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CounterPunch
December
6, 2002
Suffocated,
Beaten, Hooded & Shackled
An American Officer on the Treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban
Prisoners
by ROBERT FISK
The
Independent
The Americans take them shackled and hooded on
to transport aircraft to Kandahar. They live in pens of eight
or 10 men. They are given cots with blankets but no privacy.
They are forced to urinate and defecate publicly because the
Americans want to watch their prisoners at all times.
But United States forces have not only
failed to hunt down Osama bin Laden while they are preparing
for war in Iraq: they are finding it almost impossible to crack
the al-Qa'ida network because Bin Laden's men have resorted to
primitive methods of communication that cut individual members
of al-Qa'ida off from all information.
This extraordinary, grim scenario comes
from an American intelligence officer just back from Afghanistan
who agreed to talk to The Independent--and to supply his own
photographs of prisoners--on  condition of anonymity. His prognoses
were chilling and totally at variance with the upbeat briefings
of the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Even in Pakistan,
he says, middle-ranking Pakistani army officers are tipping off
members of al-Qa'ida to avoid American-organised raids.
"We didn't catch whom we were supposed
to catch," the officer told me. "There was an over-expectation
by us that technology could do more than it did. Al-Qa'ida are
very smart. They basically found out how we track them. They
realised that if they communicated electronically, our Rangers
would swoop on them. So they started using couriers to hand-carry
notes on paper or to repeat messages from their memory and this
confused our system. Our intelligence is hi-tech--they went back
to primitive methods that the Americans cannot adapt to."
The American officer said there were
originally "a lot of high-profile arrests". But the
al-Qa'ida cells didn't know what other members were doing. "They
were very adaptive and became much more decentralised. We caught
a couple of really high-profile, serious al-Qa'ida leaders but
they couldn't tell us what specific operations were going to
take place. They would know that something big was being planned
but they would have no idea what it was."
The officer, who spent at least six months
in Afghanistan this year, was scathing in his denunciation of
General Abdul Rashid Dostam, the Uzbek warlord implicated in
the suffocation of up to a thousand Taliban prisoners in container
trucks. "Dostam is totally culpable and the US believes
he's guilty but he's our guy and so we won't say so."
Gen Dostam uses Turkish military intelligence
men as bodyguards. "There was concern in the Isaf [International
Security Assistance Force] that the Turks who run it would create
ethnic problems, which is one reason the Turkish army does not
share the Kabul Isaf compounds with other Isaf troops. But one
of the things we failed to do was create a real government. We
let the warlords firmly entrench themselves and now they can't
be dislodged," he said.
According to the same officer, American
security agents in Karachi were looking for the murderers of
US journalist Daniel Pearl but there, as in many other cases,
they would find their arrest "targets" had fled because
of secret support within middle ranks of the Pakistani army.
"We would go with the Pakistanis to a location but there
would be no one there because once the middle level of the Pakistani
military knew of our plans, they would leak the information.
In the North-West Frontier province, the frontier corps is a
second-rate army--they are a lot more anti-Western in sentiment
than the main Pakistani army. In the end we had to co-ordinate
everything through Islamabad."
As for the hundreds of prisoners taken
in Afghanistan, the American officer insisted that none were
beaten "now" although he claimed ignorance about earlier
evidence that soldiers based in Kandahar had broken the bones
of captives after their initial arrest. "Only prisoners
who were likely to be violent or unco-operative are hooded and
their hands are tied behind their backs with plastic restraint
bands. Sometimes we would take the hoods off prisoners when they
were travelling in our helicopters, at other times not.
"In Kandahar, in what we call their
living areas, the prisoners are given cots with blankets and
Adidas suits and runners, but they have no privacy. There are
no sides to their living areas because we have to see them all
the time. They have no privacy in the bathroom. Some of them
masturbate when they are looking at the female guards. Our guards
had no reaction to this. They are soldiers. When the interrogations
take place, the prisoners are allowed to sit. I don't want to
get into specifics about the questions we ask them.
He said: "There was non- co-operation
at the beginning. But they had a misconception that ey were going
to be treated the way they treated each other. When they're not
tortured, I think this has a lot to do with changing their opinion."
But the Americans were even short of
translators. "We recruited Farsi-speakers who can speak
the local version of Persian in Afghanistan, Dari. They would
be civilians hired in the US. But they had to go through full
security procedures and out of every five, only one or two would
be given security clearance."
The American officer also had a low opinion
of the Western journalists he met at Bagram. "They just
hung around our base all day. Whenever we had some special operation,
we'd offer the journalists some facility to go on patrol with
our special forces and off they'd go--you know, 'we're on patrol
with the special forces'--and they wouldn't realise we were stringing
them along to get them out of the way."
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