President Obama receives McChrystal in the Oval Office in May 2009. Photo/Wikimedia

Three months after it initially lied about the murder by US forces of eight high school students and a 12-year-old shepherd boy in Afghanistan, and a month after it lied about the slaughter by US forces of an Afghan police commander, a government prosecutor, two of their pregnant wives and a teenage daughter, the US military has been forced to admit (thanks in no small part to the excellent investigative reporting of Jerome Starkey of the London Times), that these and other atrocities were the work of American Special Forces, working in conjunction with “specially trained” (by the US) units of the Afghan Army.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the US war effort in Afghanistan, is reported as saying he is taking over “direct charge” of Special Forces operations because of “concern” that they were not following his orders to make limiting civilian casualties a “paramount” objective. McChrystal is quoted as saying the US military “carries the burden of the guilt” for the “mistakes” made by those Special Forces.

This has to be a sick joke. These incidents were not mistakes; they were planned actions. It’s all the sicker because we know that the US is busy training the Afghan Army to take over this kind of dirty work. And besides, even if McChrystal does assume direct command over Special Forces, that would leave unaccounted for the tens of thousands of private mercenary units hired by the US who are working completely in the shadows for the CIA or other organizations. (One such group hired buy the Defense Department, which posed as an intelligence-gathering operation, was recently exposed as actually being a privately run death squad.)

McChrystal, recall, was in charge of a huge and brutal death squad operation in Iraq before he was given his new assignment in Afghanistan, and at the time he was put in charge of the Afghanistan War, it was reported that he was planning to put in place a similar operation in Afghanistan, designed to take out the Taliban leadership in the country.

What we have been seeing in Afghanistan–and this goes way back to before the appointment of McChrystal, or even the election of President Barack Obama, and his subsequent escalation of the war–has been a vicious campaign of terror against the Afghan people.

It should be no surprise that this is so. It is the way the US has always done counterinsurgency.  In a war in which the insurgents (or patriots, if you will–the people fighting against foreign occupiers, or in out case, the US) are a part of the people, and American forces are the invaders, the goal is to drive a wedge between those fighters and the rest of the population.

In Pentagon propaganda, this is referred to as “winning the hearts and minds” of the people, but in reality, the US military doesn’t give a damn about hearts and minds. It simply wants the people to become unwilling to hide or support the enemy fighters it is facing. If it can accomplish that by making people afraid, then that is what it will do, and making people afraid is much easier than “winning hearts and minds.”

How do you make people afraid of supporting or hiding and protecting enemy fighters like the Taliban? You terrorize them. You bomb their homes. You conduct night raids on their homes. You bomb their weddings and their excursions to neighboring towns or markets. You shoot them when they get too close to your vehicles.

Statistics show that the US has, in both Iraq and now Afghanistan, routinely killed more civilians than actual enemy fighters. That tells us all we need to know about what is really going on. America is fighting a war of terror against the people of Afghanistan.

No amount of feigned public hand-wringing by the blood-stained Gen. McChrystal, or of assertions that he is going to assume direct  control (from whom? are we to assume that they were operating without direction before?) of the Special Operations troops in the country, will alter that fact. Civilians–including especially women and children–in Afghanistan will continue to die in prodigious numbers because that is how the US fights its wars these days.

The people of Afghanistan know this. That’s why the majority of them want the US out of their country.

It’s Americans who don’t know the truth, and it’s Americans who are really the target of statements from the Pentagon and from Gen. McChrystal claiming that the US is taking steps, nine years into this war, to “reduce civilian casualties” in Afghanistan. It doesn’t help that news organizations like the New York Times propagate that propaganda, as the paper did today  in a lead headline that said: “US is Reining in Special Forces in Afghanistan. General Takes Control. McChrystal has Raised Civilian Casualties as a Concern.” It simply wouldn’t do to tell Americans that their country is conducting a war of terror. We are supposed to be the good guys who are bringing peace and democracy to a benighted land.

So let’s just face the facts squarely. The US is not the good guy in Afghanistan. It is an agent of death and destruction. Just check out the town of Marjah, largely destroyed over the last few months in order to “save” it from a handful of Taliban fighters. Over 30 civilians died in that American show of force, and the message of those deaths was clear: allow the Taliban to operate in your town, and we’ll kill you–not just your men, but your wives and your children, too.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

And once again the US media remain mute, accepting the official story, which was of ISAF forces responding to an attack which in reality appears never to have happened.

Before I started to write this piece, which once again was broken by the intrepid Jerome Starkey, a reporter in Afghanistan who works for the Times of London, I thought maybe I should read the Sunday edition of the New York Times, to see whether America’s “paper of record” had reported on this latest atrocity. But the night before we had suffered a heavy storm that knocked down three large trees in my front yard, and there was currently a thunderstorm underway, with rain pouring down, so I decided, what the hell, I’ll just write it. There’s no way the Times would cover this story.

I was right, of course. When the rain let up, and I went out and got the paper, and scoured it for word of this latest obscene slaughter by US forces, I found nothing. The Times’ reporters in Afghanistan and the reporters in the paper’s Washington bureau who cover the Pentagon had ignored it. So, a Google search discloses, did the rest of the servile US media.

So what actually happened?

According to Starkey, US and Afghan Army forces on February 12 launched a pre-dawn assault on the home of a prominent and popular policeman’s home just outside of Gardez, the capital of Paktia province in eastern Afghanistan. The first person to die was reportedly the policeman himself, Commander Dawood, who had stood in his doorway protesting the innocence of his family. In the volley of fire directed against him by the brave US-led team, his pregnant wife, another pregnant woman and an 18-year-old girl were also slaughtered.

Commander Dawood had been hosting a party to celebrate the naming of a newborn baby boy, Starkey reported. As he writes:

Sitting together along the walls of a guest room, the men had taken turns dancing while musicians played. Mohammed Sediq Mahmoudi, 24, the singer, said that at some time after 3am one of the musicians, Dur Mohammed, went outside to go to the toilet. “Someone shone a light on his face and he ran back inside and said the Taliban were outside,” Mr Sediq said.

Also killed was Dawood’s brother, Saranwal Zahir, a local prosecutor, who had been shouting for soldiers not to shoot as women had run outside to tend to the wounded.

A younger brother of the two men, Mohammed Sabir, was arrested by the invading forces and brought to a US base, where he was held for several days and interrogated by “ an American in civilian clothes,” before being released. Sabir said he was shown photos of a man who had been at the party, a certain Shamsuddin. Sabir says he told the interrogatyor, “Yes, he was at the party. Why didn’t you arrest him?” The man in question, Shamsuddin, later turned himself in and was, after questioning, reportedly also released.

Raising the question, what was this raid, and all the pointless killing, about in the first place?

As Starkey writes, the US and the ISAF initially, following what appears to be standard operating procedure, concocted a lie about the incident In a release immediately afterward, under the headline, “Joint force operating in Gardez makes gruesome discovery,” the NATO release claimed that the US-led team had found the women’s bodies “tied up, gagged and killed” in a room. That statement went on to say: “Several insurgents engaged the joint force in a firefight and were killed.”

As Starkey, who charges NATO with a “coverup,” reports: “The family, however, insists that no one threw so much as a stone.”

He goes on:

Rear Admiral Greg Smith, NATO’s director of communications in Kabul, denied that there had been any attempt at a cover-up.

He said that both the men who were killed were armed and showing “hostile intent” but admitted “they were not the targets of this particular raid.”

“I don’t know if they fired any rounds,” he said. “If you have got an individual stepping out of a compound, and if your assault force is there, that is often the trigger to neutralise the individual. You don’t have to be fired upon to fire back.”

He admitted that the original statement had been “poorly worded” but said “to people who see a lot of dead bodies” the women had appeared at the time to have been dead for several hours.

Starkey reports that the Americans offered the distraught family $2000 per victim of the botched raid. But as the mother of the slain brothers, Bibi Sabsparie, told him bitterly, “There’s no value on human life. They killed our family, then they came and brought us money. Money won’t bring our family back.”

So once again, we have a massacre (in a night-time raid that occurred two weeks after the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal ordered an end to the practice because of the number of errors and civilian deaths, and the bad public relations such raids cause among Afghans), with no coverage by the US media.

Meanwhile, Starkey says that even in the UK, his stories have been ignored by the rest of the British media, and that his own efforts to get at the truth have begun causing problems with the US-led military command in Afghanistan.

As he told one reader who had written him to congratulate him on his work:

Word in Kabul is that NATO are turning their wrath on me, personally,

and about to release a rebuttal. All of a sudden it’s a daunting

prospect and more than ever I feel what it must be like to be churned

through the military machine. It’s good to know people appreciate it.

I’ve also had emails from the victims’ family, which is heartening.

It is not easy to be an honest reporter in wartime, where sycophancy and blind patriotism are what is demanded. Sadly, the US media are taking the easy way out, accepting the rules of being embedded, which require them to submit articles for censorship, to avoid being critical and to play the game, in return for getting easy human interest stories to send back to the readers and viewers back home.

That’s not journalism. It’s PR. It ought to be labeled as such.

Extra! Also ignored by the Times and most of the rest of the US corporate media was a historic decision by a federal judge in Chicago on March 4 to compel former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to respond to charges by to US torture victims that Rumsfeld authorized their torture by US forces at Camp Cropper in Iraq. The two men, David Vance and Nathan Ertel, were whistleblowers against the private security (mercenary) firm that had hired them, claiming it was secretly providing arms to insurgents. Instead of getting the firm investigated, they were arrested by US troops and held–and tortured, they claim–for three months, before being released without charge and sent home to the US.

Their attorney, Mike Kanovitz of Chicago’s Loevy & Loevy, correctly calls the quashing of Rumsfeld’s effort to have the suit against him thrown out, “pretty historic”–a former secretary of defense is being accused of authorizing the torture of American citizens and will have to answer the charge in a federal court–but you wouldn’t know it from the response of the US mainstream media, which has been…nothing.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Marines from India Company, 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment and soldiers from the Afghan National Army take part in a firefight while an explosion occurs outside of Marjah, Helmand Province, Afghanistan on February 13th, 2010. The Marines from 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment and ANA soldiers have been conducting Operation Moshtarak to eliminate Taliban presence and intimidation in the city of Marjah, Afghanistan. (USMC photo by Lance Cpl. Tommy Bellegarde)

The civilian death toll in the celebrated Battle of Marjah is now up to 19, a third of them children. But that’s only part of this ugly story. While the slaughter goes on in this pointless display of Marine power, civilians have been dying at American hands elsewhere in Afghanistan.

On Thursday a US airstrike allegedly targeting “insurgents” ended up hitting and killing seven Afghani policemen. And yesterday, another airstrike, this time on a “convoy” of three vehicles, killed an astonishing 33 civilians and injured 12 more–and given the vicious nature of American weaponry, it’s a fair bet that many of those who were injured will end up dying of their wounds too.

Nice work Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Your newly professed “concern” about protecting civilians is working out nicely.

True to form, Gen. McChrystal’s response to these murderous outrages has not been to call for investigations and courts martial of those responsible for the deaths, but rather to express his concern that “inadvertently killing or injuring civilians undermines their [the Afghan people’s] trust and confidence in our mission.”

Ah, the “mission.”

Oh yeah, this general who earned his rep running a huge death squad operation in Iraq, says he’s also “extremely saddened by the tragic loss of innocent lives.” What he didn’t say though, was that he is that he is extremely angry that American forces are continuing to shoot first and ask questions later, or that he plans to call some people on the carpet and strip some badges off them to ensure compliance with his orders to protect civilians.

Why would this be?

Because the professed “concern” about protecting civilians in this war is all talk and showmanship. It’s not about actually caring about and protecting civilians.

America is not in Afghanistan because of any real concern about the welfare of the people of Afghanistan. It is in Afghanistan because America wants to control Afghanistan. This is a war about geopolitics, not about liberation.

If America really cared about the ordinary people of Afghanistan, who have endured decades of war, it would forswear the use of antipersonnel weapons, which the UN has been trying to ban–over the opposition of the US and other benighted powers like China and Israel–weapons that leave unexploded bomblets littering the landscape to maim and kill innocent people, disproportionately small children. It would sign and obey the land mine ban. It would cease using pilotless drones, which have been killing far more innocent people than actual enemy fighters, and it would stop using airstrikes on “suspected” enemy targets when those targets are likely to have civilians in them.

In fact, if the US really cared about the people of Afghanistan, it wouldn’t be fighting there at all. It would be organizing a regional peace conference, under the auspices of the United Nations and involving all the surrounding nations–Iran, China, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan–and reaching an agreement among all the forces within the country, including the Taliban, to establish a government of national reconciliation. The US would be relying not on war but on the carrot of aid to get such a government to actually work for the peaceful reconstruction of the country. And it would withdraw all of its forces promptly.

But there is no talk of such an approach. Rather, in Washington all we hear is talk of “winning” and “completing the mission,” though nobody seems able to say just what “winning” or the “mission” in Afghanistan might be. That’s understandable since the government of Afghanistan is a corrupt narco-regime led by a family of gangsters, thugs and profiteers, and the military and police are a hopeless combination of inept and corrupt. According to a first-hand, on-the-scene report in the New York Times, which has been an editorial backer of this war, Afghan forces have played almost no role in the Marjah battle, which is supposed to be a test run of the new Obama war strategy. That might explain why only one Afghan soldier has died in the battle, compared to 12 US and other NATO soldiers.

Happily, there is a light at the end of this blood-drenched tunnel. That light is the people of the Netherlands, who have so soured on their nation’s support for this stupid, criminal war, that they have brought down their government. Technically what happened is that the Dutch Labor Party, which opposes Dutch military involvement in the Afghan War, has denounced the war and, this week, pulled out of the governing coalition, leaving the coalition with just 47 of 150 seats in the country’s parliament. It is likely that the 2000 Dutch troops serving in Afghanistan will soon be pulled out.

The war, never popular in Europe, Canada or Australia, has become increasingly less popular everywhere but in America. Now, like the famed story of the little boy who saved Holland by putting his finger in a leaking dike, only in reverse, this pulling out of a Dutch finger could lead to a flood of European nations ending their commitment of troops to the NATO participation in the War in Afghanistan, leaving just US and British forces alone there.

The challenge now is for the somnolent and co-opted peace movement in the US to throw off its narcophilic embrace of the Democratic Party and of President Obama, to take heart from the Dutch people, and to demand that the US too end its war making, not just in Afghanistan, but around the globe.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

Moazzam Begg before he spoke at a meeting about civil liberties hosted by the Respect party in Manchester. Photo: JK the Unwise/Wikicommons

Just when it seemed that Republicans in America had a monopoly on Islamophobic hysteria, the Sunday Times prompted a torrent of similar hysteria in the UK by running an article in which an employee of Amnesty International — Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat — criticized the organization that employed her for its association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg.

Before getting into the substance — or lack of it — in Sahgal’s complaints, it should be noted first of all that her immediate suspension by Amnesty was the least that should have been expected. What other organization would put up with an employee badmouthing them to a national newspaper on a Sunday, and then allow them to return to work as usual on Monday morning?

That Sahgal’s many defenders have all chosen to ignore this point suggests that they believe that her allegations were so significant — the actions, indeed, of a self-sacrificing whistleblower — that this blatant unprofessionalism was acceptable, whereas, in fact, it was no such thing.

That Sahgal also chose to air her complaints in the Sunday Times, a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, is also significant, particularly because the Times first attempted to smear Begg and Cageprisoners a month ago, in connection with the failed plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in an article by the normally reliable Sean O’Neill, entitled, “Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had links with London campaign group.” To me, this suggests that Sahgal may have been used as part of an ongoing attempt to vilify Begg that was part of a specific editorial policy.

It is also significant that Sahgal confided in Richard Kernaj, a reporter who, as Rick B explained at Ten Percent, enjoys his work “specialising in exposing shortcomings, crime and corruption in the Muslim community” to such an extent that, when he exposed child abuse in an Australian Islamic council in 2006, he boasted afterwards — using a distinctly inappropriate analogy — that being handed the documents that led to his scoop “was like a journalist’s wet dream.”

So what of the allegations? According to Kernaj’s article, Sahgal stated her belief that collaborating with Begg “fundamentally damages” Amnesty’s reputation. Kernaj added that, in an email “sent to Amnesty’s top bosses,” she suggested that “the charity has mistakenly allied itself with Begg and his ‘jihadi’ group, Cageprisoners, out of fear of being branded racist and Islamophobic.” He also explained that she described Begg as “Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban.”

Kernaj also claimed that Sahgal had “decided to go public because she feels Amnesty has ignored her warnings for the past two years about the involvement of Begg in the charity’s Counter Terror With Justice campaign,” and quoted more extensively from the email written on January 30, which stated:

I believe the campaign fundamentally damages Amnesty International’s integrity and, more importantly, constitutes a threat to human rights. To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment.

Right-wingers — and other thinly-disguised right-wingers described, laughably, as the “decent left” — seized on the article with glee, and responded to Sahgal’s inevitable suspension not with recognition of her lamentable lack of professionalism, but by providing her with a platform for further misplaced allegations, and by writing opinion pieces drawing on their rarely submerged hostility towards Islam.

In the Spectator, Martin Bright posted a statement by Sahgal on his blog, David Aaronovitch followed up with an article in the Times, Nick Cohen set up a ridiculous Facebook group, “Amnesty International You Bloody Hypocrites Reinstate Gita Sahgal,” and even the Guardian allowed a friend of Sahgal’s, Rahila Gupta, to write an opinion piece that failed to justify the descriptions of Begg and Cageprisoners, and that also failed to address the question of why Sahgal should keep her job after criticizing her employers in a national newspaper. Gupta also suggested, erroneously, that Amnesty International had “filtered out” negative comments responding to a statement that the organization issued on its website, whereas, in fact, a cursory glance at the comments should convince anyone that Islamophobia is as alive and well in Amnesty’s supporters as it is in the world of Kernaj, Bright, Aaronovitch, Cohen et al.

On Cageprisoners, Begg defended himself admirably, asking Kernaj why, after discussing his planned article with him, and asking him detailed questions, he chose to ignore all his responses. Begg also criticized Sahgal for not talking to him first, noting, “Whilst it gives me no personal pleasure to hear of the suspension of Ms. Sahgal for holding her view, the newspapers were not the right place to air them without first putting them to Cageprisoners or me.”

In key passages addressed to Kernaj, he wrote:

When asked specifically about the Taliban I told you my view: that I have advocated for engagement and dialogue with the Taliban well before our own government took the official position of doing the same — only last week — although I did not say, like the government, we should be giving them lots of money in order to do so.

I also clearly told you, though you deliberately chose to ignore, that I had actually witnessed what I believe were human rights abuses under the Taliban and have detailed them in my book, from which you conveniently and selectively quote. I added that the US administration had perpetrated severe human rights abuses against me for years but that didn’t mean I opposed dialogue with them.

I even told you that Cageprisoners and I have initiated pioneering steps in that regard by organising tours all around the UK with former US guards from Guantánamo and men who were once imprisoned there. Cageprisoners is the only organisation to have done so. One of these soldiers, in response to your article, sent this message to me: “They are attacking you and your causes … don’t forget you have real support by some of us ex-soldiers who have seen the light.” […]

Had you — and Ms Sahgal no doubt — done your homework properly you’d have discovered also that I was involved in the building of, setting up and running of a school for girls in Kabul during the time of the Taliban, but of course, that wouldn’t have sat well with the agenda and nature of your heavily biased and poorly researched article.

Cageprisoners, for whom I write on a regular basis, describes itself, accurately, as an organization that “exists solely to raise awareness of the plight of the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and other detainees held as part of the War on Terror.” In his letter to Kernaj, Begg also mentioned that Cageprisoners would not “be forced into determining a person’s guilt outside a recognised court of law.” This happens to be a view that I share, and it has motivated me for the last four years as I have assiduously chronicled the stories of the men and boys — all Muslims, in case anyone has overlooked this particular point — who have been redefined as a category of human beings without rights in a post-9/11 world of hysteria in which apparently intelligent non-Muslims regard the indefinite detention without charge or trial of Muslim “terror suspects” as somehow appropriate.

I know from personal experience that Moazzam Begg is no extremist. We have met on numerous occasions, have had several long discussions, and have shared platforms together at many events. He also features in the new documentary about Guantánamo, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo,” directed by Polly Nash and myself, talking about Afghanistan, and his hopes, in 2001, that civilized intervention from other Muslims would help the country to engage with the modern world.

Along with other representatives of Cageprisoners, Moazzam and other released prisoners have all welcomed me — a non-Muslim — with nothing less than friendship, support and openness at all times, as they have with numerous other non-Muslim supporters of universal human rights. Is this really what we should expect from extremists or supporters of the Taliban?

I also know, from my conversations with Moazzam, that he is capable of far more open-minded discussions than many of his critics mentioned above (of the kind that sustained him in his conversations with guards throughout his long ordeal in US custody), and that his calm and considered response to the treatment he received is a far more moderating and moderate influence than that of his divisive critics.

It also seems clear to me that the manner in which this story has been stirred up by the media actually has less to do with Moazzam and Cageprisoners than it does with illiberal attempts to smear Amnesty International’s reputation, and to advance an all too prevalent anti-Islamic agenda.

This is supposedly disguised through the purported defense of an Amnesty employee who had no excuse for speaking to the press as she did, but instead, I would suggest, Gita Sahgal is largely being used by those whose only aim is to stir up hostility towards a man who was imprisoned without charge or trial for three years, who has never been charged with a crime, and who dares to defend the rights of other Muslims not to be held without charge or trial.

Editor’s note: Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes and Andy Worthington will attend a screening of “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” at Amnesty International’s Human Rights Action Centre in London on Tuesday February 16, at 6.30 pm, and will take part in a Q&A session following the screening, moderated by Sara MacNeice, Amnesty’s Campaign Manager for Terrorism, Security and Human Rights. For further details, see here. Tickets are free, but booking is required. Please visit Amnesty’s site for booking details, and see here for details of other UK tour dates for the film.

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.

Detainees sit around the exercise yard in Camp 4, the medium security facility within Camp Delta at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In Camp 4, highly compliant detainees live in a communal setting and have extensive access to recreation. Photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Sara Wood

Congratulations to the Swiss Canton of Jura, which recently accepted the asylum claims of two Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo, and to the Swiss federal government for agreeing to accept Jura’s decision on Wednesday.

The two men in question — Arkin Mahmud, 45, and his brother Bahtiyar Mahnut, 32 — were seized with 20 other Uighurs in December 2001. The US authorities realized almost immediately that all of these men, who are Turkic Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, had only one enemy — the Chinese government — and had been seized (or bought) by mistake. However, although the majority of the men were cleared for release by 2005, the Bush administration accepted that it could not return them to China, because of fears that they would face torture or other ill-treatment, but then struggled to find another country that would take them instead.

In May 2006, Albania was persuaded to take five of these men, but the other 17 had to wait until October 2008, when Judge Ricardo Urbina, a US District Court judge, ruled on their long-delayed habeas corpus petitions, and ordered their release into the United States, because no other country had been found that would take them, and because their continued detention was unconstitutional.

Predictably, the Bush administration appealed, and in February 2010 the Obama administration, to its eternal shame, followed suit, backing a ruling by the Court of Appeals, which overturned the lower court ruling, and hurled the Uighurs back into limbo.

In June 2009, the State Department managed to find new homes for four of these men in Bermuda, and in November the Pacific island of Palau took another six. As a result, seven Uighurs remained in Guantánamo, but by taking the brothers, the Swiss government has not only dared to take on the might of the Chinese government, which threatens any country that dares to entertain the prospect of taking any of the men from Guantánamo, but has also helped President Obama out of what appeared to be an intractable problem.

In a statement, the Swiss Justice Ministry said, “Today the Federal Council decided to admit for humanitarian reasons two Uighurs with Chinese citizenship, who have been imprisoned in Guantánamo for years by the United States without being charged with a crime nor [convicted].” Brushing aside the threats that the Chinese government had made last month, when Chinese officials warned that Switzerland should avoid damaging “overall Sino-Swiss relations,” the Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf added that Switzerland has a “stable, good relationship with China, and we want to keep it that way.”

Not mentioned publicly was the fact that, until Jura accepted the men’s asylum claims, one of them, Arkin Mahmud, appeared to stuck at Guantánamo, his only way out being to hope that the Supreme Court, which agreed to hear the Uighurs’ case last year, would overturn last February’s appeals court ruling, and allow cleared prisoners who cannot be repatriated into the United States.

The problem is that Palau had refused to take Arkin Mahmud, because, as the Washington Post noted in an editorial in October, he “suffers from serious mental health issues because of his detention and lengthy periods of solitary confinement.” As a result, Bahtiyar Mahnut turned down Palau’s offer of a new home for himself, in order to stay with his brother, and, as the Post noted, “Unless another country accepts the brothers, they could remain in custody indefinitely — a prospect that is unconscionable and that no doubt informed the justices’ decision to hear the matter.”

As I explained in an article at the time:

[T]he Supreme Court was faced with a tricky legal decision, because the justices will be considering whether, in defense of habeas corpus, and in reference to the unique position in which the Guantánamo prisoners are held, they are being asked to decide whether a judge has the power to order the release of prisoners into the US, when all the precedents, as the Court of Appeals made clear, establish that the admission of foreigners into the US is a matter for the executive and legislative branches of government.

At the time, the Post reached a principled conclusion with profound implications for the government, arguing that the “moral and ethical imperatives” were “clear and compelling,” and that the government should introduce “narrowly crafted legislation that would allow Mr. Mahmud and Mr. Mahnut into the United States, where they could remain together and Mr. Mahmud could get the medical help he needs.”

This “narrowly crafted legislation” will not now be needed, but it remains to be seen if the imminent release of Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahnut will affect the Supreme Court’s planned deliberations about the remaining five Uighurs.

The Supreme Court has scheduled argument for March 23 to decide whether to overturn the precedents regarding the admission of foreigners into the US, when, as in the cases of the Uighurs, these men are held in Guantánamo because it is not safe to repatriate them, and no other nation will take them.

The men’s lawyers will argue, as they have consistently, that the Supreme Court ruling in June 2008, granting constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights to the prisoners, is meaningless if a judge cannot actually order prisoners to be released.

As the Associated Press explained on Wednesday, the government could now try to argue that the Supreme Court should drop the case, because the remaining Uighurs were apparently offered new homes in Palau but turned down the offer. Sharon Bradford Franklin, senior counsel at The Constitution Project, told the AP that she feared this outcome. “I would not be surprised,” she said, “if the administration says that the Uighurs themselves are at fault that they have not been resettled to Palau.”

However, Sabin Willett, an attorney who has represented the Uighurs for many years, was more hopeful, telling the AP by email that he “expects the case to go forward.” I tend to share Willett’s optimism, but not, of course, if the remaining five men are miraculously resettled in some other country, perhaps just days before the March 23 deadline.

If there is one thing we have learned from the Obama administration, since the President shelved plans made last April by his counsel, Greg Craig, to bring the Uighurs to live in the US, it is that, regardless of whether senior officials may agree in private that resettling the Uighurs in the US would be the right thing to do, they are not prepared to tackle their critics — and the Bush administration’s poisonous legacy — head-on. Instead, senior officials prefer not only to avoid confrontation, but also, sadly, to avoid doing anything that would demonstrate to the American public that enormous mistakes were made at Guantánamo, and that the rhetoric of Dick Cheney and his thriving acolytes is disturbingly mistaken.

I can think of no finer way to demonstrate this than to allow the Uighurs to walk free on the streets of, say, Washington D.C., but it remains clear that this is not something that the administration will undertake willingly, and in the meantime, the people of Bermuda and Palau have been learning this instead, and are soon to be joined by the people of Switzerland.

President Obama is fortunate to have such kind allies, but he himself is the loser, the longer he refuses to tackle those who insist, in the face of overwhelming evidence, that everyone who was held at Guantánamo was a “terrorist,” and that it is somehow appropriate to continue to deprive innocent men of their liberty in Guantánamo, rather than giving them new homes in the country that, through cruelty and incompetence, deprived them of so many years of their lives.

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.

The White House claims the deal merely formalizes existing military cooperation but the Pentagon’s 2009 budget request said it needed funds to improve one of the bases in order to conduct “full spectrum operations throughout South America” and to “expand expeditionary warfare capability.”

“With a hodgepodge of treaties and projects, such as the International Law Enforcement Academy and the Merida Initiative, Obama is continuing the policies of his predecessors, spending millions to integrate the region’s military, policy, intelligence and even, through Patriot Act-like legislation, judicial systems,” writes historian Greg Grandin, a New York University professor.

Although much of Latin America is in the vanguard of the “anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement,” Grandin writes, the Obama administration is “disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.” Grandin’s article in The Nation’s February 8th issue is titled, “Muscling Latin America.”

The fountainhead of this effort is Plan Colombia, a multibillion-dollar U.S. aid package that over the past decade “has failed to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States,” Grandin says, noting that more Andean coca was synthesized into cocaine in 2008 than in 1998.

Underlying the anti-drug fight, however, is a counterinsurgency struggle for control of “ungoverned spaces” via a “clear, hold and build” sequence urged by the U.S. military to weaken Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces(FARC). The Bush White House condoned the right-wing paramilitaries who, along with their narcotraficante allies “now control about 10 million acres, roughly half of the country’s most fertile land,” Grandin reports. They also spread terror in the countryside and are responsible for many killings and for driving peasants from their land.

Grandin reports that the paras “have taken control of hundreds of municipal governments, establishing what Colombian social scientist Leon Valencia calls ‘true local dictatorships,’ consolidating their property seizures and deepening their ties to narcos, landed elites and politicians.”

What’s more, “The country’s sprawling intelligence apparatus is infiltrated by this death squad/narco combine, as is its judiciary and Congress, where more than forty deputies from the governing party are under investigation for ties to (the right-wing) AUC (United Self Defense Forces).

“Colombia remains the hands-down worst repressor in Latin America,” Grandin asserts. “More than 500 trade unionists have been executed since (Alvaro) Uribe took office. In recent years 195 teachers have been assassinated, and not one arrest has been made for the killings. And the military stands accused of murdering more than 2,000 civilians and then dressing their bodies in guerrilla uniforms in order to prove progress against the FARC.”

Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities fighting paras who have seized land to cultivate African palm for ethanol production have been evicted by mercenaries and the military, Grandin says. “From Panama to Mexico, rural protesters are likewise targeted. In the Salvadoran department of Cabanas,” he observes, “death squads have executed four leaders—three in December—who opposed the Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining Company’s efforts to dig a gold mine in their community.”

Obama could reconsider the Pentagon’s base deal and Plan Colombia, Grandin writes, “But that would mean rethinking a longer, multi-decade, bipartisan, trillion-dollars-and-counting ‘war on drugs,’ and Obama has other wars to extricate himself from—or not, as the case may be.”

“Unable or unwilling to make concessions on these and other issues important to Latin America—normalizing relations with Cuba, for instance, or advancing immigration reform—the White House is adopting an increasingly antagonistic posture,” Grandin explains. He notes that after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Brazil, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned Latin Americans to “think twice” about “the consequences” of engagement with Iran. An Argentine diplomat responded, “The Obama administration would never talk to European countries that way.”

Sherwood Ross formerly worked for The Chicago Daily News and other major dailies and as a columnist for wire services. He currently runs a public relations firm for “worthy causes.” You can reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com

Made available in response to an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, the list contains the names of 645 prisoners who were detained at Bagram as of September 2009.

But the government blacked out other vital information requested by the civil rights group – including prisoners’ citizenship, length of detention, country where captured, and circumstances of capture.

The government’s previous position was that the public had no right to have this information.

Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said, “Releasing the names of those held at Bagram is an important step toward transparency and accountability at the secretive Bagram prison, but it is just a first step.”

“Hundreds of people have languished at Bagram for years in horrid and abusive conditions, without even being told why they’re detained or given a fair chance to argue for release,” she said.

But she added, “The information the government continues to withhold is just as vital as the names of prisoners. Full transparency and accountability” about Bagram requires full disclosure.

“The public has long been kept in the dark about what goes on at Bagram. It is time to shine a bright light on the secretive prison,” Goodnam said.

It was not clear whether the list of names also included those held in field detention sites around the country, where some detainees are taken initially before being placed in the general detainee population.

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records relating to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan in April 2009.

When documents were not forthcoming, the ACLU filed the FOIA lawsuit in September 2009, seeking the disclosure of documents related to the detention and treatment of prisoners at Bagram, records relating to the rules and agreements that govern the facility, and documents pertaining to the conditions of confinement and status review process afforded prisoners.

The U.S. government’s Bagram detention facility has been the focus of widespread media attention and public concern for many years, but very little information has been publicly available about the secrecy-shrouded facility or the prisoners held there.

The U.S. government has been detaining a previously-unknown number of prisoners at the facility since 2002. Some have been held for as long as six years without access to counsel or a meaningful opportunity to challenge their imprisonment.

The conditions of confinement at Bagram are reportedly primitive, with allegations of mistreatment and abuse continuing to surface; in fact, in 2002, two Afghan prisoners at Bagram were fatally beaten by U.S. troops.

The U.S. military has recently built a modern new prison to take the place of the dilapidated and inefficient original unit. The U.S. is in the process of handing management of this new facility over to the Afghan authorities.

Nonetheless, there is growing public concern in the U.S. and around the world that Bagram has become, in effect, the new Guantanamo.

Former detainees have described abusive treatment at the base, especially in the first two or three years it was in existence. But in the last several years, detainees who have been released described improved conditions.

While the majority of the detainees at Bagram are Afghan, a small number are foreigners who are accused of fighting with the Taliban. Also held there are a handful of detainees captured in other countries, according to human rights lawyers and military detention officials.

The current detainee population is about 750, according to military detention officials, but in September, when the information request was made, there were about 100 fewer detainees. The numbers have grown over the past few months because of the increased military operations by U.S. forces.

An investigation by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has revealed that former detainees at Bagram were beaten, deprived of sleep, and threatened with dogs.

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, told us, “The BBC investigation provides further confirmation of the United States’ mistreatment of prisoners at Bagram. These abuses are the direct consequence of decisions made at the highest levels of the U.S. government to avoid the Geneva Convention and forsake the rule of law.”

The Barack Obama administration has sought to deflect some of the heat it is getting from civil rights organisations and legal experts over its management of Bagram. For example, it recently announced a set of new procedures for conducting periodic assessments of the status of each prisoner.

But, according to Tina Monshipour Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, the only U.S. organisation actively litigating on behalf of Bagram detainees, “The ‘new’ procedures adopted by the Obama administration are not new at all, they appear to be exactly the same as the procedures created by the [George W.] Bush administration in response to prior court challenges by Guantanamo detainees.”

“The idea of assigning a non-lawyer ‘personal representative’ who does not legally represent the detainee, but works for the military, is a step in the wrong direction,” Foster said.

She told us, “Only a lawyer who is independent from the government can effectively assist a detainee with his defense against allegations being made by the government.”

The Pentagon denied the BBC’s charges of harsh treatment and insisted that all inmates in the facility are treated humanely.

Another prominent human rights organisation, the British-based Reprieve, called on the British government to take action concerning two Pakistanis who it says Britain helped render there from Iraq.

“These men were never in Afghanistan until the UK and the U.S. took them there,” Stafford Smith told us. “It is the height of hypocrisy to take someone to Bagram and then claim that it is too dangerous to let them see a lawyer. Even Guant·namo Bay is better than this.”

Since coming to office a year ago, President Obama has banned the use of torture and ordered a review of policy on detainees, which is expected to report next month. But unlike its detainees at the U.S. naval facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the prisoners at Bagram have no access to lawyers and they cannot challenge their detention.

In April 2009, in a lawsuit brought in federal court by the International Justice Network, Judge John D. Bates ruled that three Bagram prisoners – two Yemenis and one Tunisian citizen – had the right to petition U.S. courts for their release because they were not Afghans captured on the Afghan battlefield.

But he also ruled that for a fourth appellant, a citizen of Afghanistan, rather than a Yemeni or Tunisian citizen held at Bagram, granting him legal rights might upset the relationship between the U.S. and Afghanistan.

Judge Bates dismissed the petition of Haji Wazir, an Afghan civilian held at Bagram without charge for more than six years. The judge ruled that because the petitioner was a citizen of Afghanistan, he had no right to petition the U.S. courts for his release.

Afghan government sources have said prisoners will have a right to appeal their detentions once the U.S. transfers its authority.

People of Narang district mourning for the civilians killed. Photo/RAWA

The Taliban suicide attack that killed a group of CIA agents in Afghanistan on a base that was directing US drone aircraft used to attack Taliban leaders was big news in the US over the past week, with the airwaves and front pages filled with sympathetic stories referring to the fact that the female station chief, who was among those killed, was the “mother of three children.”

But the apparent mass murder of Afghan school children, including one as young as 11 years old, by US-led forces (most likely either special forces or mercenary contractors working for the Pentagon or the CIA), was pretty much blacked out in the American media.

Especially blacked out was word from UN investigators that the students had not just been killed but executed, many of them after having first been rousted from their bedroom and handcuffed.

Here is the excellent report on the incident that ran in the Times of London (like Fox News, a Rupert Murdoch-owned publication) on Dec. 31:

Western troops accused of executing 10 Afghan civilians, including children

By Jerome Starkey in Kabul

American-led troops were accused yesterday of dragging innocent children from their beds and shooting them during a night raid that left ten people dead.

Afghan government investigators said that eight schoolchildren were killed, all but one of them from the same family. Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed.

Western military sources said that the dead were all part of an Afghan terrorist cell responsible for manufacturing improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which have claimed the lives of countless soldiers and civilians.

“This was a joint operation that was conducted against an IED cell that Afghan and US officials had been developing information against for some time,” said a senior Nato insider. But he admitted that “the facts about what actually went down are in dispute”.

The article goes on to say:

In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster [of the local school] said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. “Seven students were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting and came outside. When they saw him they shot him as well. He was outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”

A local elder, Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five were handcuffed before they were shot. “I saw their school books covered in blood,” he said.

The investigation found that eight of the victims were aged from 11 to 17. The guest was a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said. He said that six of the students were at high school and two were at primary school. He said that all the students were his nephews.

Compare this article to the one mention of the incident which appeared in the New York Times, one of the few American news outlets to even mention the incident. The Times, on Dec. 28, focusing entirely on the difficulty civilian killings cause for the US war effort, and not on the allegation of a serious war crime having been committed, wrote:

Attack Puts Afghan Leader and NATO at Odds

By Alissa J. Rubin and Abdul Waheed Wafa

KABUL, Afghanistan — The killing of at least nine men in a remote valley of eastern Afghanistan by a joint operation of Afghan and American forces put President Hamid Karzai and senior NATO officials at odds on Monday over whether those killed had been civilians or Taliban insurgents.

In a statement e-mailed to the news media, Mr. Karzai condemned the weekend attack and said the dead had been civilians, eight of them schoolboys. He called for an investigation.

Local officials, including the governor and members of Parliament from Kunar Province, where the deaths occurred, confirmed the reports. But the Kunar police chief, Khalilullah Ziayee, cautioned that his office was still investigating the killings and that outstanding questions remained, including why the eight young men had been in the same house at the time.

“There are still questions to be answered, like why these students were together and what they were doing on that night,” Mr. Ziayee said.

A senior NATO official with knowledge of the operation said that the raid had been carried out by a joint Afghan-American force and that its target was a group of men who were known Taliban members and smugglers of homemade bombs, which the American and NATO forces call improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s.

According to the NATO official, nine men were killed. “These were people who had a well-established network, they were I.E.D. smugglers and also were responsible for direct attacks on Afghan security and coalition forces in those areas,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue.

“When the raid took place they were armed and had material for making I.E.D.’s,” the official added.

While the article in the New York Times eventually mentions the allegation that the victims were children, not “men,” it begins with the unchallenged assertion in the lead that they were “men.”  There is no mention of the equally serious allegation that the victims had been handcuffed before being executed, and the story leaves the impression, made by NATO sources, that they were armed and had died fighting. There is no indication in the Times story that the reporters made any effort, as the London Times reporter did, to get local, non-official, sources of information.

Moreover, the information claiming that the victims had been making bombs was attributed to an anonymous NATO source, though there was no legitimate reason for the anonymity (“because of the delicacy of the situation” was the lame excuse offered)–indeed the use of an anonymous source here would appear to violate the Times’ own standards.

It’s not that in American newsrooms there was no knowledge that a major war crime may have been committed. Nearly all American news organizations receive the AP newswire. Here is the AP report on the killings, which ran under the headline “UN says killed Afghans were students”:

The United Nations says a raid last weekend by foreign troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight local students.

The Afghan government says that all 10 people killed in a village in Kunar province were civilians. NATO says there is no evidence to substantiate the claim and has requested a joint investigation.

UN special representative in Afghanistan Kai Eide said in a statement Thursday that preliminary investigation shows there were insurgents in the area at the time of the attack. But he adds that eight of those killed were students in local schools.

Once again, the American media are falling down shamefully in providing honest reporting on a war, making it difficult for the American people to make informed judgements about what is being done in their name.

Let’s be clear here. If the charges are correct, that American forces, or American-led forces, are handcuffing their victims and executing them, then they are committing egregious war crimes. If they are killing children, they are committing equally egregious war crimes. If they are handcuffing and executing children, the atrocity is beyond horrific. This indeed, would actually be worse than the infamous war crime that occurred in My Lai during the Vietnam War.

In that case, we had ordinary soldiers in the field, acting under the orders of several low-ranking officers in the heat of an operation, shooting and killing women and children. But in this case we appear to have seasoned special forces troops actually directing the taking captives, cuffing them, herding them into a room, and spraying them with bullets, execution style.

Given the history of the commanding general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who ran a massive death squad operation in Iraq before being named to his current post by President Obama, and who is known to have called for the same kind of operation in Afghanistan, it should not be surprising that the US would now be committing atrocities in Afghanistan. If this is how this war is going to be conducted, though, the US media should be making a major effort to uncover and expose the crime.

On Jan. 1, the London Times’ Starkey, in Afghanistan, followed up with a second story, reporting that Afghan President Hamid Karzai is calling for the US to hand over the troops who killed the students. He also quoted a “NATO source” as saying that the “foreigners involved” in the incident were “non-military, suggesting that they were part of a secret paramilitary unit based in the capital” of Kabul.  Starkey also quotes a “Western official” as saying: “There’s no doubt that there were insurgents there, and there may well have been an insurgent leader in the house, but that doesn’t justify executing eight children who were all enrolled in local schools.”

Good enterprise reporting by the London Times and its Kabul-based correspondent. Silence on these developments in the US media.

Meanwhile, it has been a week since the New York Times reporters Rubin and Wafa made their first flawed report on the incident, and there has been not a word since then about it in the paper.  Are Rubin and Wafa or other Times reporters on the story? Will there be a follow-up?

On the evidence of past coverage of these US wars and their ongoing atrocities by the Times, and other major US corporate media news organizations don’t bet on it. You’ll do better looking to the foreign media.

By the way, given that we’re talking the allegation of a serious war crime here, it should be noted that it is, under the Geneva Conventions, a legal requirement that the US military chain of command immediately initiate an official investigation to determine whether such a crime has occurred. One would hope that the commander in chief, President Obama, would order such an inquiry.

Any effort to prevent such an inquiry, or to cover up a war crime, would be a war crime in itself.  We just had one administration that did a lot of that. We don’t need another one.

Author’s Note:

As a teenager, I spent a year going to school in Darmstadt, in what was then West Germany. I used to have many discussions with German friends about how Germans could have allowed Nazism to happen, and how anyone could have allowed the kinds of atrocities which we Americans learned that German soldiers had committed during the war–the destroying of entire towns when one partisan fired on a German soldier, the killing of prisoners of war, etc. Of course we know now that Americans too committed equally heinous war crimes, culminating in the use of the two atomic bombs against civilian targets, not to mention the firebombing of Darmstadt itself by the Brits. But the larger point at the time was, how could Germans, who are decent people for the most part, have allowed the horror of Nazism to happen?

Now we are confronted yet again with an example of American military forces (and it matters not a whit whether they are uniformed regular soldiers or paid mercenaries who executed those Afghan kids) apparently committing exactly the type of atrocity for which the German Waffen SS was known. And whether or not the charges are true, there is enough evidence at this point, with the special UN representative in Afghanistan saying it happened, for us to believe it probably did happen. Yet there has not been one editorial in the US media calling for an open investigation into this alleged atrocity. No Americans are marching in the street demanding answers. Obama, whose daughter Malia is 11–the same age as the youngest of the slain boys–has not said a word, although Afghan students are demonstrating en masse, and burning him in effigy because of this latest outrage.

So what makes us Americans any better than the Germans of 1940? In a way, we are really worse. It would have taken considerable courage, as my German friends have pointed out, to take a stand against German atrocities in 1940, when such a stand could mean arrest, imprisonment and even execution, even execution of one’s family. No such risks are faced by Americans who take a stand against American atrocities. Here one faces, at most, social ostracism or a minor citation for arrest at a protest.

We are, as a nation, only as good as our worst behavior and our worse impulses, and can be judged by how we respond to them when they are manifested in our name. And right now, Americans aren’t looking very good at all.

NOTE: Kudos to David Swanson of afterdowningstreet.org for bringing attention to this story.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net

But corruption takes many forms and is found at many levels. To the lawyers of Human Rights First (HRF), understanding the relationship between corruption, how prisoners are treated and the rule of law is “critical to the success of any strategy” the Obama administration may decide to pursue.

Sahr MuhammedAlly, an HRF attorney and author of a new report, “Fixing Afghanistan,” explained this. She told us:

“Over the past eight years, the prisoner detention policies and practices of both the Afghans and the Americans and their NATO allies have been totally uncoordinated – a complete disaster,” she says.

There are lots of examples. A man is arrested and confined to a cell. Hours later, that same person is out on the street, having bribed his prison guard to gain his freedom. His next stop is his bomb-making safe house. And the step after that is a crowded marketplace in Kabul or Kandahar littered with dead bodies.

A person gets arrested and imprisoned, is denied a lawyer, is kept for months, even years, in prison conditions that can only be described as medieval, with no hope of ever seeing freedom again – because the guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time or because someone lost his paperwork or because someone with power was able to get money by selling this person into a legal no-man’s land.

Muhammed says “rule of law” training designed to prevent both kinds of situations has been going on for eight years, but has been “uncoordinated.” She says the US, NATO and the Afghan government are going have to recognize that “further detention policy reforms at Bagram are critical to achieving US counterinsurgency goals in Afghanistan.” And these reforms, she adds, are going to require substantial resources.

That is the central message of the new HRF policy paper. It outlines steps the United States should take now “to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan people and to more fully align US detentions with strategic priorities.”

“Successful counterinsurgency depends on US actions being seen as fair, humane, and beneficial to the security of the Afghan people, whose cooperation is needed to ensure a stable Afghanistan,” said Muhammed, who wrote the paper.

The paper says, “To achieve this goal, the US government should take further steps now to support US goals of bolstering Afghan sovereignty, increase the capacity of the Afghans to handle detentions on their own, and to establish legitimacy of US detentions in the eyes of the Afghan people by reducing the risks of arbitrary detentions, mistaken captures, and to ensure detainees a more meaningful way to challenge their detention.”

The report notes that in April 2009, HRF interviewed former prisoners held by the United States in Afghanistan who at the time of their release were found by the US military not to be a threat to US, Afghan or Coalition forces. The report says that some detainees interviewed had been detained for five years, others from four months to two years.

According to those we interviewed in April, “prisoners held by the US military in Afghanistan were not informed of the reasons for their detention or the specific allegations against them. They were not provided with any evidence that would support claims that they are members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda or supporters of other insurgent groups. They did not have lawyers.”

Detainees, it continues, “were not allowed to bring village elders or witnesses to speak on their behalf or allowed to offer evidence that the allegations could be based on individual animosities or tribal rivalries. These prisoners had no meaningful way to challenge their detention. Former prisoners and Afghan government officials told Human Rights First that captures based on unreliable information have led to the wrongful detention of many individuals, which in turn creates friction between the Afghan people and the Afghan government as well as the US military.”

The report continues: “In 2008 and in our follow-up visit to Afghanistan in 2009, we found that individuals transferred from US to Afghan custody for prosecution in the Afghan National Defense Facility are tried in proceedings that fail to meet Afghan and international fair trial standards. Prosecutions were based on allegations and evidence provided by the United States, supplemented by investigations conducted by the Afghan intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS), years after the initial capture. Although lawyers defend detainees at the ANDF, during the trials there were no prosecution witnesses, no out-of-court sworn prosecution witness statements, and little or no physical evidence presented to support the charges.”

Specifically, HRF recommends that the US and Afghan governments enter into a public security agreement that sets forth the grounds and procedures for US detentions consistent with international law. In order to avoid mistaken captures, the organization says, the US must improve intelligence that results in detention. It must reduce the risk of arbitrary detentions by providing detainees sufficient ability to challenge their detention.

The US must also work to increase the capacity of the Afghan authorities to handle detentions on their own by involving Afghan judges in a joint US-Afghan review body. The US should establish more transparency for detention operations by facilitating access to detainees and to US detention facilities by Afghan and international human rights organizations. And the US should strengthen the fairness of Afghan criminal prosecutions of those captured by the United States by providing resources and training to soldiers to assist them in information and evidence collection at point of capture.

Back in September, the Pentagon announced new detainee review board (DRB) procedures for the 600 detainees being held by the US military at Bagram.

The new guidelines would assign a United States non-lawyer military official to each detainee. They would be tasked to gather exculpatory witnesses and evidence to present before review boards to be appointed by the US military.

Currently, these detainees – some of whom have been imprisoned for more than six years – do not have access to lawyers and have no right to hear the allegations against them. Their status as “enemy combatants” is theoretically reviewed periodically by military panels, but critics say these reviews are incomplete, prejudiced and ineffective.

Also announced were reforms outlined in Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s August 30 assessment on Afghanistan for both US and Afghan prisons, focusing on rehabilitation and skills training of prisoners in order to prevent their radicalization, as well as on evidentiary concerns that hinder successful and fair prosecution of suspected insurgents transferred by international military forces to Afghan courts.

General McChrystal noted that “detention operations, while critical to counterinsurgency operations, also have the potential to become a strategic liability for the US and ISAF” and concluded that the “desired endstate” is to transfer all detention operations, including US, to the Afghan government provided it has the capacity to run these systems in accordance with international and national law.

“We are mindful of the significant challenges that lie ahead to accomplish the detention goals outlined by the Pentagon and we are gratified to see improved detainee review procedures replace ones that were unfair and detrimental to US counterinsurgency goals. To win back support for its mission and cooperation of the Afghan people, the United States however, must enact further reforms to US detention practices,” said Muhammed.

She said, “Given the lessons learned from Guantanamo, it is important that detention review procedures in Bagram must provide detainees a legal representative to ensure a meaningful mechanism for detainees to challenge their detention which the new procedures don’t provide.

“It is equally important to improve the reliability of information leading to capture of an individual in order to mitigate the risks of erroneous detentions, which the new procedures do not address,” she added.

Muhammed called for independent, public monitoring of implementation of the new procedures in order to assess their effectiveness.

HRF’s recommendations come as the newly created Joint Task Force 435 in Afghanistan undertakes its mission to oversee new detainee review procedures in Bagram and assess how to effectuate the “endstate” of transferring detention operations to the Afghan government. It also comes as the Obama administration nears the end of its own policy review and prepares to announce its strategy for Afghanistan operations.

In September, human rights activists and legal experts reacted swiftly to disclosures that the US government is planning to introduce new measures it claimed would give inmates at Afghanistan’s notorious Bagram prison more opportunities to challenge their detention.

Their views ranged from cautious optimism to total condemnation.

Tina Monshipour Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network (IJN), a legal advocacy group that represents four Bagram detainees in a pending federal court case, called the proposed changes “a step in the wrong direction.”

She told us, “No set of procedures will have legitimacy until there is transparency and accountability for any violations of the military’s own rules. Preventing the accused from having contact with his lawyer is antithetical to any legitimate system of justice.”

She said the first step should be to allow the detainees access to actual lawyers. Anything less, she added, “only invites rule-breaking and casts doubt over the legitimacy of any proceedings that may be going on behind closed doors.”

“The ‘new’ procedures adopted by the Obama administration are not new at all; they appear to be exactly the same as the procedures created by the Bush administration in response to prior court challenges by Guantanamo detainees,” she said.

David Frakt, a law professor at Western State University and former Guantanamo defense counsel, was skeptical that the administration’s new rules would work.

He told us, “The administration’s proposal to provide greater rights to detainees at Bagram reminds me of the Bush administration’s woefully inadequate Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) process for detainees at Guantanamo, which has been suspended by the Obama administration after serious criticism by the Supreme Court.”

He said, “The most obvious flaw with the proposed process is the failure to provide counsel to the detainees. Instead, the administration proposes to assign officers with no special expertise to serve as the detainees’ representative. This model was a complete failure for the CSRTs and should not be repeated.”

He added, “It is simply unrealistic to expect non-lawyers to zealously advocate on behalf of the detainees, or to be effective in gathering witnesses and evidence to challenge the lawfulness of the detention.”

In April, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request asking the Obama administration to make public records pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at Bagram. The government has not yet turned over the records.

Melissa Goodman, a staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, said that while she found the proposed new guidelines “encouraging,” she remains concerned about the level of secrecy that surrounds Bagram.

“The public remains uninformed of basic facts such as who is imprisoned there, how long they have been held, where they were captured, and on what grounds they are being subjected to indefinite detention,” she noted.

“The government should make public documents that could shed light on this crucial information about the detention and treatment of prisoners at Bagram,” she said.

Chip Pitts, a lecturer at the Stanford University law school and president of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, also expressed skepticism.

He told us, “Whatever the new rules say, it’s crucial that they distinguish between classical and legitimate conflicts where the rules of war apply, and the continuing attempt to encompass all counterterrorism within the illegitimate, overbroad, so-called ‘war on terror’ framework that wrongly disregards fundamental rights of civilians who are not active on actual battlefields.”

While it is unclear how soon the Pentagon’s new guidelines will be implemented – largely because of lack of personnel – they appear to have been announced with some sense of urgency. The probable reason is that the Obama administration is preparing to appeal a federal judge’s ruling in April that some Bagram prisoners brought in from outside Afghanistan have a right to challenge their imprisonment.

In that decision, a federal district judge, John D. Bates, ruled that three detainees at Bagram had the same legal rights that the Supreme Court last year granted to prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, because they were captured outside Afghanistan and taken to Bagram, where they have been held for more than six years without trials.

The two Yemenis and a Tunisian want a civilian judge to review the evidence against them and order their release, under the constitutional right of habeas corpus.

Chip Pitts supports their position. He told us, “Judge Bates’ decision laudably made that distinction, and, rather than fight it, the Obama administration should take the opportunity to restore sensible and moral rules in keeping with nearly a millennium of legal evolution.”

“These would recognize that civilians have a right to habeas corpus, that combatants on true battlefield situations have a right to article V hearings under the Geneva Conventions, and that places like Bagram shouldn’t be manipulated to simply form new Guantanamos or law-free zones,” Pitts said.

There are some 600-plus prisoners being held at Bagram. Critics charge that President Barack Obama has been turning Bagram into “a new Guantanamo,” since terror suspects are no longer being sent to the prison in Cuba because of plans to close it in January.

Tony Blair at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2009. Photo by Andy Mettler/flickr

Most Americans are blissfully in the dark about it, but across the Atlantic in the UK, a commission reluctantly established by Prime Minister Gordon Brown under pressure from anti-war activists in Britain is beginning hearings into the actions and statements of British leaders that led to the country’s joining the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Even before testimony began in hearings that started yesterday, news began to leak out from documents obtained by the commission that the government of former PM Tony Blair had lied to Parliament and the public about the country’s involvement in war planning.

Britain’s Telegraph newspaper over the weekend published documents from British military leaders, including a memo from British special forces head Maj. Gen. Graeme Lamb, saying that he had been instructed to begin “working the war up since early 2002.”

This means that Blair, who in July 2002, had assured members of a House of Commons committee that there were “no preparations to invade Iraq,” was lying.

Things are likely to heat up when the commission begins hearing testimony. It has the power, and intends to compel testimony from top government officials, including Blair himself.

While some American newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, have run an Associated Press report on the new disclosures and on the commission, key news organizations, including the New York Times, have not. The Times ignored the Telegraph report, but a day later ran an article about the British commission that focused entirely on evidence that British military leaders in Iraq felt “slighted” by “arrogant” American military leaders who, the article reported, pushed for aggressive military action against insurgent groups, while British leaders preferred negotiating with them.

While that may be of some historical interest, it hardly compares with the evidence that Blair and the Bush/Cheney administration were secretly conspiring to invade Iraq as early as February and March 2002.

Recall that the Bush/Cheney argument to Congress and the American people for initiating a war against Iraq in the fall of 2002 was that Iraq was allegedly behind the 9-11 attacks and that it posed an “imminent” danger of attack against the US and Britain with its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Of course, such arguments, which have subsequently been shown to have been bogus, would have had no merit if the planning began a year earlier, and if no such urgency was expressed by the two leaders at that time. Imminent, after all, means imminent, and if Blair, Bush and Cheney had genuinely thought an attack with WMDs was imminent back in the early days of the Bush administration, they would have been acting immediately, not secretly conjuring up a war scheduled for a year later. (The actual invasion began on March 19, 2003).

As I documented in my book, The Case for Impeachment, there is plenty of evidence that Bush and Cheney had a scheme to put the US at war with Iraq even before Bush took office on Jan. 20, 2001. Then Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill in his own tell-all book, The Price of Loyalty, written after he was dumped from the Bush Administration, recounts that at the first meeting of Bush’s new National Security Council, the question of going to war and ousting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was on the agenda.

Immediately after the 9-11 attacks, NSC anti-terrorism program czar Richard Clarke also recalled Bush ordering him to “find a link” to Iraq. Meanwhile, within days, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was ordering top generals to prepare for an Iraq invasion. Gen. Tommy Franks, who was heading up the military effort in Afghanistan that was reportedly closing in on Osama Bin Laden, found the rug being pulled out from under him as Rumsfeld began shifting troops out of Afghanistan and to Kuwait in preparation for the new war.

It is nothing less than astonishing that so little news of the British investigation into the origins of the illegal Iraq War is being conveyed to Americans by this country’s corporate media—yet another example demonstrating that American journalism is dead or dying.

It is even more astonishing that neither the Congress nor the president here in America is making any similar effort to put America’s leaders in the dock to tell the truth about their machinations in engineering a war that has cost the US over $1 trillion (perhaps $3 trillion eventually when debt payments and the cost of veterans care is added in), and over 4000 lives, not to mention as many as one million innocent Iraqi lives.

Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He is author of Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) and The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at thiscantbehappening.net