Welcome back to the show, it's Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Wharton and I'm happy to welcome Nathaniel Raymond to the show.
He's the director of the Campaign Against Torture at Physicians for Human Rights and he is leading their inquiry into the Afghan massacre of 2001.
If you remember that story, Amy Goodman, I know, did great work on Democracy Now back in the day, but I guess we can take this opportunity to learn all about it.
Welcome to the show, Nathaniel.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on the program today.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
So now, I guess the first thing I'll ask you is to tell me about Dostum.
Who is this?
I know he's some Afghan warlord and I know that Eric Margulies knows him and would like to see him be killed somehow.
But that's about all I know about him.
Why don't you teach us all about Dostum first here?
General Dostum is the head of what's called the Jumbash Party in Afghanistan, which is a coalition of northern Afghan ethnic groups, primarily the Uzbeks, that has been fighting the Taliban alongside the United States since the 9-11 attacks.
General Dostum, immediately following 9-11, was a critical ally of the United States, primarily working with U.S. Special Forces, A-teams, and CIA paramilitary personnel.
And it was that partnership which led to the capture of Mazar-e-Sharif and the fall of the Taliban in the north.
But what Physicians for Human Rights has been investigating is Dostum's alleged responsibility for the massacre of approximately 1,500 to 2,000 surrendered Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters, according to U.S. government documents we've received through Freedom of Information Act requests, that were allegedly suffocated in containers after giving themselves over to General Dostum's Northern Alliance forces and American personnel.
Well, you know, I have the New York Times here from just a few days ago, I guess it's January 9th here.
The article is called, New Afghan Cabinet Picks Still Generate Resistance, and it says here that Abul Rashid Dostum and his party are very happy with the new list of cabinet officials picked by Hamid Karzai, and apparently they're pretty well represented in the government of Afghanistan right now.
I guess, does that mean, because I remember last year Dostum was officially part of the government, right?
Does that mean he's kind of stepped back into the background?
Well, General Dostum was reappointed basically Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army, which is a ceremonial position, but makes him the Chief Ranking Officer of the Afghan National Army.
General Dostum was removed from that position following a scandal involving him beating and engaging in assault on a political supporter and his son in Kabul in the past two years, and it was in the aftermath of that scandal that General Dostum left Afghanistan in December of 2008 and went into exile in Turkey.
It was with the recent election and General Dostum's pledge of support of his Junbash party to Karzai's re-election that Dostum returned to Afghanistan and was reinstated as Chief of Staff of the Afghan Army.
As you can see, that political support from the Junbash party has translated into several strong cabinet portfolios for senior Junbash personnel under the leadership of General Dostum.
So he is very much a political figure that is active in the current situation in Afghanistan.
Okay, so now that people are familiar with his character, I guess we'll try to take him back to the fall of 2001, where the Air Force had been bombing al-Qaeda at Tora Bora and all that kind of thing, and as they were letting Osama escape, they directed all their energy toward really regime change against the Taliban in Kabul, rather than al-Qaeda, once the military really got there, it seems like.
As people may or may not remember, because in fact I guess I know there are some people listening to this show who were in maybe middle school or something at the time, a lot of years have gone by now, basically Rumsfeld did this light and fast kind of military transformation thing where he tried to outsource as much of the war as possible to the locals.
So rather than America really defeating the Taliban, they just armed and paid the Northern Alliance to go ahead and finish off and win their civil war.
Is that basically right?
I would actually amend that time frame in the narrative a bit.
What happened in the North is something called Operation Jawbreaker, which was the effort to use, as you mentioned, US tactical bombing with the Northern Alliance ground force augmented by CIA paramilitaries called Special Activities Directorate and small 12-man A-teams of US Special Forces, the Green Berets.
And the point at that time was about capturing the Northern stronghold, such as Kunduz and Mazar-e-Sharif, from a hybrid mix of Taliban and what was called Ansar Brigade.
And Ansar Brigade was the forward foreign fighter unit of Al-Qaeda that was protecting the North, which was critical for capturing Kabul.
The events you describe at Tora Bora, et cetera, happened after the fall of Kabul, which was accomplished because of US partnership with the Northern Alliance and augmentation of their force with the Special Forces and tactical bombardment.
Tora Bora happened after the Taliban had been ousted and Al-Qaeda was on the run through the eastern border with Pakistan.
And so really...
I guess the Battle of Tora Bora was mostly in December and the fall of Kabul had come in November, right?
Yes.
And by this point, by the point of the massacre, that had occurred allegedly before Thanksgiving of 2001.
So at that point, the US was just finishing up active combat operations to ask the Taliban for power and reclaim the major cities, particularly Mazar-e-Sharif and, of course, Kabul.
Okay.
And then if I remember right, well, from Amy Goodman's reporting and then I guess what you just said earlier, it's between, what, 1,500 and 2,000 prisoners, you say, were massacred.
And how is it that they were massacred or allegedly massacred?
They were allegedly massacred, according to a special report in 2002 by Newsweek and our forensic findings at Physicians for Human Rights and the reporting of Jim Risen of the New York Times this past year, by being suffocated in containers after the...
This is an important part of the story, Scott, after the riot at Kali Jangi, where Johnny Michael Spahn, a US CIA paramilitary operative, was killed in the same timeframe when John Walker Lynd, quote-unquote, the American Taliban, was captured by US personnel.
Well, so what exactly is the context?
I mean, are you saying that it was, in a way, like anger and revenge for the uprising and the killing of Mike Spahn and all that, or what?
I'm saying that the Dostoyevsky massacre were these prisoners who were under US and Northern Alliance Joint Control, were suffocated, occurred immediately following the Kali Jangi uprising.
But they were the same prisoners, or...?
They were.
The Kali Jangi massacre slash uprising, however you want to term it, occurred when approximately a couple hundred hardcore Ansar Brigade foreign fighters from Al-Qaeda that were being held at Kali Jangi while other prisoners, largely Taliban, were being moved from Kunduz, basically got a hold of an arsenal in the basement of this giant fort, Kali Jangi, which means the house of war, where they were being held.
And they killed the CIA operative and began a three-day battle, which ended up with all of them except 83 dead, approximately 80.
And so it was at that point, we believe that the additional prisoners who were not Ansar in that initial group at Kali Jangi, who were being taken from Kunduz, were allegedly suffocated on the way to the Sheberghan prison in Dostum stronghold in the north called the Daryal Suf.
I see.
And I remember, I think, part of this from Democracy Now!
's coverage, I forget what year it was.
It was very early on in the war anyway when they did their coverage, and I think part of what they said was that holes were drilled for people to breathe through by machine guns.
They just said, oh, you need to breathe, you're suffocating in there, huh?
And so they just opened up their machine guns in order to make breathing holes and then blood just poured out and all that.
Where am I getting that from?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Where you're getting that from is from the special report by Roy Gottman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, and his team, John Berry and Babak Dikapanesha at Newsweek that published the first comprehensive report based on eyewitnesses.
And also Amy Goodman, I believe, was referencing the Jamie Dorian film, Massacre of Mazar, as well.
The fact is that we have multiple corroborated accounts, both in, yes, reporting such as Newsweek and Democracy Now!
and Jamie Dorian's film, but most importantly, from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
And what last year's article in July by James Risen points out clearly is that FBI agents as part of the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantanamo in 2002 took a series of witness reports from survivors of this massacre.
And what those witness reports said is that people were suffocated and there was also shooting into the containers.
And those FBI reports were sent back to headquarters by the agents at Guantanamo, according to the special agent in charge of that team, Bill Spry.
And those reports were met with a message back to the FBI agents from senior officials, presumably at the FBI, that this was a military matter and that they should not continue their investigation.
So a critical part here is not just the media coverage, but the efforts of the FBI to assist the truth in this case, while at Guantanamo interviewing survivors, alleged survivors of the massacre at Dostoyevsky.
By the way, for people in the audience here, your footnote, it's James Risen, U.S. in action scene after Taliban POWs died.
It's from July 11th, 2009 by James Risen, one of their greatest reporters, obviously.
And so, I mean, that's really almost a whole other thing.
I learned when I was a boy from being told the story of Watergate, that it's usually not the crime that gets them when, you know, you're talking about government officials committing crimes.
Usually they can.
It's the cover up.
And they step on too many other government toes trying to cover up things.
And that's what really gets them in trouble.
And yeah, it says here it's not just this one FBI investigation, but apparently over and over again, the White House intervened, you know, one way or another to try to prevent any real investigation from going forward here.
Is that right?
Well, let's talk about the good news in this story before we talk about the bad news.
The good news is that agents, law enforcement agents and the FBI tried to do their job, comporting with the Constitution and their responsibilities as Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents.
Elements of the State Department worked hard to ascertain what occurred at Dasht-e-Laylee under the leadership of then-Secretary Colin Powell.
And at the Department of Defense, there were efforts by some to ascertain what happened at Dasht-e-Laylee and to move forward with security for Physicians for Human Rights investigators that were seconded to the U.N., for our forensic teams that were going to go back to conduct a full exhumation.
That's the good news, that there were people in the Bush administration who were trying to do their job in the best traditions of our government.
The bad news is this, that at the end of the day, as we learned from Risen's reporting, officials such as Zalmay Khalilzad, then at the U.S. National Security Council, made it clear to individuals from the State Department that this was not going to be looked at.
Similarly with Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz at DOD.
And you really hit the proverbial nail on the head here, Scott.
What the task of now is, is to finally ascertain the truth in terms of what the U.S. government knew, when did it know it, and how did it know it about the Dasht-e-Laylee massacre.
Underneath the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, we have a responsibility to report, and then to investigate, all violations of the laws of war, which this alleged massacre clearly is.
That obligation has not been fulfilled.
We need to fulfill it now.
You know what I wonder, is there any kind of John Yoo style, Jay Bybee sort of memo that says, oh in this case you can determine in a finding that the laws of war don't apply, or did they just cover it up?
On February 7, 2002, several months after the massacre, there was a finding in the form of an executive order by the President, based on a Bybee memo, saying that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention about base standard for treatment, and POW status for Taliban Al-Qaeda prisoners did not apply in this conflict.
So at that time, the laws of war did apply underneath the Bush administration's guidance.
So basically, they are liable.
Even after the finding about Common Article 3 and POW status, as we've seen from the Bomettine Supreme Court decision, they've ruled that, wait a second, the Geneva Convention and Common Article 3 still applies under U.S. treaty obligations.
So we have a responsibility, regardless of what the executive orders said then, to investigate now.
Right.
Well, and this is sort of, Nathaniel, isn't it, where the law comes up against politics?
And after all, ultimately it's politicians who are in charge of enforcing the law.
The Constitution isn't automatic.
It's got to be done.
And ultimately, if politicians, if a President wants to cover something up, and a Congress won't impeach him for it, then that's it.
We just move on.
It's sort of like if the Supreme Court rules that murder is constitutional, or whatever.
That's just the way it is, right?
Let me stop you here, Scott, because let's talk about what's been happening.
After the Jim Risen story came out, President Obama, on CNN, ordered his national security team to conduct a fact-finding review of the Dostoyevsky case.
Oh, really?
That review, which he announced on CNN, is, at this point, has not been publicly released as to its status or conclusions.
We and allies in Congress are calling for President Obama to conclude that review, if it has not been concluded already, and to make it public.
The good news here is that President Obama has asked for the facts.
The bad news depends on whether President Obama shares those facts with the American people, who deserve to know what was done, or not done, in our name.
Right.
Well, so let me ask you this, too.
Were any American soldiers or CIA spies present during this?
Or was this solely Dostum's responsibility, this massacre here?
Well, that's why we need an investigation.
One reason, Scott.
But you don't know the answer to that at all yet?
Well, what we know is this, is that it was a joint operation, where U.S. Special Forces, as you can see from the record, public record of the U.S. military about the operation, their military history, as you can see in the photographs of Dostum and Special Forces working together, we were direct command and control support for General Dostum and the Northern Alliance.
We were calling in airstrikes.
We were interrogating prisoners.
We were helping to call out prisoners and move them on to Kandahar and Bagram and then on to Guantanamo.
It was a joint operation.
So in terms of the specifics of U.S. knowledge, we do not know.
But what we do know is that the international and domestic legal obligations are clear, regardless of what that knowledge was, is that an incident occurred in joint operation, and we need to find out what we know, and that there was a concerted effort by the Bush administration to impede at least three executive branch-level efforts, the State Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of Defense to find out what the heck happened.
And that's the fact.
So we need to know why we don't know.
Well, and in a lot of reporting here, part of the motivation for the cover-up, other than just the war crime, is because Dostum is a protected man.
He works for the CIA.
And so that means that George Tenet is involved in this decision-making, too, right?
We don't know his current status, but at the time of the massacre, he was an asset of the Central Intelligence Agency, and that was reported by James Risen, yes.
You know, because it makes me wonder, you hear, you think back to the reports like ABC News.
In fact, they say here you're in charge of the torture project here for Physicians for Human Rights, right?
That's correct.
Remember the ABC report where it says, oh yeah, the cabinet sat around and choreographed the torture of Katani down there at Guantanamo Bay, and here are all the cabinet officials who were in the room, and that kind of thing.
I wonder, that's the story I want to know about this.
You know, you say Powell tried to do the right thing there, right?
I wonder if this ever amounted to a screaming match between him and David Addington or anything, you know?
Well, these are the questions we need to know.
The good news of the past couple weeks is that we won a major federal court decision against the Department of Defense to have them go back and review their Freedom of Information Act filings to comply with our request for all their documents.
So expect in the coming weeks for Physicians for Human Rights to receive additional documents from the Department of Defense, and to hopefully from those documents have more information about the questions that you are raising, Scott.
So this story's not over.
In many ways, it's just begun.
Great.
Well, I hope I can have you back to keep us up on the details of it.
Thank you so much, Scott.
I appreciate it.
All right, everybody.
And thank you.
Everybody, that's Nathaniel Raymond, Director of the Campaign Against Torture at Physicians for Human Rights.
