Afghanistan

Pretrial hearing on tap for war-crimes case

by Howard on November 6, 2010

From The Seattle Times:

Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, a squad leader in a platoon under investigation for Afghanistan war crimes, faces a pretrial hearing next week at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Army officials announced Friday.

Gibbs, a key figure in the case, is charged with crimes that include the murder of three Afghan men, assaulting a fellow soldier and possessing body parts from corpses.

Gibbs served with the 5th Brigade 2nd Infantry Division, and assumed a platoon squad-leader position last November. In the weeks that followed, Gibbs allegedly organized a team of soldiers willing to carry out random executions and then place weapons by the corpses to make the killings appear to be legitimate battlefield deaths.

The pretrial Article 32 hearing that begins Tuesday will help Army commanders decide whether there is enough evidence to conduct a court-martial.

If convicted on all charges, Gibbs, a 26-year-old soldier who served three tours of duty in combat zones, could face a sentence of life imprisonment or death.

In a meeting with Army investigators in May, Gibbs said all the killings he was involved in were the result of combat. He said any suggestions to the contrary were “offensive.”

In addition to Gibbs, four other soldiers have been charged with involvement in one or more of the three murders.

Seven other soldiers have been charged with lesser crimes, including personal possession of photos of human casualties, illegal drug use and assault.

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Iran reportedly paying off Afghan president’s chief of staff

by Howard on October 23, 2010

The New York Times reported that Iran has paid millions of dollars to Umar Daudzai, the chief of staff to Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai.

The Iranian payments are intended to secure the allegiance of Mr. Daudzai, a former ambassador to Iran who consistently advocates an anti-Western line to Mr. Karzai, the officials said. Mr. Daudzai briefs Mr. Karzai each morning.

“Karzai knows that without the U.S., he is finished,” an associate of the president said. “But it’s like voodoo. Daudzai is the source of all the problems with the U.S. He is systematically feeding him misinformation, disinformation and wrong information.”

The payments to Mr. Daudzai illustrate the degree to which the Iranian government has penetrated Mr. Karzai’s inner circle despite his presumed alliance with the United States and the other NATO countries, which have sustained him with military forces and billions of dollars since the Taliban’s ouster since 2001.

Earlier this year, Mr. Karzai invited the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the presidential palace, where Mr. Ahmadinejad gave a virulently anti-American speech. When Mr. Ahmadinejad visited Kabul, he brought two boxes of cash with him, an Afghan official said. “One box was for Daudzai personally, the other for the palace,” the official said.

Update

From BBC News:

Mr Karzai said the money was not for an individual but to help run the president’s office.

Speaking at a news conference, he said many countries had given money to Afghanistan in this way, including the US.

“The government of Iran has been assisting us with five or six or seven hundred thousand euros once or twice every year, that is an official aid,” he told reporters, according to the AFP agency.

He said his chief of staff, Umar Daudzai, “is receiving the money on my instructions”.

“The cash payments are done by various friendly countries to help the presidential office and to help dispense assistance… in various ways to the employees around here, to people outside, and this is transparent,” he said.

“This is something that I have also discussed… at Camp David with President Bush. This is nothing hidden.

“We are grateful for the Iranian help in this regard. The United States is doing the same thing, they’re providing cash to some of our offices.”

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U.S. soldiers exposed to potentially harmful emissions from burn pits

by Howard on October 17, 2010

From CNN:

Military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to use waste methods that expose troops to potentially toxic emissions without fully understanding the effects, according to a new government audit obtained by CNN.
Between September 2009 and October 2010, investigators from the Government Accountability Office visited four bases in Iraq and reviewed planning documents on waste disposal for bases in Afghanistan. None of the Iraq bases visited were in compliance with military regulations. All four burned plastic — which generates harmful emissions — despite regulations against doing so.
The emissions have been the source of controversy as troops have complained about a host of problems, from cancerous tumors to respiratory issues, blaming exposure to burn pits. Military officials have denied any consequential effects on most troops.
The military, the report concluded, has been slow in using alternatives and has not considered the long-term costs of dealing with subsequent health issues.
…
Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, who has been vocal in his concern about troops’ exposure to burn pits, urged the Pentagon to restrict the use of the pits in Afghanistan.
“I am deeply troubled to learn that the Defense Department has not taken simple steps, such as segregating plastics, to ensure that our troops are not exposed to harmful emissions,” Feingold said in a statement released Friday.
The acting commander of Central Command, Lt. Gen. John Allen, wrote a letter to Feingold in July saying the military is trying to eliminate the use of burn pits at bases that are active for 90 days or more and occupied by 100 personnel or more. In Iraq, Allen anticipates there will be no burn pits by December of this year. Afghanistan is more challenging, but the military is in the process of procuring “almost 200 incinerators,” he said in the letter, obtained by CNN.
The military, Allen wrote, continues “to evaluate potential health outcomes in Service Members who have deployed” and he promises an improvement in air sampling collection.

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Now we’re in Afghanistan to save women?

by Howard on August 21, 2010

I strongly recommend reading an excellent article written by Bretigne Shaffer titled “Saving Women and Preventing Genocide: The Real Reasons We’re in Afghanistan Now”. It was written in response to the recent Time magazine cover showing an Afghan woman whose face had been mutilated, as well as a recent article by The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens.

The US military has made life worse for women in Afghanistan, not better. Is it possible that a US exit will result in their lives becoming even worse than they are now, as Bret Stephens and Time magazine fear? Of course it is possible. But what is certain is that the occupation has had a harmful effect on the lives of the vast majority of Afghan civilians – not a positive one as the promoters of war as a vehicle for social change assert. Also indisputable is that the Taliban has grown in strength since the occupation began, and it only continues to do so. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has looked closely at the motives for terrorism. Even US intelligence agencies have acknowledged that the US occupation of Iraq has strengthened Islamic fundamentalism and .”..made the overall terrorism problem worse.”

To call for even more certain death and destruction as a defense against imagined, possible worse bloodshed reveals a curious kind of moral reasoning. For let’s not forget what it is that Time magazine (despite its protestations to the contrary) and Stephens are defending: The indiscriminate killing of innocent men, women and children, in the pursuit of what they believe to be some greater good.

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