newsrackblog.com

Ha! “Taxi to the Dark Side” won the Oscar award for best documentary feature. I saw the film last week at a National Archives screening; it is an excellent, thorough, unflinching look at the dark side this administration has turned our country towards.

And we have done better, in more dire circumstances. In accepting the award, director Alex Dibney dedicated the film to Dilawar, the young man who died at American hands in custody in Bagram, but also his father, noting that “My father, a navy interrogator … urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law.” As the credits roll at the end of the film, Dibney added a shot of his father saying so. I remember a Washington Post article from last fall where veterans of a World War II interrogation team based in the District made similar remarks.

Naturally, the award was presented to weirdly inappropriate triumphal music, and a clip of Afghans gazing skyward in awe as B-52s circle overhead. But whatever. On a final note: hey, nice going, Discovery Channel! How does it feel to be the a$$h0les who unloaded a documentary for “controversial content” just before it won an Oscar?

=====
NOTES: “noted” — Melbourne Sun, “It’s an Oscar for Eva” (Eva Orner was the documentary’s producer); “weirdly inappropriate” — ThinkProgress has the video of the award presentation and accompanying clip; “article” — “Fort Hunt’s Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII,” Petula Dvorak, 10/6/07: “We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture.

An occasional review of further developments in stuff I’ve written about before.

Discovery is more than the name of their company…, 02/12/08 — “Taxi to the Dark Side” is an Oscar-nominated documentary about torture and other human rights violations by the United States in the wake of 9/11. After acquiring the rights to the movie, the Discovery Channel got cold feet and announced it might not air the documentary, saying the “film’s controversial content might damage Discovery’s public offering.”

Now ThinkProgress reports that one day before the Oscars, Discovery has sold the movie to HBO, which has said it will be airing it on pay TV in September, and on basic cable in 2009. I suppose it’s better than nothing, but I don’t see pay TV as a particularly promising mass release method for this movie… unless, of course, that’s organized in September. McCain gets mixed reviews in the movie, as well he might — against torture, but for throwing away the key — so I could imagine this being a campaign/cultural event after all.

Kiriakou: apologist or whistleblower?, 12/23/07 — When ex-CIA man John Kiriakou showed up on ABC confirming that the U.S. had engaged in waterboarding, it was a revelation quickly followed by a criminal investigation into whether he had revealed state secrets. But at the time I wondered whether the investigation was serious — Kiriakou’s statements fit comfortably within the “24″ scenario, since he claimed valuable intelligence had been gained.

As is well known, CIA chief Michael Hayden subsequently also confirmed that three men — Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim Nashiri — have been waterboarded. In Google searches since then, the dog that hasn’t barked is any further development in the criminal investigation. Kiriakou is slated to appear at the University of Pittsburgh on the topic of “Ethics in Intelligence.” The notice is subheadlined with what seems like the intended takeaway from the affair: Controversial waterboarding technique “probably saved lives, but was a form of torture.”

Some good news, anyway: …. Adel Hamad released, 12/14/07 — Adel Hamad, the Guantanamo detainee from Sudan who regained his freedom late last year, is continuing to press his legal case against the United States, suing for compensation for his 5 year detention — during which one of his daughters died for lack of medicine his wife couldn’t afford any more. The Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Beldauf reports that Hamad nevertheless isn’t just suing for the money:

We don’t want animosity, we just want to respect America again,” says Hamad, speaking in English phrases he learned while in prison. “The American conscience and the American people need to return to the great concepts established by the Founding Fathers, of freedom, democracy, equality, and justice. All these values and even the justice system are being shaken, played with.”

Released Sudanese detainee Salid Mahmud Adam was also interviewed:

Asked about the nature of his treatment by Pakistani police, and by Americans at Bagram and Guantánamo, Adam becomes vague. When pressed, he recalls the constant light and noise that deprived him of sleep, beatings, tear gas, pepper spray, attack dogs, the desecration of the Koran, and the “degrading” personal searches in which he was forced to expose himself in front of other men.

“Most of the soldiers there, I doubted they could be from a great nation,” Adam says. But sometimes he would meet an educated soldier, who would “deal with us quietly, kindly,” until that soldier would be ordered to “change his style of treatment.”

=====
NOTES: “film’s controversial content” — ThinkProgress; Christian Science Monitor item on Adel Hamad via Project Hamad

A vendor sells boiled eggs during a performance of
Shakespeare’s ‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ in Kabul’s Babur Garden.
Via Truth and Beauty.

A bit of nice news for a change. The Associated Press’ Daniel Cooney reports (via the Boston Globe):

Four centuries after the famous bard’s death, one of his plays has been adapted for the local culture in an effort to help revive a once-thriving theater scene and to promote peace in a country riven by ethnic hatred and still wracked by violence after decades of war.

“Theater is the best way to communicate messages in Afghanistan, whether it be about peace, democracy, or women’s rights. It’s much more popular than television,’ said Aziz Elyas, an Afghan playwright. ”But during the Taliban’s time, it wasn’t allowed. They said Islam forbid it.’ [...]

In the past week, ”Love’s Labor’s Lost,’ a Shakespeare comedy, has been performed in the capital to packed audiences of local royalty, diplomats, aid workers, residents, and street kids.

“Love’s Labor Lost” turns out to be an interesting choice — it’s about men who initially forswear women to devote themselves fully to learning and books, only to be convinced that some remarkable women they meet are of far greater value. Given Afghanistan’s recent reign of terror by blinkered scholastics, its history of repression of women, and the still unsatisfactory status of women there, this is a nicely chosen play. Good for its producers — I just hope at least a few women were able to attend the performances.

I saw this first at the wonderfully named “Truth and Beauty” blog, whose proprietor Baraka quotes some relevant lines:

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain, and nourish all the world…

Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.
It is religion to be thus forsworn,
For charity itself fulfils the law
And who can sever love from charity?’

Baraka limns this as decrying “the stupidity of blind adherence to vows or books, and the ultimate need for compassion & love to suffuse all actions,” and adds:

I’d rather like to be a part of the crowd in that garden in Kabul, under the stars, listening to Shakepeare in Pashtun, dreaming of & planning for new days to come.

In the spirit of those new days, I’ll close with one of my favorite photographs ever — of women in January 2002 waiting at the gates to apply to northern Afghanistan’s University of Balkh, for the first time in years.

Like Jim Henley, I was struck by this observation in Tim Golden’s Sunday New York Times report (”Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse“):

While the proposal to close the case was ultimately rejected by senior officials, documents show that the inquiry was at a virtual standstill when an article in The New York Times on March 4, 2003, reported that at least one of the prisoner’s deaths had been ruled a homicide, contradicting the military’s earlier assertions that both had died of natural causes. Activity in the case quickly resumed.

The military agency involved is the Criminal Investigation Command (CID),* and this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed a certain lack of alacrity in their work in Afghanistan.

Foot dragging on the Gardez 7 case
Last September, another homicide at the hands of U.S. soldiers — about two weeks after the Times Bagram homicide report in 2003 — came to light in a case known as the “Gardez 7″ after the seven surviving witnesses (see “Yet more bad apples“). Acting on what was likely purposely misleading information in an intra-Afghan power struggle, U.S. soldiers took eight Afghan soldiers prisoner. Writing for the L.A. Times (”U.S. Probing Alleged Abuse of Afghans“),** reporters Craig Pyes and Mark Mazzetti describe what happened next :

Alleged American mistreatment of the detainees included repeated beatings, immersion in cold water, electric shocks, being hung upside down and toenails being torn off, according to Afghan investigators and an internal memorandum prepared by a United Nations delegation that interviewed the surviving soldiers.

They also beat one Afghan, Jamal Naseer, so badly over the next two weeks that he died. As with the Bagram case reported last weekend, there are reports the victim was unable to walk on his own on the final day of his life, and of severe injuries around his knees.

And as with the Bagram case, Army investigators seem to need large, brightly colored arrows pointing to evidence before they’ll go find it or do much with it. It took Afghan prosecutors and a freelance journalist to come up with the eyewitness accounts the CID needed:

The case of the “Gardez 7,” as CID officials dubbed it, was filed away as unfounded because investigators had no records, victims’ names or witnesses, said Christopher E. Coffey, an Army detective based at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. [...]

Coffey said that with the new information, the CID would pursue charges of murder and of abuse of a person in U.S. custody.

“We’re trying to figure out who was running the base,” Coffey said. “We don’t know what unit was there. There are no records. The reporting system is broke across the board. Units are transferred in and out. There are no SOPs [standard operating procedures] … and each unit acts differently.”

Troop rotations admittedly complicate the story. The unit that took the Afghan soldiers prisoner was from the 20th Special Forces group from Birmingham, AL. That group was officially replaced on March 15, 2003, by the 3rd Special Forces Group from Ft. Bragg, N.C. — two days before Jamal Naseer died.

Still, I’d think that between seven eyewitnesses, and photographs of soldiers in each of the units, a reasonably hard working investigator would have a pretty decent shot at identifying the culprits. But there have been no further public developments in the case that I’m aware of since last September.

What of it? Well, this is why we can assume Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Gardez are merely what we know, rather than all there is. The story only came to light because Afghan officials, an American human rights group (”Crimes of War Project”), and a freelance journalist (Craig Pyes) followed up on a case involving Afghan soldiers, as opposed to luckless civilians or insurgents not entitled to Geneva Convention protections, if “military necessity” seemed to require that.

Stonewalling
The glacial pace of the U.S. military investigations is complemented by Defense Department stonewalling of Afghan officials who seem more eager to bring the perpetrators to justice. From the L.A. Times report:

Afghanistan’s attorney general ordered that the case be fully investigated by military prosecutors. A request by Afghanistan’s Army III Corps for an explanation of the incident from U.S. military officials received no response, according to documents in the Afghan report to the attorney general.

As Crimes of War Project’s Andrew Dworkin pointed out in a commentary about the case, the U.S. and Afghanistan seem to have no “Status of Forces” agreement that specifies the U.S. military’s obligations to a host country when an American soldier is accused of a crime. That may contribute to the stonewalling tactics:

In the absence of a Status of Forces Agreement, U.S. soldiers would be criminally liable under Afghan law for killing or torturing an Afghan national. The suggestion by Afghan military prosecutors that those responsible for the Gardez killing and torture be prosecuted in Afghanistan is legally credible, though politically unlikely.

“Cooperate and consult”
The stonewalling and arrogance go all the way to the top, of course. In Tuesday’s Washington Post, Michael Fletcher reported (”Bush Rebuffs Karzai’s Request on Troops“):

President Bush rebuffed Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s effort to gain greater control over U.S. military operations in his country yesterday, as the two leaders endorsed an agreement allowing the United States to continue its policy of simply informing Afghan officials before launching raids in Afghanistan.

“In terms of more say over our military, our relationship is one of cooperate and consult,” Bush said.

Bush also turned down Karzai’s request for Afghanistan to take custody of its citizens being detained by the United States as suspected terrorists, saying that Afghanistan lacks facilities where the suspects “can be housed and fed and guarded.”

Instead, Karzai got his marching orders to cut opium production.

=====
* The acronym is for “…Division,” the original name of the branch.
** The article costs $3.95 to retrieve. Pyes also describes the events in Gardez in “A Torture Killing by U.S. Forces in Afghanistan” at the Crimes of War Project, which commissioned his investigative work.

Tim Golden had a two part series (In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates’ Deaths, Army Faltered in Investigating Detainee Abuse) in the New York Times this weekend about two prisoners who died in U.S. custody at Bagram, Afghanistan, about how badly they were mistreated, and about how pathetic the investigation into their deaths was. One of the victims, Dilawar, was kneed so often just above the knees (a so-called “peroneal strike”), that the coroner said “I’ve seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus.” She also used the word “pulpified.”

I’d read about the case before. When the first reports about it surfaced a couple of years ago, there was a lot of chin pulling (including my own) about what had likely happened, why it had happened, what might justify it, et depressing cetera.

In the event, it was pitiful, shameful, and devoid of any shred of redeeming meaning. By the time Dilawar’s martyrdom — dozens of “peroneal strikes,” chained to a ceiling overnight, sleep deprived, mocked, thirsty — was nearly over, one soldier (Sergeant Yonushonis, not among those charged or responsible) recalls that “most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent.”

Even if he’d been Osama Bin Laden himself, what happened to him would have been wrong. But Dilawar, it turned out, really was just a skinny, scared cab driver, given up to the Americans by an Afghan warlord on a flimsy suspicion. Then mutual incomprehension, sadism, racism, and the United States of America cost him his life, an inch at a time. From the first article:

“He screamed out, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god,” Specialist Jones said to investigators. “Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny.”

Other Third Platoon M.P.’s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.

It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out ‘Allah,’ ” he said. “It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.”

It must have been all right with the chain of command, though:

…many of the Bagram interrogators, led by the same operations officer, Capt. Carolyn A. Wood, were redeployed to Iraq and in July 2003 took charge of interrogations at the Abu Ghraib prison. According to a high-level Army inquiry last year, Captain Wood applied techniques there that were “remarkably similar” to those used at Bagram.

Here’s what happened to one honest soldier in Iraq, Sergeant Greg Ford, who reported abuses like mock executions and interrupted asphyxiation to his CO (”Soldier Who Reported Abuse Was Sent to Psychiatrist,” R. Jeffrey Smith, Josh White, Washington Post, 3/5/2005):

An Army intelligence sergeant who accused fellow soldiers in Samarra, Iraq, of abusing detainees in 2003 was in turn accused by his commander of being delusional and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation in Germany, despite a military psychiatrist’s initial judgment that the man was stable, according to internal Army records released yesterday. [...]

A witness in his unit told investigators that the captain later pressured a military doctor — who had found the soldier stable — into doing another emergency evaluation, saying: “I don’t care what you saw or heard, he is imbalanced, and I want him out of here.“

The next day, after the doctor did another evaluation, the soldier was evacuated from Iraq in restraints on a stretcher to a military hospital in Germany, despite having been given no official diagnosis, according to the documents. A military doctor in Germany ruled he was in stable mental health, according to the documents, but sent him back to the United States for what the soldier recalls the doctor describing as his “safety.” (all emphases added)

It turns out many of the details of this story were reported last December by Amy Goodman, of Independent Media TV, who interviewed David DeBatto, an Iraq veteran and writer who broke the story. DeBatto says that doctors at a base in Germany told him “at least three or four” other soldiers got the same loony-bin treatment Ford did. The Post writers base their story on documents newly obtained by the ACLU that apparently corroborate DeBatto’s findings; the documents will be posted on ACLU’s web site on Monday.

>Then there’s this, from last Wednesday’s Washington Post (”CIA Avoids Scrutiny of Detainee Treatment,” Dana Priest):

In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case.

The Afghan guards — paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit — dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.

As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.

By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.

After a quick autopsy by a CIA medic — “hypothermia” was listed as the cause of death — the guards buried the Afghan, who was in his twenties, in an unmarked, unacknowledged cemetery used by Afghan forces, officials said. The captive’s family has never been notified; his remains have never been returned for burial. He is on no one’s registry of captives, not even as a “ghost detainee,” the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said.

“He just disappeared from the face of the earth,” said one U.S. government official with knowledge of the case.

To me that sounds like manslaughter, at least, and obstruction of justice to boot. The kicker? That CIA case officer has been promoted.

And that’s all after the recent Jane Mayer “Outsourcing Torture” article in the New Yorker, which described certain Egyptian methods so foul my mind still feels polluted weeks later. The point here being that we share in those methods, because the U.S. is carrying out “extraordinary rendition” — turning over of people in its custody to another country without due process — of terror suspects to Egypt. Emphasis on “suspects” — but even if they were dead certain Al Qaeda members, some of this is stuff one would or at least should not wish on one’s worst enemy. I read Mayer’s piece and had no trouble imagining people willing to fight Egypt and anyone or anything remotely allied to Egypt by any means at all.

Wrong? Stupid? Why choose? It’s both. Thanks, George. Thanks, Dick. Thanks, Don.

And thanks, 51%, for their “accountability moment.” In “Outsourcing Torture,” Jane Mayer spoke with John Yoo, co-author of the “torture memos” and the notion that the President has wide, unfettered power to wage war and order interrogations as he sees fit. Mayer writes:

[Yoo] went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.“

Don’t let that be the last word.

David Brooks, “The CIA versus Bush,” New York Times, 11/13/2004:

Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.

(Via Bob Somerby) Here’s what Brooks regrets — from “Osama Litmus Test,” New York Times, 10/30/2004:

But politics has shaped Kerry’s approach to this whole issue. Back in December 2001, when bin Laden was apparently hiding in Tora Bora, Kerry supported the strategy of using Afghans to hunt him down. He told Larry King that our strategy “is having its impact, and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively, and we should continue to do it that way.”

But then the political wind shifted, and Kerry recalculated. Now Kerry calls the strategy he supported “outsourcing.” When we rely on allies everywhere else around the world, that’s multilateral cooperation, but when Bush does it in Afghanistan, it’s “outsourcing.” In Iraq, Kerry supports using local troops to chase insurgents, but in Afghanistan he is in post hoc opposition.

(emphasis on “strategy” added) The relevant part of the Larry King 12/14/2001 interview with Kerry (again, via Somerby):

CALLER: Hello. Yes, I would like to ask the panel why they don’t use napalm or flame-throwers on those tunnels and caves up there in Afghanistan?

KING: Senator Kerry?

CALLER: My golly, I think they could smoke him out.

KING: Senator Kerry?

KERRY: Well, I think it depends on where you are tactically. They may well be doing that at some point in time. But for the moment, what we are doing, I think, is having its impact and it is the best way to protect our troops and sort of minimalize the proximity, if you will. I think we have been doing this pretty effectively and we should continue to do it that way.

(Emphasis on “tactically” added.) So Kerry was saying there might be better tactics than flamethrowers, he wasn’t saying anything about the wisdom of relying heavily on hired Afghan warlord troops.

Just all for the record. See Somerby for appropriate commentary, especially about the spectacular hackery of Tim “I’m the sorriest excuse for a journalist ever, Big Russ” Russert. But yes, Brooks gets a brownie point for admitting what a sorry hack he is. Does anyone ever check the record, or do they just all regurgitate what ever the fax from the White House says?

And American soldiers held captive in Afghanistan? That’s what the Asia Times’ Syed Saleem Shahzad is reporting:

United States and Pakistani intelligence officials have met with Taliban leaders in an effort to devise a political solution to prevent the country from being further ripped apart.

According to a Pakistani jihadi leader who played a role in setting up the communication, the meeting took place recently between representatives of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Taliban leaders at the Pakistan Air Force base of Samungli, near Quetta. (Via Jim Henley and Jesse “Pandagon“)

Among the conditions the US is reportedly setting for “any sort of reconciliation” are that any US or allied soldiers held captive must be released. Also: Mullah Omar deposed, Pakistani and Saudi fighters out.

I remember noting a late September 2001 German language relay of an Al Jazeera report about US soldiers taken prisoner — before “Enduring Freedom” was officially underway. I didn’t ever develop much faith in Al Jazeera, and nothing seemed to come of it, so I forgot about it. Maybe I shouldn’t have.

And yes, this is terrible news, if it’s true — any of it: prisoners, negotiations, Taliban share of power, any of it.

They were German soldiers, with names that seem to tell a story of a changing Germany all by themselves. They died in Afghanistan on Saturday, the victims of a suicide car bomber according to the New York Times. 29 other Germans were wounded; all were on their way out of the country after completing a 6-month peacekeeping/nation-building tour. A memorial service was held by the assembled ISAF (International Security Assistance Force)* personnel yesterday in Kabul (AP).

To their credit, German defense officials are thinking of expanding that work, according to the AP report:

Germany also said Tuesday it will dispatch a fact-finding team to examine whether its soldiers can provide security for reconstruction work beyond the Afghan capital.

“We are not prepared to bow to the will of terrorist groups. We will continue with our contribution to the stabilization of the country — we owe that to the soldiers who were killed,” Struck said.

Germany provides about half of the 4600 peacekeeping troops in the ISAF contingent. (The 11,500 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan conduct combat operations against Al Qaeda and Taliban forces still at large in the country.) Take a moment to re-evaluate what our longstanding alliance and friendship with our European friends is worth, and maybe another to express your sympathies and gratitude for these German soldiers’ service and sacrifice.

The May 26 Spanish peacekeeper airplane crash was attributed more to bad weather (fog) than to concerns with the Ukrainian air service involved. Still, it seems a bit of a coincidence that both incidents came at the end of peacekeeping tours of duty. Are security or safety procedures perhaps unconsciously relaxed as peacekeepers prepare to depart? Is this aspect of ISAF’s operations underfunded?

=====

* I got this ISAF information as well as the names of the 4 German soldiers via Tobias Schwarz, a German in Mainz who writes an excellent blog — in English. This particular information comes via a not-individually-linkable “Links of the Minute” sidebar item, dated June 10, 2003.

Condolences to the country and families of the 62 Spanish peacekeeping troops who died in a plane crash in Turkey on Monday. Most had been in Afghanistan for four months building an airport road and clearing mines and explosives.

Americans should take a moment to remember them, and thank their country for their service. The Spanish Embassy to the US has a web site and an e-mail form, that’s all I can find.

This is neither here nor there, but I’ve been to Spain twice, once last year: Madrid, Toledo, the Asturias region, and Barcelona. I had a great time, even though my Spanish is confined to a handful of words. Nice people, great food, fascinating history, beautiful country. And an ally we owe a debt of gratitude to.