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CHAPTER XIV
Protecting Al Qaeda Fighters in the
War Theater
In late November 2001, the Northern Alliance, supported by US
bombing raids, took the hill town of Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan.
Eight thousand or more men “had been trapped inside the city in the
last days of the siege, roughly half of whom were Pakistanis.
Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens, and various Arab mercenaries accounted
for the rest.”1
Also among these fighters, were several senior Pakistani military
and intelligence officers, who had been dispatched to the war
theater by the Pakistani military.
The presence of high-ranking Pakistani military and intelligence
advisers in the ranks of the Taliban/Al Qaeda forces was known and
approved by Washington. Pakistan’s military intelligence, the ISI,
which was indirectly involved in the 9/11 attacks, was overseeing
the operation. (For details on the links of ISI to the CIA, see
chapters II, IV and X.)
In a statement in the Rose Garden of the White House, President Bush
confirmed America’s resolve to going after the terrorists:
I said a long time ago, one of our
objectives is to smoke them out and get them running and bring
them to justice. … I also said we’ll use whatever means
necessary to achieve that objective—and that’s exactly what
we’re going to do.2
Most of the foreign fighters, however,
were never brought to justice, nor were they detained or
interrogated. In fact, quite the opposite occurred. As confirmed by
Seymour Hersh, they were flown to safety on the orders of Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld:
The Administration ordered the US
Central Command to set up a special air corridor to help insure
the safety of the Pakistani rescue flights from Kunduz to the
northwest corner of Pakistan. …
[Pakistan President] Musharraf won American support for the
airlift by warning that the humiliation of losing hundreds—and
perhaps thousands—of Pakistani Army men and intelligence
operatives would jeopardize his political survival. “Clearly,
there is a great willingness to help Musharraf,” an American
intelligence official told me [Seymour Hersh]. A CIA analyst
said that it was his understanding that the decision to permit
the airlift was made by the White House and was indeed driven by
a desire to protect the Pakistani leader.
The airlift “made sense at the
time,” the CIA analyst said. “Many of the people they spirited
away were the Taliban leader-ship”—who Pakistan hoped could play
a role in a postwar Afghan government. According to this person,
“Musharraf wanted to have these people to put another card on
the table” in future political negotiations. “We were supposed
to have access to them,” he said, but “it didn’t happen,’’ and
the rescued Taliban remain unavailable to American intelligence.
According to a former high-level American defense official, the
airlift was approved because of representations by the
Pakistanis that “there were guys—intelligence agents and
underground guys—who needed to get out.3
Out of some 8000 or more men, 3300
surrendered to the Northern Alliance, leaving between 4000 and 5000
men “unaccounted for”. Indeed, according to Indian intelligence
sources (quoted by Seymour Hersh), at least 4000 men including two
Pakistani Army generals had been evacuated. The operation was
casually described as a big mistake, leading to “unintended
consequences”. According to US officials:
What was supposed to be a limited
evacuation, apparently slipped out of control, and, as an
unintended consequence, an unknown number of Taliban and Al
Qaeda fighters managed to join in the exo-dus.4
An Indian Press report confirmed that
those evacuated by the US were not the moderate elements of the
Taliban, but rather “hardcore Taliban” and Al Qaeda fighters.5
“Terrorists” or “Intelligence Assets”?
The foreign and Pakistani Al Qaeda fighters were evacuated to North
Pakistan as part of a military-intelligence operation led by
officials of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in
consultation with their CIA counterparts.
Many of these “foreign fighters” were subsequently incorporated into
the two main Kashmiri terrorist rebel groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army
of the Pure) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (Army of Mohammed). (See Chapter
II.) In other words, one of the main consequences of the US
sponsored evacuation was to reinforce these Kashmiri terrorist
organizations:
Even today [March 2002], over 70 per
cent of those involved in terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir are not
Kashmiri youths but ISI trained Pakistani nationals. There are
also a few thousand such Jehadis in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir
prepared to cross the [Line of Control] LOC. It is also a matter
of time before hundreds from amongst those the Bush
Administration so generously allowed to be airlifted and escape
from Kunduz in Afghanistan join these terrorists in Jammu and
Kashmir.6
A few months following the November 2001
“Getaway”, the Indian Parliament in Delhi was attacked by
Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad. (See Chapter II.)
Saving Al Qaeda Fighters, Kidnapping
Civilians
Why were several thousand Al Qaeda fighters airlifted and flown to
safety? Why were they not arrested and sent to the Pentagon’s
concentration camp in Guantanamo?
What is the relationship between the evacuation of “foreign
fighters” on the one hand and the detention (on trumped up charges)
and imprisonment of so-called “enemy combatants” at the Guantanamo
concentration camp.
The plight of the Guantanamo “terrorist suspects” has come to light
with the release of a number of prisoners from Camp Delta in
Guantanamo, after several years of captivity.
While Defense Secretary Rumsfeld claims that the Guantanamo
detainees, are “vicious killers”, the evidence suggests that most of
those arrested and sent to Guantanamo were in fact civilians:
The Northern Alliance has received
millions of dollars from the US Government, and motivated the
arrest of thousands of innocent civilians in Afghanistan on the
pretext they were terrorists, to help the US Government justify
the “war on terror”. Some Guantanamo prisoners “were grabbed by
Pakistani soldiers patrolling the Afghan border who collected
bounties for prisoners.” Other prisoners were caught by Afghan
warlords and sold for bounty offered by the US for Al Qaeda and
Taliban fighters. Many of the prisoners are described in
classified intelligence reports as “farmers, taxi drivers,
cobblers, and laborers”. (Testimony provided by the Lawyer of
Sageer, see Appendix to this chapter by Leuren Moret.)
Whereas Al Qaeda fighters and their
senior Pakistani advisers were “saved” on the orders of Donald
Rumsfeld, innocent civilians, who had no relationship whatsoever to
the war theater, were routinely categorized as “enemy combatants”,
kidnapped, interrogated, tortured and sent to Guantanamo. Compare,
in this regard, Seymour Hersh’s account in the “Getaway” with the
testimonies pertaining to the deportation of innocent civilians to
Guantanamo. (See Appendix to this chapter.)
This leads us to the following question. Did the Bush administration
need to “recruit detainees” amidst the civilian population and pass
them off as “terrorists” with a view to justifying its commitment to
the “war on terrorism”? In other words, are these detentions part of
the Pentagon’s propaganda campaign?
Did they need to boost up the numbers “to fill the gap” resulting
from the several thousand Al Qaeda fighters, who had been secretly
evacuated, on the orders of Donald Rumsfeld and flown to safety?
Were these “terrorists” needed in the Kashmiri Islamic militant
groups in the context of an ISI-CIA covert operation?
At least 660 people from 42 countries, were sent to the Camp Delta
concentration camp in Guantanamo. While US officials continue to
claim that they are “enemy combatants” arrested in Afghanistan, a
large number of those detained had never set foot in Afghanistan
until they were taken there by US forces. They were kidnapped as
part of a Pentagon Special-access program (SAP) in several foreign
countries including Pakistan, Bosnia and The Gambia on the West
Coast of Africa, and taken to the US military base in Bagram,
Afghanistan, before being transported to Guantanamo.
Moreover, two years later, in October 2003, the Bush administration
decided to expand the facilities of the Guantanamo camp. Kellogg,
Brown & Root (KBR), the British subsidiary of Vice President Dick
Cheney’s company Halliburton was granted a multimillion dollar
contract to expand the facilities of the Guantanamo concentration
camp including the construction of prisoner cells, guard barracks
and interrogation rooms. The objective was to bring “detainee
capacity to 1,000”.7
Several children were held at
Guantanamo, aged between 13 and 15 years old. Indeed, according to
Pentagon officials, “the boys were brought to Guantanamo Bay because
they were considered a threat and they had ‘high value’ intelligence
that US authorities wanted”.8 According to Britain’s Muslim News,
“out of the window has gone any regard for the norms of
international law and order … with Muslims liable to be kidnapped in
any part of the world to be transported to Guantanamo Bay and face
summary justice”.9
Going after Al Qaeda in Northern
Pakistan
Also in October 2003, the Pentagon decided to boost its
counter-terrorism operations in Northern Pakistan with the support
of the Pakistani military. These operations were launched in the
tribal areas of northern Pakistan, following the visit to Islamabad
of Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Assistant
Secretary of State Christina Rocca.
The operation was aired live on network TV in the months leading up
to the November 2004 US presidential elections. The targets were bin
Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, who were said to be hiding in
these border regions of Northern Pakistan.
Both the Pentagon and the media described the strategy of “going
after” bin Laden as a “hammer and anvil” approach, “with Pakistani
troops moving into semiautonomous tribal areas on their side of the
border, and Afghans and American forces sweeping the forbidding
terrain on the other”.10
In March 2004, Britain’s Sunday Express, quoting “a US intelligence
source” reported that:
Bin Laden and about 50 supporters
had been boxed in among the Toba Kakar mountainous north of the
Pakistani city of Quetta and were being watched by satellite. …
Pakistan then sent several thousand extra troops to the tribal
area of South Waziristan, just to the North.11
In a bitter irony, it was to this
Northern region of Pakistan that an estimated 4,000 Al Qaeda
fighters had been airlifted in the first place, back in November
2001, on the explicit orders of Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. And these
Al Qaeda units were also being supplied by Pakistan’s ISI.12
In other words, the same units of Pakistan’s military intelligence,
the ISI—which coordinated the November 2001 evacuation of foreign
fighters on behalf of the US—were also involved in the “hammer and
anvil” search for Al Qaeda in northern Pakistan, with the support of
Pakistani regular forces and US Special Forces.
From a military standpoint, it does not make sense. Evacuate the
enemy to a safe-haven, and then two years later (in the months
leading up to the 2004 presidential elections), “go after them” in
the tribal hills of Northern Pakistan.
Why did they not arrest these Al Qaeda
fighters in November 2001?
Was it incompetence or poor military planning? Or was a covert
operation to safeguard and sustain “Enemy Number One”? Because
without this “outside enemy” personified by Osama bin Laden, Musab
Al-Zarqawi and Ayman al-Zawahri, there would be no justification for
the “war on terrorism”.
The terrorists are there, we put them there. And then “we go after
them” and show the World in a vast media disinformation campaign
that we are committed to weeding out the terrorists.
The timing of this operation in Northern Pakistan was crucial. “The
war on terrorism” had become the cornerstone of Bush’s 2004
presidential election campaign. The Bush campaign needed more than
the rhetoric of the “war on terrorism”. It needed a “real” war on
terrorism, within the chosen theater of the tribal areas of Northern
Pakistan, broadcast on network TV in the US and around the World.
Notes
1. Seymour M. Hersh, “The Getaway”,
The New Yorker, 21 January 2002,
2. The White House, November 26, 2001.
3. Seymour Hersh, op cit.
4. Quoted in Hersh, op cit.
5. The Times of India, 24 January 2002.
6. Business Line, 4 March 2002.
7. Vanity Fair, January 2004.
8. The Washington Post, 23 August 2003.
9.Muslim News, 11 March 2004.
http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/index/press.php?pr=177
10. The Record, Kitchener, 13 March 2004.
11. Quoted in The South China Morning Post, 7 March 2004.
12. United Press International, 1 November 2001.
Back to Contents
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER
XIV
The Deportation of
Civilians to the Guantanamo Concentration Camp
by Leuren Moret
In November 2001, during the Holy Month of Ramadan, a contingent of
ten missionary members from Pakistan made a Tableegh Dora, routine
preaching visit to the Northern Afghanistan Province of Kunduz.
Among them was Mr. Sagheer, 54, a religious man from Phattan, a town
in Pakistan near the border of Afghanistan, who had traveled as a
preacher on other Tableegh (preaching missions). During this visit
he was swept up and arrested with thousands of others by Uzbek
warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, the area Northern Alliance commander,
“on the instructions and orders of the US Government/Army … in a
hunt against Al Qaeda, Osama bin-Laden, the Taliban and [Taliban
leader] Mullah Umer”.1
Mr. Sagheer was transported from Kunduz by truck with other
prisoners in containers where many died, some who were injured were
buried alive, others held in jails in Afghanistan, and finally he
was transported by the US military to Guantanamo Bay.2 There he was
held like other prisoners in small cages, subjected to torture,
humiliation, violation of religious prohibitions, denied legal
rights, beaten and interrogated at Camp Delta.
After ten months, he was told by a senior US military officer at
Camp Delta that he was found to be innocent and would be released.
He was transported from Guantanamo back to Pakistan on a US military
plane and released with a compensation of $100 from the US
Government for his ordeal of nearly one year.
Mr. Sagheer, was arrested by the Northern Alliance. More than 30,000
detainees were also swept up in an indiscriminate arrest of
civilians, but many died in Kunduz due to ground fire or bombardment
by the US Air Force.
Mr. Sagheer witnessed wounded and injured men buried alive with the
dead. He was in a group of 250 who were blindfolded, handcuffed,
chained and put into trucks and taken to Mazar-e-Sharif by the
Dostum Forces. At Mazar-e-Sharif they were held as prisoners and
guarded for nearly six weeks by fifteen to twenty armed US military,
assisted by local Northern Alliance commanders.
Later at Mazar-e-Sharif, they were crowded into airtight containers
by US Forces and local soldiers for transport to the Shabargan Jail
75 miles west of Mazar-e-Sharif. Sagheer was one of about 250
crowded into one airtight container, which had a capacity of 50-60
people. Mr. Sagheer said that more than 50 died in the container
from suffocation, lack of food, water and medical aid. In other
containers, people died or were wounded when soldiers were ordered
by US commanders to shoot holes for air into containers full of
prisoners.3
Thousands more died in containers and were dumped in the desert by
Afghan drivers hired by the US military forces.4 In this regard,
Massacre in Mazar, a disturbing documentary film by Irish director
Jamie Doran, documents the torture and mass killings of POWs and
civilians in Mazar-e-Sharif by US forces.5
At Shabargan Jail in Kandahar where they were detained two weeks,
there were more than 3000 prisoners including Mr. Sagheer, accused
of being Taliban. The FBI, with the US military, participated in the
torture of prisoners there. Prisoners were thrashed, deprived of
water, made to lie down on the dirt at midnight and not allowed to
sleep.
Inside Guantanamo: Concentration Camp
At Guantanamo, Mohammed Sagheer was identified with an ID bracelet
labeled “Delta” for Guantanamo which he still retains. The prisoners
were put like animals in chain-link cages with roofs on cement pads
out in the open—6ft. X 6 ft. X 7 ft.—where they were fully chained
and locked inside the cages. They were subjected to physical and
mental torture, starved, forced to drink urine, and not allowed to
speak.
Prisoners were detained on “suspicion of terrorism” without charges
and provided with no legal mechanism for appeal, condemning them to
long-term imprisonment.6
Notes
1. Mohammad Sagheer vs. Government
of USA, complaint filed November 3, 2003, District Court,
Islamabad, by Muhammad Ikram Chaudhry, Ikram Law Associates.
2,“Cuba calls Guantanamo ‘concentration camp’“, USA Today, 27
December 2003
3 S. Steinberg, “Massacre in Mazar-I-Sharif”, World Socialist
Website, December 2001, http://www.wsws.org.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. J. Andrews, “Bush goes ahead with ‘Enemy Combatant
Detentions’”, Global Outlook Issue 3, Winter 2003.
Leuren Moret is an independent scientist
who works on radiation and public health issues. After leaving the
Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory, she has dedicated her life to
revealing and understanding the health effects of radiation exposure
resulting from US led military operations.
The complete text of Leuren Moret’s article entitled “Inside
Guantanamo Concentration Camp: Former Detainee Sues Bush
Administration”, was published by the Centre for Research on
Globalization at
www.globalresearch.ca, 6 January 2004.
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