Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Revisiting the Massacre

Sadly, this seems like a good time to bring up an earlier horrible story that nobody wanted to hear about. Were U.S. troops in Afghanistan complicit in a massacre?

June 15, 2002

Irish documentarian Jamie Doran says he has evidence of American complicity in a massacre in Afghanistan, and he’s been showing his rough footage to European leaders in the hope of preventing a coverup.

Doran, who worked at the BBC for more than seven years and has made documentaries about human rights abuses throughout the world, screened 20 minutes of his unfinished feature documentary, “Massacre at Mazar,” to the European parliament and the German parliament on Wednesday. After witnessing the screening, Andrew McEntee, former head of Amnesty International in the U.K., called for an independent investigation.

Doran has yet to release the footage to the public because he says his eyewitnesses’ identities need to be obscured for their own protection. But Doran felt he had to get some of the information out immediately because the mass graves he secretly filmed are in danger of being tampered with, which would make an independent inquiry into his film’s allegations of Northern Alliance and American war crimes impossible.

According to Doran, of the approximately 8,000 Taliban prisoners taken after the fall of Kunduz in late November 2001 to Gen. Rashid Dostum, around 5,000 are unaccounted for. He says he’s filmed eyewitnesses testifying that many of those prisoners suffocated in the metal containers used to transport them between Qala-I-Zeini fortress and Sherberghan prison, and that Northern Alliance troops fired into the containers, killing and wounding other prisoners. One witness claims that an American officer ordered the bodies dumped in the desert of Dasht-I-Leili, and that living people were taken there as well and executed. Furthermore, Doran says he has witnesses claiming to have seen American special-forces soldiers torturing prisoners who made it to Sherberghan.

I remember hearing about this film on “Democracy Now” some months ago. It could not find distribution in the US and no television station would air it. It has been seen all over the world, however, including the CBC in Canada, (which also has a lot of links to various stories and resources on this story.)

Here’s an article about it from the Global Policy Forum:

When the containers were unlocked at Sheberghan, the bodies of the dead tumbled out. A 12-man U.S. Fifth Special Forces Group unit, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, guarded the prison’s front gates and, according to witnesses, controlled the facility in the hopes of picking key prisoners for interrogation and possible transportation to Guant?namo Bay. (This is how Lindh was singled out.) “Everything was under the control of the American commanders,” a Northern Alliance soldier tells Doran in the film. American troops searched the bodies for Al Qaeda identification cards. But, says another driver, “Some of [the prisoners] were alive. They were shot” while “maybe 30 or 40” American soldiers watched.

Members of ODA 595, interviewed for the PBS program “Frontline” on August 2, 2002, confirm their presence at Sheberghan but cagily deny participating in war crimes. “The prisoners were being treated the exact same way as Dostum’s forces were,” said master sergeant “Paul.” “I didn’t see any atrocities, but I easily could have. Some prisoners may have died because they were sick or ill, and Dostum’s forces just couldn’t give them any care because they didn’t have it.” But even General Dostum admits 200 such deaths. And the Northern Alliance soldier quoted above says U.S. troops masterminded the cover-up”: “The Americans told the Sheberghan people to get rid of them [the bodies] before satellite pictures could be taken.”

These ODA 595 Special Forces guys freely admitted being very close to General Dostum and his troops. But, they had to leave right after the massacre at Mazer al Sharif:

Yeah we eh, we were ordered out quite rapidly and without General Dostum’s knowledge. He was out of town and we got word that we were to be quickly ex-filled, to brief Mr. Rumsfeld.

We have no idea what really happened here, but there is ample evidence that the massacre itself took place. Whether Americans were involved remains unknown.

And, while this is a war crime, there is a distinction between what happened in Afghanistan to these suspected Taliban fighters and the Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib — the most obvious being that we invaded Iraq, unprovoked, on the basis of lies about “grave and gathering” threats, lies about ties to terrorists and the increasingly surreal and threadbare claim of liberation. Nonetheless, war crimes are war crimes and this was a particularly horrifying one.

And regardless of any righteousness of cause, it is the policy of “gloves off” that Bush and his testosterone addled advisors begat right after 9/11 that led inexorably to the sickening display at Abu Ghraib. There is a direct line from Mazar al Sharif to Gitmo to arcane arguments about habeus corpus before the Supreme Court to Abu Ghraib and it began with the puerile warcry that afternoon on top of Ground Zero when our president called for bloodlust instead of strength and wisdom.

I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon.

With that level of statesmanship and leadership, what did we expect?

Freudian Spin

There are a few people there in Iraq that want to claim credit for any situation on the ground, but the people in Fallujah are tired of foreign fighters and radicals and extremists preventing them from living a normal life. And those who remain in Fallujah will be taken care of. And the Iraqi forces that have been stood up are now in the process of patrolling the streets and bringing law and order to the streets.

Most of that comment is either gibberish or a bad translation from his native Martian, but the president is certainly right about the people of Fallujah being tired of foreign fighters, radicals and extremists preventing them from living a normal life. It’s just a bit disorienting to hear Bush describe himself in such terms.

Oh. Well That Explains It

Via Wonkette

“RUSH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?”

Just gimme some ‘o that old time moral relativism baby. And pass me a coupla little blue babies to wash it down with.

Hate is a gateway drug.

Spinning Depravity

The Right is in trouble but they just keep digging their hole deeper and deeper and if we don’t stop them, we will all be sucked into the void they have created. Even their most nimble spinners and rhetorical pole dancers are unable to sound even minimally coherent when trying to rationalize the horrors of Abu Ghraib. The tired old “Jane, you ignorant slut” formula is embarrassingly irrelevant in light of the pictures that shook the world, yet their intellectual bankruptcy seems to provide them no other way to discuss with the problem.

Here is Tucker Carlson, fielding a “question” to Bianca Jagger yesterday who was on Crossfire on behalf of Amnesty International:

Read the rest on The American Street, here

Also, be sure to check out (among many others) Kevin Hayden’s post today about never having to say you’re sorry and Mary Ratcliffe’s very interesting piece about Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In fact, read it all. There are a ton of fine writers over there churning out good stuff day in and day out. I’m thrilled to be a part of it.

I said what I meant and I meant what I said

Wolf Blitzer’s “Arab analyst” was unimpressed with Crusader Codpiece’s little interview. She thought that the Iraqi people might get the impression that the president was talking down to them. Wolf, clearly stunned and shaken, said, “you think this president was condescending?!” She replied that while we may find the president friendly and open, when his words “the people of the middle east have got to understand…” are translated into arabic they sound quite rude.

I have always thought they sounded rude coming straight out of his mouth. The boy is always lecturing people with words like “you gotta unnerstand, in a democracy we love freedom. Free people love democracy. That’s what freedom is. I tole the Iraqi people they are free and I meant it!” Apparently, he has somehow gotten the impression that if you forcefully say incredibly stupid things as if it’s the first time anyone has ever uttered them, people will believe that you are a strong leader.

Certainly, hearing Bush go on and on again this morning about how good Americans are for bringing democracy to the Iraqis and insisting that we got rid of torture and rape rooms so the Iraqis could be free is not likely to bring any greater confidence in our ability to deal with the hideous reality Abu Ghraib.

I can’t see how this will help us. They should never let him off his leash.

The Boy In The Bubble

From Salon:

It’s time to revise the president’s stump speech. We wouldn’t want anyone out there to be misled, and surely, he wouldn’t either.

We found, in just a handful of sentences from a speech Bush gave on his “bus tour,” several misleading comments that would not pass the muster of even a junior factchecker. Even saying Bush is on a “bus tour” isn’t quite right. Apparently, the president is taking the kind of bus tour that involves flying in an airplane.

Here are seven consecutive sentences from Bush’s speech at a Michigan rally on Monday. We counted four factual problems. If we had more time, we’d fact-check the whole speech. But you get the idea.

“My opponent admits that Saddam Hussein was a threat. He just didn’t support my decision to remove Saddam from power. (1) Maybe he was hoping Saddam would lose the next Iraqi election. (Laughter.) We showed the dictator and a watching world that America means what it says. (Applause.) Because — because we acted, Saddam’s torture chambers are closed. (2) Because we acted, Iraq’s weapons programs are ended forever. (3) (Applause.) Because we acted, nations like Libya got the message and renounced their own weapons programs. (4) (Applause.)

1.) Actually, Kerry voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. He disagreed with the president’s rush to use force. As Kerry wrote in an op-ed in September 2002: “Regime change in Iraq is a worthy goal. But regime change by itself is not a justification for going to war. Absent a Qaeda connection, overthrowing Saddam Hussein — the ultimate weapons-inspection enforcement mechanism — should be the last step, not the first.”

2.) Saddam’s torture chambers may be closed, but the president should be embarrassed to even mention the phrase “torture chamber” and Iraq in the same sentence this week. One Iraqi prisoner allegedly abused at the U.S.-run prison Abu Ghraib say he preferred Saddam’s brand of torture to what the American troops meted out.

3.) Since no one, not even the scores of U.S. agents scouring bombed-out Iraq, has found evidence that Saddam had active WMD programs just prior to the invasion last year, it is not right to say they were ended “because we acted.” In fact, they “ended” well before Bush rushed to war with shoddy proof. The UN says Iraq hadn’t had WMD of any significance since 1994.

4.) Libya again. He continues to mention the Iraq War as the reason Muammar Gaddafi got religion and gave up pursuit of WMD programs. To get a different, correct view on this topic, read Brookings’ Martin Indyk’s piece, called The Iraq War did not Force Gadaffi’s Hand.

And the arrogant little prick smirked all the way through it. I saw it.

Shoes Dropping

This may be BS and I hope it is. But, I’ve been wondering what went on with the women who were imprisoned at Abu Ghraib. You would assume that they’d use similar types of “pressure” to “soften them up.”

New questions about U.S. troops’ conduct came to light Tuesday when the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd published four photographs appearing to show U.S. soldiers raping at least two women and forcing them to give oral sex, one of them at gunpoint.

The newspaper, an opposition publication whose reliability has been questioned in the past, ran the photos under a banner headline reading, “The Democracy of the American Empire of Evil and Adultery: Gang Rape by Occupation Soldiers of Iraqi Women Under Gunpoint.”

The newspaper did not comment further on the photographs or report how it received them, and there was no way to independently confirm their authenticity.

After what we’ve already seen, I don’t think it even matters. The rest of the world is going to believe the worst.

Veteran Vice President

Ron Brownstein suggest that Kerry needs to pick a VP with national security cred and I couldn’t agree more.

Conventional wisdom among Democratic strategists has been that sooner or later national security will recede as a concern and bread-and-butter domestic issues will decide the presidential election. One senior party operative recently offered what he called the Google theory of 2004: If an Internet search about the campaign the day after the election turns up more references to Iraq than to the economy, that probably means President Bush has won.

But the continuing violence in Iraq is shaking these assumptions. It’s no longer certain that domestic issues such as jobs and healthcare will displace Iraq as the central focus of public attention and the campaign debate. Nor is it certain that sustained attention on Iraq will benefit the president.

This transformed landscape will challenge both Bush and his Democratic opponent, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts.

The dangers for Bush are most obvious. Iraq is his war.

[…]

CBS/New York Times survey released last week showed that approval of Bush’s handling of the war plummeted to 41%, dragging his overall approval rating below the 50% level that historically marks the dividing line between presidents who win reelection and those who don’t.

Those numbers are certain to fluctuate in the months ahead. Yet they underscore the threat to the president. The centerpiece in his case for reelection is that he has been a resolute and effective manager in the war on terrorism.

[…]

But that doesn’t mean Kerry will automatically benefit. Instead, he faces a paradox. The more Americans focus on Iraq, the more they seem to weigh credibility as commander in chief when choosing between the candidates.

And despite their anxieties about the occupation, far more Americans say they trust Bush rather than Kerry to safeguard the nation’s security.

[…]

Perhaps the most pressing challenge for Kerry is to find ways beyond his biography to reassure Americans that he can be trusted to protect their security.

One of Kerry’s best opportunities to send that message could come through his selection of a running mate. So far, though, there’s little evidence that the campaign is thinking in that direction. The rumors in Democratic circles are focused almost entirely on those who would help Kerry most on domestic issues: Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri and Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa.

Conspicuously missing from that list are candidates who could reinforce Kerry’s national security credentials.

[…]

Even more intriguing is a name that has attracted even less attention: former NATO Supreme Commander and 2004 Democratic presidential contender Wesley K. Clark. The irony is that Clark probably would be generating more buzz as a potential vice president if he hadn’t sought his party’s nomination. The consensus in Democratic circles is that the retired Army general dimmed his prospects through an uneven performance on the campaign trail.

Yet those experiences left Clark with more preparation for a vice presidential campaign than if he hadn’t run at all. And he has proven one of the Democrats’ most acute analysts and effective messengers on national security: His speeches on Iraq last fall, which called for broadening international participation in the occupation and warned against dismantling the entire Iraqi army, look prescient now.

Last week, Clark underscored the potential value of a running mate who once wore four stars on his shoulders and a Silver Star on his chest when he responded to recent Republican attacks on Kerry’s activities in and after Vietnam with a ringing challenge: “Those who didn’t serve, or didn’t show up for service,” he wrote, “should have the decency to respect those who did … ”

As a candidate, Clark demonstrated plenty of flaws. But few other Democrats could deliver a punch like that with such authority. And none could better symbolize Kerry’s determination to rebuild relations with traditional allies than the man who directed, in Kosovo, the one war NATO ever fought. In an election that could revolve more around guns than butter, Clark may pack more firepower than any of the other names on Kerry’s list of running mates.

Democratic conventional wisdom, it appears, is the same conventional wisdom that advised Kerry to vote for the war resolution and advised Democrats in 2002 to pretend that Bush wasn’t riding all over the country on a metaphorical white horse, swinging his terrible swift sword while they labored in town hall meetings debating the fine points of prescription drug coverage. As it was then, this conventional wisdom is wrong.

Rove is pulling out all his guns to neutralize Kerry’s war record because he knows it’s the national security issue that is the biggest threat to President Asterisk’s ascension to the ranks of legally elected presidents. The Scumbags For Truth is just the beginning. And, over the next 6 months, it is likely to take its toll.

As my 4 regular readers know, I have long believed that this election was going to be about national security whether we like it or not. Events are taking us there as much as the machinations of the Bush campaign. They must run on Bush’s “gut” or lose. It is wishful thinking to believe that the election will be about jobs and health care, as much as we would like to believe that everybody is voting on those kitchen table issues and despite the fact that focus groups say that’s what they want to hear the candidates talk about. What they say they want and what they actually want are often far from the same thing.

From what I can tell, the zeitgeist suggests that what voters want this time is a masculine man of action. Karl Rove knows this, which is why he is resorting to South Carolina level dirty tricks this early in the campaign. His inarticulate little boy isn’t looking so good. Kerry’s war record must be put into play and it must be destroyed. And there are always willing Scumbags For Truth around to do that dirty work.

I like Clark and think he could be an effective counterweight to that charge as VP. They’ll attack his claim to heroism too, of course, but one wonders if they could really persuade the country that two silver star winners, one a 4 star General, are lacking in patriotism. I’m sure they’ll try, but at some point enough of the non-koolaid drinking public has to start asking themselves if it’s reasonable that every single Democratic war hero, from Kerry to Kerrey to Cleland to Clark are all traitors and cowards who got some sort of special treatment.

Regardless of whether it’s Clark or someone else, I think Kerry should pick a veteran for VP. I think it’s obvious that Iraq and the WOT are the central issues of our time. We must confront it head-on, without apology, and to do that credibly we must use the useful contrast of Republican chickenhawk incompetence as our foil.

Calling Karen Hughes

In U.S., Seeking To Limit Damage

The Bush administration is struggling to develop a damage-control strategy to counter the mounting global backlash against the United States after revelations that U.S. military and intelligence personnel abused Iraqi prisoners, according to U.S. officials.

The search for a strong response follows a review of international reaction by the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department that revealed devastating fallout and criticism well beyond the Islamic world, from Brazil and Britain to Hong Kong, U.S. officials said.

“It’s very, very sobering,” said a State Department official briefed on the INR review. He requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “It’s like the song by the Who, ‘Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.’ That’s the widespread perception we have to deal with.

There is no problem that can’t be solved with a little bit of clever political spin, right? Karen’s usually the gal who comes up with all that wonderful, nonsensical alliteration — “Compassionate Conservative,” “Reformer With Results” etc.

How about “Torturers With Tolerance?”

“Masturbator Emancipators?”

“Sadists For Sovereignty?”

Surely, the Arab world can be as successfully spun as a bunch of dittoheads. All it takes is a snappy slogan and George W. Bush assuring everybody that he believes he’s been called by God to lead a crusade for freedom.

Liars For Bush Part CXXIII

Gen. Richard B. Myers called CBS anchor Dan Rather eight days before the report was to air, asking for extra time, said Jeff Fager, executive producer of the US network’s ’60 Minutes II’ program.

Myers cited the safety of American hostages and tension surrounding the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Fager said, adding that he held off as long as he believed possible given it was a competitive story.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible that Myers personally called Dan Rather three weeks before the broadcast aired and yet still hadn’t actually read the internal 57 page report that was delivered by General Taguba back in February by last Sunday.

It’s also theoretically possible that Trent Lott’s aquanet hair helmet wouldn’t spontaneously burst into flame in the presence of a butane lighter.

But I doubt it.