02/09/10 – Anand Gopal – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
We're streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at AntiWar.com slash radio.
And our next guest today is Anand Gopal.
He is a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and Wall Street Journal, or at least has been.
He has a new report that is a project of TomDispatch.com and of the Nation Institute.
It's called Obama's Secret Prisons and you can find it under Tom Englehart's name at AntiWar.com.
That's original.antiwar.com slash Englehart.
Welcome to the show Anand, how are you doing today?
Good, thanks for having me.
Well thank you very much for joining us on the show.
Really groundbreaking story that you have here and in a way that's almost news in itself that really you're the first person to write a story quite like this and it's already February 2010, huh?
Well, it says something about how much people have been paying attention to the war in the last five to six years.
Alright, so Obama's Secret Prisons, basically, if I can try to break this down a little bit, I guess it's really the same story, but you're talking specifically about these night raids and that's something that we don't hear too much about.
So why don't you, I guess, just kind of give us the background, maybe a couple of examples out of the article if you'd like.
Certainly, the night raids refer to U.S. military operations that happen at night, often taking place in people's homes.
And the point of these operations is to find people who are deemed as threats, ties to the insurgents, bomb makers, that sort of thing.
And they usually take people from their homes and take them away to a series of bases across the country.
And the process of night raids and detentions has done a lot to undermine the support of coalition forces amongst the local population.
Ah, I see.
Yeah, and in fact that's something that you actually spent quite a bit of time on in the article, is quoting people who said, well, you know, we welcome the Americans after all, it's not like we're the Soviets or anything, and we thought that they would be all right.
In fact, you quote one guy saying, I used to go on TV and tell people to support the Karzai government, to support the American occupation for the time being, and now he's decided to change his mind.
That's one specific example, but you say that really kind of across the country, people who formerly, at least grudgingly, accepted the American occupation are now starting to turn more and more against it because of this very activity.
Well, that's right.
This is particularly true for the rural, posturing countryside.
It's a different story outside of those areas, but in my story I'm mostly focused in those parts of the country.
One person that you mentioned who went on TV, who used to go on TV and defend the government, his case is interesting because there was a night raid in his home in which two of his cousins were killed in the course of it, and another of his cousins was taken, and his family doesn't know where his cousin is today.
Soldiers took him, and presumably he's in some military base, most likely Bagram prison, but his family's had no contact, and they have no way of following up with what's actually happened to him.
Well now, let me make a crude metaphor or analogy or something, and you kind of set me straight.
I sort of kind of picked up a theme in this article, it kind of reminded me about reading about Iraq, even maybe late 2003, early 2004, where we're doing these sweeps, and anyone sitting back here in America can look at it and predict that all you're going to do is create more and more enemies and make things harder and harder for yourselves.
Basically what we're seeing here is those kind of General Casey style search and destroy missions and rounding people up in sweeps, and the very kind of thing that creates the insurgency they claim they're trying to stop?
It's a similar sort of thing, this is counter-terrorism, the term there, where the idea that you need to either assassinate or remove insurgents and those who are associated with them from the scene, and the fact that Iraq was, that it alienated the population, the same sort of thing is happening here.
Some of the same people who are in charge of counter-terrorism operations in Iraq are now doing so in Afghanistan, so it brought this whole strategy over from that theater to this one.
Yeah, I'm always kind of confused about that, whether, you know, they say that the counter-insurgency doctrine as revised by General Petraeus, etc., is to abandon search and destroy in favor of clear hold and build, and that kind of thing, and yet it sure sounds like search and destroy to me when you're talking about just rounding up fighting-age males in whatever village.
Well, that's right, and there's a tension between counter-insurgency, which is the notion of going and trying to protect the civilian population so that you can win their hearts and minds, and counter-terrorism, and it seems to me when talking to military officials that they haven't adequately resolved that tension, because on the one hand, there is at least verbally an understanding, there's a sense that they need to stop doing these sorts of things, and in fact, General McChrystal, the main commander in Afghanistan, put out a directive in the summer saying we need to limit night raids and other sorts of operations that cause offense amongst the population, but at the same time, it still continues, and it really hasn't abated in any way since that directive.
All right, now talk to me about this series of bases, these black jails or black sites across the country.
Bagram, I guess, has been reported, they've put a bunch of money into modernizing Bagram and turning it into a wonderful Colorado-style supermax facility, so apparently they're not just beating people to death at Bagram like they did poor Delaware the cab driver back in the day, but they're doing that everywhere else, is that it?
Well, you're right, Bagram has gotten a lot better, but there are these smaller prisons, there's at least nine that we know of officially, and then perhaps more that we don't know of, that sit on small U.S. military outposts throughout the country, and of the people I interviewed, I interviewed about a half a dozen, and more than half said that they were abused either at these sites or on the way to these sites.
Well, so can you tell us what you learned about these sites from them?
Well, these are tiny sites that are usually run by U.S. special operations forces.
They're typically used for interrogation, so people are brought from the homes to these places, held for three or four days, and interrogated, especially in the early years, from 2001 to about 2005, there was some pretty gross abuses that were taking place there, including people who were being killed just by being tortured to the point where they could no longer stay alive.
Some of that subsided, but you still have allegations of abuse even today.
This runs the gamut from slapping and kicking and punching to sleep deprivation, the use of very loud music throughout the night so that the prisoner cannot fall asleep, to forcing prisoners to assume what's called stress positions, this is where they're made to sit on their knees for extended periods of time.
And then after three or four days of interrogation, the authorities, the interrogators will deem whether the detainees are a threat or not, and if they're deemed a threat, then they're typically moved from there to Bagram.
So is now all that abuse, is that the bad old days of the David Addington administration, or that's continuing to this day?
I think to an extent it's continuing to this day.
The Bush administration curtailed some of this in the last couple of years that it was in power, but there hasn't been a fundamental change since then, since 2006, even with the assumption of power of the Obama administration.
You describe some pretty horrific stuff in here, a guy chained to the ceiling, not quite waterboarding but being forced to drink, basically being waterlogged, that's water torture just the same.
In fact I read a story about a lady who drank water in a radio contest and died of it from too much, so that's the kind of torture that they're continuing to use on these people, is that right?
Yeah, there's been more than one case, more than one set of allegations, and the case you're referring to is one in which a prisoner was taken and tied down and then forced to drink 12 bottles of water, and then he went unconscious and then he was aroused and vomited uncontrollably after that.
This particular prisoner, they also hung upside down for extended periods of time, they also made him kneel on a metal rod as it rolled across his shins, and then sent him on to Bagram after about three or four days of this.
He spent six months in Bagram and then was released and given a letter by U.S. authorities saying they had wrongfully imprisoned him.
And did he feel better after that?
Oh, sorry.
I think it hasn't really made a difference, yeah.
Yeah.
Alright, well, and you also bring up the question of field executions, and I don't think this part is in your part of the article, but in Tom Englehardt's introduction, he brings up again the story of these eight students who supposedly were taken out and executed, some of them as young as sixth grade, supposedly.
Were you able to confirm that, or do you know about that story?
I know about the story, and it refers to an incident which was also a night raid that happened in one part of the country where special operations forces came into a village, and the villagers claimed that these children, the students, were taken out of their homes and tied up and shot.
The U.S. military claims that they were fired at, that these were combatants.
It's very difficult to get to the heart of the matter, but I did see the photos of the people who were killed, and they certainly were students, that much we know.
But one of the problems with reporting these sorts of stories is that so much of this happens in areas that are inaccessible to reporters, and so you have to, it's sort of a he-said-she-said thing.
Well, you know, it's funny, my previous guest knows somebody who's on their way to go and try to investigate and get to the bottom of that particular story, so I hope that we'll be able to get more of that.
I'm interested in the pictures that you saw.
You say they, in the picture, I believe if I understood you right, you said they were definitely students.
The picture that I saw, I don't know if this is accurate or not, they may have been students, but certainly none of them were as young as 12 years old in the picture that I saw of the dead men laying out there.
Well, that's right.
I don't think I saw anybody as young as 12 either.
All the people I saw were young teenagers, but they all had beards as well, and it's unlikely that a 12-year-old would have a beard.
Yeah, not that it's okay to put a 16-year-old on his knees and shoot him in the back of the head, but I mean, that's the story that's coming out of the Karzai government and the local authorities there is that these kids were as young as 6th grade, and I just want to know what the truth is there.
It's not like our government has a problem shooting 6th graders with missiles.
I don't know if it's really much different to put them on their knees and execute them, but is this the kind of thing, I guess more broadly speaking, are you hearing about people being executed out there in the field?
Well, first, I just wanted to clarify to people, too, that in the Afghan countryside, people are illiterate.
Most people are illiterate, and most people don't even know their ages, so it's very difficult to get an accurate estimate of age from people, and also, a 6th grader means many different things because there's people as old as 18 and as young as 10 that are all in the same class and the nature of it, but I've heard cases of people being executed.
It's very difficult to prove any of this.
There's one case that I talked about in my story in which somebody was detained, and then two people were detained, and their bodies were found in handcuffs near a U.S. base two days later.
It's difficult to say what actually happened, but what we do know is what the political effect of that is on the ground, and that is that people, the locals, think that the Americans killed them, and that's done more than anything to undermine any sort of support that the Americans can garner there.
Well, now, another thing that you bring up in your article is that the NATO rules say that the American or other forces there, other NATO forces there, can only hold prisoners for 96 hours, but you say that they found a loophole right around that.
Oh, that's right.
Those rules apply only to the conventional U.S. military forces that are part of the NATO military force there, but there's a separate force, which is the Special Operations Forces, and that's the Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and the like, and the rules don't really apply to that, and so one of the things that they've done is hand over the detainees to Special Operations Forces, and another thing they've done is hand over detainees to Afghan forces, because of course the rules don't apply to Afghan forces either.
After a few days, they'll give the detainees back to the U.S. forces, who will hold them for another 96 hours, and that will continue until the interrogators feel that they have what they want.
Yeah, well, and then, of course, I guess it seems like from, you know, reading this article, whatever it is that they want out of these people, or whatever it is that they end up getting seems to be the worst intelligence.
I mean, as Engelhardt points out in his introduction here at original.antiwar.com slash Engelhardt, where we have your article, Obama's Secret Prisons, this is the same geniuses who let a suicide bomber right into a room full of seven of them, or more, kill them all.
They do nothing, apparently, except, I guess it's the CIA in Pakistan, and more the military in Afghanistan, supposedly, but all they do is shoot missiles at civilians all day.
I mean, is there anybody in the Special Operations Command, or the CIA, or anything who actually knows what they're doing at all, or they're just kind of reenacting their Operation Phoenix fantasies out there on strangers, or what?
Well, I will say that it is an extraordinarily difficult terrain, human terrain, and one of the things that the U.S. forces, the CIA, Special Operations Forces, what happens to them often is they get caught in the web of the local politics.
For example, in some of the cases I described in my story where people were, houses were raided, the reason those houses were raided was because U.S. forces got tips from other Afghans in the village, and there may be long-standing rivalries, you know, this may be a case where I don't like my neighbor, and I have some dispute with him, and I can go and tell the U.S. forces, well, guess what, that guy is Al-Qaeda or Taliban, so you should go after him.
And the intelligence is usually at that level, which is why so many of the people who get picked up are often wrongfully so.
Well now, I guess to go back to the question of how much support the occupation has, it does seem like it's kind of broken down along the lines of the old Civil War, of the Northern Alliance versus the Pashtun-backed Taliban and all that, and I guess for the most part, at least in the media, and really I guess to hear the generals talk at the press conferences and stuff, the insurgents are the Taliban, the Taliban are the insurgents, that's the same thing, although I guess it is true, isn't it, that the insurgency basically is made up of the Pashtuns, but then again, you also say that there were a lot of support among them for the occupation, at least for a while there, until we blew it.
Well, that's right, and firstly, the insurgency is mostly made up of Pashtuns, and it's mostly Pashtun, if anybody that gives any support to the insurgency, so outside of Pashtun areas there's almost no insurgent presence, and also there's no real war being fought outside of Pashtun areas, it's almost entirely, the war today is almost entirely being fought in half the country, essentially, and in the other half of the country where there's no war, those other ethnic minorities view the U.S. military as a sort of buffer between them and the Pashtuns, so it's a very complicated situation that we've gotten ourselves into.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess I'm still fascinated by the idea that any of them would have welcomed us, any of the Pashtun tribesmen, since our government apparently has aligned against them on the side of the other, you know, the Northern Alliance-type factions, I'm kind of just surprised that any of them would have welcomed our presence at all, not, you know, that night raids would have to be, you know, the deal-breaker is kind of a shock.
Well, you have to remember that the Taliban regime wasn't the most popular government in the world, and so a lot of people, even in the Pashtun South, thought that, well, once the Taliban's gone and the Americans come, that they'll bring some prosperity, and that was the biggest complaint that Pashtun men at least had with the Taliban, which is that there were no jobs, no development, the country didn't move forward at all in those six or seven years that Taliban were in power, and people associated the Americans with wealth and prosperity, and there's also a sense where, of course, our government supported the mujahideen, which is the insurgency that fought against the Soviets in the 80s, and those people were still popular, some of them were still popular in the Pashtun areas, and so they thought, well, the Americans supported them then, and so they're a natural ally, and therefore they welcomed them when they came in 2001, welcomed them with open arms.
Well, and after all, Karzai is a Pashtun, although, you know, a city boy and not a country guy, but I guess there's that, if it's something.
Do you think that the policy really is to, and this is something that's been in the news lately, is to try to work a deal with the Taliban, Karzai wants to work a deal with them sooner, and apparently the Obama administration is opening to working a deal with them, but they want to have, you know, a few big offensives first, at least, or maybe as long as another year and a half worth of fighting, and then try to deal with them.
What do you think is going to go on there?
I think there's two things.
The Carter administration is willing to deal with the leadership of the Taliban, and I think it's doing that because it views the insurgency as an existential threat, whereas Washington is not there yet.
I think they are more interested in peeling off the lower rank and file of the insurgency, but they're not at a point where they want to negotiate with the very leadership.
And there's still a sense in Washington that there'll be this military surge that'll put the Taliban back on their heels, and then the situation will be ripe for exploiting, where they can split the insurgents, take away the rank and file of the ones that are more amenable to deals, and isolate the leadership so that they can either be killed or made politically irrelevant.
Well, it seems like part of that strategy is, for example, this new offensive that I'm not sure if I understand why.
Maybe you can help explain why, if you understand.
This new offensive that's about to start in Helmand, they're announcing it weeks in advance.
They're saying, hey, if you're Taliban, go home and pretend not to be Taliban for a couple of days, because we're coming.
What's going on there?
Yeah.
I think the last thing they want to see is a big firefight.
They'd rather see the Taliban melt away and not fight.
And it's part of the whole thinking of counterinsurgency, which is that you want to protect the civilian population.
So the thinking is that if they just scare the Taliban and tell them to go away, we can take the town.
It'll be a huge political victory if we can retake the town, especially without any bullets fired, and then the population won't be put in harm's way, and then they'll support us.
Okay.
So I guess I had a worry, and I think I saw Chris Floyd express this pretty well in writing over at his blog, that perhaps this would be like Fallujah 2004, where all those kids got injured, where they said, listen, if you're not a bad guy, run.
And then they went in a week later and said, if you're still in Fallujah, you're a bad guy, or else why didn't you run?
And they turned the whole city into a free fire zone.
Do you think that there's a possibility that might happen here?
Well, there's certainly a danger of that.
And just like before Fallujah, we're seeing people fleeing.
There's been families that have been fleeing, but then, of course, not everybody can leave, and there's families that are staying behind as well.
I think there's a danger.
But the differences are Fallujah is a pretty big city compared to Mardah.
And also, I think the insurgents in Fallujah were more willing to stay and fight.
It remains to be seen, perhaps the Taliban will, but Taliban historically have taken pretty major losses when they've tried to take on the US or NATO forces in a conventional battle.
And they've succeeded much more when they've melted into the background and laid roadside bombs and sort of fired rockets from the distance, and over time, given losses to the coalition forces.
Yeah, well, and again, breeding contempt for them.
I wonder, you talk about in this article here, and again, it's Obama's secret prisons at original.antiwar.com slash Engelhardt.
It's by our guest, Anand Gopal.
You talk about how basically the Taliban will stage an attack on American or NATO forces in a small village, and then they'll melt away.
They take off running, and then the Americans come and round up a bunch of people in that village and end up provoking a lot more resistance among the regular people there, as we've been talking about.
But I wonder if you think that's deliberate.
Is this the Taliban tactic, is to actually, you know, kind of a little miniature September 11th all the time, smacking us in the face and daring us to come and put our soldiers in a place where it'll turn more people toward them, and they can get a shot at our guys?
Absolutely.
I think it is deliberate.
I think they plant themselves in areas that if the US comes and attacks them, civilians would be killed.
And it's sort of a perverse strategy, but it does work in their favor, because when civilians are killed, it's a propaganda coup for the insurgents.
But I do think that's a deliberate strategy on their part.
All right, everybody, that's Anand Gopal.
People can still find you at the Christian Science Monitor in the Wall Street Journal?
No, I'm independent.
Okay, independent journalist.
And this most recent one is at Tom Dispatch.
It will be published in The Nation magazine.
And right now you can find it at original.antiwar.com slash Engelhardt.
It's called Obama's Secret Prisons by Anand Gopal.
Thank you very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.