One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.
First of all, Dick Cheney has all sorts of nerve purporting to speak in defense of the CIA. His administration outed a senior CIA operative, Valerie Plame, in retaliation for her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, exercising his freedom of speech (because he exercised it to criticize the Bush administration’s lie-filled, one-way propaganda train to the Iraq war).
Second, CIA interrogators themselves have said that they believed that Cheney’s torture policy put individual CIA personnel in legal jeopardy. As Greg Sargent has pointed out, on page 94 of the recently released Inspector General’s report, we learn the following:
“During the course of this Review, a number of Agency officers expressed unsolicited concern about the possibility of recrimination or legal action resulting from their participation in the CTC program….One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some “wanted list” to appear before the World Court for war crimes…”
This is not even to mention, in a broader sense, the risk to any US personnel that possibly ended up in “enemy” hands where captors of US prisoners could justify their own acts of torture by pointing to US tactics. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATE: Gethin Chamberlain writes in this morning’s The Guardian of London on reports coming out of the camps, including claims that 15,000 people died in the last three months of fighting.
Understandably, most of the US and British media focused yesterday on the Sri Lankan Government’s military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the deaths of LTTE leaders including (probably) Velupillai Prabhakaran. Some, such as The Washington Post and The Times of London added calls for a “political process that is fully inclusive and democratic”.
Today, however, some outlets are noting the immediate humanitarian (and longer-term political) issue: the more than 250,000 refugees now in overcrowded camps. The United Nations Children’s Fund has demanded access to the shelters: “”People are arriving into camps sick, malnourished and some with untended wounds of war….Water and sanitation needs are critical.”
On 5 May, Britain’s Channel 4 aired a video report on the situation in one of the camps (secretly filmed before the arrival of another 65,000 people in recent days.) Below that is an article by Andrew Buncombe of The Independent of London, published last Sunday, on the plight of the civilians, including at least 50,000 children.
No one is safe as Tigers fight to the death
Some stare, others frown. Some smile at the camera, though there is remarkably little for them to smile about. As these youngsters trapped in Sri Lanka’s war zone stand in line with their bowls and cups, waiting patiently for soup, there are reports that food is running low and that children are dying almost every day from sickness and injury. All the while the fighting continues. Shells explode, gunfire rattles. Read the rest of this entry »
The raised eyebrows over “confirm” are justified, however. While “a senior military official” told the press, in advance of a formal briefing on Friday, that, yes, US airstrikes had killed civilians, he was quick to shift responsibility.
According to CNN, the official said that the “buildings and compounds” hit by the U.S. had been “identified as areas from which insurgent fighters were firing on Afghan and coalition forces”. The insurgents were holding residents in those buildings “as a means of causing civilian casualties”. And, just for good measure and a good headline, he added that there was “separate intelligence that some civilians in a nearby area were killed with hand grenades by militants who then displayed the bodies”. Read the rest of this entry »
From Dan Froomkin’s excellent overview blog “White House Watch” on The Washington Post site:
What the ‘Military Solution’ Looks Like
There’s a tremendous sense of urgency surrounding President Obama’s meetings today with the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. And a sense of urgency often leads people to focus primarily on military solutions.
So it’s worth stopping to consider what the “military solution” has been looking like recently in that region of the world. Read the rest of this entry »
All day we’ve been following reports of the mass killing in a US airstrike in western Afghanistan. The aerial assault was called in after fighting between Afghan forces, backed by coalition troops, and insurgents. Estimates of the dead have varied from a few dozen to 120 — an accurate count may not be possible because some of the dead have already been buried — but the provincial governor fears about 100 civilians have been killed.
For the defendants of the use of torture by U.S. forces — still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney — this has been a rocky few weeks, with the publication, in swift succession, of the leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), based on interviews with the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006, which concluded that their treatment “constituted torture” (and was accompanied by two detailed articles by Mark Danner for the New York Review of Books), the release, by the Justice Department, of four memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002 and 2005, which purported to justify the use of torture by the CIA, and the release of a 231-page investigation into detainee abuse conducted by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF.) Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a question: When was the last time American officials waterboarded a detainee? Well, that would be 2003 — six years ago. Here’s another: When did Americans first find out about it? That would be 2004 — five years ago. May 13, 2004, to be precise, in an article in the New York Times that informed readers that “C.I.A. interrogators used graduated levels of force, including a technique known as ‘water boarding,’ in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.”
The first paradox of the torture scandal is that it is not about things we didn’t know but about things we did know and did nothing about. Beginning more than a half-dozen years ago, Bush administration officials broke the law and did repugnant things to detainees under their control. But if you think that the remedy is simple and clear — that all officials who broke the law should be tried and punished — then ask yourself what exactly the political elite of the country has been doing for the last five years. Or what it has not been doing. And why. Read the rest of this entry »
Anand Gopal writes for TomDispatch:
From Dan Froomkin’s excellent overview blog “White House Watch” on The Washington Post site:
All day we’ve been following reports of the mass killing in a US airstrike in western Afghanistan. The aerial assault was called in after fighting between Afghan forces, backed by coalition troops, and insurgents. Estimates of the dead have varied from a few dozen 
Mark Danner in The Washington Post
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