Ex-Bush official confirms innocents at Gitmo

If it wasn't obvious by now, it should be: most of the people rounded up and jailed without charge at Guantanamo Bay were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Retired Army colonel and former chief of staff to the then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence B. Wilkerson, told The Associated Press last Thursday that many of the detainees were innocent men, and that there was no meaningful attempt by US forces to distinguish actual terrorists from civilians.

Not only were they unable to separate civilians from fighters, but they had no desire to. Wilkerson revealed that he learned from military commanders that they had determined early on that the men were innocent, but decided to keep them imprisoned regardless: "It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance." [Emphasis added.]

Wilkerson wrote, "U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released." Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney prevented the situation from being addressed, because "to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership."

Wilkerson also confirmed that many detainees had no connection to either the Taliban or to al-Qaida, and had been turned in for the $5,000 per head reward money.

Of the 800-odd prisoners at Guantanamo, of which 240 remain, Wilkerson claimed that two dozen are actual terrorists. (That's a ratio of over 32 innocents per terrorist.) He also revealed that the US government couldn't try them even if they wanted to, "because we tortured them and didn't keep an evidence trail."

More here.

This is a good time to remember that while President Obama has promised to close Guantanamo Bay, he has so far refused to do the same for the even more secret Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Not only has Obama refused to close Bagram, or open it to oversight, or at least to trials, but there are plans to increase the number of people disappeared into the secret prison.

WikiLeaks cracks secret Pentagon documents

News from Wikileaks:

Wikileaks has cracked the encryption to a key document relating to the war in Afghanistan. The document, titled "NATO in Afghanistan: Master Narrative", details the "story" NATO representatives are to give to, and to avoid giving to, journalists.

The news doesn't seem hugely interesting: NATO lies, the Pentagon lies, they try to manage journalists to spread the message they want spread rather than the truth. Well duh. After eight years of Dubyah and his propaganda, anyone surprised by this is terminally stupid.

There are two bits of interest though: the password cracked by Wikinews was... "progress". Yes, that's right, the best and brightest NATO and the Pentagon can hire are utterly clueless about choosing passwords. Ain't it grand?

The other bit of interest is that the documents reveal that Jordan is secretly part of the US occupation forces, the ISAF. I'm sure that won't go down well in the Middle East.

Whatever happened to bin Laden's Super-Fortress?

In the lead-up to the US invasion of Afghanistan, there was a lot of press about Osama bin Laden's super-fortress buried deep under the mountain of Tora Bora. The British press told us that bin Laden was holed up in a vast redoubt, a fortress buried as deep under the mountain as the World Trade Centre was high, powered with its own hydroelectric generators, housing 2,000 fanatical fighters and equipped with at least one Russian tank in perfect working order.

This story caught the imagination of the press corps, especially when the basic claims were repeated by American officials such as Donald Rumsfeld.

In December 2001 Afghan mujahadeen forces attacked the "impenetrable" fortress, assisted by American and British air-strikes and a small number of American, British and German special forces. According to Time Magazine, the battle cost the lives of one mujahadeen and seven Taliban fighters. Afterwards, American troops combed the mountain for bin Laden. No fortress was discovered, no hydroelectric generators, no massive hotel housing thousands of fighters, and no Russian tank.

They did however find a tube of deodorant.

(On a related note: Edward Jay Epstein also casts serious doubt on the box-cutter story from 9/11.)

Bin Laden rants again

Compared to previous time Osama bin Laden has made threats against the US and West, there's been little attention paid to his latest rant. Apart from the general silence, those few commentators who have talked about him have been mostly saying he made no threats against the US. Juan Cole wonders why they are denying he made threats.

Nevertheless, I think bin Laden is essentially irrelevant in the big picture. Not because he can't cause trouble, but he's essentially a murderer and trouble-maker, not a genuine threat against democracy and the West. He could kill some people, but he can't overthrown Western civilization and install a global Islamic theocracy. Not that he ever could, despite the Chicken Little cry-babies on the conservative-right of politics. (No, the only ones who are destroying the Western virtues of freedom, democracy, tolerance and liberty are our own leaders.)

Bin Laden is especially irrelevant in Iraq. Despite propaganda from the US government, al Qaeda In Iraq doesn't take orders from bin Laden, and even if they did, they're a tiny player in the civil war. As Juan Cole puts it:

Bin Laden, however, is not now and perhaps never has been a credible actor in Iraq. Most Iraqis are nationalists and would not want a Saudi telling them what to do. He made a big but perhaps unavoidable error in attacking the Shiites, and so denying his movement a nationalist platform. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is a small cult of hyper-Sunni bigots and serial murderers. Instead of playing Abdul Nasser, who attracted the allegiance even of many Shiite Arabs in his day, Bin Laden long ago chose to play the role of a cultist, a David Koreish with better explosives.

[...]

Bin Laden is like a venomous snake, always dangerous, and you never want to underestimate a cobra if it is in striking distance. But Iraq isn't the Afghanistan of the 1980s and 1990s, and if Bin Laden thinks it is, he is very out of touch.

Watching the last six years of stupidity unfolding has just made me more sure than ever that the right response to 9/11 was to treat it as a crime, not an act of war. Maybe the Taliban would have needed some sabre-rattling to cooperate, maybe we'd even need to send in troops to force the issue, but the fundamental strategy would be to treat bin Laden as a mass-murderer, capture him, put him on trial in the Hague, and lock him up to rot forever. No martyrdom for Osama!

Instead, we had the stupid games of the Bush administration threatening war if Afghanistan didn't hand bin Laden over for trial. When the Taliban offered to comply (see also here for another offer), the US invaded. Then, with bin Laden trapped like a rat, US forces were told to stand-down and watch as he escaped into the wilderness. Having sworn that nothing would stand in his way of catching bin Laden, Bush soon lost interest, and apart from occasionally remembering to mention the bogey-man, there has been no serious attempts to catch or kill bin Laden for years now.

A cynic would suggest that having bin Laden free to make threats suited the US government's purposes better than having him in jail or dead. A trial wouldn't have given them the excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.

More revelations about Pat Tillman

One year ago today I wrote about Pat Tillman, football star, who gave up his career and volunteered to join the army to defend his country, and died under suspicious circumstances.

One year on, and the story is darker, murkier and a lot more suspicious than it was back then.

• Army doctors who examined his body suggest he was shot at close range in the head three times, probably by an American M16 rifle. Their attempts to have the death investigated were railroaded.


• Army attorneys passed around emails congratulating each other for avoiding a criminal investigation.


• A three-star general, who initially deceived the public about Tillman's death, told investigators seventy times that he couldn't recall details of his actions.


• Tillman's personal diary has disappeared instead of being returned to his family.


• His body armour and uniform was burnt.


• And most suspicious of all, the Whitehouse has refused to release documents regarding the death of Tillman, claiming Executive Privilege.

If it were just an innocent, tragic case of friendly fire, why would the Bush administration make the documents secret?

The "forgetful" general was punished for his role in deceiving the public about Tillman's death: his retirement package, estimated at $10,000+ per month, was cut by $900 a month.

Was it an accident? A fragging of an unpopular atheist officer? It has been suggested that perhaps some of the men in Tillman's unit were involved in the opium trade, and he was killed because he wouldn't go along with it. Or was it more sinister?

Tillman made a great American Hero, the poster boy for the US Army: football star and patriot, he didn't wait to be drafted, he gave up safety and a massive salary to volunteer. With his chiseled good looks he could have been a real life Captain America.


But this Captain America was known to oppose the Iraq occupation, and was planning to campaign against President Bush in the 2004 elections, and had arranged to meet with Noam Chomsky as soon as he could leave Afghanistan. Instead of the poster boy for Bush's war becoming a political embarrassment, he became a hero to be buried. What a lucky coincidence that was for Bush Co.

More about Tillman on the DailyKos and on Wikipedia.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul

Another consequence of Bush's "surge" is the damage it will do to the war in Afghanistan. At a time that the Taliban is expected to make another big push in Afghanistan, American forces are about to be removed from "The Forgotten War" to Iraq. As the Boston Globe reports:

President Bush is expected to announce this week the dispatch of thousands of additional troops to Iraq as a stopgap measure. Such an order, Pentagon officials say, would strain the Army and Marine Corps as they man both wars.

A US Army battalion fighting in a critical area of eastern Afghanistan is due to be withdrawn within weeks to deploy to Iraq.

Army Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata and other US commanders say that will happen as the Taliban is expected to unleash a campaign to cut the vital road between Kabul and Kandahar.

The official said the Taliban intend to seize Kandahar, Afghanistan's second-largest city, where the group was organized in the 1990s.

The news story makes one error, in the very first sentence:

"Taliban forces, shattered and ejected from Afghanistan by the US military five years ago..."

Not so. The Taliban are native Afghans, mostly Pushtun from the south of the country. As a government and army, they were certainly shattered, and some may even have fled the country temporarily, but the vast bulk of Taliban remained in their tribal areas where US and allied forces never went.

I'm with Mark Kleiman on this: "GWB seems to be determined to make history by becoming the first American President to lose two wars at once."

Of course, the war in both countries will drag on long beyond Bush's time as President, leaving some other shmuck to swallow the defeat. And given Bush's disinterest in reading or watching independent news, preferring to hear all his news from yes-men, it is likely that Dubyah will go to his grave believing that he was America's saviour, and the next guy messed it all up.

Price of heroin

One of the accidental consequences of the "War on Terror" is the US market for heroin is now flooded with cheap, strong Afghan heroin. As Mark Kleiman of the Reality-Based Community explains:

The reporter places no emphasis on the most astonishing (if true) fact in the story: grams of highly pure Afghan heroin are now trading at $90 in LA. That's about a dime per pure milligram, compared with $2.50 a pure milligram in New York during the "French Connection" days. For a naive user, 5mg of heroin is a hefty dose, so your first heroin experience is now available for less than the price of a candy bar.

Ain't competition grand?

[...]

Heroin, even more than cocaine, illustrates the near-futility of trying to use drug law enforcement to control drug abuse once a drug has found a mass market. Prices have been dropping (about 80% in inflation-adjusted terms for cocaine, much more than that for heroin) even as the number of dealers going to prison has soared.

Taken at face-value, this suggests that competition and market forces could lead to falling profits for the Mister Bigs in the drug trade. But then, it could easily go the other way: a lower prices leading to a larger market and more over-all profit.

Either way, anyone who still believes that prohibition is the answer is clearly living in Cloud Cuckoo Land. It isn't working now, and it has never worked, ever.

The asymmetry of warfare

Early in the Afghan War, President Bush made a comment about not wanting to fire a $50 million missile to blow up some camel in the desert. Five years later, America's reliance on high-tech weaponry is costing them big time.

Billmon reports that American forces in Iraq are spending almost $3.5 billion a year to lose ground in the fight against improvised explosive devices (IEDs). With $1.4 billion in R&D per year, the army now manages to disarm almost fifty percent of the IEDs before they explode.

But IEDs are dirt cheap, and are getting more common and harder to find, despite the ever increasing sophistication and cost of the high-tech devices for finding, jamming and defusing them. The increase in numbers of IEDs far outstrips the increased success in disarming them, and so the army is falling further behind:

It isn't just the monetary cost that hurts America, but also the opportunity cost. Every dollar spent on electronic gadgets to detect a bomb, is a dollar less to spend on intelligence, bribery or rewards for informants, to find the bad guys before they plant the bomb in the first place. But this is so very typical of the bull-in-a-china-shop approach of the Americans, blundering about, causing more harm than good, trying ineffectively to fix the problem that they could have prevented in the first place.

The sad thing is we'll all suffer for it. Just as the old Soviet Union created today's terrorists by invading Afghanistan (and Carter and Reagan trained them), so America is creating tomorrow's terrorists in Iraq.

Thanks George.

Meanwhile, in liberated Afghanistan...

...the Taliban are effectively in control in the south, thanks in a big way to the War on Drugs.

What a mess Afghanistan is. In the 19th century, the Great Game was played out by Russia and Great Britain. In the late 20th century, it was USSR and the USA. Now it looks like continuing, between the US and UK on one side, and Pakistan on the other, and no doubt a more aggressive Russia will insist on joining again. Whoever wins, the Afghani people lose; and, with the expansion of religious Fundamentalism and extremism, so will the rest of us.

Detainee deaths

The human rights group The Edmund Rice Centre, is reporting that at least nine asylum seekers who were sent back to Afghanistan by the Australian government have been killed on their return. In addition, three children of asylum seekers who were sent back to Afghanistan from Nauru have also been killed.

At least two of the asylum seekers were murdered by the local militia (a polite word for "armed mob with automatic weapons and pretentions of being in the army"), while some of the others were killed when their houses were bombed.

Of course the government ministers who rejected claims that the asylum seekers' lives would be in danger if they were sent back, are putting on a brave face, arguing that they had no way of knowing that the people's lives were in danger if they went back to Afghanistan.

Gosh. We send people back into a country where armed militias are settling old scores and murdering those who are insufficiently religious, where terrorists set off bombs deliberately targetting civilians, where terrorists in uniforms occupying military forces fire missiles at houses, and they get killed. Even Blind Freddie could have seen that coming.

Tillman friendly fire

American football star Pat Tillman volunteered for the Army Rangers to fight in Afghanistan. While he was there, he was killed by friendly fire from his own platoon under suspicious circumstances, a fact the Army tried to hide for five weeks, even after it was common knowledge in the ranks within days. Now, two years later, there are still serious unanswered questions and signs that the Army is hiding the truth about Tillman's death.

I sense a future movie coming out of this, in the same vein as Meg Ryan's Courage Under Fire.

One thing which I predict will never make it into a movie, though, is that Tillman was an atheist -- a fact which gives ammunition to the officer in charge of the first enquiry into Tillman's death. Lt. Col. Ralph Kauzlarich, as well as leading the first enquiry, also just happened to be responsible for many of the tactical decisions which lead directly to Tillman's death.

Hey, coincidences happen. Besides, the Army is pretty busy, occupying two countries. He was probably the only guy available.

Kauzlarich knows why his enquiry's findings weren't accepted:

"I don't know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs."
[...]
Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family's unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.

In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: "When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don't believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don't know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough."

Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans' religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, "I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know."
[...]
"Well, this guy makes disparaging remarks about the fact that we're not Christians, and the reason that we can't put Pat to rest is because we're not Christians," Mary Tillman, Pat's mother, said in an interview with ESPN.com. Mary Tillman casts the family as spiritual, though she said it does not believe in many of the fundamental aspects of organized religion.

"Oh, it has nothing to do with the fact that this whole thing is shady," she said sarcastically, "But it is because we are not Christians."