Afghanistan, July 19: Obama outside Bagram airbase. Photo: U.S. Army.

“Rosy official statements” from top US military brass are misleading the American people into believing our occupation of Afghanistan is yielding solid results toward building a sustainable democracy.

Instead, says Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis – who traveled more than 9,000 miles and “talked, traveled and patrolled with troops in Kandahar, Kunar, Ghazni, Khost, Paktika, Kunduz, Balkh, Nangarhar and other provinces,” I witnessed the “absence of success on virtually every level,” Col. Davis said.

Col. Davis said that in his travels, he “saw the incredible difficulties any military force would have to pacify even a single area of any of those provinces; I heard many stories of how insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.”

He declares that he “saw little to no evidence the local governments were able to provide for the basic needs of the people. Some of the Afghan civilians I talked with said the people didn’t want to be connected to a predatory or incapable local government.”

He adds that, “From time to time, I observed Afghan Security forces collude with the insurgency.” He characterized their performance as “from bad to abysmal.”

While classification limits what he can say publicly, “I can say that such reports — mine and others’ — serve to illuminate the gulf between conditions on the ground and official statements of progress.”

For example, he writes, on his first trip into the mountains of Kunar province near the Pakistan border to visit the troops of 1st Squadron, 32nd Cavalry. he arrived at an Afghan National Police (ANP) station that had reported being attacked by the Taliban 2½ hours earlier, he said.

“Through the interpreter, I asked the police captain where the attack had originated, and he pointed to the side of a nearby mountain. “What are your normal procedures in situations like these?” I asked. “Do you form up a squad and go after them? Do you periodically send out harassing patrols? What do you do?”

“As the interpreter conveyed my questions, the captain’s head wheeled around, looking first at the interpreter and turning to me with an incredulous expression. Then he laughed. ‘No! We don’t go after them,” he said. “That would be dangerous!’ “

“According to the cavalry troopers, the Afghan policemen rarely leave the cover of the checkpoints. In that part of the province, the Taliban literally run free,” he said.

“In June, I was in the Zharay district of Kandahar province, returning to a base from a dismounted patrol. Gunshots were audible as the Taliban attacked a U.S. checkpoint about one mile away.

“As I entered the unit’s command post, the commander and his staff were watching a live video feed of the battle. Two ANP vehicles were blocking the main road leading to the site of the attack. The fire was coming from behind a haystack.

“We watched as two Afghan men emerged, mounted a motorcycle and began moving toward the Afghan policemen in their vehicles.

The U.S. commander turned around and told the Afghan radio operator to make sure the policemen halted the men. The radio operator shouted into the radio repeatedly, but got no answer.

“On the screen, we watched as the two men slowly motored past the ANP vehicles. The policemen neither got out to stop the two men nor answered the radio — until the motorcycle was out of sight.

“To a man, the U.S. officers in that unit told me they had nothing but contempt for the Afghan troops in their area — and that was before the above incident occurred.

In August, Davis went on a dismounted patrol with troops in the Panjwai district of Kandahar province. Several troops from the unit had recently been killed in action, one of whom was a very popular and experienced soldier. One of the unit’s senior officers rhetorically asked me, “How do I look these men in the eye and ask them to go out day after day on these missions? What’s harder: How do I look [my soldier’s] wife in the eye when I get back and tell her that her husband died for something meaningful? How do I do that?”

What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground. Entering this deployment, I was sincerely hoping to learn that the claims were true: that conditions in Afghanistan were improving, that the local government and military were progressing toward self-sufficiency. I did not need to witness dramatic improvements to be reassured, but merely hoped to see evidence of positive trends, to see companies or battalions produce even minimal but sustainable progress.

Davis arrived in country in late 2010 for the start of my fourth combat deployment, and my second in Afghanistan. A Regular Army officer in the Armor Branch, I served in Operation Desert Storm, in Afghanistan in 2005-06 and in Iraq in 2008-09. In the middle of my career, I spent eight years in the U.S. Army Reserve and held a number of civilian jobs — among them, legislative correspondent for defense and foreign affairs for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas.

He says he interviewed or had conversations with more than 250 soldiers in the field, from the lowest-ranking 19-year-old private to division commanders and staff members at every echelon. I spoke at length with Afghan security officials, Afghan civilians and a few village elders.

On Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the infamous attack on the U.S., Col. Davis visited another unit in Kunar province, this one near the town of Asmar, and “talked with the local official who served as the cultural adviser to the U.S. commander.”

“Here’s how the conversation went:”

Davis: “Here you have many units of the Afghan National Security Forces [ANSF]. Will they be able to hold out against the Taliban when U.S. troops leave this area?”

Adviser: “No. They are definitely not capable. Already all across this region [many elements of] the security forces have made deals with the Taliban. [The ANSF] won’t shoot at the Taliban, and the Taliban won’t shoot them.

“Also, when a Taliban member is arrested, he is soon released with no action taken against him. So when the Taliban returns [when the Americans leave after 2014], so too go the jobs, especially for everyone like me who has worked with the coalition.”

“Recently, I got a cellphone call from a Talib who had captured a friend of mine. While I could hear, he began to beat him, telling me I’d better quit working for the Americans. I could hear my friend crying out in pain. [The Talib] said the next time they would kidnap my sons and do the same to them.

“Because of the direct threats, I’ve had to take my children out of school just to keep them safe. “And last night, right on that mountain there [he pointed to a ridge overlooking the U.S. base, about 700 meters distant], a member of the ANP was murdered. The Taliban came and called him out, kidnapped him in front of his parents, and took him away and murdered him. He was a member of the ANP from another province and had come back to visit his parents. He was only 27 years old. The people are not safe anywhere.”

“That murder took place within view of the U.S. base, a post nominally responsible for the security of an area of hundreds of square kilometers. Imagine how insecure the population is beyond visual range. And yet that conversation was representative of what I saw in many regions of Afghanistan.”

“In all of the places I visited, the tactical situation was bad to abysmal. If the events I have described — and many, many more I could mention — had been in the first year of war, or even the third or fourth, one might be willing to believe that Afghanistan was just a hard fight, and we should stick it out,” He said, adding:

“Yet these incidents all happened in the 10th year of war. As the numbers depicting casualties and enemy violence indicate the absence of progress, so too did my observations of the tactical situation all over Afghanistan.”

Davis notes that Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that ISAF and the U.S. leadership failed to report accurately on the reality of the situation in Afghanistan.

“Since June 2010, the unclassified reporting the U.S. does provide has steadily shrunk in content, effectively ‘spinning’ the road to victory by eliminating content that illustrates the full scale of the challenges ahead,” Cordesman wrote.

“They also, however, were driven by political decisions to ignore or understate Taliban and insurgent gains from 2002 to 2009, to ignore the problems caused by weak and corrupt Afghan governance, to understate the risks posed by sanctuaries in Pakistan, and to ‘spin’ the value of tactical ISAF victories while ignoring the steady growth of Taliban influence and control.”

“Year after year, the congressionally mandated reports from the Government Accountability Office revealed significant problems and warned that the system was in danger of failing. Each year, the Army’s senior leaders told members of Congress at hearings that GAO didn’t really understand the full picture and that to the contrary, the program was on schedule, on budget, and headed for success,” he said.

“Ultimately, of course, the program was canceled, with little but spinoffs to show for $18 billion spent.”

Davis concluded: “If Americans were able to compare the public statements many of our leaders have made with classified data, this credibility gulf would be immediately observable. Naturally, I am not authorized to divulge classified material to the public. But I am legally able to share it with members of Congress. I have accordingly provided a much fuller accounting in a classified report to several members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, senators and House members.”

Unlike most whistleblowers, Davis did not report up his chain of command. Instead, he sent a report to Congress, another to the Defense Department’s Inspector General, and released a third for public consumption via the civilian press.

It remains unclear how the military will treat Davis’ unusual form of whistleblowing.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

The Iraq war isn’t over.

For tens of thousands of soldiers returning from the battlefield, it never will be.

Some of these men and women will turn to alcohol and drugs to ease their mental injuries; some will end up homeless, unemployed and divorced. Some will commit suicide. Most will be forgotten.

That will be one of the lasting legacies of the nearly nine-year-long conflict.

Fortunately, there are journalists like Joshua Phillips who have taken great pains to preserve the memories of a handful of veterans whose lives have been ravaged by the war.

Phillips is the author of “None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture,” a harrowing book about the torture of prisoners in Iraq and the deep psychological scars it left on the members of one battalion who dispensed pain to their victims.

In this compelling and heartrending on-camera interview, Phillips, who spent more than five years researching and writing “None of Us Were Like This Before,” discusses his investigation into the 2004 death of Army Sgt. Adam Gray, and how it led him to uncover a tragic story about torture’s other victims.

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. Photo/OnIslam.net

When the Taliban dishonored their word and exploited the trust of the Afghan government by assassinating Afghanistan’s High Peace Council Chair and its former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai was left with no choice but to approach the peace process with a pragmatic view. Mr. Karzai stated that Afghanistan will no longer enter into peace negotiations with the Taliban; instead it will hold direct talks with Taliban’s mentor, Pakistan.

Perhaps, this is one of the most realistic policies that has ever emerged from Afghanistan’s current presidency; however, based on historical facts, negotiating with Pakistan in hopes of bringing a long lasting peace to Afghanistan requires more than superior diplomatic skills. Here is why?

Contrary to the views of many external observers who evaluate Pakistan’s behavior on the basis of their own expectations, Pakistan government’s support for terrorism is not characterized by “irrationality” or craziness but rather it is highly regularized and internally consistent.

Historically, after World War II, when Britain decided to downsize its colonial stake in South Asia, the Congress Party of India and the British viceroy had, at last, agreed with the Muslim League that independence would be granted to India on the basis of partition of the subcontinent, guaranteeing the Muslim of India their own separate state through the establishment of Pakistan. The British government, however, did not give due consideration to the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), situated west of the Indus River and part of the Frontier, was mostly composed of lands formerly belonging to Afghanistan and was essentially inhabited by Pashtuns.

This Pashtun dilemma is the essential cause of more than a half-century long animosity between Afghanistan and Pakistan. While, undeniably, it would have been responsible for Britain to streamline Pakistan’s entry into statehood by removing the Pashtun problem from Afghan-Pakistan relations beforehand, the evolution of geopolitics dictates otherwise.

Pakistan has, since its establishment, attempted to employ brinkmanship and unconventional crisis-oriented “guerrilla” tactics to foster an atmospheres designed to weaken Afghanistan’s position & extract concession. Pakistani negotiators – whether the military, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) or the foreign office – have shown remarkably consistent style, behavior, and objective in their interactions with Afghan and American officials. While senior Pakistani officials have constantly promised at the negotiating table, that includes former Pakistani Dictator Pervis Musharaf, to eradicate terrorist sanctuaries within Pakistan territory, their actions or lack of, speak otherwise.

Today, the government of Pakistan overtly uses NWFP also known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa & Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) to recruit, nurture, congregate, & train Taliban terrorists to stage attacks on Afghan civilians, the United States Armed Forces & our NATO allies.

Given the nature of Pakistan’s military leadership, which converges in all its aspects and elements with a Jihadi complex, it would be difficult for Afghanistan and its partner, the United States, to achieve a significant settlement with tactics that employ mild diplomatic language.

Even Pakistan’s advocate Anatol Lieven, a professor at King’s College London, who had spent more than four years living in Pakistan and researching its government’s behavior concluded that: “If Washington wishes to improve relations with Pakistan, it needs to stop regarding Pakistan as an ally, and to start regarding it as an enemy — at least as far as the Afghan War is concerned.”

Lieven’s idea to change our rhetoric vis-à-vis Pakistan might help the Obama administration to depart from unrealistic sets of expectations and it, perhaps, invalidates the US State Department’s cosmetic phrase, “rogue elements within Pakistan Military and the ISI,” while for fact we know that Pakistan military and the ISI espouse terrorism & violence to express Pakistan’s foreign policy.

Although Lieven’s view is useful, it’s still unclear whether the National Security Council (NSC) at the White House views Pakistan as an enemy or as a failed State. Either way, the NSC is in an awkward position as the erosion of Pakistan’s reputation, among the American people, & our international allies, undermines any policy that tries to conjure up Pakistan as an ally.

Meanwhile, despite many Pakistani experts claim, the United States has rarely exhorted Pakistan to behave in accordance with US policies based on the generosity of US aid. For example: the US has never given Pakistan an ultimatum to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), however, the US has simply asked Pakistani government to not support, train, & protect terrorists in its citadels and allow its territory to be used as a staging ground against American interests – this is not an unrealistic demand but a minimum respect to diplomatic reciprocity – yet, it is worth noting that Pakistan has demonstrated a lack of concern with the United States & Afghanistan’s appeal or with harmful situation created by its overt support of the Haqqani Taliban & many other terrorist groups.

Afghanistan’s leaders must also realize that the process of negotiating with Pakistan itself has developed its own style and ritual, characterized by seemingly contradictory techniques at different stages. It’s fundamentally acceptable for the Afghan government to call Pakistan its enemy, yet enter into negotiations rather than calling Pakistan a “brother” and exude weakness in the negotiating process. Historically, many enemies have reached armistice through negotiations without ever calling each other brothers.

Finally, simply calling Pakistan an enemy is insufficient. We need a policy that addresses our Pakistan problem appropriately. A comprehensive policy that supports the US & Afghanistan interests effectively. If we have decided to treat Pakistan as an enemy, what action does it imply? Land invasion, increased drones attacks, denuclearizing Pakistan through clandestine operation or an International isolation through a United Nations Security Council resolution? Will it achieve our long term benefits or objectives?

Wahid Monawar is a former chief of staff of the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a former permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations in Vienna, Austria. Follow him @AfghanPolicy

Former CIA Operative Glenn Carle. Photo: Lance Page/Truthout

Reporting by Jason Leopold. Originally published on Truthout.

Rob Richer, the No. 2 ranking official in the CIA’s clandestine service, paid a visit to Glenn Carle‘s office in December 2002 and presented the veteran CIA operative with an urgent proposal.

“I want you to go on a temporary assignment,” Carle recalls Richer telling him. “It’s important for the agency, it’s important for the country and it’s important for you. Will you do it?”

Richer, who resigned from the CIA in 2005 and went to work for the mercenary outfit Blackwater, told Carle that agency operatives had just rendered a “high-value target,” an Afghan in his mid-forties named Haji Pacha Wazir, who was purported to be Osama bin Laden’s personal banker as well as financier for a number of suspected terrorists. Wazir was being held at a CIA black site prison in Morocco, and the agency needed a clandestine officer who spoke French to take over the interrogation of the detainee.

Carle, formerly the deputy national intelligence officer for transitional threats, who had no prior interrogation experience, agreed, and within 72 hours, he boarded a CIA-chartered jet bound for Morocco.

The Interrogator

Carle recounts what unfolded next in his riveting book, “The Interrogator: An Education,” which stands as a damning indictment of the CIA’s torture and rendition program and the Bush administration’s approach to the so-called Global War on Terror.

Carle refers to Wazir in his book as CAPTUS. The CIA, which did not respond to requests for comment for this report, would not allow Carle to print Wazir ‘s name in his book, nor was he permitted to disclose the locations of the two black site prisons where Wazir was imprisoned and tortured.

A report published in Harper’s in July first disclosed that CAPTUS is Wazir and the location of the CIA black site prisons where he was held.

During an on-camera interview with Truthout in Washington, DC, Carle said he originally believed the agency had captured a “significant Al-Qaeda leader” who had been a concern to US intelligence agencies “for a long time.”

“The assessment that was made of [Wazir] was quite compelling and I accepted it,” Carle said. “I knew my colleagues to be hard-working and careful and that they reviewed their assessments regularly and the assessment was that [Wazir] was one of the top players in Al-Qaeda.”

Although Carle was told by a top agency official that he should do “whatever it takes to get this man to talk,” which he said he understood meant using torture to “break this fellow’s will” and obtain intelligence, Carle said he “would not do it [because] it was wrong.”

Instead, Carle said he interrogated Wazir using standard rapport-building techniques and “psychological manipulation” that led the detainee to believe Carle was his “friend.”

Carle concluded not long after he began interrogating Wazir that the agency had “kidnapped” the “wrong guy” and Wazir, who ran an informal money-transfer business known as a Hawala, was not a “committed jihadist” or Bin Laden’s personal banker.

Wazir was “more like a train conductor who sells a criminal a ticket,” Carle writes in “The Interrogator.” “Slowly, progressively, first in dismay, then in anger, I had realized that on the CAPTUS case the Agency, the government, all of us, had been victims of delusion.”

Wazir’s life had been “destroyed” based on what Carle characterized as an “error.”

But the CIA’s position did not change. The agency believed Wazir was withholding intelligence due to the fact that he could not answer specific questions. So in an attempt to convince him to reveal information about Al-Qaeda, agency operatives kidnapped his older brother, Haji Ghaljai, in December 2002 and held him captive for six months at the same black site prison.

Carle documented his conclusions about Wazir, and called for his immediate release, in top-secret cables he prepared that were supposed to be sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. However, Carle said when he later inquired about his cables he discovered they “were never transmitted so they never formally existed.”

The US government eventually moved Wazir from Morocco to the infamous Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan, which Carle refers to as “Hotel California,” and then transferred him to the Bagram prison facility.

Psychological Torture

Carle described in great detail the conditions in which Wazir and other detainees were held at the black site prisons.

“It was instantaneously, completely black,” Carle said about the black site prisons. “Not dark, black. A darkness where literally I could not see my hand…Totally black. And there was loud incessant noise or a series of other sounds. Babies wailing, sounds that would appear to be someone being hit or car crashes or wheels screeching. The goal is to play upon the senses so as to disorient the prisoner.”

Carle said he believed the psychological methods used to disorient detainees rose to the level of torture. He said that if “things got out of hand” during an interrogation a CIA psychologist would step in. Carle said, however, he “never saw any of the physical techniques being administered [to Wazir]” while he was present.

“Whenever anything came up to make that possible I wouldn’t allow it,” Carle said. “I stopped it. So I wasn’t aware of that happening. But I don’t know what happened to him after I left” the black site prison.

Habeas Denial

Blogger Marcy Wheeler reported that in September 2006 Wazir filed a habeas petition and “his suit was ultimately consolidated with the three Bagram detainees whose DC Circuit habeas denial remains the relevant decision denying Bagram detainees habeas.”

“But Wazir’s petition was denied in spite of the fact that a former Bagram detainee revealed that Wazir had been told some time in June or July 2008 there was no evidence against him,” Wheeler wrote.

Tina Foster, a constitutional attorney who represented Wazir in his habeas petition against the US government, told Harper’s, “the Justice Department maintained that Pacha Wazir was legally detainable on unspecified grounds, but that the determination had been properly made by those with knowledge of his case.”

“Had the conclusions reached by [Carle in cable assessments he sent about Wazir] not been destroyed, and instead acknowledged and disclosed by the government to the court, it would likely have tipped the scales of justice in his case and possibly also in other cases,” Foster said.

Wazir was not freed until February 2010, eight years after his capture.

Heavily Redacted

The CIA’s Publications Review Board, “under the guise of ‘protecting sources and methods,’ imposed numerous redactions and elliptical phrases on my manuscript,” Carle writes in “The Interrogator,” which was published following a year-long battle with the agency. “These have eliminated or softened harsh facts about what our government has done in pursuit of terrorists, rounded edges of wrongdoing, and obscured the corruption of our institutions and of our system of government caused by the rendition, detention, and coercive interrogation of terrorists or terrorist suspects.”

Still, Carle footnoted the redactions and summarized, in general terms, what the agency had censored. For example, in response to a redacted paragraph on page 134, Carle added this footnote:

The deleted passage concerns my assessment of why Headquarters would persit in its conceptual and operational errors in [Wazir's] case. The passage is acidic. This is the only reason I can see why it would be redacted, for it reveals no source or method–other than contemptible institutional incompetence.

Carle told Truthout that since his book was published in June, he has been the subject of a “whispering campaign,” where “unnamed anonymous representatives and supporters of [torture] and defenders of them will speak to significant members of the media and say, ‘You shouldn’t take a chance on [reporting] his story because you don’t want to damage your access to useful sources.”

“That’s had some effect on my ability to get this story out,” Carle said, without citing the media outlets that were allegedly contacted. “The effort clearly has been, and I have heard this from multiple sources, to keep me from having access to the major media networks and newspapers and magazines. It has worked. I have not been able to share my story on a major network.”

Prosecutions Would “Divide Us”

Yet Carle, who retired from the CIA in 2007, refuses to endorse an investigation and/or prosecution of key Bush administration and CIA officials who he said they were responsible for violating numerous laws in the name of national security, claiming it would “divide” the country.

“It’s not to protect the guilty,” Carle told Truthout about the reasons he does not support accountability. “I think a trial or series of trials would divide us, polarize us and become a he said, she said, ‘I attempted to protect the nation’ – and I am sure everyone sincerely intended to do that – and ‘You’re just for political reasons coming after me.’ I think that would be counterproductive.”

“The country is already ‘divided,’” Truthout retorted, “even without a full-scale investigation or prosecution. You’re well aware of the partisan bickering currently taking place in Washington, DC. How would a criminal probe further polarize the country?”

“Well, we are divided in a more distressing way than at any time since the the Vietnam War,” Carle said. “But Vietnam was over an issue not over a political philosophy. By taking steps that fuel the divisions we don’t end them. My objective is to make the feeling more broad among the American public that [torture is] un-American and unacceptable and doesn’t work. I think that comes not by going after the designers of them, but by taking steps that make the average American think, ‘well, yeah these methods don’t work and are incompatible with what it means to be an American citizen. So, I think strengthening the feeling that the measures are wrong is more important than having three or four people pay a penalty for this.”

“I Did My Best”

Another CIA officer took over Wazir’s case in 2003 and Carle returned to the United States. He said he did not inquire about what happened to the detainee until he reluctantly typed his name into Google in December 2010.

“I was an undercover CIA operations officer for most of my career,” Carle said. “I was known to foreign services around the world as a CIA officer. It would be unwise for me to associate my name with an operation. I never asked [about Wazir] and I never looked. I learned only last year, nine months after [Wazir] had been freed, that in fact he had been freed. I knew nothing about it.”

Ultimately, Carle said, “I did my best and I think in this case I made the right decisions and acted honorably, although I was unable to accomplish much of what I tried.”

Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t

The UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) has released its October 2011 report on “Treatment of Conflict-Related Detainees in Afghanistan” (PDF). Ten years after the US invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, and ostensibly dismantle the Al Qaeda forces linked to the 9/11 attacks, the regime in place is not only hopelessly corrupt and unable to provide security for its citizens, Afghan security forces in the National Security Directorate (NDS) have been charged by UNAMA with “systematically” torturing “detainees for the purpose of obtaining confessions and information” at a number of provincial facilities.

The report alleges that fully 46 percent of prisoners held by security forces, and approximately one-third held by Afghan national police (ANP), are tortured. Furthermore, “[n]early all detainees tortured by NDS officials reported the abuse took place during interrogations and was aimed at obtaining a confession or information.” Until last month, the U.S. routinely turned prisoners over to Afghan security forces, while NATO stopped turning over prisoners to a number of different Afghan facilities last July.

Controversies over allied forces releasing prisoners to Afghan security, where they reliably knew they would be tortured, have simmered for years now. As Marcy Wheeler highlighted in an article on the UN report today, according to UNAMA, “The US has not yet put in place a monitoring programme to track detainees it hands over to Afghan authorities.”

Turning prisoners over to forces or governments that are known to commit gross human rights violations, such as torture or murder of detainees, is a violation of international law, and of the US-signed Convention Against Torture treaty.

Torture of Children

Ten percent of the prisoners examined were minors. Nearly two-thirds of the children held by the NDS and ANP (62 percent) were tortured.

UNAMA’s report was statistically derived from a random sampling. Issues of possible falsification of torture evidence is addressed in the report, and the evidence was found to be credible. (Actually, the Executive Summary says the allegations have not been judged on their credibility. But the Methodology section of the report states, “In a number of cases, UNAMA interviewers observed injuries, marks and scars that appeared to be consistent with torture and ill‐treatment or bandages and medical treatment for such injuries as well as instruments of torture described by detainees such as rubber hoses.” The report adds that “UNAMA rigorously analysed patterns of allegations in the aggregate and at specific facilities which permitted conclusions to be drawn about abusive practices at specific facilities and suggested fabricated accounts were uncommon…”

UNAMA statisticians calculated the margin of error for the different samples they used ranged from approximately 5 to 9 percent.

Torture for Confessions

A major conclusion from the report is that much of the torture was specifically aimed at obtaining confessions from prisoners during torture. UNAMA notes, “Confessions are rarely examined at trial and rarely challenged by the judge or defence counsel as having been coerced.” Hence, there’s very little to constrict government prosecutors in using torture to get their confessions, and confessions are “[i]n most cases… the sole form of evidence or corroboration submitted to courts to support prosecutions.” There are few procedural safeguards for defendant prisoners, and what few there are are routinely ignored.

The following is testimony from one prisoner cited specifically in the report, Detainee 371 at Kandahar, interviewed last May:

After two days [in a National Directorate of Security (NDS) facility in Kandahar] they transferred me to NDS headquarters [in Kandahar]. I spent one night on their veranda. On the following day, an official called me to their interrogation room. He asked if I knew the name of his office. I said it was “Khad” [Dari term for the former NDS]. “You should confess what you have done in the past as Taliban; even stones confess here,” he said. He kept insisting that I confess for the first two days. I did not confess. After two days he tied my hands on my back and start beating me with an electric wire. He also used his hands to beat me. He used his hands to beat me on my back and used electric wire to beat me on my legs and hands. I did not confess even though he was beating me very hard. During the night on the same day, another official came and interrogated me. He said “Confess or be ready to die. I will kill you.” I asked him to bring evidence against me instead of threatening to kill me. He again brought the electric wire and beat me hard on my hands. The interrogation and beating lasted for three to four hours in the night. The NDS officials abused me two more times. They asked me if I knew any Taliban commander in Kandahar. I said I did not know. During the last interrogation, they forced me to sign a paper. I did not know what they had written. They did not allow me to read it.

According to the report, forms of torture included “routine blindfolding and hooding [i.e., sensory deprivation] and denial of access to medical care,” in addition to “suspension (being hung by the wrists from chains or other devices attached to the wall, ceiling, iron bars or other fixtures for lengthy periods) and beatings, especially with rubber hoses, electric cables or wires or wooden sticks and most frequently on the soles of the feet. Electric shock, twisting and wrenching of detainees’ genitals, stress positions including forced standing, removal of toenails and threatened sexual abuse…”

Alibiing the Afghan Government

Strangely, after describing the “systematic” use of torture by Afghan security and police forces, UNAMA declares the Afghan government innocent of use of torture as government policy. The report cites the fact that the NDS cooperated with the investigation, concluding “the use of torture is not a de facto institutional policy directed or ordered by the highest levels of NDS leadership or the Government. This together with the fact that NDS cooperated with UNAMA’s detention observation programme suggests that reform is both possible and desired by elements within the NDS.”

This is a surprising assertion, and of course, the international press has highlighted this supposed reassurance about the Afghan government in its coverage of the report’s conclusions. The cooperation of the NDS appears to have been equivocal at best. For one thing, as the report concedes, the NDS refused to allow UNAMA to visit its national counter-terrorism facility in Kabul, or interview prisoners there. Known as Department 90, it is where “high-value” prisoners are held. Information on Department 90 prisoners was gathered from those held elsewhere who previously had been held at the NDS Kabul facility.

Twenty-six of 28 prisoners who were determined to have been held at Department 90 were tortured, leading to a near 100 percent probability of being tortured there. One prisoner told UNAMA investigators, “When they took me to [Department] 90, I did not know where I had been taken. . . After two days, I learned that I was in 90 from my cellmates. There is so much beating at 90 that people call it Hell.” Five of the six children interviewed who had been held at Department 90 were tortured.

The Afghan government has long promised they would clean up their act regarding abuse of prisoners, and US agencies have covered up for them in the past. A 2006 RAND study, prepared for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, that torture and extrajudicial killings were in decline by Afghan authorities, and that US assistance had “somewhat improved” human rights practices by Afghan police. (RAND has a very stringent warning about quoting its material, or even providing links, but here’s the link the New York Times gave in its article on the UNAMA report.)

One can only conclude that the US government has been more than supportive of the torture policies within Afghanistan, only withdrawing funds when it was politically expedient to do so. Most of the stories on the UNAMA report have noted UNAMA’s mention of the so-called “Leahy law.” According to UNAMA, “legal provisions in the US Foreign Appropriations Act and Defence Appropriations Act prohibit the US from providing funding, weapons or training to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible evidence that such unit has committed gross human rights violations, unless the Secretary of State determines the concerned government is taking effective remedial measures” (emphasis added).

None of the press results and analysis thus far has noted this escape from accountability clause, wherein the Secretary of State can decide a foreign government — say, Afghanistan — which has committed “gross human rights violations,” is sincerely doing the best it can to address the issue. Indeed, parts of the UNAMA report appear to be written to allow just such an interpretation by the Obama/Clinton-led State Department.

So while the Americans and their allies in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) have as of last month, “in response to the findings in this report, “stopped transferring detainees to certain installations as a precautionary measure,” the report also notes that a return to the previous transfer policy “would presumably require the US to resume transfer of detainees only when the Government of Afghanistan implements appropriate remedial measures that include bringing to justice NDS and ANP officials responsible for torture and ill‐treatment.”

But this doesn’t speak to the funding or arming of the Afghan security and police forces. Indeed, by indicating that portions of the government, including the NDS, are sympathetic and trying to change the abuse/torture situation, it would appear that ammunition is being provided to Secretary Clinton to conclude that a good faith effort is being made, and bypass the provisions of the Leahy Law. This would seem to be the point in concluding the torture is not “institutional,” and that “reform is both possible and desired by elements within the NDS.”

But anyone reading this report could hardly come to this politically convenient conclusion. In fact, senior NDS officials admitted “they have investigated only two claims of torture in recent years, neither of which led to charges being pursued against the accused NDS official.” Nor would NDS officials “provide UNAMA with any information on any other disciplinary or criminal action against NDS officials for torture and abuse.” This doesn’t sound like desired elements for reform to me.

Ten years after US and foreign forces invaded Afghanistan and installed a puppet regime, all the while jockeying for alliances among various warlord forces, has not improved the human rights situation in Afghanistan. Surely the Taliban and the various warlords cannot be counted upon to provide such improvement either. But there is one big difference. The Taliban are not foreign invaders. While such foreign invaders occupy the country, killing civilians and giving political and military support to a torture regime, no progress from within Afghanistan can take place.

Originally published in The Dissenter.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

Americans are still blissfully unaware that their “heroes” in uniform are guilty of this obscene massacre. The ovine US corporate media has been reporting on this story based upon a gutless press release from the Pentagon which attributes the “mistake” to “NATO” helicopters.

The thing is, this terrible incident occurred in the Pech Valley in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, where US forces have for several years been battling Taliban forces, and from which region they are now in the process of withdrawing. Clearly then, it is US, and not “NATO” helicopters which have been responding to calls to attack “suspected Taliban forces.”

So why can’t the Pentagon say that? And if they won’t say that, why won’t American reporters either demand that they clearly state the nationality of whatever troops commit an atrocity, or exercise due diligence themselves and figure it out?

There is a second issue too. Most publications appear to have followed the lead of the highly compromised New York Times, and are going with the Pentagon line that the boys who were killed were aged 9-15. That’s bad enough. It’s hard to see how helicopter pilots with their high-resolution imaging equipment, cannot tell a 9-year-old boy when they see one, from a bearded Taliban fighter. But at least one news organization, the McClachy chain, is reporting that the ages of the boys who were murdered from the air were 7-13. If that latter range of ages is correct, then it is all the more outrageous that they were picked off one by one by helicopter gunners. No way could they have mistaken a 7-year-old for an adult.

Click here to read the rest of this story at ThisCantBeHappening.net.

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

Pfc. Bradley Manning

Alleged WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been in US custody since last May, after he reportedly told a former hacker that he had passed thousands of classified US military documents and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, had 22 new charges filed against him on Tuesday by the US Army, including a capital offense — “aiding the enemy” — for which the government has said it will not seek the death penalty, although, as Wired explained, “under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the presiding judge ultimately decides what charges to refer to court-martial and whether to impose the death penalty.”

Manning, who is is held at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, is waiting to hear whether a mental health hearing requested by his attorney will be allowed to proceed. His mental health has been in question due to the perceived severity of his solitary confinement, and the undoubted pressure exerted on him by the administration, which has been humiliated by WikiLeaks’ revelations over the last nine months, including the “Collateral Damage” video, the Afghan and Iraqi war logs, and the diplomatic cables whose release dominated headlines in the closing months of 2010. I discussed the concerns about Manning’s mental health in my articles, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”?, Psychologists Protest the Torture of Bradley Manning to the Pentagon; Jeff Kaye Reports and Former Quantico Commander Objects to Treatment of Bradley Manning, the Alleged WikiLeaks Whistleblower.

As well as being charged with “aiding the enemy,” Manning has also been charged with “five counts of theft of public property or records, two counts of computer fraud, eight counts of transmitting defense information in violation of the Espionage Act, and a count of wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing it would be accessible to the enemy … Five additional charges are for violating Army computer security regulations.”

According to the Guardian, “Pentagon and military officials say some of the classified information released by WikiLeaks contained the names of informants and others who had cooperated with the US military in Afghanistan, endangering their lives. According to the officials, the US military attempted to contact many of those named and take them into US bases for their own protection. Military officials told NBC News that a small number of them have still have not been found, with one official quoted as saying: ‘We didn’t get them all.’”

Observers are closely watching developments in Bradley Manning’s case, because of the possible ramifications for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who is currently in the UK, fighting attempts to extradite him to Sweden to face sex charges. Assange’s supporters fear that the proposal to extradite him to Sweden is a thinly veiled attempt to secure his onward extradition to the US, although it is still not clear that the US government has any grounds for calling for his extradition, because, unlike Manning (or whoever it was who leaked the information to WikiLeaks), Assange can argue — and has many defenders prepared to argue also — that WikiLeaks is essentially a media organization. As such, the argument goes, WikiLeaks has dealt with leaked classified material that has a compelling public interest angle by doing what media outlets have regularly done with such material — publishing it.

In addition, the fact that Assange chose, last summer, to establish collaborative relationships with mainstream media — the Guardian, Der Spiegel, the New York Times and others — who, with the cables in particular, dictated what to publish, and when, ought to strengthen this argument, although as the charges stand, the “enemy” that Bradley Manning is accused of “aiding” is clearly WikiLeaks, and, by extension, the major newspapers who worked with WikiLeaks, and, I guess, the readers of those newspapers, even if the narrow intent is to focus on informants endangered in Afghanistan.

Neither WikiLeaks nor Julian Assange are mentioned in the charge sheet against Bradley Manning, who faces a life sentence in prison if convicted on the latest charges — if, that is, he avoids the death penalty for something that, despite the hyperbole emanating from the corridors of power in the US, has primarily been a source of embarrassment and a sign that the opening up of access to classified documents after 9/11 to an estimated three million US government employees was a whistleblowing disaster waiting to happen.

Those interested in Bradley Manning’s case can visit the website of the Bradley Manning Support Network to contribute to his legal funds, or to find out more information about his case. When the news charges were announced, Jeff Paterson of the Bradley Manning Support Network (and Courage to Resist) wrote:

I’m shocked that the military opted to charge Pfc. Bradley Manning today with the capital offense of “aiding the enemy.” While the military is down playing the fact, the option to execute Bradley has been placed on the table. It’s beyond ironic that leaked US State Department cables have contributed to revolution and revolt in dictatorships across the Middle East and North Africa, yet an American may be executed, or at best face life in prison, for being the primary whistleblower. Millions of Americans, and even more internationally, clearly understand the contribution of Pfc. Manning towards not only freedom of information, but literally freedom itself. It’s hard for me to reconcile that with the US Army’s additional criminal charges against Pfc. Manning today.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

David Hicks, author of "Guantanamo: My Journey." (Image: Random House Australia)

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published at Truthout.org

David Hicks, author of "Guantanamo: My Journey." (Image: Random House Australia)

Editor’s Note: Click here to read Jason Leopold’s story on David Hicks and click here to read an excerpt from Hicks’ book, “Guantanamo: My Journey.” This report was originally published on Truthout.org

David Hicks was one of the first “war on terror” detainees to be sent to Guantanamo the day the prison facility opened on January 11, 2002. He is one of the small group of detainees who challenged President George W. Bush’s November 13, 2001 executive order authorizing indefinite detention, which led to a landmark 2004 Supreme Court case, Rasul v. Bush, in which the High-Court said detainees have the right to habeas corpus. Hicks spent five-and-a-half years at Guantanamo and was tortured. Last October, he published a memoir, “Guantanamo: My Journey.” This is his first interview since his release from Guantanamo in 2007.

Truthout: Can you describe for me what you felt, emotionally, as you were writing the book and having to relive the torture you were subjected to?

David Hicks: At times I wrote as a third person, as if I was writing a chronological research report as part of my day job. At other times I had moments of vivid clarity. I would stop typing, sit back, and stare into nothing. The smells, sounds, the feeling of actually being there came flooding back as if had been transported to the camps of Guantanamo, clearly remembering what it was like to have actually been there.

TO: Solitary confinement appears to be among the worst of all the terrible experiences prisoners faced at Guantanamo. Can you explain what it does to you in a way that Americans, with no experience of such things, can understand what such isolation, especially with no knowledge of how long it will last, does to a person?

DH: Solitary and indefinite detention are two different things and are devastating when combined. Isolation has a powerful impact on the mind, especially when coupled with incommunicado detention as in GTMO. Everything outside the four walls is quickly forgotten. With no mental stimulation the mind becomes confused and dull. That state of mind is an advantage to interrogators who manipulate every aspect of your environment. They create a new world reality. Time ceases to exist. Talking becomes difficult, so when conversations do take place, you cannot form words or think. Even when hostility is not present such as during a visit with a lawyer or International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visit, coherent sentences become elusive and huge mental blanks become common, as though you are forgetting the very act of speaking. Everything you think and know is dictated by the interrogators. You become fully dependent with a childlike reliance on your captors. They pull you apart and put you back together, dismantling into smaller pieces each time, until you become something different, their creation, when eventually reassembled. Indefinite detention is draining and cruel. Only after five and a half years when I had been promised a date of release did the intense battle with insanity subside, and that I started to feel a little more normal again. I finally had some certainty and felt a glimmer of control return. I began to remember that another world existed and could once again dream about what that world used to feel like. Indefinite detention is draining because you are taken prisoner and thrown into a cage. No reason is given or any relevant information or explanation offered. There are no accusations, no court rooms or judges. Nobody informs “you will be here for X amount of time.” It’s an impossible situation to accept and every minute is spent silently asking and hoping, “this cannot last forever, I will have to be released soon‚”. But when the mind is so desperate, when you are on your last legs, you can’t let go of the thought that you could be released any moment, even if all seems lost and hopeless. In a strange way it is one of those things the mind latches onto for a source of strength, a reason to keep going: false hopes and dreams are better than nothing.

TO: What do you believe gave you the strength to survive in such terrible conditions? Have you sought medical or psychological help since returning? If so, has it helped you?

DH: I survived because I had no choice, as many of us may unfortunately experience at some time in our lives. It was a psychological battle, a serious and dangerous one. It was a constant struggle not to lose my sanity and go mad. It would have been so easy just to let go: it offered the only escape. I have attended regular counseling since being released. It has helped but the passing of time has been just as helpful. Being exposed to such a consuming environment for five and a half years leaves a stain that cannot be removed overnight. It will take longer to reverse the consequences but even so, some experiences, especially one so prolonged, can never be entirely forgotten. I shudder to think what state of mind those who are still detained in GTMO must be in, and wonder how damaged they will be upon release. If they are released. At the time of writing, the US government is seriously considering enacting indefinite detention into law. It is hard to comprehend that they will effectively sentence someone to life in prison, without ever being charged, accused of breaking a law, or not even being told why they are being held. As with medical experimentation, indefinite detention on its own is a form of torture which causes mental anguish.

TO: At what moment in your mind did you begin to realize or understand that you were being tortured?

DH: I was beaten by US forces the first time I saw them and realized straight away that torture was going to be a reality, it was very scary. As I say in my book, I could not help thinking of the saying, “like trying to get blood from a stone,” and I was afraid of becoming that stone.

TO: What do you think makes a human being torture another human being?

DH: In Guantanamo torture was driven by anger and frustration. It seemed like a mad fruitless quest to pin crimes on detainees, to extract false confessions, and produce so-called intelligence of value. The guards were desensitized and detainees de-humanized. Soldiers were not allowed to engage us in conversation. They were told to address us by number only and not by name. They were constantly drilled with propaganda about how much we supposedly hated them and wanted them dead and how much they needed to hate us. On occasion, when some groups of soldiers jogged around the camp perimeters I heard them sing lyrics such as, ‘you hate us and we hate you.’ One time in the privacy of Camp Echo a male soldier broke down when we were alone repeating, “what have I become?‚” after having arrived from an interrogation of a detainee in another camp.

TO: Can you describe for me the facial expressions of the interrogators and /or the guards as you were being abused? How did they react to your pain?

DH: Usually the guards seemed cold and indifferent. They deployed a “just doing my job‚” attitude, such as when they chained me to the floor in stress positions or made me sleep directly on a metal or concrete floor in a very cold air-conditioned room in only a pair of shorts. However some soldiers displayed discomfort and embarrassment. Usually guards were only used to restrain detainees, move them about, or help in the back ground with equipment. It was the interrogators who did the dirty work, expressing, hatred and frustration. At times soldiers did participate directly in beatings however, such the beatings I received before I arrived in GTMO (in Afghanistan, in transit, or when I was rendered to the two ships). These soldiers made a sport of it.

TO: Did any US soldier or any US official present at Guantanamo during your interrogations ever speak out about your torture or the torture of other detainees?

DH: If you mean protest during the act of torture, never. Many soldiers in private however apologized for what their government was doing to us and emphasized that not all Americans were like that or agreed with such treatment.

TO: Were you ever interrogated by anyone from the CIA?

DH: Some interrogators stated which agencies they represented, some didn’t, while others lied about who they worked for. To the best of my knowledge I was seen by the CIA, FBI, US military intelligence, MI5 from the UK, ASIO and the AFP from Australia. There were other organizations working in GTMO, some I had never heard of before.

TO: In your book you write: “These beatings and other activities were systematic and ordered from above, not the result of low- ranking MPs looking for ways to have some fun.” Did anyone ever state who from above ordered the beatings?

DH: The soldiers were very open about where their orders came from and interrogators never allowed us to forget that they controlled every aspect of our lives; whether it was torturing us, allowing us a shower, clothing, or a letter from home. Then there were examples such as when General [Geoffrey] Miller took over camp procedures in early 2003. He unleashed a new wave of interrogation techniques upon us. Each new General, and wave of interrogators who were accompanied by experts from various professions, brought newly signed orders from Department of Justice employees allowing ever harsher techniques.

TO: Have you read the torture memos written by former Justice Department attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee? Were you ever subjected to torture techniques described in those memos?

DH: I have read them but it was some time ago and I cannot currently recollect all that they contained. Some of the techniques I was subjected to from the memos was being chained to the floor, known as “stress positions.” Sleep deprivation was an everyday occurrence during all of the years I spent in GTMO. Noise manipulation also happened often depending on what camp I was in. They used chainsaw motors and loud music in Camp Delta. They used temperature extremes on me, which meant subjecting me to the freezing cold because they knew I have a low tolerance to the cold. Sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation and other psychological manipulation techniques were also used on me (injecting me with substances, giving me cold and sometimes green food such as eggs, putting cameras up on the ceiling). They also used techniques that exploited my fears.

TO: You write that at Camp Echo that guards were placed to observe you constantly and that they wrote notes about your every behavior. Did you ever ask these guards what their instructions were, or if they knew what their superiors did with these notes? Did they ever tell you?

DH: We were observed in all camps. Guards always carried a pen and note book having been ordered to write down everything we did, including the trivial such as what we did to pass the time and what we spoke about when other detainees were around. They even recorded how we went to the bathroom, i.e. did we shield ourselves from neighboring detainees or guards and if so, how? Nothing went un-noted. This information was combined with personality traits learnt from interrogations, ranging from how we spoke to how we responded to the so called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The end result was the US government compiling files on each of us, including a micro level psychoanalysis. They knew our likes and dislikes, fears and weaknesses. These files were then used against us in interrogation and in daily camp life. It was about crushing and defeating us, to make us become so desperate that we would do and agree to anything to escape. Collecting this information and what they used it for was no secret and some guards explained this program when in private. In Camp Echo guards who sat outside our cages staring at us twenty four hours a day had to write what we were doing every fifteen minutes night and day. The interrogation rooms of Camp Delta had an entire wall as a one way observation glass. Behind these walls sat teams of so-called experts: Intelligence officers, behavioral scientists, psychologists; people who made conclusions upon which they decided what techniques were to be employed. By this I mean what programs the detainee would be subjected to in his cage such as sleep deprivation, noise or food ‚Äòmanipulation‚Äô. There was no shortage of ideas, resources, expertise, or personnel. A lot of effort went into these customized interrogations. Nothing was private. We were violated internally, psychologically, spiritually. They probed and tinkered in recesses so deep; parts of ourselves we are not conscious of or in touch with in our daily lives and may not even connect with and discover in our lifetimes.

TO: Did you ever meet separately with a psychologist or psychiatrist when at Guantanamo, for ostensibly psychological reasons, either a psychological test or assessment, or for supposed treatment of any sort?

DH: No, but they did approach me occasionally during the last year or so I spent in GTMO to see if I would talk and cooperate. Apart from their contributions in interrogations they were always lurking in the back ground, waiting to “help a detainee,” but to really act as another prong to interrogation. If a detainee even whispered for such medical intervention a “mental health expert,” would appear with a pocket of unknown medication and a long list of probing questions. They were not there to help, but to harm. We knew this and so I always refused to speak with them when they offered. If I did speak with them, such as the period when I eventually, after two years, had limited access to a lawyer for example, the questions would have been centered on how I intended to defend myself and any court actions I was considering. All they wanted was information, or to find a new way to defeat you.

TO: Were psychologists and/or medical professionals present at all interrogations? Were the interrogations ever stopped to check your heart rate and/or pulse?

DH: The major physical beatings I endured occurred in Afghanistan, during transportation and en-route to GTMO. During those sessions, one was around 10 hours, my vital signs were checked often. In GTMO medical personnel were not in the same room as me during actual interrogations but from my understanding they were monitoring my interrogations from behind the one way glass in Camp Delta. For other detainees, such as those being shocked or water boarded, medical personnel were present, or if drugs were being administrated during interrogation as I describe in my book when they extracted false confessions from one of the UK detainees. They were present when I was injected in the spine, but that experience is one that I don’t like to talk about.

TO: Have your attorneys tried to get a copy of your medical records?

DH: Yes, but with no luck. We gave up thinking me might be allowed to see them long ago. Even upon return to Australian where I was forced to spend the first seven months in isolated detention as part of the agreement to get out of GTMO. My family requested an independent blood test be taken on my return to Australia. They were refused without an excuse. It was nearly eight months since GTMO and about a year since being given medication before I was allowed to have my first blood test. I was informed that too much time had passed to see what I had been given.

TO: During your interrogations, did the interrogators ever ask you questions about Iraq ?

DH: No, the policy of incommunicado was strictly enforced, for years we knew absolutely nothing about the outside world. We weren’t even meant to know the time of day, let alone our location, especially any news. The first time I learnt about the war in Iraq was the end of 2003. A guard was kind enough to allow me to read his copy of FHM magazine and it contained an article about the US invasion, otherwise I would not have known. Rumors of a war in Iraq did not begin to circulate amongst the detainees until 2004 and was viewed with skepticism by most. The military did not inform us officially of the Iraq invasion until late 2006 by placing large posters of Saddam hanging from a noose around the camps with slogans splashed across the front like, “this could be you.” It was only then that detainees believed that the war had taken place.

TO: You have written eloquently of your terrible experience with what you say was medical experimentation, calling it the worst and darkest of your experiences there. Have you talked with any other detainees about whether they had similar experiences? How do you think about it now?

DH: When I was injected in the back of the neck I was being held in isolation, so I was unable to discuss what had happened with other detainees. A year passed before I was eventually able to see and communicate with fellow detainees, and I am unable to remember today if I discussed that particular personal experience with them. We did discuss medical experimentation in general however. A detainee with UK citizenship described being injected daily, resulting in one of his testicles becoming swollen and racked with pain. Along with these daily injections he was subjected to mind games by interrogators, medical personnel, and guards whom worked as a team. Under these conditions they were able to extract written false confessions from him. How I experienced the injection at the base of my neck is described in detail in my book. In a nutshell, I felt my soul had been violated. That is just one experience I had with medication. There were many pills and injections, plus constant blood tests over the years. Everybody regardless of their citizenship should acknowledge that medical experimentation, whether on human beings or animals, is unacceptable. As with animals, we were held as prisoners when these procedures were forced upon us against our will. And as with animals, we were voiceless.

TO: Did any interrogator or other official working for the US government ever use the word “torture” or “experiment” as you were being interrogated?

DH: I don’t remember the word torture being used but there were many ways to imply it. After a torture session for example an interrogator would just say, “the treatment you have recently endured can always be repeated,” and threats were often made referring to past treatment or what was happening to other detainees. Guards often alluded to GTMO as being a big laboratory where we were subjected to their government’s well-honed techniques. I remember in the early days while being held aboard a US ship when a soldier said, “be strong man no matter what they do to you, just keep your head in God man,”. It didn’t leave me with much confidence.

TO: Did you ever sign any document stating that you consented to the medications/injections you received? Did anyone ever ask you to sign such a document?

DH: I had two surgeries while in GTMO. One was for a double hernia, while the other was to remove painful golf ball size lumps on my chest. The cause of the lumps or what they were was never explained to me but research since my release indicates that it was either the mediations I was forced to take or the extreme stress levels may have been responsible. On the two occasions I was operated on I was asked to sign a consent form, which I did. However my permission was not sought nor had I any choice when it came to being forced fed tablets, or the numerous injections that we were all given. Many blood tests were also taken consistently over the years I was detained.

TO: How typical was it, do you think, that interrogators attempted to get prisoners to become agents for their government?

DH: Interrogators attempted to bribe detainees with food, bed sheets, toilet paper and other “luxuries‚” to become spies and to give information about other detainees. On occasion some detainees in GTMO became so drained and broken that they would succumb to the temptation. Interrogators tried everything to make detainees “confess,” including being asked to lie via imagination or simply to agree to an interrogator’s theories. Interrogators became desperate with the passing of time to find and pin actual crimes on detainees, and paper trails have shown they were willing to manipulate evidence in their favor. There was one time in 2003 when we were all asked if we would work for the US government performing secret operations off the island, somewhere abroad. Nearly every detainee laughed at this question and word quickly spread so we knew we weren’t alone. Apparently the proposition was a part of their profiling system. Interrogators worked around the clock to break us. Once broken, detainees were asked to agree to anything by interrogators, to repeat after them, to sign confessions, to be false witnesses, or to sow discord amongst detainees.

TO: When did you become aware that journalists were writing about torture at Guantanamo and at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan?

DH: Not until the photos from Abu Ghraib in Iraq had become public. I found the public debate interesting. At first it was, “are they being tortured or not.” Then once torture was confirmed, the debate evolved to, “is it acceptable, is it justified, is it legal?” I am surprised by how many people still try to justify torture and support it as government policy, as an extra “necessary” tool to tackle terrorism.

TO: Do you know if any prisoners ever died at Guantanamo while you were there?

DH: Four died during my time in Guantanamo.

TO: Have you heard about the three prisoners who allegedly committed suicide in June 2006? Do you know anything about them? Do you believe they committed suicide?

DH: Suicide is possible in that situation, but evidence has emerged in various forms and from various sources suggesting foul play. Some witnesses are soldiers and have said that they believe that the detainees were “accidentally‚” killed during an interrogation at a secret camp on the island called “Camp No‚” as in no, it doesn’t exist. It seems they pushed their dangerous techniques too far. The fact that the organs were removed from the bodies so that an independent autopsy could not be carried out raises more questions than answers. This topic is covered in detail in my book with researched references pointing to foul play.

TO: Did you ever interact with Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held at Guantanamo?

DH: I saw him on the odd occasion over the years and exchanged greetings, otherwise I never had the chance to talk or interact with him. The military has often kept him separated from other detainees and I believe subjected him to horrific treatment. When I left GTMO in early 2007 I knew that he was being held in isolation in Camp Echo because that is where I was. Whenever I saw him he always looked so skinny, weak, and tired. I cannot understand why they continue to hold him and the nearly two hundred men still detained there.

TO: Were dogs ever used to invoke fear in you? You describe the use of chainsaws in your book. What was the purpose of this?

DH: Not personally, dogs were mainly used against detainees known to have a fear of them. Our individual fears and weaknesses were used against us as customized interrogations. The chainsaw engines kept at full revs were used as part of their noise manipulation program. It prevented detainees from communicating with each other, prevented sleep, and basically drove us mad.

TO: Can you tell me whether you have any flashbacks and if so what triggers it? When that happens, what do you start to feel?

DH: Day time flashbacks consist of those moments of vivid clarity as I described previously, but it is the dreams that are the worst. I see myself having to begin the long process of imprisonment again accompanied with vivid feelings of hopelessness and no knowledge of the future or how long it will last. The other dreams consist of gruesome medical experimentations too horrible to describe. Losing my personality, my identity, memories and self is much more frightening to me than any physical harm. It is these dreams that are the most common and terrifying.

TO: Do you remember former Guantanamo guards Brandon Neely and Albert Melise?

DH: Unfortunately, I don’t remember Neely from Camp X-ray, it was a very confusing time for me. We established contact last year, but I became aware of Neely some time ago when he flew to the UK and publicly met some of the former UK detainees. He apologized for what he and his government had done. He is a brave man and I admire his courage and moral values so it was an honor to speak with him. I remember the polite and respectful soldiers, and the bad, but especially the good men and women I spent time with privately, such as in Camp Echo. One of those good men is Albert Melise who made contact with me to apologize, to offer help, and to see if I was alright. I remember him well because he did what he could in that controlled high security environment to help slow the deterioration of my sanity for the few months I spent with him. He is another brave man that I respect and admire, to add his voice to the growing number of witnesses that are coming forward to publicly share the truth and expose that shameful time in our history. Melise did a lot to help me in those dark times, and it was a joy to hear his voice that first time as a free man. I hope to gather enough funds so I can fly these two men to Australia to thank them personally and show my gratitude for their friendship and trust. I’d like to show them my hospitality and my country, and to show them how much I appreciate their past kindness and current bravery. Neely and Melise were not alone in covertly showing humanity to myself and other detainees whenever they had the opportunity. A handshake, an apology (though that responsibility shouldn’t have to have been shouldered by them), even a simple hello and a smile goes a long way in an environment drowning in hostility and hatred. There were other soldiers who helped me in their own way and apologized for what was happening when no one else was around. As bad as that place was, and some of the people who worked there, they were all human and there is good in all of us. A good percentage of the soldiers were very young and most were only reservists who had never expected to be deployed. It was always interesting to watch the shock on their faces when they first entered the camps, a scene they had often seen only in old war movies and the realization that their government “did torture.” Some of these poor souls suffered greatly as they experienced the “other” America and struggled to carry out questionable orders. It is not just the tortured who suffer.

TO: What do you think should happen, if anything, to the individuals who tortured you and the government officials who sanctioned it?

DH: As for the soldiers I don’t think “following orders” is an excuse. Interrogators should be disciplined and charged if found to have acted illegally. All medical personnel who participated in interrogations, whether doctors, nurses, corpsman, psychologists and psychiatrists should be investigated and banned from practicing, even if they only gave advice or kept silent if aware of what was happening. I also think that the highest ranking military officials, politicians, and lawyers who created and supported the system need to go in front of an international court.

But these are not the only issues. GTMO should be closed, torture abolished, military commissions scrapped, renditions ceased, indefinite detention should be a thing of the past, and people (including children) should no longer be made to “disappear” into unknown black site prisons.

Justice is coming slowly however. Former Guantanamo soldiers, translators, FBI and other US employees, even prosecutors, have gone public to expose the truth of GTMO and many documents have made it into the public realm. Spain and Germany had begun the process of prosecuting former president Bush and members of his regime but after being pressured by the US they dropped the proceedings. The latest country said to be exploring the possibility of prosecuting US officials is Poland for the US using its soil in its rendition program. Last year Italy convicted 26 CIA agents in absentia for their involvement in kidnapping an Italian citizen and then dumping him in the woods near his home in the middle of the night a year later. The former UK detainees were recently paid just over a million pounds each in compensation and the Australian government has just paid compensation to the other Australian who was held in GTMO after being tortured in Egypt. In both instances these men were required to drop their court cases against the state. Wikileaks has been another vehicle shedding light on what took place at GTMO and beyond, exposing those responsible for illegal acts. Sometime this year about thirteen hundred diplomatic cables are to be released concerning Australia. I have been told to look out for information concerning my case. Especially cables that talk about the treatment I was receiving, and who was involved with the political interference and creation of the plea deal that I was forced to sign if I was ever to come home. I will be watching with great interest once all that information comes to light.

TO: Is there anything the US government or the Australian government told you that you can never speak about?

There was a one year gag order upon my release and I had to sign a plea agreement that said I had never been mistreated by US officials or their employees while in US detention. I am also not allowed to challenge or “collaterally attack‚” my conviction, seek compensation or other remedies, or sue anyone for my illegal imprisonment and treatment. I have been advised that no court would uphold the plea agreement.

TO: There aren’t many Caucasians at Guantanamo? How were you treated by the other detainees? And now that you’ve been released, how have you been treated by the public?

DH: There weren’t many Caucasians at GTMO but I wasn’t the only one. Before the release of detainees began there must have been close to forty European citizens spread between eight or nine western European countries. Usually most detainees treated each other the same regardless of their geo-political or cultural background. The Australian public has been wonderful; very welcoming, glad to see me home and very helpful. I often have people approach me to say hello.

TO: How did you and your wife Aloysia meet?

DH: Aloysia has been involved in human rights activism for years and in her efforts for social justice became involved in the Australian campaign to see me released from Guantanamo bay. Over the years she came to know my dad quite well, and he played a part in our relationship.

TO: You have a long life ahead of you. What would you like to accomplish? What are your hopes and dreams?

DH: When I was released I wondered if refugees newly arrived in a country felt similar. I had to begin a new life from the beginning, from collecting a set of identification papers to such privileges as a vehicle license and obtaining a Medicare card. Despite long term plans such as owning a home I have been taking a day at a time, receiving treatment for physical and mental injuries, finding employment and working, and when I get the chance or in the mood fishing or socializing. Writing my book for two years took up a lot of my time, as does keeping abreast of all the continuous developments regarding GTMO, the so-called war on terror and its related policies, and those whose lives (detained or not) they continue to effect, including my own. Life is very busy for me. Finding the love of my life has been my biggest accomplishment, of course! And then writing my book. Otherwise there is a lot of work left to do and in the years to come I will continue to rebuild my life, seek normality, and to live in peace with the hardships of the past far behind me.

Here is why? While secrets from Wikileaks were spattered all over the media, I couldn’t help but wonder: What if Iran had a Wikileaker and we could see what its embassy in Kabul was reporting about Afghanistan and US engagement there? I suppose the cable would read like this:

Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Kabul, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs – Tehran,

TOP SECRET/Subject: Afghanistan today

In the name of Allah the most merciful and most compassionate

Things are going well here for Iran. Afghanistan remains a deeply politically polarized country; its leadership is incompetent, politically corrupt and resentful of America’s military tactics, which is certainly helpful for our goal of proliferating sectarian divide, and helping the Taliban fight the infidels. This, of course, allows us sufficient time to pursuit our goal of acquiring nuclear weapons. But we are particularly optimistic because the Afghan government and the Americans are in constant disagreement. They point fingers at each other for all the wrong reasons.

There is an unruly self-destructiveness in the air here as if the Afghan leadership has no interest in the future of Afghanistan. Their vision of a pluralistic Afghanistan is blurred by their colossal egos. The leadership fights over things like — we are not making this up — which minister is entitle to a suite instead of an ordinary room while on an official trip. They are fighting – we are happy to report— over what are the quickest ways to take cash out of Afghanistan instead of investing in their own country. So far the Afghan leadership has taken 8 billion dollars out of Afghanistan.

Furthermore, Afghanistan just had what they call a “parliamentary election.” Best we could describe it involved an ugly vitriolic campaign between the largest ethnic group the Pashtuns and other minorities, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks. The parliamentary election was a clear replicate of last year’s presidential election ensnared in massive fraud. Nonetheless, the Afghan candidates that we had financed, majority of them have prevailed. This leaves us relieved. It means Afghans will do nothing serious to fix their fundamental problems; their fragment has opened up the door and paved the way for our strategic goal in Afghanistan. Therefore, we are happy to report that it is not premature to write an obituary for the evolution of democracy in Afghanistan.

As for the Americans/NATO in Afghanistan – we are happy to report – that after nine years they are still in a stage of confusion. Not only they have been blindly supporting an incompetent and unpopular Pashtun leader with no political base while fighting a Pashtun insurgency, but their civilian policies are equally inadequate. They pour money into programs that yield no substantial result, for example: the reintegration process is a complete failure. All in all, the road ahead for Americans seems difficult; their counter-insurgency strategy just received lukewarm performance review by the White House. We are happy to report that the Americans have failed to tailor a democracy in accordance with the nature and wishes of the Afghan people.

Now as for the Taliban, whose leadership is entirely in the North Waziristan region of Pakistan, Americans remain delusional to believe that Pakistan will eventually attack extremist groups within its territory using its Muslim army against other Islamist groups. Pakistan’s military still believe that the only way to have influence in Afghanistan is through the Taliban, with which they have had a 20-year joint-venture. We, too, see our interest in supporting Taliban commanders by supplying them with weapons in Nimorz and Uruzgan provinces, even though we believe their jihad is not meritorious.

We are encouraged that our nuclear project will experience no setback, as the United States is busy squandering $190 million a day in Afghanistan on a project with no clear vision or end. By the time the Americans do get out of Afghanistan, the Afghans will surely hate them so much that our hard-work on supporting Shi’ah sect will enjoy a clear success. Already, the only eye-catching project in Kabul is our $5 million Shi’ah Seminary. Therefore, we are happy to report that our goal of obtaining a Shi’ah majority in Kabul is on the right track.

Sardonically, the Afghan government is oblivious. The golden opportunity of an international community’s commitment to rebuild their country is slipping through their fingers because of unwise Afghan leadership. However, our bags of cash delivered to Mr. Karzai’s office has helped us obtain countless United Nations resolutions against Afghanistan, that will oblige Afghanistan for years to come to fulfill this liability. Our leverage to have continuous flow of water from the Helmand River into Iranian territory an equivalent of 35 billion dollars yearly loot remains unchanged.  And once we acquire our nuclear arsenals, god willing, Afghanistan will no longer be in a position to compromise. Unless the United States has the desire to establish a permanent military base here.

Finally, in our quest for regional preeminence – we are happy to report – that China, Russia and Pakistan favor us as a reliable partner rather than a dysfunctional Afghanistan. By the time Afghans get their acts together, China’s mining companies already operating here should be able to control up the rest of Afghanistan’s rare minerals and its much needed revenue. Since China prefers Hazara minority in Afghanistan, this will be a shoe-in for our sectarian goal and in our uninterrupted influence in Kabul.

End of Cable. Respectfully: Ambassador Fada Hosein Maleki. 10/10/1389

Wahid Monawar is a former chief of staff of the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a former permanent representative of Afghanistan to the United Nations in Vienna, Austria. He is currently an associate of Zurich Partners.