenades] or small arms”, a Ministry of Defence source said. The insurgents “are constantly watching us and adapting their tactics”, said a senior military official.
- The Afghan war logs reveal the difficulties encountered by US troops when they tried to talk to villagers. Photograph: John Moore/Getty Images
In the latest incident an American Cobra helicopter was shot at in Marjah in central Helmand province, sources told the Guardian.
David Cameron was forced last month to abandon a visit to British troops in Helmand province after an intelligence report suggested the Taliban was plotting to target an unnamed VIP. The prime minister’s Chinook helicopter diverted after five minutes in the air when the information was received.
Until very recently intelligence officials have argued that there was little risk that heat-seeking missiles ever be acquired by the Taliban, although the released military intelligence includes numerous reports of insurgent groups in individual provinces who were thought to have the capability as early as 2005.
A western diplomat recently told the Guardian that the Taliban could not access such weapons because they are not freely available on the black market run by the world’s private arms dealers.
Taliban fighters in the a madrasa near the northern city of Kundoz, Afghanistan. Photograph: Ghaith Abdul-Ahad for the Guardian
According to one unconfirmed April 1 2004 intelligence report, seven anti-aircraft missiles, originally acquired in Algeria, were sneaked over the porous Afghan border.
But one intelligence source told the Guardian that although Shia Iran is happy to provide limited support to insurgents, it would never want to see such weapons in the hands of a Sunni movement which it nearly went to war with in 1998 when the Taliban killed ten Iranian diplomats.
Another possibility is that the missiles were rare leftovers from the original stock of some 2,000-2,500 Stingers distributed to the mujahideen by the CIA.
Even though the missile launchers are unlikely to work because their batteries degrade over time, the CIA made a big effort in the 1990s trying to recover as many Stingers as possible, offering between $80,000 and $150,000 per weapon in a buyback programme.
source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/wikileaks-documents-taliban-missiles-aircraft
… after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.
The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.
The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.
The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.
As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.
The material comes to light as Congress and the public grow increasingly skeptical of the deepening involvement in Afghanistan and its chances for success as next year’s deadline to begin withdrawing troops looms.
The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.
The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:
• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.
• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.
• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.
Over all, the documents do not contradict official accounts of the war. But in some cases the documents show that the American military made misleading public statements — attributing the downing of a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking missiles or giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by Special Operations commandos.
White House officials vigorously denied that the Obama administration had presented a misleading portrait of the war in Afghanistan.
“On Dec. 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on Al Qaeda and Taliban safe-havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years,” said Gen. James L. Jones, White House national security adviser, in a statement released Sunday.
“We know that serious challenges lie ahead, but if Afghanistan is permitted to slide backwards, we will again face a threat from violent extremist groups like Al Qaeda who will have more space to plot and train,” the statement said.
General Jones also decried the decision by WikiLeaks to make the documents public, saying that the United States “strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.””
“WikiLeaks made no effort to contact us about these documents – the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted,” General Jones said.
The archive is clearly an incomplete record of the war. It is missing many references to seminal events and does not include more highly classified information. The documents also do not cover events in 2010, when the influx of more troops into Afghanistan began and a new counterinsurgency strategy took hold.
They suggest that the military’s internal assessments of the prospects for winning over the Afghan public, especially in the early days, were often optimistic, even naïve.
There are fleeting — even taunting — reminders of how the war began in the occasional references to the elusive Osama bin Laden. In some reports he is said to be attending meetings in Quetta, Pakistan. His money man is said to be flying from Iran to North Korea to buy weapons. Mr. bin Laden has supposedly ordered a suicide attack against the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. These reports all seem secondhand at best.
The reports portray a resilient, canny insurgency that has bled American forces through a war of small cuts. The insurgents set the war’s pace, usually fighting on ground of their own choosing and then slipping away.
Sabotage and trickery have been weapons every bit as potent as small arms, mortars or suicide bombers. So has Taliban intimidation of Afghan officials and civilians — applied with pinpoint pressure through threats, charm, violence, money, religious fervor and populist appeals.
FEB. 19, 2008 | ZABUL PROVINCE Intelligence Summary: Officer Threatened
An Afghan National Army brigade commander working in southern Afghanistan received a phone call from a Taliban mullah named Ezat, one brief report said. “Mullah Ezat told the ANA CDR to surrender and offered him $100,000(US) to quit working for the Afghan Army,” the report said. “Ezat also stated that he knows where the ANA CDR is from and knows his family.” Read the Document »
MAY 9, 2009 | KUNAR PROVINCE Intelligence Summary: Taliban Recruiter
A Taliban commander, Mullah Juma Khan, delivered a eulogy at the funeral of a slain insurgent. He played on the crowd’s emotions, according to the report: “Juma cried while telling the people an unnamed woman and her baby were killed while the woman was nursing the baby.” Finally he made his pitch: “Juma then told the people they needed to be angry at CF [Coalition Force] and ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] for causing this tragedy” and “invited everyone who wants to fight to join the fighters who traveled with him.” Read the Document »
The insurgents use a network of spies, double agents, collaborators and informers — anything to undercut coalition forces and the effort to build a credible and effective Afghan government capable of delivering security and services.
NOV. 20, 2007 | HELMAND PROVINCE Taliban militants drove through Musa Qala, a southern Afghan town, in a Ford pickup truck, that very kind of vehicle the United States had provided the Afghan Army and police force.
The reports repeatedly describe instances when the insurgents have been seen wearing government uniforms, and other times when they have roamed the country or appeared for battle in the very Ford Ranger pickup trucks that the United States had provided the Afghan Army and police force.
NOV. 20, 2006 | KABUL Incident Report: Insurgent Subterfuge
After capturing four pickup trucks from the Afghan National Army, the Taliban took them to Kabul to be used in suicide bombings. “They intend to use the pick-up trucks to target ANA compounds, ISAF and GOA convoys, as well as ranking GOA and ISAF officials,” said a report, referring to coalition forces and the government of Afghanistan. “The four trucks were also accompanied by an unknown quantity of ANA uniforms to facilitate carrying out the attacks.” Read the Document »
The Taliban’s use of heat-seeking missiles has not been publicly disclosed — indeed, the military has issued statements that these internal records contradict.
In the form known as a Stinger, such weapons were provided to a previous generation of Afghan insurgents by the United States, and helped drive out the Soviets. The reports suggest that the Taliban’s use of these missiles has been neither common nor especially effective; usually the 
missiles missed.
MAY 30, 2007 | HELMAND PROVINCE Incident Report: Downed Helicopter
An American CH-47 transport helicopter was struck by what witnesses described as a portable heat-seeking surface-to-air missile after taking off from a landing zone.
The helicopter, the initial report said, “was engaged and struck with a Missile … shortly after crossing over the Helmand River. The missile struck the aircraft in the left engine. The impact of the missile projected the aft end of the aircraft up as it burst into flames followed immediately by a nose dive into the crash site with no survivors.”
The crash killed seven soldiers: five Americans, a Briton and a Canadian.
Multiple witnesses saw a smoke trail behind the missile as it rushed toward the helicopter. The smoke trail was an important indicator. Rocket-propelled grenades do not leave them. Heat-seeking missiles do. The crew of other helicopters reported the downing as a surface-to-air missile strike. But that was not what a NATO spokesman told Reuters.
“Clearly, there were enemy fighters in the area,” said the spokesman, Maj. John Thomas. “It’s not impossible for small-arms fire to bring down a helicopter.”
The reports paint a disheartening picture of the Afghan police and soldiers at the center of the American exit strategy.
The Pentagon is spending billions to train the Afghan forces to secure the country. But the police have proved to be an especially risky investment and are often described as distrusted, even loathed, by Afghan civilians. The reports recount episodes of police brutality, corruption petty and large, extortion and kidnapping. Some police officers defect to the Taliban. Others are accused of collaborating with insurgents, arms smugglers and highway bandits. Afghan police officers defect with trucks or weapons, items captured during successful ambushes or raids.
MARCH 10, 2008 | PAKTIA PROVINCE Investigation Report: Extortion by the Police
This report captured the circular and frustrating effort by an American investigator to stop Afghan police officers at a checkpoint from extorting payments from motorists. After a line of drivers described how they were pressed to pay bribes, the American investigator and the local police detained the accused checkpoint police officers.
“While waiting,” the investigator wrote, “I asked the seven patrolmen we detained to sit and relax while we sorted through a problem without ever mentioning why they were being detained. Three of the patrolmen responded by saying that they had only taken money from the truck drivers to buy fuel for their generator.”
Two days later when the American followed up, he was told by police officers that the case had been dropped because the witness reports had all been lost. Read the Document »
One report documented the detention of a military base worker trying to leave the base with GPS units hidden under his clothes and taped to his leg. Another described the case of a police chief in Zurmat, in Paktia Province, who was accused of falsely reporting that his officers had been in a firefight so he could receive thousands of rounds of new ammunition, which he sold in a bazaar.
Coalition trainers report that episodes of cruelty by the Afghan police undermine the effort to build a credible security force to take over when the allies leave.
OCT. 11, 2009 | BALKH PROVINCE Incident Report: Brutal Police Chief
This report began with an account of Afghan soldiers and police officers harassing and beating local civilians for refusing to cooperate in a search. It then related the story of a district police commander who forced himself on a 16-year-old girl. When a civilian complained, the report continued, “The district commander ordered his bodyguard to open fire on the AC [Afghan civilian]. The bodyguard refused, at which time the district commander shot [the bodyguard] in front of the AC.”
Rivalries and friction between the largest Afghan security services — the police and the army — are evident in a number of reports. Sometimes the tensions erupted in outright clashes, as was recorded in the following report from last December that was described as an “enemy action.” The “enemy” in this case was the Afghan National Security Force.
DEC. 4, 2009 | ORUZGAN PROVINCE Incident Report: Police and Army Rivalry
A car accident turned deadly when an argument broke out between the police and the Afghan National Army. “The argument escalated and ANA & ANP started to shoot at each other,” a report said.
An Afghan soldier and three Afghan police officers were wounded in the shootout. One civilian was killed and six others were wounded by gunfire. Read the Document »
One sign of the weakness of the police is that in places they have been replaced by tribal warlords who are charged — informally but surely — with providing the security the government cannot. Often the warlords operate above the law.
NOV. 22, 2009 | KANDAHAR PROVINCE Incident Report: Illegal Checkpoint
A private security convoy, ferrying fuel from Kandahar to Oruzgan, was stopped by what was thought to be 100 insurgents armed with assault rifles and PK machine guns, a report said.
It turned out the convoy had been halted by “the local Chief of Police,” who was “demanding $2000-$3000 per truck” as a kind of toll. The chief, said the report, from NATO headquarters in Southern Afghanistan, “states he needs the money to run his operation.”
The chief was not actually a police chief. He was Matiullah Khan, a warlord and an American-backed ally of President Karzai who was arguably Oruzgan’s most powerful man. He had a contract, the Ministry of Interior said, to protect the road so NATO’s supply convoys could drive on it, but he had apparently decided to extort money from the convoys himself.
Late in the day, Mr. Matiullah, after many interventions, changed his mind. The report said that friendly forces “report that the COMPASS convoy is moving again and did not pay the fee required.”
APRIL 24, 2009 | PAKTIKA PROVINCE Members of a provincial reconstruction team tossed pencils to children in an eastern village. The teams have confronted problems like local corruption and cultural misunderstandings.
The documents show how the best intentions of Americans to help rebuild Afghanistan through provincial reconstruction teams ran up against a bewildering array of problems — from corruption to cultural misunderstandings — as they tried to win over the public by helping repair dams and bridges, build schools and train local authorities.
A series of reports from 2005 to 2008 chart the frustrations of one of the first such teams, assigned to Gardez, in Paktia Province.
NOV. 28, 2006 | PAKTIA PROVINCE Civil Affairs Report: Orphanage Opens
An American civil affairs officer could barely contain her enthusiasm as she spoke at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new orphanage, built with money from the American military.
The officer said a friend had given her a leather jacket to present to “someone special,” the report noted. She chose the orphanage’s director. “The commander stated that she could think of no one more deserving then someone who cared for orphans,” it said.
The civil affairs team handed out blankets, coats, scarves and toys. The governor even gave money from his own pocket. “All speeches were very positive,” the report concluded. Read the Document »
DEC. 20, 2006 | PAKTIA PROVINCE Civil Affairs Report: Not Many Orphans
The team dropped by to check on the orphanage. “We found very few orphans living there and could not find most of the HA [humanitarian assistance] we had given them,” the report noted.
The team raised the issue with the governor of Paktia, who said he was also concerned and suspected that the money he had donated had not reached the children. He visited the orphanage himself. Only 30 children were there; the director had claimed to have 102. Read the Document »
OCT. 16, 2007 | PAKTIA PROVINCE Civil Affairs Report: An Empty Orphanage
Nearly a year after the opening of the orphanage, the Americans returned for a visit. “There are currently no orphans at the facility due to the Holiday. (Note: orphans are defined as having no father, but may still have mother and a family structure that will have them home for holidays.)” Read the Document »
FEB. 25, 2007 | PAKTIA PROVINCE District Report: Lack of Resources
As the Taliban insurgency strengthened, the lack of a government presence in the more remote districts — and the government’s inability to provide security or resources even to its own officials — is evident in the reports.
An official from Dand Wa Patan, a small sliver of a district along the border with Pakistan, so urgently wanted to talk to the members of the American team that he traveled three and a half hours by taxi — he had no car — to meet them.
“He explained that the enemy had changed their tactics in the area and were no longer fighting from the mountains, no longer sending rockets toward his compound and other areas,” the report noted. “He stated that the enemy focus was on direct action and that his family was a primary target.”
Ten days earlier the Taliban crept up to the wall of his family compound and blew up one of the security towers, the report said. His son lost his legs in the explosion.
He pleaded for more police officers, weapons and ammunition. He also wanted a car so he could drive around the district he was supposed to oversee.
But the Americans’ situation was not much better. For months the reports show how a third — or even a half — of the team’s vehicles were out of service, awaiting spare parts.
NOV. 15, 2006 | PAKTIA PROVINCE Civil Affairs Report: Local Corruption
For a while the civil affairs team worked closely with the provincial governor, described as “very charismatic.” Yet both he and the team are hampered by corrupt, negligent and antagonistic officials.
The provincial chief of police is described in one report as “the axel of corruption.”
“He makes every effort to openly and blatantly take money from the ANP troopers and the officers,” one sympathetic officer told the Americans.
Other officers are more clever. One forged rosters, to collect pay for imaginary police officers. A second set up illegal checkpoints to collects tolls around Gardez. Still another stole food and uniforms, leaving his soldiers underfed and ill equipped for the winter.
The governor, meanwhile, was all but trapped. Such animosity developed between him and a senior security official that the governor could not leave his office for weeks at a time, fearing for his life. Finally, the corrupt officials were replaced. But it took months.
SEPT. 24, 2007 | PAKTIA PROVINCE Civil Affairs Report: The Cost of Corruption
Their meetings with Afghan district officials gave the American civil affairs officers unique insights into local opinions. Sometimes, the Afghan officials were brutally honest in their assessments.
In one case, provincial council officials visited the Americans at their base in Gardez to report threats — the Taliban had tossed a grenade into their office compound and were prowling the hills. Then the officials began a tirade.
“The people of Afghanistan keep loosing their trust in the government because of the high amount of corrupted government officials,” the report quoted them as saying. “The general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worst than the Taliban.”
“The corrupted government officials are a new concept brought to Afghanistan by the AMERICANS,” the oldest member of the group told the civil affairs team.
In conclusion, the civil affairs officer who wrote the report warned, “The people will support the Anti-Coalition forces and the security condition will degenerate.” He recommended a public information program to educate Afghans about democracy. Read the Document »
The reports also evoke the rivalries and tensions that swirl within the presidential palace between President Karzai’s circle and the warlords.
OCT. 16, 2006 | KABUL Intelligence Summary: Political Intrigue
In a short but heated meeting at the presidential palace, the Kabul police chief, Brig. Gen. Mir Amanullah Gozar, angrily refuted accusations made publicly by Jamil Karzai that he was corrupt and lacked professional experience. The report of the meeting identified Jamil Karzai as the president’s brother; he is in fact a cousin.
General Gozar “said that if Jamil were not the president’s Brother he would kidnap, torture, and kill him,” the report said. He added that he was aware of plans by the American-led coalition to remove him from his post.
He threatened the president, saying that if he were replaced he would reveal “allegations about Karzai having been a drug trader and supporter of the Pakistan-led insurgency in Afghanistan,” presumably a reference to Mr. Karzai’s former links with the Taliban.
Incident by incident, the reports resemble a police blotter of the myriad ways Afghan civilians were killed — not just in airstrikes but in ones and twos — in shootings on the roads or in the villages, in misunderstandings or in a cross-fire, or in chaotic moments when Afghan drivers ventured too close to convoys and checkpoints.
The dead, the reports repeatedly indicate, were not suicide bombers or insurgents, and many of the cases were not reported to the public at the time. The toll of the war — reflected in mounting civilian casualties — left the Americans seeking cooperation and support from an Afghan population that grew steadily more exhausted, resentful, fearful and alienated.
From the war’s outset, airstrikes that killed civilians in large numbers seized international attention, including the aerial bombardment of a convoy on its way to attend President Karzai’s inauguration in 2001. An airstrike in Azizabad, in western Afghanistan, killed as many as 92 people in August 2008. In May 2009, another strike killed 147 Afghan civilians.
SEPT. 3, 2009 | KUNDUZ PROVINCE Incident Report: Mistaken Airstrike
This report, filed about the activities of a Joint Terminal Attack Controller team, which is responsible for communication from the ground and guiding pilots during surveillance missions and airstrikes, offers a glimpse into one of the bloodiest mistakes in 2009.
It began with a report from the police command saying that “2X FUEL TRUCKS WERE STOLEN BY UNK NUMBER OF INS” and that the insurgents planned to cross the Kunduz River with their prizes. It was nighttime, and the river crossing was not illuminated. Soon, the report noted, the “JTAC OBSERVED KDZ RIVER AND REPORTED THAT IT DISCOVERED THE TRUCKS AS WELL AS UP TO 70 INS” at “THE FORD ON THE RIVER. THE TRUCKS WERE STUCK IN THE MUD.” How the JTAC team was observing the trucks was not clear, but many aircraft have infrared video cameras that can send a live feed to a computer monitor on the ground.
According to the report, a German commander of the provincial reconstruction team “LINKED UP WITH JTAC AND, AFTER ENSURING THAT NO CIVILIANS WERE IN THE VICINITY,” he “AUTHORIZED AN AIRSTRIKE.” An F-15 then dropped two 500-pound guided bombs. The initial report said that “56X INS KIA [insurgents killed in action] (CONFIRMED) AND 14X INS FLEEING IN NE DIRECTION. THE 2X FUEL TRUCKS WERE ALSO DESTROYED.”
SEPT. 4, 2009 | KUNDUZ PROVINCE Afghans near the city of Kunduz buried victims of a NATO airstrike. Fuel trucks hijacked by militants were the intended target, but dozens of civilians near the stalled trucks were killed.
The initial report was wrong. The trucks had been abandoned, and a crowd of civilians milled around them, removing fuel. How the commander and the JTAC had ensured “that no civilians were in the area,” as the report said, was not explained.
The first sign of the mistake documented in the initial report appeared the next day, when another report said that at “0900 hrs International Media reported that US airstrike had killed 60 civilians in Kunduz. The media are reporting that Taliban did steal the trucks and had invited civilians in the area to take fuel.” Read the Document »
The reports show that the smaller incidents were just as insidious and alienating, turning Afghans who had once welcomed Americans as liberators against the war.
MARCH 5, 2007 | GHAZNI PROVINCE Incident Report: Checkpoint Danger
Afghan police officers shot a local driver who tried to speed through their checkpoint on a country road in Ghazni Province south of Kabul. The police had set up a temporary checkpoint on the highway just outside the main town in the district of Ab Band.
“A car approached the check point at a high rate of speed,” the report said. All the police officers fled the checkpoint except one. As the car passed the checkpoint it knocked down the lone policeman. He fired at the vehicle, apparently thinking that it was a suicide car bomber.
“The driver of the vehicle was killed,” the report said. “No IED [improvised explosive device] was found and vehicle was destroyed.”
The police officer was detained in the provincial capital, Ghazni, and questioned. He was then released. The American mentoring the police concluded in his assessment that the policeman’s use of force was appropriate. Rather than acknowledging the public hostility such episodes often engender, the report found a benefit: it suggested that the shooting would make Afghans take greater care at checkpoints in the future.
“Effects on the populace clearly identify the importance of stopping at checkpoints,” the report concluded. Read the Document »
MARCH 21, 2007 | PAKTIKA PROVINCE Incident Report: A Deaf Man Is Shot
Members of a C.I.A. paramilitary unit moved into the village of Malekshay in Paktika Province close to the border with Pakistan when they saw an Afghan running away at the sight of their convoy, one report recounted. Members of the unit shot him in the ankle, and medics treated him at the scene. The unit had followed military procedure — first shouting at the man, then firing warning shots and only after that shooting to wound, the report said.
Yet elders in the village told the unit that the man, Shum Khan, was deaf and mute and that he had fled from the convoy out of nervousness. Mr. Khan was “unable to hear the warnings or warning shots. Ran out of fear and confusion,” the report concludes. The unit handed over supplies in compensation. Read the Document »
The reports reveal several instances of allied forces accidentally firing on one another or on Afghan forces in the fog of war, often with tragic consequences.
APRIL 6, 2006 | HELMAND PROVINCE Incident Report: Friendly Fire
A British Army convoy driving at night in southern Afghanistan suddenly came under small-arms fire. One of the British trucks rolled over. The British troops split into two groups, pulled back from the clash and called in airstrikes from American A-10 attack planes. After several confusing minutes, commanders realized that the Afghan police had attacked the British troops, mistaking them for Taliban fighters. One Afghan police officer was killed and 12 others were wounded.
The shifting tactics of the Americans can be seen as well in the reports, as the war strategy veered from freely using force to trying to minimize civilian casualties. But as the documents make clear, each approach has its frustrations for the American effort.
Strict new rules of engagement, imposed in 2009, minimized the use of airstrikes after some had killed civilians and turned Afghans against the war. But the rules also prompted anger from American troops and their families. The troops felt that their lives were not sufficiently valued because they had to justify every request for air or artillery support, making it easier for the Taliban to fight.
OCT. 1, 2008 | KUNAR PROVINCE Incident Report: Barrage
In the days when field commanders had a freer hand, an infantry company commander observed an Afghan with a two-way radio who was monitoring the company’s activities. Warning of “IMMINENT THREAT,” the commander said he would “destroy” the man and his equipment — in other words, kill him. A short while later, a 155-millimeter artillery piece at a forward operating base in the nearby Pech Valley began firing high-explosive rounds — 24 in all.
NOV. 13, 2009 | HELMAND PROVINCE Incident Report: Escalation of Force
As the rules tightened, the reports picked up a tone that at times seemed lawyerly. Many make reference, even in pitched fights, to troops using weapons in accordance with “ROE Card A” — which guides actions of self-defense rather than attacks or offensive acts. This report described an Apache helicopter firing warning shots after coming under fire. Its reaction was described as “an escalation of force.”
The helicopter pilots reported that insurgents “engaged with SAF [surface-to-air fire]”and that “INTEL suggested they were going to be fired upon again during their extraction.”
The helicopters “fired 40x 30mm warning shots to deter any further engagement.”
The report included the information that now is common to incident reports in which Western forces fire. “The terrain was considered rurally open and there were no CIV PID IVO [civilians positively identified in the vicinity of ] the target within reasonable certainty. There was no damage to infrastructure. BDA [battle damage assessment] recording conducted by AH-64 Gun Tape. No follow up required. The next higher command was consulted. The enemy engaged presented, in the opinion of the ground forces, an imminent threat. Engagement is under ROE Card A. Higher HQ have been informed.” Read the Document »
Lt. Col. Leslie Pratt/U.S. Air Force, via Associated Press SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN An undated Air Force photo of a MQ-9 Reaper, a drone aircraft armed with laser-guided munitions and Hellfire missiles. The military has expanded its use of drones in Afghanistan.
The reports show in previously unknown detail the omnipresence of drones in Afghanistan, the Air Force’s missile-toting Predators and Reapers that hunt militants. The military’s use of drones in Afghanistan has rapidly expanded in the past few years; the United States Air Force now flies about 20 Predator and Reaper aircraft a day — nearly twice as many as a year ago — over vast stretches of hostile Afghan territory. Allies like Britain and Germany fly their own fleets.
The incident reports chronicle the wide variety of missions these aircraft carry out: taking photographs, scooping up electronic transmissions, relaying images of running battles to field headquarters, attacking militants with bombs and missiles. And they also reveal the extent that armed drones are being used to support American Special Operations missions.
Documents in the Afghan archive capture the strange nature of the drone war in Afghanistan: missile-firing robots killing shovel-wielding insurgents, a remote-controlled war against a low-tech but resilient insurgency.
DEC. 9, 2008 | KANDAHAR PROVINCE Incident Report: Predator Attack
Early one winter evening in southern Afghanistan, an Air Force Predator drone spotted a group of insurgents suspected of planting roadside bombs along a roadway less than two miles from Forward Operating Base Hutal, an American outpost.
Unlike the drones the C.I.A. operated covertly across the border in Pakistan, this aircraft was one of nearly a dozen military drones patrolling vast stretches of hostile Afghan territory on any given day.
Within minutes after identifying the militants, the Predator unleashed a Hellfire missile, all but evaporating one of the figures digging in the dark.
When ground troops reached the crater caused by the missile, costing $60,000, all that was left was a shovel and a crowbar. Read the Document »
SEPT. 13, 2009 | BADAKHSHAN PROVINCE Incident Report: A Lost Drone
Flying over southern Afghanistan on a combat mission, one of the Air Force’s premier armed drones, a Reaper, went rogue.
Equipped with advanced radar and sophisticated cameras, as well as Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs, the Reaper had lost its satellite link to a pilot who was remotely steering the drone from a base in the United States.
Again and again, the pilot struggled to regain control of the drone. Again and again, no response. The reports reveal that the military in Afghanistan lost many of the tiny five-pound surveillance drones with names like Raven and Desert Hawk that troops tossed out like model airplanes to peer around the next hill. But they had never before lost one of the Reapers, with its 66-foot wingspan.
As a last resort, commanders ordered an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet to shoot down the $13 million aircraft before it soared unguided into neighboring Tajikistan.
Ground controllers picked an unpopulated area over northern Afghanistan and the jet fired a Sidewinder missile, destroying the Reaper’s turbo-prop engine. Suddenly, the satellite link was restored, but it was too late to salvage the flight. At 5:30 a.m., controllers steered it into a remote mountainside for a final fiery landing. Read the Document »
As the Afghanistan war took priority under the Obama administration, more Special Operations forces were shifted from Iraq to conduct secret missions. The C.I.A.’s own paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan grew in tandem — as did the agency’s close collaboration with Afghanistan’s own spy agency.
Usually, such teams conducted night operations aimed at top Taliban commanders and militants on the “capture/kill” list. While individual commandos have displayed great courage, the missions can end in calamity as well as success. The expanding special operations have stoked particular resentment among Afghans — for their lack of coordination with local forces, the civilian casualties they frequently inflicted and the lack of accountability.
JUNE 17, 2007 | PAKTIKA PROVINCE INCIDENT REPORT: Botched Night Raid
Shortly after five American rockets destroyed a compound in Paktika Province, helicopter-borne commandos from Task Force 373 — a classified Special Operations unit of Army Delta Force operatives and members of the Navy Seals — arrived to finish the job.
The mission was to capture or kill Abu Laith al-Libi, a top commander for Al Qaeda, who was believed to be hiding at the scene of the strike.
But Mr. Libi was not there. Instead, the Special Operations troops found a group of men suspected of being militants and their children. Seven of the children had been killed by the rocket attack.
Some of the men tried to flee the Americans, and six were quickly killed by encircling helicopters. After the rest were taken as detainees, the commandos found one child still alive in the rubble, and performed CPR for 20 minutes.
Word of the attack spread a wave of anger across the region, forcing the local governor to meet with village elders to defuse the situation.
American military officials drew up a list of “talking points” for the governor, pointing out that the target had been a senior Qaeda commander, that there had been no indications that women and children would be present and that a nearby mosque had not been damaged.
After the meeting, the governor reported that local residents were in shock, but that he had “pressed the Talking Points.” He even “added a few of his own that followed in line with our current story.”
The attack was caused by the “presence of hoodlums,” the governor told the people. It was a tragedy that children had been killed, he said, but “it could have been prevented had the people exposed the presence of insurgents in the area.”
He promised that the families would be compensated for their loss.
Mr. Libi was killed the following year by a C.I.A. drone strike. Read the Document »
APRIL 6, 2008 | NURISTAN PROVINCE Incident Report: A Raging Firefight
As they scrambled up the rocks toward a cluster of mud compounds perched high over the remote Shok Valley, a small group of American Green Berets and Afghan troops, known as Task Force Bushmaster, were confronted with a hail of gunfire from inside the insurgent stronghold.
They were there to capture senior members of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin militant group, part of a mission that the military had dubbed Operation Commando Wrath.
But what they soon discovered on that remote, snowy hilltop was that they were vastly outnumbered by a militant force of hundreds of fighters. Reinforcements were hours away.
A firefight raged for nearly seven hours, with sniper fire pinning down the Green Berets on a 60-foot rock ledge for much of that time.
Casualties mounted. By midmorning, nearly half of the Americans were wounded, but the militants directed their gunfire on the arriving medevac helicopters, preventing them from landing.
“TF Bushmaster reports they are combat ineffective and request reinforcement at this time.”
For a time, radio contact was lost.
Air Force jets arrived at the scene and began pummeling the compounds with 2,000-pound bombs, but the militants continued to advance down the mountain toward the pinned-down group.
The task force reported that there were “ 50-100 insurgents moving to reinforce against Bushmaster elements from the SW.”
Carrying wounded Americans shot in the pelvis, arm and legs — as well as two dead Afghans — the group made its way down toward the valley floor. Eventually, the helicopters were able to arrive to evacuate the dead and wounded.
Ten members of the Green Berets would receive Silver Stars for their actions during the battle, the highest number given to Special Forces soldiers for a single battle since the Vietnam War. By Army estimates, 150 to 200 militants were killed in the battle. Read the Document »
MARCH 8, 2008 | BAGRAM AIR BASE Meeting Report: A Plea for Help
Toward the end of a long meeting with top American military commanders, during which he delivered a briefing about the security situation in eastern Afghanistan, corruption in the government and Pakistan’s fecklessness in hunting down militants, Afghanistan’s top spy laid out his problem.
Amrullah Saleh, then director of the National Directorate of Security, told the Americans that the C.I.A. would no longer be handling his spy service’s budget. For years, the C.I.A. had essentially run the N.D.S. as a subsidiary, but by 2009 the Afghan government was preparing to take charge of the agency’s budget.
Mr. Saleh estimated that with the C.I.A. no longer bankrolling the Afghan spies, he could be facing a budget cut of 30 percent.
So he made a request. With the budget squeeze coming, Mr. Saleh asked the Americans for any AK-47s and ammunition they could spare.
If they had any spare boots, he would also take those, he said. Read the Document »
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?no_interstitial
read also:
The Guardian version of the report here
and also: Wikileaks documents suggest Taliban has capacity to fire on aircraft
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