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Rift Between US Government and US Special Forces Rumsfeld orders torture for Afghan prisoners of war Joe Vialls, 19 January 2002 Did you ever wonder who provided you with the startling video of American John Walker being tortured by CIA operative Mike Spann, or those sickening pictures of hooded, chained, and drugged prisoners being herded onto American military aircraft at Kandahar Airport? Extraordinary though it may seem, these and other horrific images were deliberately leaked to you by members of US Special Forces, who had direct control of the areas where the images were produced. Considerably concerned by the actions of local CIA operatives, and certain illegal orders from Washington, members of Special Forces responded by leaking highly sensitive information to the public. Do not misunderstand me. American and other western Special Forces are not a crowd of harp-playing angels determined to protect the “human rights” of any old Tom, Dick or Harry. Most members of Special Forces are seriously heavy duty soldiers who go about their business loaded for bear, and God help anyone who gets in their way. Nor are Special Forces averse to knocking captured members of the enemy around on the battlefield, if they believe that the enemy in question has tactical information that might reduce risks to their own unit. Many years ago I was stupid enough to volunteer for a “practice interrogation” at the hands of these folk; a mistake I remember vividly to this day because the details are etched in my memory. The main point to note is that although painful, my “practice interrogation” was swift and soon over. In a tactical battlefield situation, a soldier or airman is only reckoned to have information relevant for about 48 hours after capture, because grass roots military folk are never privy to long term strategic planning. Thus if a battlefield prisoner hasn’t spilled the beans inside 48 hours, chances are there are no useful beans left to spill. At that stage, Special Forces and other military units ship the captured enemy off to a normal prisoner-of-war facility. Put simply, soldiers are not “into” extended sensory deprivation, and other obscene forms of torture favored by psychiatrists and psychologists working for most of the intelligence agencies and security services. Details of this torture and its effects will be provided later in the report, but first we need to examine the ways in which the American military in faraway Afghanistan, alerted the American public at home by using members of the media as unwitting tools. Early on in the “War on Terror”, four hundred Taliban prisoners were transported by warlords to a fort outside Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan. The only cameras and long-range shotgun microphones present were in the hands of US Special Forces, who used them to film and catch the sound of CIA operative Mike Spann torturing “American Taliban” John Walker. Not long after that, someone chucked the so-called Taliban a few grenades which they used to stage a revolt against their captors, who at that time were gleefully pouring oil on the Taliban prisoners and lighting it with matches. A little later, the CIA’s Mike Spann was reportedly beaten to death, and the survivors of the revolt were shipped off to another prison camp. Under normal circumstances the footage and sound captured by Special Forces would be considered as top secret material, for Pentagon eyes only, especially as this footage showed the CIA torturing a prisoner. But these were not normal circumstances. A member of the CIA was torturing an American citizen in the presence of “allied” warlords, the latter directly responsible for supplying seventy percent of America’s heroin until 1995 (UN Estimate). So instead of sending the footage off in a diplomatic pouch to the Pentagon, Special Forces “lost it” in the immediate vicinity of the Kabul media pack. If action had not been taken when it was, there is a high probability John Walker would not have survived his “interrogation” by Mike Spann, and without the critical video footage you would never have known Walker ever existed. Next up we have the equally astonishing footage of so-called Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners being led hooded, chained, and medically sedated, to an American C17 transport aircraft parked at Kandahar Airport at the dead of night. It was this footage in particular that caused such a huge fuss by human rights groups all over the world. This is not surprising, because without this video footage, few people would believe that Americans from the “Land of the Free” would indulge themselves in such barbaric behavior. So, were members of Special Forces responsible for taking this footage as well? No they were not, but Special Forces did have complete control of Kandahar Airport, meaning that they and only they controlled the flow of people in and out of the Airport proper. In this particular case, Special Forces “gave the nod” to the media, telling them what time to arrive, and where to point their cameras in order to get the best shots of the prisoners. This activity took place completely outside the US Government chain of command, and it was a while before Washington found out what had happened. Then US Government officials went ballistic. Unable to retrieve the footage from the various news organizations, officers nominated personally by Donald Rumsfeld frantically asked members of the media pack to sign an “undertaking” that they would not show the footage until they received permission. Too late! By then some of the footage had been transmitted by satellite, and had already been shown to a startled and outraged western public on international television. The Defense Secretary, officials, psychiatrists, and psychologists in Washington had several valid reasons to be alarmed, not least of which was the fact that this footage in isolation proves exactly what sort of torture was, and still is, intended for these prisoners. Military contacts have confirmed that far from being the “very, very dangerous” men claimed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, most of the prisoners taken to Cuba are low grade fighters and others, i.e. those most likely to “crack” under sustained cruelty, and sign false confessions of the kind needed by Washington to ramp up its flagging “War on Terror”. Interrogators have been told the confessions must be ready by September at the latest. Exactly how psychological torture will be used to extract the required confessions is explained further down this page, but first we have to consider why the US Government needs confessions all. At present the US Government is using inference, innuendo, and outright lies to bolster its ridiculous claim that a bunch of Arab Terrorists were responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, story here. . There has never been any hard evidence to support this wild and inaccurate claim, so as usual, the US Government is planning one of its more spectacular “Trials by Media” later this year. In the dock on 14 October [shortly after the first anniversary of the World Trade center attack] will be one Zacarius Moussaoui, who was arrested on immigration charges on 17 August 2001, nearly a month before the attacks, and who has now been charged with “conspiracy” in those attacks. The case against Moussaoui is pitifully weak, with no hard or even corroborative evidence that he knew what al Qaeda was, much less that he was part of the alleged organization. In any case, how can a man firmly in US custody at the time of the attacks be a suspect? In a court nearby will be Richard Colvin Reid, the alleged “Shoe Bomber” on American Airlines Flight 63, said to have tried to light his shoe in flight in order to blow up the aircraft. The US Government is now trying to invent “links” to al Qaeda, the principle claim being that Reid worshipped at the same London Mosque as Moussaoui during late 1998. So what? I visited Westminster Abbey the same year as Queen Elizabeth the Second, but I never met Her Majesty personally, and neither of us are members of the mysterious al Qaeda. You can see the way this is going, can’t you? One creative false link at a time, until we have enough creative false links to finally convince a skeptical American public that the official lie of October 2001, should be accepted as the actual truth in October 2002. But the huge problem facing the US Government is that neither Moussaoui or Reid have actually been seen in the company of Osama Bin Laden, or even in Afghanistan, though we do know the Israelis shipped Reid to Israel for a week aboard one of their very own El Al jets. This total absence of any proof that either man was connected to al Qaeda is where the prisoners kidnapped to Cuba finally come into the picture – God help them. |
