The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Commemoration Committee, Baltimore Quaker
Peace and Justice Committee of Homewood and Stony Run Meetings and Chesapeake
Physicians for Social Responsibility are continuing the FILM & SOCIAL
CONSCIOUSNESS DVD SERIES. The DVDs will be shown at Homewood Friends
Meetinghouse, 3107 N. Charles St., Baltimore 21218, usually on the First
Friday. At 7:15 PM, from January through June, a DVD will be shown with a
discussion to follow. There is no charge, and refreshments will be
available. The series theme is CHANGE IS INEVITABLE.
On June 3 see THE GROUND TRUTH [USA, 2006] Filmmaker
Patricia Foulkrod examines the experiences of Iraq War veterans and the plight
of the military. She documents stories of human wreckage arising from the
horrors of war and the dehumanizing military training. Some ten veterans
discuss how their time in Iraq changed their lives irrevocably. Regarding
basic training, they discuss desensitization and depersonalization. The
accounts given for their experiences in Iraq highlight both physical and mental
injuries. After they were discharged, they had adjust and adapt to a civilian
world. Of course, many of them are dealing with post-traumatic stress
disorder and amputated limbs. Call 410-323-1607 or email mobuszewski at
Verizon.net.
Members of a joint Afghan and U.S. security force provide security during an
operation "in search of a Taliban facilitator" in Gardez district,
Paktia province, Afghanistan, March 21, 2013. (photo: US Army)
Pentagon:
Special Ops Killing of Pregnant Afghan Women Was "Appropriate" Use of
Force
By Jeremy Scahill, The
Intercept
01 June 16
An
internal Defense Department investigation into one of the most notorious night
raids conducted by special operations forces in Afghanistan — in which seven
civilians were killed, including two pregnant women — determined that all
the U.S. soldiers involved had followed the rules of engagement. As a result,
the soldiers faced no disciplinary measures, according to hundreds of pages of
Defense Department documents obtained by The Intercept through
the Freedom of Information Act. In the aftermath of the raid, Adm. William
McRaven, at the time the commander of the elite Joint Special Operations
Command, took responsibility for the operation. The documents made no
unredacted mention of JSOC.
Although
two children were shot during the raid and multiple witnesses and Afghan
investigators alleged that U.S. soldiers dug bullets out of the body of at
least one of the dead pregnant women, Defense Department investigators
concluded that “the amount of force utilized was necessary, proportional and
applied at appropriate time.” The investigation did acknowledge that
“tactical mistakes” were made.
The
Defense Department’s conclusions bear a resemblance to U.S. Central Command’s
findings in the aftermath of the horrifying attack on a Médecins Sans
Frontières hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last October in which 42 patients
and medical workers were killed in a sustained barrage of strikes by an
AC-130. The Pentagon has announced that no criminal charges will be
brought against any members of the military for the Kunduz
strike. CENTCOM’s Kunduz investigation concluded that “the incident
resulted from a combination of unintentional human errors, process errors, and
equipment failures.” CENTCOM denied the attack constituted a war crime, a claim
challenged by international law experts and MSF.
The
February 2010 night raid, which took place in a village near Gardez in Paktia
province, was described by the U.S. military at the time as a heroic attack
against Taliban militants. A press release published by NATO in Afghanistan
soon after the raid asserted that a joint Afghan-international
operation had made a “gruesome discovery.” According to NATO, the force
entered a compound near the village of Khataba after intelligence had
“confirmed” it to be the site of “militant activity.” As the team
approached, they were “engaged” in a “fire fight” by “several insurgents.” The
Americans killed the insurgents and were securing the area when they made their
discovery: three women who had been “bound and gagged” and then executed inside
the compound. The U.S. force, the press release alleged, found the women
“hidden in an adjacent room.” The story was picked up and spread throughout the
media. A “senior U.S. military official” told CNN that the bodies had “the
earmarks of a traditional honor killing.”
But
the raid quickly gained international infamy after survivors and local Afghan
investigators began offering a completely different narrative of the deadly
events that night to a British reporter, Jerome Starkey, who began a serious
investigation of the Gardez killings. When I visited Starkey in Kabul, he told
me that at first he saw no reason to discount the official story. “I thought it
was worth investigating because if that press release was true — a mass honor
killing, three women killed by Taliban who were then killed by Special Forces —
that in itself would have made an extraordinary and intriguing story.” But when
he traveled to Gardez and began assembling witnesses to meet him in the area,
he immediately realized NATO’s story was likely false. Starkey’s reporting,
which first uncovered the horrifying details of what happened that night,
forced NATO and the U.S. military to abandon the honor killings cover story. A
half-hearted official investigation ensued.
Witnesses
and survivors described an unprovoked assault on the family compound of
Mohammed Daoud Sharabuddin, a police officer who had just received an important
promotion. Daoud and his family had gathered to celebrate the naming of a
newborn son, a ritual that takes place on the sixth day of a child’s life.
Unlike the predominantly Pashtun Taliban, the Sharabuddin family were ethnic
Tajiks, and their main language was Dari. Many of the men in the family were
clean-shaven or wore only mustaches, and they had long opposed the Taliban.
Daoud, the police commander, had gone through dozens of U.S. training programs,
and his home was filled with photos of himself with American soldiers. Another
family member was a prosecutor for the U.S.-backed local government, and a
third was the vice chancellor at the local university.
At
about 3:30 a.m., when the family heard noises outside their compound, Daoud and
his 15-year-old son Sediqullah, fearing a Taliban attack, went outside to
investigate. Both were immediately hit with sniper fire.
“All
the children were shouting, ‘Daoud is shot! Daoud is shot!’” Daoud’s
brother-in-law Tahir recalled when I visited the family compound in 2010.
Daoud’s eldest son was behind his father and younger brother when they were
hit. “When my father went down, I screamed,” he told me. “Everybody — my
uncles, the women, everybody came out of the home and ran to the corridors of
the house. I sprinted to them and warned them not to come out as there were
Americans attacking and they would kill them.”
Within
a matter of minutes, a family celebration had become a massacre. Seven people
died, including three women and two people who later succumbed to their
injuries. Two of the women had been pregnant. Sixteen children lost their
mothers.
The
Americans were still present when survivors prepared burial shrouds for
those who had died. The Afghan custom involves binding the feet and head. A
scarf secured around the bottom of the chin is meant to keep the mouth of the
deceased from hanging open. They managed to do this before the Americans began
handcuffing them and dividing the surviving men and women into separate areas.
Several of the male family members told me that it was around this time that
they witnessed a horrifying scene: U.S. soldiers digging the bullets out of the
women’s bodies. “They were putting knives into their injuries to take out the
bullets,” Sabir told me. I asked him bluntly, “You saw the Americans digging the
bullets out of the women’s bodies?” Without hesitation, he said, “Yes.” Tahir
told me he saw the Americans with knives standing over the bodies. “They were
taking out the bullets from their bodies to remove the proof of their crime.”
The
U.S. military’s internal investigation into the raid, which was described
in detail in the documents obtained by The Intercept, was ordered
by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of the Joint Special
Operations Command, who at the time of the raid was the commander of all
international forces in Afghanistan. The lead investigator, whose identity was
redacted, noted at the beginning of the report that he did not visit the scene
of the raid, saying that the risks of “re-awakening emotional and political
turmoil” would not have been “worth the cost.” Instead, family members of the
victims were asked to travel to a U.S. base to be interviewed.
The
documents’ redactions and omissions are perhaps more interesting than the
conclusions of the investigation. U.S. Central Command released 535 pages,
including more than 100 photographs taken at the scene, but withheld nearly 400
additional pages, stating that they are exempt from FOIA for national security
reasons. Photographs of bodies and wounds were redacted. The documents include
NATO press releases and talking points claiming that the victims of the
U.S. attack were Taliban militants and offering the standard assurances that
“Coalition Forces take every precaution to ensure non-combatant civilians are
protected from possible hostilities during the course of every operation.” An
error-laden “questions and answers” document stated that during the operation,
“two militants [were] killed and one wounded,” and “one women and two children
were protected.” A list of talking points titled “Post Operation IO and
Mitigation” characterized the “Area Tribe” in the following terms: “One Ph.D
described them as ‘great robbers’ and ‘utter savages’ and that their country
was formerly a refuge for bad characters.”
While
the investigation asserted that the soldiers did not dig any bullets out
of the bodies of the dead, the sections of the investigation addressing this
allegation were almost entirely redacted. The investigation found that the
survivors interviewed in the raid’s aftermath, referred to as “detainees,”
provided credible testimony. The report also noted “consistency in all eight
detainees’ statements that would be impossible to pre-plan without prior
knowledge of specifics of the operation,” adding that “the detainee reports
corroborate that the women died when they tried to stop Zahir [one of the men
killed] from exiting the building.”
Despite
this assessment of the credibility of the survivors’ testimony, the Pentagon
investigation dismissed outright the statements from multiple witnesses,
including the husband of one of the dead women, that the Americans dug bullets
from the women’s bodies. “This investigation found no attempt to hide or cover
up the circumstances of the local national women’s deaths,” the executive
summary of the investigation concluded. The investigators were instructed by
the main U.S. command at Bagram to determine: “Did anyone alter, clean or
otherwise tamper with the scene in any way following the operation, and if so,
why?” The answer to that question was completely redacted.
The
investigation did note, however, that the Afghan investigation conducted
immediately after the raid “reports that an American bullet was found in the
body of one of the dead women, but it does not say how that bullet was found or
who removed it from the woman.” Citing statements from the members of the
strike force that conducted the raid, the investigators asserted, “There
is no evidence to support that bullets were removed from the bodies by anyone
associated with U.S. forces.”
The
initial press release on the raid contained erroneous information about the
women being bound and gagged, according to the investigation, because “the
ground force was confused by the unfamiliar sight of the women prepared so
quickly for burial and firmly believed that they did not kill the three women.”
The investigation concluded that the “assumption” that the women “had been
killed by Afghans and placed on the scene” was an “honest assessment” and the
result of a “lack of cultural awareness,” not “an attempt to mislead higher
headquarters.”
According
to the instructions provided to investigators, the U.S. forces claimed the
women had been killed as many as two days before the raid occurred, but the
report observed that their “remains were collocated with EKIA,” enemies killed
in action, and photos taken in the immediate aftermath showed the women with
wounds indicating they had been killed during the raid. “Was this an attempt to
deceive?” That question was not answered in the documents provided by the Pentagon,
at least not in an unredacted format.
The
report also noted a curious contradiction. One of the men killed by American
forces had been prepared for burial just as the dead women were — with a cloth
wrap tied around his head so his jaw would remain closed. Yet when the U.S.
forces first reported on the raid, they described only the women as having
their heads bound and suggested their deaths were the result of a “cultural
custom.”
The
cause of death listed for the men was gunshot wounds to the chest. For the
three women, the cause of death was “wounds.” The most credible theory,
according to the final report, was that the women were killed in a “shoot
through” once the raid had begun, and that their deaths were unintentional —
and unknown to the shooters.
“It is
undeniable that five innocent people were killed and two innocent men were
wounded in the conduct of this operation,” the report stated. “To simply call
this ‘regrettable’ would be callous; it is much more than that. However, the
unique chain of events that led to their deaths is explicable.”
According
to the report, the university official who was at the party inside the
compound called the police headquarters in Paktia as the raid was
beginning because he believed the house was coming under attack from the
Taliban. All the witnesses interviewed stated that Mohammed Daoud, the Afghan
police commander, left the party and entered the courtyard, believing he was
confronting a Taliban attack. Still, the investigation concluded that the U.S.
forces were justified in shooting him, as well as his cousin Mohammed Saranwal
Zahir, the local prosecutor. The investigators found that the men had showed
“hostile intent” because they were armed with rifles.
In the
end, the investigation determined that American forces had followed the rules
of engagement and standard operating procedures during the raid, concluding
only that there were “tactical mistakes made.” The investigation recommended
that the coalition forces “make an appropriate condolence payment to the family
as a sign of good faith in our sincerity at the seriousness of the incident.”
Because
of excessive redactions, these documents fail to answer many questions. While
the report referenced “Special Forces,” the specific unit was redacted.
The report also seemed to indicate that the strike force came from a base in
another province, rather than the local base in Paktia, yet offered no
explanation. The letter accompanying the documents provided to The
Intercept stated that some documents could not be released because
they would expose “inter-agency and intra-agency memorandum.” What other
agencies were involved in this raid and subsequent management of the fallout
and investigation? Who provided the Americans with the intelligence that led to
the raid, which claimed that a Taliban facilitator was present? No explanation
was given for why the documents, which were requested from SOCOM, the
parent command of JSOC, under the Freedom of Information Act in March 2011,
were only now released, after being reviewed by another — unnamed — agency.
The
report noted that “there are considerable questions about the cause of the
females’ deaths and males’ injuries” as well as “multiple inconsistencies
between what was observed and what has since been reported by local nationals.”
If the women were killed by U.S. forces, even in a “shoot through,” what
happened to the bullets? The report stated that the throat of one of the women
had been slit with a knife and that another dead body contained knife marks on
the chest. Where did these lacerations come from? One investigator
observed a blood splatter pattern that “appeared to be more consistent
with blunt force trauma” and suggested “someone had possibly slipped on the ice
and split open his or her head on the hard concrete.” If that is truly what the
splatter indicated, then which person received those injuries? If the
investigators determined the surviving witnesses of the raid were convincing
and credible, why then was their testimony about Americans digging bullets out
of the women’s dead bodies discarded?
Mohammed
Sabir was one of the men singled out for further interrogation after the raid.
With his clothes still caked with the blood of his loved ones, Sabir and seven
other men were hooded and shackled. “They tied our hands and blindfolded us,”
he recalled. “Two people grabbed us and pushed us, one by one, into the
helicopter.” They were flown to a different Afghan province, Paktika, where the
Americans held them for days. “My senses weren’t working at all,” he recalled.
“I couldn’t cry, I was numb. I didn’t eat for three days and nights. They
didn’t give us water to wash the blood away.” The Americans ran biometric tests
on the men, photographed their irises, and took their fingerprints. Sabir
described to me how teams of interrogators, including both Americans and
Afghans, questioned him about his family’s connections to the Taliban. Sabir
told them that his family was against the Taliban, had fought the Taliban, and
that some relatives had been kidnapped by the Taliban.
“The
interrogators had short beards and didn’t wear uniforms. They had big muscles
and would fly into sudden rages,” Sabir recalled, adding that they shook him violently
at times. “We told them truthfully that there were not Taliban in our home.”
One of the Americans, he said, told him they “had intelligence that a
suicide bomber had hidden in your house and that he was planning an operation.”
Sabir told them, “If we would have had a suicide bomber at home, then would we
be playing music in our house? Almost all guests were government employees.” By
the time Mohammed Sabir returned home after being held in American custody, he
had missed the burial of his wife and other family members.
The
Pentagon investigation stands in stark contrast to an independent investigation
conducted by a United Nations team, which determined that the survivors of the
raid “suffered from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by being physically
assaulted by U.S. and Afghan forces, restrained and forced to stand bare feet
for several hours outside in the cold.” The U.N. investigation added that
witnesses alleged “that U.S. and Afghan forces refused to provide adequate and
timely medical support to two people who sustained serious bullet injuries,
resulting in their death hours later.” The Pentagon investigation did note that
three of the survivors detained stated they had been “tortured by Special
Forces,” but that allegation was buried below statements attributed
to other survivors who said being held by the American forces “felt like home
not like prisoner” and they were treated “very well.”
In the
end, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, Vice Adm. William
McRaven, visited the compound in Gardez accompanied by a phalanx of Afghan and
U.S. soldiers. He made an offer to the family to sacrifice a sheep, which his
force had brought with them on a truck, to ask forgiveness.
Months
later, when I sat with the family elder, Hajji Sharabuddin, at his home, his
anger seemed only to have hardened. “I don’t accept their apology. I would not
trade my sons for the whole kingdom of the United States,” he told me, holding
up a picture of his sons. “Initially, we were thinking that Americans were the
friends of Afghans, but now we think that Americans themselves are terrorists.
Americans are our enemy. They bring terror and destruction. Americans not only
destroyed my house, they destroyed my family. The Americans unleashed the
Special Forces on us. These Special Forces, with the long beards, did cruel,
criminal things.”
“We
call them the American Taliban,” added Mohammed Tahir, the father of Gulalai,
one of the slain women.
The
internal investigation ordered by Gen. McChrystal into the Gardez raid is an
incomplete accounting of this horrifying incident. It is also based on the word
of the force that carried out the killings, whose personnel could have faced
serious charges under the Uniform Code of Military Justice if investigators had
taken seriously the survivors’ allegations.
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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