The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (6 page)

January 12, 2012

Guantánamo at Ten: The Prisoner and the Prosecutor

Ten years ago, Omar Deghayes and Morris Davis would have struck anyone as an odd pair. While they have never met, they now share a profound connection, cemented through their time at the notorious U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Deghayes was a prisoner there. Air Force Col. Morris Davis was chief prosecutor of the military commissions there from 2005 to 2007.

Deghayes was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to the U.S. military. He told me: “There was a payment made for every person who was handed to the Americans. . . . We were chained, head covered, then sent to Bagram [Afghanistan]—we were tortured in Bagram—and then from Bagram to Guantánamo.”

At Guantanámo, Deghayes, one of close to 800 men who have been sent there since January 2002, received the standard treatment: “People were subjected to beatings, daily fear . . . without being convicted of any crime.”

While Deghayes and his fellow inmates were suffering in their cages, the Bush administration was erecting a controversial legal framework to prosecute the Guantánamo prisoners. It labeled those rounded up “enemy combatants,” argued they had no protections under the U.S. Constitution, nor under the Geneva Conventions, no rights whatsoever. Guantánamo became a legal black hole.

When I asked Col. Davis if he felt that torture was used at Guantánamo, he said: “I don’t think there’s any doubt. I would say that there was torture. Susan Crawford, a Dick Cheney protégé, said there was torture. John McCain has said waterboarding was torture, and we’ve admitted we’ve waterboarded. There have been at least five judges in federal court and military courts that have said detainees were tortured.”

Chained, kept in cages in orange jumpsuits, subjected to harsh interrogations and humiliations, with their Muslim faith vilified, the prisoners at Guantánamo began to fight back, through the time-honored tradition of nonviolent noncooperation. They began a hunger strike. In response, examples were made of Deghayes and the other protesters. He recalled: “After beating me in the cell, they dragged me outside, and then one of the guards, while another officer was standing, observing what was happening, [tried] to gouge my eyes out. . . . I lost sight in both of my eyes. Slowly, I regained my sight in one of the eyes. The other eye has completely gotten worse. And they went to do the same thing to the next cell and the next cell and the next cell . . . to frighten everyone else from campaigning or from objecting to any policies.”

Deghayes now has sight in one eye. His right eye remains shut. After his release from Guantánamo, he was sent back to Britain. He is suing the British government for its collaboration in his imprisonment and torture.

Col. Morris Davis, disgusted with the military tribunal process, resigned his position in 2007, and in 2008 retired from the military. He went to work at the Congressional Research Service. After penning an opinion piece critical of the Obama administration’s embrace of the military tribunals, which was published in the
Wall Street Journal
in 2009, Davis was fired.

Deghayes notes that the hundreds of men who have left Guantánamo this past decade have been released because of pressure on governments from grassroots campaigning. That is why more than 350 separate protests were held this week, on Guantánamo’s tenth anniversary. One hundred seventy-one men remain imprisoned there, more than half of whom have been cleared for release, but languish nevertheless.

To make matters worse, in what Col. Davis called a “complete act of cowardice,” President Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act, giving the U.S. government the power to detain anyone, without charge, for an indefinite period of time. Davis explained that it “is not a dramatic departure from what the policy has been for the last few years, but now it’s law.”

One could imagine an “Occupy Guantánamo” movement, but that would be redundant: The United States has occupied Guantánamo since 1903. Since the U.S. has maintained a crushing embargo against Cuba for more than half a century, presumably because it doesn’t like Cuban policies, you’d think the U.S. would exhibit model behavior on its little slice of Cuba. It does just the opposite. Which is why grassroots movements are so important. With the U.S. presidential race heating up, be assured that the Republican and Democratic parties see eye to eye on Guantánamo.

February 16, 2012

The Afghan War’s Nine Lives

Eight youths, tending their flock of sheep in the snowy fields of Afghanistan, were exterminated last week by a NATO airstrike. They were in the Najrab district of Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan. Most were reportedly between the ages of six and fourteen. They had sought shelter near a large boulder, and had built a fire to stay warm. At first, NATO officials claimed they were armed men. The Afghan government condemned the bombing and released photos of some of the victims. By Wednesday, NATO offered, in a press release, “deep regret to the families and loved ones of several Afghan youths who died during an air engagement in Kapisa province Feb. 8.” Those eight killed were not that different in age from Lance Cpl. Osbrany Montes de Oca, twenty, of North Arlington, New Jersey. He was killed two days later, February 10, while on duty in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. These nine young, wasted lives will be the latest footnote in the longest war in United States history, a war that is being perpetuated, according to one brave, whistle-blowing U.S. Army officer, through a “pattern of overt and substantive deception” by “many of America’s most senior military leaders in Afghanistan.”

Those are the words written by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis in his eighty-four-page report, “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leaders’ Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort.” A draft of that report, dated January 27, 2012, was obtained by
Rolling Stone
magazine. It has not been approved by the U.S. Army Public Affairs office for release, even though Davis writes that its contents are not classified. He has submitted a classified version to members of Congress. Davis, a seventeen-year Army veteran with four combat tours behind him, spent a year in Afghanistan with the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, traveling more than 9,000 miles to most operational sectors of the U.S. occupation and learning firsthand what the troops said they needed most.

In a piece he wrote in
Armed Forces Journal
(
AFJ
) titled “Truth, lies and Afghanistan,” Davis wrote of his experience, “What I saw bore no resemblance to rosy official statements by U.S. military leaders about conditions on the ground.” Speaking out is strongly discouraged in the U.S. military, especially against one’s superiors. His whistle-blowing was picked up by the
New York Times
and
Rolling Stone
, whose reporter, Michael Hastings, told me, “The fact is that you have a 17-year Army veteran who’s done four tours—two in Afghanistan and two in Iraq—who has decided to risk his entire career—he has two and a half more years left before he gets a pension—because he feels that he has a moral obligation to do so.”

Davis interviewed more than 250 people—U.S. military personnel and Afghan nationals—in his recent year in the war zone. He compared what he learned from them with optimistic projections from the likes of David Petraeus, former head of the military’s CENTCOM and of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, and now head of the CIA, who told Congress on March 15, 2011, that “the momentum achieved by the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2005 has been arrested in much of the country, and reversed in a number of important areas.”

In his
AFJ
piece, Davis wrote, “Instead, I witnessed the absence of success on virtually every level . . . insurgents controlled virtually every piece of land beyond eyeshot of a U.S. or International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) base.”

His observations concur with the death of Osbrany Montes de Oca. His girlfriend, Maria Samaniego, told the New York
Daily News
, “He was walking out of the base and he was immediately shot.”

The number of U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan approaches 2,000, which is about the number of civilians killed there annually. Nic Lee, the director of the independent Afghanistan NGO Safety Office, wrote in his year-end report for 2011, “The year was remarkable for being the one in which the US/NATO leadership finally acknowledged the unwinnable nature of its war with the Taliban.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently remarked, “Hopefully by the mid- to latter part of 2013 we’ll be able to make a transition from a combat role to a training, advise and assist role.” Petraeus countered, saying the U.S. remains committed to ending the combat mission by the end of 2014. Meanwhile, images surface of U.S. Marines urinating on Afghan corpses, or posing with a Nazi SS flag, and the drumbeat continues, death by death. Lt. Col. Davis wrote, “When having to decide whether to continue a war, alter its aims or to close off a campaign that cannot be won at an acceptable price, our senior leaders have an obligation to tell Congress and the American people the unvarnished truth.”

March 15, 2012

Terror, Trauma, and the Endless Afghan War

We may never know what drove a U.S. Army staff sergeant to head out into the Afghan night and allegedly murder at least sixteen civilians in their homes, among them nine children and three women. The massacre near Belambai, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, has shocked the world and intensified the calls for an end to the longest war in U.S. history. The attack has been called tragic, which it surely is. But when Afghans attack U.S. forces, they are called “terrorists.” That is, perhaps, the inconsistency at the core of U.S. policy, that democracy can be delivered through the barrel of a gun, that terrorism can be fought by terrorizing a nation.

“I did it,” the alleged mass murderer said as he returned to the forward operating base outside Kandahar, that southern city called the “heartland of the Taliban.” He is said to have left the base at 3 a.m. and walked to three nearby homes, methodically killing those inside. One farmer, Abdul Samad, was away at the time. His wife, four sons, and four daughters were killed. Some of the victims had been stabbed, some set on fire. Samad told the
New York Times
, “Our government told us to come back to the village, and then they let the Americans kill us.”

The massacre follows massive protests against the U.S. military’s burning of copies of the Koran, which followed the video showing U.S. Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghans. Two years earlier, the notorious “kill team” of U.S. soldiers that murdered Afghan civilians for sport, posing for gruesome photos with the corpses and cutting off fingers and other body parts as trophies, also was based near Kandahar.

In response, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta rolled out a string of cliches, reminding us that “war is hell.” Panetta visited Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province, near Kandahar, this week on a previously scheduled trip that coincidentally fell days after the massacre. The 200 Marines invited to hear him speak were forced to leave their weapons outside the tent. NBC News reported that such instructions were “highly unusual,” as Marines are said to always have weapons on hand in a war zone. Earlier, upon his arrival, a stolen truck raced across the landing strip toward his plane, and the driver leapt out of the cab, on fire, in an apparent attack.

The violence doesn’t just happen in the war zone. Back in the U.S., the wounds of war are manifesting in increasingly cruel ways.

The thirty-eight-year-old staff sergeant who allegedly committed the massacre was from Joint Base Lewis-McChord (JBLM), a sprawling military facility near Tacoma, Washington, that has been described by
Stars and Stripes
newspaper as “the most troubled base in the military” and, more recently, as “on the brink.” The year 2011 marked a record for soldier suicides there. The base also was the home for the “kill team.”

The
Seattle Times
reported earlier this month that 285 patients at JBLM’s Madigan Army Medical Center had their post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses inexplicably reversed by a forensic psychiatric screening team. The reversals are now under investigation due to concerns they were partly motivated by a desire to avoid paying those who qualify for medical benefits.

Kevin Baker was also a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Lewis. After two deployments to Iraq, he refused a third after being denied a PTSD diagnosis. He began organizing to bring the troops home. He told me: “If a soldier is wounded on a battlefield in combat, and they’re bleeding to death, and an officer orders that person to not receive medical attention, costing that servicemember their life, that officer would be found guilty of dereliction of duty and possibly murder. But when that happens in the U.S., when that happens for soldiers that are going to seek help, and officers are ordering not a clear diagnosis for PTSD and essentially denying them that metaphoric tourniquet, real psychological help, and the soldier ends up suffering internally to the point of taking their own life or somebody else’s life, then these officers and this military and the Pentagon has to be held responsible for these atrocities.”

While too late to save Abdul Samad’s family, Baker’s group, March Forward!—along with Iraq Veterans Against the War’s “Operation Recovery,” which seeks to ban the deployment of troops already suffering from PTSD—may well help end the disastrous, terrorizing occupation of Afghanistan.