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August 8, 2002
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
August 7, 2002
Anis Shivani
The First
21st Century
Police State
Jeffrey St. Clair
Fallon's
Fallen
Is the US Navy Killing
Children in Nevada?
Robert Fisk
For the
Forgotten Afghans,
the UN Offers a Fresh Hell
Dr. Susan Block
Rigas in
Cuffs
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
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CIA, Drugs & the
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by Alexander
Cockburn
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
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A Pocket Guide to
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August
8, 2002
Return
to Afghanistan
Families
of the Disappeared
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
They came for Hussain Abdul Qadir on 25 May. According
to his wife, there were three American agents from the FBI and
25 men from the local Pakistani CID. The Palestinian family had
lived in the Pakistani city of Peshawar for years and had even
applied for naturalisation.
But this was not a friendly visit to
their home in Hayatabad Street. "They broke our main gate
and came into the house without any respect," Mrs Abdul
Qadir was to report later to the director of human rights at
Pakistan's Ministry of Law and Justice in Islamabad.
"They blindfolded my husband and
tied his hands behind his back. They searched everything in the
house--they took our computer, mobile phone and even our land-line
phone. They took video and audio cassettes. They took all our
important documents--our passports and other certificates--and
they took our money too," she said.
Where, Mrs Abdul Qadir asked Ahsan Akhtar,
the director of human rights, was her husband? The Independent
has now learnt exactly where he is--he is a prisoner in a cage
on the huge American air base at Bagram in Afghanistan. He was
kidnapped--there appears to be no other word for it--by the Americans
and simply flown over the international frontier from Pakistan.
His "crime" is unknown. He has no lawyers to defend
him. In the vacuum of the US "war on terror", Mr Abdul
Qadir has become a non-person.
His wife has now received a single sheet
of paper from the Red Cross which gives no geographical location
for the prisoner but lists his nationality as "Palastainian"
(sic) and the following message in poorly written Arabic: "To
the family and children in Peshawar. I am well and need, first
and foremost, God's mercy and then your prayers. Take care of
your faith and be kind to the little ones. Could you send me
my reading glasses? Your father: Hussain Abdul Qadir."
The sheet of paper is dated 29 June and
the Red Cross has confirmed that the prisoner--ICRC number AB7
001486-01--was interviewed in Bagram.
Needless to say, the Americans will give
no information about their prisoners or the reasons for their
detention. They will not say whether their interrogators are
Afghan or American--there are increasing rumours that Afghan
interrogators are allowed to beat prisoners in the presence of
CIA men--or if, or when, they intend to release their captives.
Indeed, the Americans will not even confirm that prisoners have
been seized in Pakistan and taken across the Afghan border.
Fatima Youssef has also complained to
the Pakistani authorities that her Syrian husband, Manhal al-Hariri--a
school director working for the Saudi Red Crescent Society--was
seized on the same night as Mr Abdul Qadir from their home in
Peshawar, again by three Americans and a group of Pakistani CID
men.
"I have the right to ask where my
husband is and to know where they have taken him," she has
written to the Pakistani authorities. "I have the right
to ask for an appeal to release him now, after an interrogation,
I have the right to ask for the return of the things which they
took from my house."
An Algerian doctor, Bositta Fathi, was
also taken that same night by two Americans and Pakistani forces,
according to his wife. "I don't have any support and I am
not able to go anywhere without my husband," she has told
Mr Akhtar in Islamabad. Both Mr Hariri and Dr Fathi are believed
to be held at Bagram, which is now the main American interrogation
centre in Afghanistan. "From there," one humanitarian
worker told The Independent, "you either get released or
packed off to Guantanamo. Who knows what the fate of these people
is or what they are supposed to have done? It seems that it's
all outside the law."
Many Arabs moved to Peshawar during the
war against the Russians in Afghanistan and remained there as
doctors or aid workers. The Abdul Qadirs, for example, asked
for naturalisation in January 1993--Mr Abdul Qadir holds a Jordanian
passport--long before Osama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan
and founded his al-Qa'ida movement.
"I don't know why all this happened
to us because we are Muslims and Arabs," Mrs Abdul Qadir
says. "I want to know about my husband. We will leave Pakistan
if the government wants us to leave. We will do anything the
government wants but in a human and civilised manner."
* At least 15 people have been killed
in a shoot-out between Afghan police and what witnesses said
was a group of Arabs and Pakistanis south of Kabul yesterday.
Omar Samad, a foreign ministry spokesman described the gang as
"determined and suicidal".
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
Karzai's
Bodyguard
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