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Part II: Deaths Were a "Clue That Something's Wrong"    [

    Part I: A Silence in the Afghan Mountains
    By Kevin Sack and Craig Pyes
    The Los Angeles Times

    Sunday 24 September 2006

"Firebase Gardez" examines the deployment to Afghanistan of a decorated Alabama National Guard unit. It is the result of a yearlong investigation in the US and Afghanistan by Times staff writer Kevin Sack and freelance investigative journalist Craig Pyes. It was written by Sack.
0aPyes, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and frequent contributor to the newspaper, reported from Afghanistan jointly for The Times and the Crimes of War Project, a Washington-based nonprofit that describes itself as "a collaboration of journalists, lawyers and scholars dedicated to raising public awareness of the laws of war." In 2004, the group provided The Times with the first evidence of an unreported Afghan death in US custody and joined with the newspaper to investigate further. That led to a military inquiry by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command that continues today.
0aThe Times reviewed thousands of pages of internal military documents to reconstruct the period when a 10-member Special Forces combat team called ODA 2021 (for Operational Detachment Alpha) was assigned to the Gardez firebase.
0aEvery member of the team was contacted. Most declined to be interviewed or referred reporters to public affairs officers. The Army and all of its subordinate commands - the US Central Command, US Special Operations Command, Army Special Forces Command, 20th Special Forces Group and the Alabama National Guard - declined to comment.
0aThe concealment of two detainee deaths paints a troubling picture of abuse by US Special Forces units deployed to the country.

    Gardez, Afghanistan - After completing their deployment to this remote firebase, the Green Berets of ODA 2021 left for home covered in glory.

    The 10-member Special Forces team, part of the Alabama National Guard, returned to their families in the spring of 2003 with tales to tell of frenzied firefights and narrow escapes.

    Its commander had nominated each of his men - as well as himself - for medals for valor. The team's performance was heralded as evidence that the Guard could play as equals with the regular Army in the war on terrorism.

    But the team also had come home with secrets.

    Apparently unknown to Army officials, two detainees had died in the team's custody in separate incidents during the unit's final month in eastern Afghanistan. Several other detainees allege that they were badly beaten or tortured while held at the base in Gardez.

    One victim, an unarmed peasant, was shot to death while being held for questioning after a fierce firefight. The other, an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit, died after being interrogated at the firebase. Descriptions of his injuries were consistent with severe beatings and other abuse.

    A member of the Special Forces team told The Times his unit held a meeting after the teen's death to coordinate their stories should an investigation arise.

    "Everybody on the team had knowledge of it," the soldier said, insisting on anonymity. "You just don't talk about that stuff in the Special Forces community. What happens downrange stays downrange.... Nobody wants to get anybody in trouble. Just sit back, and hope it will go away."

    What distinguishes these two fatalities from scores of other questionable deaths in U.S. custody is that they were successfully concealed - not just from the American public but from the military's chain of command and legal authorities.

    The deaths came to light only after an investigation by The Times and a nonprofit educational organization, the Crimes of War Project, led the Army to open criminal inquiries on the incidents. Two years later, the cases remain under investigation and no charges have been filed.

    The Times has since reviewed thousands of pages of internal military records showing that prisoner abuse by Special Forces units was more common in Afghanistan than previously acknowledged.

    More than a year before the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal broke in Iraq, top officers worried that harsh treatment and excessive detentions could lead to criminal prosecutions.

    In one November 2002 correspondence, a high-ranking Special Operations official said military police were detecting "an extremely high level of physical abuse" of detainees transferred from Special Forces field bases to a prison in Bagram.

    An operations officer with the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, the command supervising Special Forces teams in Afghanistan, complained in a memo that prisoners were being held for so long without charges that it "may be implied as kidnapping, a federal crime."

    Early in 2003, the chief Special Forces intelligence officer in Afghanistan warned in a note to the task force commander, Col. James G. "Greg" Champion, and his top aides: "As you are all aware, alleged assaults and kidnapping [have] been occurring for quite some time. Again, I want to emphasize, this is not isolated."

    The same officer reported another improper detention less than two weeks later, notifying Champion's staff in a memo that reflected his exasperation. "Today is Day 5 of this hostage crisis," wrote the intelligence officer, Maj. David Davis. He said that such unauthorized detentions amounted to "criminal conduct in my book."

    There also were early warnings from outside sources about prisoner mistreatment.

    In a series of meetings that began in late 2002, officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross told top U.S. commanders in Afghanistan that they had fielded a rash of detainee abuse reports involving at least five Special Forces firebases, according to previously undisclosed military documents.

    The Red Cross representatives protested that the bases had, in effect, become short-term detention centers, without adequately trained personnel or effective monitoring, said several U.S. officials with knowledge of the meetings.

    Most of the bases singled out by the agency were under the control of National Guardsmen with the Alabama-based 20th Special Forces Group. The compound at Gardez, then occupied by ODA 2021, was portrayed as one of the worst. Detainees there alleged they were beaten, kicked, immersed in icy water and deprived of sleep for days at a time.

    The Army declined to comment on the cases involving ODA 2021 or more generally on allegations of detainee abuse.

    Special Forces firebases in Afghanistan - often the first stop in a detainee's journey to a holding facility and possibly on to the prison at Guantanamo Bay - operated largely beyond the reach of human rights monitors, journalists and, at times, the military chain of command.

    Because of their clandestine nature, Special Forces operations have been a concern to some in Congress and the State Department who worry that human rights violations could be occurring under a cloak of secrecy.

    The handling of detainees in Afghanistan became a murky area after President Bush declared early in the war, launched in October 2001, that the Geneva Convention would not be applied to Al Qaeda, and Taliban captives would not be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, detainees were to be treated "humanely," according to a February 2002 White House directive.

    The internal military records show that although senior U.S. commanders in Afghanistan issued warnings and distributed rules consistent with the Army field manual and Geneva Convention, those procedures were routinely ignored.

    "You have so much freedom and authority over there," one member of ODA 2021 said. "It kind of makes you feel like God when you're out there in cowboy and Indian country."

    The documents also show that in 2003 the leadership of ODA 2021 was repeatedly criticized by its superiors. One 20th Group officer said the Gardez ODA (for Operational Detachment Alpha) was "the most troubled" field team among nearly a dozen in Afghanistan. Another senior officer expressed concern in a note that the team was gaining a reputation as "a rogue unit."

    That a small Special Forces detachment could be tied to two detainee deaths and two apparent cover-ups in less than two weeks reflected an almost perfect confluence of circumstances. They included the personality of the team, the unaccountability of its leadership, the evolution of U.S. policy on detentions, the failure of United Nations officials to report abuses, and the complicity of Afghan officials.

    The story of the team's deployment, like the five-year American campaign in Afghanistan itself, is a tale of high-stakes but often conflicting goals. For the men of ODA 2021, it would be a place and time in which questionable deaths and unquestionable daring were all part of the same mission.

    Hotel Gardez

    The shooting war was supposedly over when about 300 National Guardsmen of the 20th Group's 1st Battalion arrived in Afghanistan nine months after the December 2001 ouster of the Taliban regime. Nonetheless, it was a dangerous and chaotic time.

    Al Qaeda and the Taliban were in flight, but not vanquished. The new government was trying to stand up, but it was still wobbly. And, much like today, the U.S. military struggled to balance the sometimes incompatible missions of combat and reconstruction.

    As this latest rotation of U.S. Special Forces hit the ground, much of the countryside remained beyond the control of the newly installed government of interim President Hamid Karzai.

    It would fall to Special Forces teams such as ODA 2021 to root out Al Qaeda and Taliban stragglers and unearth caches of weapons. In Paktia, the province that includes Gardez, the task was complicated by byzantine local politics.

    Tribal warlords and bandits had skirmished for centuries over the inhospitable terrain along the porous border with Pakistan. They had only been emboldened by the power vacuums and shifting alliances created after the U.S.-led invasion.

    As in centuries past, power and wealth in the region flowed to those who controlled the trade routes. In 2002, that meant controlling 17 longtime checkpoints along about 50 miles of dusty mountain road between the provincial capitals of Khowst and Gardez. Both of the detainee deaths linked to ODA 2021 came as a consequence of efforts to pacify that perilous route.

    For the Americans, securing the checkpoints would help them detect militants' movements and ensure the free passage of troops and supplies. For the warlords, who were regularly accused of extorting cash or produce from truck drivers, the checkpoints afforded a means to pay and feed their militias.

    The Green Berets were prepared to remove illegally operated checkpoints by force, but Pentagon planners regarded the problem as a local political dispute that should be handled by the Afghans. Besides, the U.S. military was under pressure to move from combat operations to a reconstruction phase aimed at winning hearts and minds.

    The stakes could not have been higher for Col. Champion, commander of the 20th Special Forces Group. Not only was the Army counting on his National Guard troops to perform like active-duty professionals, but Champion also had been placed in charge of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force.

    It was the first time since the Korean War that a National Guard unit held command over all U.S. Special Forces in wartime. If Champion succeeded, a general's star awaited his lapel.

    The 20th, with about 1,600 members, is one of the Army's seven active Special Forces groups, and one of only two consisting of National Guard troops. ODA 2021 belonged to the 1st Battalion, based in Huntsville, Ala., and its 10 members came from five Southern states.

    Some were longtime friends and neighbors, like Sgt. 1st Class Dan L. Smith, a world-class judo competitor who ran a gym outside Nashville, and Sgt. 1st Class Scott Barkalow, a locomotive engineer. Though many of the guardsmen had drilled together for years, most would be seeing their first combat.

    The team leader, Capt. Michael M. May, 35, was a decorated Kentucky state trooper who had a cop's respect for procedure and the chain of command. A father of two, he was cautious and regarded the Special Forces as ambassadors who were helping the Afghans reclaim their country. Though some of his men were eager to round up bad guys, May focused on the team's broader mission of training Afghan troops.

    "I'm going to be the one to write the letter to your kids if you get hurt or killed," he would tell his teammates.

    Some clearly felt May was too passive, especially as conditions in the area deteriorated. They "wanted [us] to grab our guns and drive out the door and go do it," one team member recalled.

    In Gardez, the dusty provincial capital nearly a mile and a half above sea level, the ODA settled into an adobe fort the size of a football field. They called it Hotel Gardez. It was surrounded by 25-foot mud walls and had an elevated latrine accessible only by ladder.

    The region was endlessly brown, parched by drought. Being stationed there, one U.S. soldier said, was like "living in a gravel pit."

    The fortress came under regular attack, most often by Taliban loyalists lobbing missiles from a pair of nearby hilltops. One day, a shell exploded in a cemetery behind the fort and the soldiers watched dogs fight over the bones of unearthed remains.

    Army regulations at the base were relaxed. The guardsmen wore bushy beards and civilian clothing, a look intended to ease their approach to locals. They also adorned the grille of a red Toyota truck with a James Brown doll, thrilling local children when, at the press of a button, it sang out: "Whoa! I feel good!"

    The Warlord

    From their earliest days in Gardez, the members of ODA 2021 bristled at being kept on a short leash. They were particularly eager to mount an offensive against their primary nemesis, a renegade warlord named Pacha Khan Zadran.

    In an assessment sent to headquarters shortly after its arrival, the team's leaders labeled the warlord "a thug" and asked permission "to take a much stronger stance" against him.

    Pacha Khan was an imposing figure. With heavy eyebrows, a thick dyed mustache and trademark bandolier, he resembled a Pashtun Pancho Villa.

    As the leader of the Zadran tribe, he commanded 300 to 600 armed men and, with American backing, had helped fight the Taliban. He also controlled various checkpoints along the Khowst road.

    CIA and Special Forces operatives who dealt with Pacha Khan (or PKZ, as they called him), described him as brutish, mercurial and unstable. "I thought he was a windbag and a bully and just out for the money," said one U.S. intelligence analyst.

    But Pacha Khan's stature grew when he became one of the signatories to the December 2001 Bonn agreement that formed the transitional Afghan government. Karzai rewarded his support by naming him governor of Paktia, then rescinded the decision after Afghan military commanders in Gardez refused to cede power to the warlord.

    Pacha Khan responded by furiously bombarding Gardez in the spring of 2002. American forces were caught in the middle of the rocket attacks and the policy confusion over how to deal with the warlord.

    CIA operatives and Special Forces tacticians hatched a number of plans to capture and imprison him, but senior officials in Washington always resisted. The havoc he wrought was exactly the kind of intra-Afghan dispute that the Defense Department insisted should be dealt with by the Karzai government.

    Denied its preferred option, the CIA tried intimidation. As Pacha Khan was leaving a confrontational meeting at the Gardez firebase, intelligence officials arranged for three jets to buzz the compound in a display of American might. The low-level flyover sent the warlord diving beneath his car, toppling his turban, according to a witness.

    Then U.S. officials embraced a plan by Gen. Atiqullah Lodin, an Afghan military commander, to pay Pacha Khan's checkpoint commanders to defect to the government. Lodin said in an interview that the CIA put up the cash. Military correspondence shows that the agency contributed at least $100,000.

    One who defected for dollars was the commander of the strategic Sato Kandaw checkpoint, Ahmad Naseer, who told The Times the CIA gave him $3,000 and a pickup truck. He said an agent photographed him accepting the payoff.

    By November, however, ODA 2021 had begun receiving reports that the checkpoint shakedowns had resumed.

    The team's patience was already wearing thin when, on the morning of Nov. 27, 2002, a unit convoy was ambushed while passing through a steep draw on the Khowst road. The soldiers had just picked up the 1st Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Steven W. Duff, who was headed to Gardez for a Thanksgiving visit despite warnings about security along the road.

    "We told him if he wants to come see us, take a helicopter - don't come down the Khowst road," a team member recalled. But Duff insisted. As his red Toyota sped through the kill zone, a sniper round slammed through Duff's left thigh.

    Smith and Sgt. 1st Class Jason Howard ran off the snipers, and Duff was evacuated by helicopter. Indebted to the team, he recommended Smith and Howard, the team's senior medic, for the Bronze Star.

    The team took it personally that its battalion commander had been wounded while in its care. After Pacha Khan quickly emerged as the prime suspect, the ODA redoubled its efforts to have him listed as a high-value target.

    But the warlord was considered "a pseudo political figure" - untouchable unless they could tie him to the Taliban or Al Qaeda, according to an official of the Special Operations task force. If they could, he wrote, "the ballgame changes completely."

    He concluded: "We do not want to get in the middle of Afghan politics, even if he is a shithead who deserves to spend a decade or two at Gitmo."

    "Smear Campaign"

    Five days after Duff was shot, a commando task force made an unexpected visit to the Gardez firebase in pursuit of a top-tier target believed to be in the area.

    The complex mission called for ODA 2021 to join the operation, but no one had bothered to inform the team. The team's commander, Capt. May, refused to go along because of inadequate planning, according to several 20th Group officials and documents reviewed by The Times.

    May's refusal infuriated the Delta Force officer in charge of the commando task force, the officials said. A month later, on his way out of the country, the officer delivered a four-page memo to Special Operations officials, in effect accusing May of cowardice and dereliction of duty.

    At Champion's request, Duff looked into the accusations. Though he ultimately dismissed them as unfounded and "a smear campaign," he learned that many on May's team considered him a tentative leader, more focused on bringing his men home alive than on attacking the enemy. Duff reassigned May to the battalion's operations center in neighboring Uzbekistan.

    Though Duff insisted that the transfer was unrelated to the criticism, May saw the reassignment as "a career-ending thing," said one 20th Group colleague. "Mike was stressed about this," the colleague said. He "was devastated."

    In an interview, Duff said he had intended to transfer May anyway to season him for promotion. May, who referred requests for an interview to the 20th Group public affairs office, was in fact promoted to major and given a company command after returning to the U.S.

    May's removal heartened those on the team who wanted to conduct more "posse operations" in the manner of the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEALs.

    "This was an aggressive, door-kicking bunch," said one 20th Group official, "and Mike May was the control rod."

    Bamian Mutiny

    More than 100 miles to the northwest, in Bamian, another Green Beret team was having its own leadership problems. For many in ODA 2015, Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth C. Waller, their team commander, was too hungry for a fight and had a habit of planning risky missions without their input.

    Waller was not a weekend warrior but a full-time National Guardsman. He worked at 20th Group headquarters in Birmingham and was perceived by many to be Col. Champion's "golden child." He declined to be interviewed for this article.

    Late in November 2002, Waller's team discovered a large cache of weapons in the nearby Kahmard Valley. They linked it to a warlord suspected of supporting Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

    Waller carried the news directly to Champion's command, bypassing his 1st Battalion superiors. He argued for a full assault on the area, peppering his entreaties with reminders of 9/11 and imploring commanders to "think war."

    His end runs, and his flamboyant prose, incensed Waller's superiors at headquarters. They were so annoyed by his tendency to act on his own that they marked his periodic sightings on a wall map, calling the exercise "Where's Waller?"

    The team leader had trouble within his own ranks as well. The Bamian unit's senior noncommissioned officer, Master Sgt. Pasquale "Jim" Russo, sent a defiant note to battalion officials in December openly challenging Waller's proposal to raid an area that was thick with enemy fighters. "I can't think of many more principles of combat that we have not violated," Russo said of the plan.

    The operation was temporarily scrubbed, redesigned and its planning assigned to a different team.

    Not long after Russo's complaint, a sizable contingent of the 2015 team let battalion leaders know they preferred not to serve under Waller, several members said. It was an almost unthinkable act of mutiny.

    After Maj. Tony Wheeler, a top 1st Battalion official, arrived in Bamian in early January to head the provincial reconstruction team there, he reported to Duff that the trust between Waller and his men had deteriorated beyond repair. "The team seems to see Ken as a loose canon [sic] who might get them killed for no reason," he wrote.

    Duff relieved Waller of his command in Bamian and ordered him to Gardez as Capt. May's replacement. Champion signed off on the transfer. However, Duff acknowledged making the decision over the warnings of his own staff. His aides cautioned that Waller would be even less controllable in Gardez and that inserting him into the conflict with Pacha Khan might make things combustible.

    "It was like throwing a match into gasoline," one Special Forces official said.

    Chaotic Mission

    Back in Gardez, ODA 2021 was between commanders on the night of Feb. 6, 2003, when the team set out on a "snatch mission." The plan was to swoop into the nearby village of Neknam and seize two men suspected of having ties to the Taliban.

    The first was taken without incident. But before team members could grab the second, they came under intense fire that left two soldiers pinned against a wall. The team responded with small arms and hand grenades.

    Because the leaderless team had failed to file proper operational plans, headquarters had no idea who was in command on the ground. To those monitoring radio communications from the scene, it appeared that U.S. forces might be attacking one another in the dark. That also made it unsafe to call in airstrikes to help end the battle.

    Both suspects were finally captured, but almost immediately the team was blistered with high-level criticism.

    "As you can imagine, this makes everyone in this unit look like amateurs and incompetent as well," Lt. Col. Robert E. Biller, a top Special Operations task force official, wrote to 20th Group counterparts. Biller characterized the chaotic mission as a "goatscrew."

    Col. Champion promptly confined the team to its base. Then he and his staff set out to control the damage. Champion personally briefed Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan. Champion's aides later reported he had succeeded in stressing the intelligence value of the captured detainees rather than the team's blunders.

    "Things have died down," Maj. Jeff Pounding, a Special Operations task force official, wrote to subordinates in the 1st Battalion the following day. "We turned the emphasis of operation of a 'rogue team' to a 'time-sensitive PUC operation.' " PUC, or "person under U.S. control," was shorthand for detainee.

    But the missteps continued. Two days after the raid, the team in Gardez transferred two detainees to the Bagram Collection Point, a U.S. holding facility. The detainees arrived "bagged," their mouths taped and hoods secured around their necks, according to military documents.

    "As you well know," Pounding wrote to battalion officials, "this is a significant violation of the PUC handling procedures. Bagram detention facility may be doing an investigation."

    Red Cross Warnings

    There should have been little confusion over detainee policy among members of the 20th Special Forces Group. Champion had distributed the Army's guidelines when the 20th deployed to Afghanistan, and they had been reissued when reports of abuse first made their way to headquarters.

    Only detainees found to meet Pentagon criteria for prolonged imprisonment, such as those with clear ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban, were to be transferred to Bagram. Fearing that innocents might wind up at Guantanamo, Gen. McNeill had stressed to subordinates that he wanted terrorists, not truck drivers and farmers, said a civilian military advisor.

    But it wasn't always easy for soldiers to tell the difference. Given the constant threat of ambush, their instinct often was to detain first and ask questions later. The Pentagon criteria provided plenty of latitude, allowing the detention of any suspects "who pose a threat" or "who may have intelligence value."

    There was supposed to be a 96-hour limit on battlefield detentions. Sometimes prisoner transfers to Bagram were delayed because helicopters weren't available. But at other times, one 20th Group official said, Special Forces teams extended their prisoners' stays in hopes of extracting better intelligence.

    State Department officials in Afghanistan said the teams seemed not to care that their door-kicking roundups and prolonged detentions might stoke local resentment even as the Army was trying to build bridges.

    "They felt ... there was carte blanche to carry out actions and there would be little repercussion if they made tactical mistakes," said a State Department official who asked not to be named.

    By the end of 2002, the Red Cross had relayed early complaints of prisoner mistreatment to top U.S. military officials in Afghanistan. On Jan. 10, 2003, officials of the organization met with Gen. McNeill's staff, describing the 20th Group's firebases as some of the worst offenders.

    Two weeks after the Red Cross meeting in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld convened a working group in Washington to recommend whether the list of approved anti-terrorism interrogation methods should be expanded. McNeill asked his various intelligence-gathering units to assess the techniques that were in use in Afghanistan.

    Despite the Red Cross allegations, the 1st Battalion's chief intelligence officer reported back that there were no problems. "I have not witnessed any abuse or maltreatment of PUCs," Capt. Steven D. Perry wrote. "When they detain a person, I have faith that it is for a very good reason."

    On Jan. 24, 2003, McNeill's command reported on its interrogation techniques in a memo to the Pentagon. The list conformed to the Army field manual's approved battlefield methods, but the memo also requested approval of "more aggressive, creative and flexible techniques."

    The wish list included food deprivation for up to 24 hours, sensory overload through loud music and extreme temperature changes and the use of muzzled dogs to create "controlled fear." Some of the requested procedures might need to be assessed for compliance with Pentagon rules for humane treatment, the memo acknowledged.

    However, according to the Red Cross, many of the more coercive techniques were already being used at some of the firebases.

    Blood and Grudge

    ODA 2021's new commander took charge in Gardez on Feb. 7 as recriminations were still flying from the "time-sensitive PUC operation" in Neknam. For a team chafing at the second-guessing of its missions, Waller's arrival was a welcome relief.

    "He wanted to be aggressive," said one team member. "We knew he had problems with his other team, but he fit right in with us."

    Another team member said Waller quickly won respect. "He seemed very competent and certainly wasn't afraid in combat," he said. In mid-February, only 12 days after he had taken command, Waller and his team were returning from patrol along a road blanketed with 5 inches of snow. The red Toyota - the same truck Duff had been shot in - rumbled along in the middle of a five-vehicle convoy.

    Staff Sgt. Mark "Marco" Deliz, a team engineer from Oneonta, Ala., tried to steer precisely through the tread marks carved by the two vehicles ahead. But his front right tire strayed a few inches and hit a land mine.

    The explosion blew the truck 6 feet into the air, military reports said. Watching in horror from the vehicle behind, Waller could not imagine that anyone had survived.

    With blood streaming down his face, Deliz stumbled out the driver's door, brushing the remains of a foot from his lap. It belonged to his teammate and passenger, Barkalow, the 40-year old intelligence sergeant from Burns, Tenn.

    Deliz determined that Barkalow was still alive and gestured for someone to radio for a helicopter. Staff Sgt. Philip S. Abdow, a junior medic who had joined the team six weeks earlier, wrapped what remained of Barkalow's right leg.

    After the unnerving incident, the medic accompanied Barkalow on his helicopter evacuation. Abdow reportedly acted so frantically during the flight, barking orders and cursing, that the copter crew later complained to Special Operations officials.

    He was recalled to battalion headquarters for evaluation before being cleared to return to the field, according to a 20th Group officer familiar with the incident. Abdow did not respond to requests for an interview.

    By several accounts, the attack had a profoundly sobering effect on the team. Before the explosion, members had merely been frustrated by political constraints on their activities. Now they shared Barkalow's loss - and some nursed an abiding grudge.

    "You get mad when you see your buddies blown up," one team member said. "You stay pissed off about it."

 

---

    Go to Original

    Part II: Deaths Were a "Clue That Something's Wrong"
    By Craig Pyes and Kevin Sack
    The Los Angeles Times

    Monday 25 September 2006

A Special Forces team in Afghanistan failed to alert its superiors. Witnesses tell of torture.

    Wazi, Afghanistan - The Green Berets of ODA 2021 were on high alert as their convoy rumbled down the winding, rutted road that day in March 2003. The team had been tipped that armed men loyal to the notoriously volatile warlord Pacha Khan Zadran lay in wait around the bend.

    As they approached this mountain village in eastern Afghanistan, the Americans spied the warlord's fighters high on a ridge to their right. They scrambled for cover behind their trucks and Humvees.

    Moments later, machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades rained down on their vulnerable position. Though pinned down, the Americans responded with a fusillade of their own.

    "The air was snapping like Rice Crispies [sic]," the Special Forces team's newly assigned commander, Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth C. Waller, 32, wrote in a florid after-action report. "So many rounds were flying back and forth that lead was overcoming the oxygen in the air."

    The battle raged for 45 minutes, then A-10 attack planes and Apache helicopters flew in and strafed the Afghans into retreat.

    There were no casualties among the 17 Americans on patrol that day. "It seemed as if we had an angelic bubble surrounding our position," Waller reported to headquarters.

    Though Waller filed several detailed and colorful accounts of the battle, he apparently omitted any mention of what happened next.

    As some members of ODA 2021 pursued the warlord's men into the hills, others moved into the village to search the mud-walled houses for fighters.

    They detained three unarmed men for questioning. Two of them, brothers Jan and Wakil Mohammed, told the soldiers they were just returning from evening prayers at the mosque and had nothing to do with the shootout.

    Suddenly, another band of five or six Green Berets emerged from the hills where they had been chasing Pacha Khan's men. They had no interpreters.

    "Those soldiers were running toward us and yelling in English, and we didn't understand what they were saying," Jan Mohammed recalled in an interview. Amid the confusion, he said, his brother grew frantic. Wakil, a woodcutter and father of two, raised his hands and shouted in Pashto, "De Khoday day para ma me vala!" according to his brother. "For God's sake, don't shoot me!"

    There was a burst of gunfire from one soldier, Jan Mohammed said, and three rounds ripped into Wakil. One struck him in the mouth. He fell dead at his brother's feet.

    At day's end, Waller would report to his chain of command that six enemy fighters had been killed in action.

    But the circumstances of Wakil's death were not described in Waller's reports, and Army criminal investigators would later determine that the killing could not be classified as a battlefield casualty. Last year, they listed it as a murder. However, the military has since reopened its probe, and investigators decline to say whether the same charges are being pursued.

    It would not be the only questionable death of a detainee in the custody of ODA 2021, nor the only one that leaders of the 10-man field team would fail to disclose to superiors in the Alabama National Guard's 20th Special Forces Group.

    Within days of the Wazi killing, an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit named Jamal Naseer died after being interrogated at the team's firebase in Gardez, about 25 miles to the north. Multiple witnesses say his body showed signs of severe beating and other abuse. His brother and six others also held at Gardez say they were tortured.

    The commander over all Special Forces in Afghanistan at the time, then-Col. James G. "Greg" Champion, said in a brief interview that neither death was reported up the chain of command. Champion, a National Guardsman who has since been promoted to brigadier general, said he did not hear of the deaths until 18 months later, when he learned that The Times was investigating.

    The team's battalion commander also said that neither death was reported to him.

    "Two unreported deaths in a few days are a clue that something's wrong" with that team, said a military official familiar with the incidents, who asked not to be identified.

    There were others who helped keep the secrets of the base. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, which was responsible for monitoring human rights abuses, was informed that Naseer's death in Gardez probably involved "torture and other cruel and inhuman treatment" by Special Forces troops. But U.N. officials acknowledge they did not report it to American authorities for at least 13 months, and U.S. officials say it was never reported at all.

    The provincial governor helped conceal the mistreatment by arranging for the late-night removal of Naseer's body from the military base. He also ordered the abrupt transfer of the other detainees from the base to the custody of the local police chief after they had been held many days beyond what military procedures allowed.

    Though U.S. commanders in Afghanistan said they did not know about the death, word spread throughout Paktia province, according to Gen. Hajji Abdul Sattar, the Paktia attorney general for intelligence. He said no one spoke out or complained, however, because "people were scared that ... the same thing would happen to them."

    The Army's Criminal Investigation Command has been examining both deaths and apparent cover-ups for two years, since learning about them from The Times and the Crimes of War Project, a Washington-based nonprofit educational organization, which first confirmed Naseer's death.

    ODA 2021's missions and tactics became markedly more aggressive after Waller took charge of the Special Forces detachment in February 2003, a month before the questionable deaths in Wazi and Gardez. He recently had been reassigned from another Special Forces unit, where some of his men complained that his gung-ho leadership style put them at unnecessary risk.

    Waller was characterized by several 20th Group officials as deeply affected by the 9/11 attacks and having come to Afghanistan "spoiling for a fight."

    In Gardez, he was able to set his sights squarely on Pacha Khan, the warlord who had been destabilizing the countryside for months.

    Pacha Khan's men were suspected of extorting illegal payments from truckers on the road from Gardez to Khowst, supporting anti-government forces, and staging an ambush that wounded the ODA's battalion chief during a Thanksgiving trip to Gardez.

    But at the Pentagon and State Department, Pacha Khan was regarded as a political figure and thus a problem for the new Afghan government, not the U.S. military. The Special Forces team chafed at the political constraints on its freedom to go after him.

    Local U.N. officials said they were struck by how deeply personal the conflict between the team and the warlord had become. One of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalled that one Green Beret likened the team's rivalry with Pacha Khan to a blood feud.

    Another U.N. official said the same American soldier had told him that "he was so frustrated with [Pacha Khan] that he was going to kill him."

    Tea at Sato Kandaw

    Unmanned Predator aircraft patrolled the skies over Paktia province, their cameras trained on the 17 checkpoints along the mountain road linking Khowst and Gardez. What they recorded convinced U.S. intelligence officials that trucks hauling firewood and produce were again being stopped and forced to pay bribes.

    At the most infamous checkpoint, atop Sato Kandaw Pass, drivers typically had to pay $10 or $15, according to a March 2, 2003, Army intelligence report. The money was being split between Pacha Khan and a former Taliban official, Jalaludin Haqqani, the report said.

    Situated on a bend overlooking a sparsely vegetated valley, the Sato Kandaw checkpoint consisted of living quarters and a small mosque used as an armory. The post was controlled by a former Pacha Khan lieutenant named Ahmad Naseer, better known as Commander Parre. He had recently defected to the Afghan government in exchange for $3,000 and a truck provided by the CIA. He said he saw the future of the country with the Americans, not with Pacha Khan.

    Despite the change in management, reports of shakedowns persisted, along with complaints that female travelers were being harassed and that a young boy was being held as a sex slave.

    Sato Kandaw was enough of a concern that Raz Mohammed Dalili, then the governor of Paktia, took the unusual step of asking American troops to remove the checkpoint. Dalili, in an interview, said he had made his request to a Special Forces soldier named Mike.

    There was no ODA 2021 member named Mike at the time, military documents show. However, Sgt. 1st Class Michael E. MacMillan, an intelligence analyst and member of the regular Army's 7th Special Forces Group at Ft. Bragg, N.C., was then working with the Gardez unit.

    Described in correspondence from Waller as the team's "intelligence agent," MacMillan was assigned to conduct interrogations and collect information for combat operations, including one at Sato Kandaw, according to several people familiar with the team. MacMillan, contacted at his home in North Carolina, declined to be interviewed for this report and shut his door.

    Parre and his men had their guards down when the ODA (for Operational Detachment Alpha) arrived at Sato Kandaw on the chilly morning of March 5. He said that they shook hands and that the soldier he knew as Mike asked to talk over green tea.

    Parre said he knew Mike because the Americans had stopped by from time to time to collect intelligence. The checkpoint commander thought it odd when some of the Americans scrambled to take positions along the road and on the high bluffs, but Mike assured him it was merely a precaution.

    Inside, Parre began cutting chocolate as his cook prepared the tea. Mike asked about his relationship with Pacha Khan. Parre said that before he could respond, two men jumped him from behind, pushing him to the ground so that he could barely breathe.

    "They covered me with a hood," Parre said. "The interpreter translated, 'If you move, we'll kill you.' And I told him, 'If there is any problem, we can solve it through negotiation.... We are your friends.' "

    In the next room, other American soldiers quickly subdued Parre's men, including his 18-year-old brother, Jamal Naseer. The Afghans were cuffed, hooded and tossed by their bound limbs into vehicles, Parre said.

    The Americans also found the boy who allegedly had been pressed into sexual slavery and made plans to return him to his family. Before leaving, ODA 2021 confiscated a stash of munitions and mostly unserviceable weapons and blew them up.

    Allegations of Abuse

    The detainees said the physical abuse began as soon as they reached the Gardez firebase.

    "We were kicked in the small of our back and told to stay straight, and cold water was poured over our body in the open air," Parre told The Times. "They put stones under our knees. We were continuously forced to stay on our knees until we lost the sensation of our legs and couldn't walk."

    He said an interrogator ripped off one of his toenails. At another point, he said, someone fired four rounds near his head. The other seven detainees, among them a 23-year-old with one leg, also reported abuse.

    Because the detainees were hooded through much of their detention, they said, they could not identify their interrogators, except to note that their speech sounded American.

    "They were asking me international questions," Parre said. "Have you met any Al Qaeda leader? Have you gone to Pakistan? To Iran? And who was creating trouble on the highway? But I didn't know any of these things."

    He said there were also questions about Pacha Khan. Interrogators had obtained a note from the warlord to Parre promising to make him a division commander. Parre said he told the Americans they no longer had ties.

    As the beatings continued, he said, an Afghan interpreter pleaded with him to give the interrogators what they wanted. "Just say anything to get it to stop," Parre quoted the interpreter as saying. He said there were times he felt seconds from death. "I can't tell you the feeling," he said. "Half dead. Half alive."

    An American in Gardez at the time said Afghan soldiers working with the Special Forces complained to someone on the team about the mistreatment. The American, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also told The Times that interrogations were taken over after a day or two by a Navy SEAL. The detainees were moved into a tent at a back corner of the base, out of sight, he said.

    The Times could not verify any involvement by the Navy commandos, but internal military documents show that SEALs were operating around Gardez during the period. A spokesman for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service said it "was not alerted at any time to the potential of SEAL involvement."

    The detention of Parre and his men was no secret in the region. An intelligence summary filed by ODA 2021 shortly after the arrests reported ecstatic reactions from both the Afghan government and the local populace. Gov. Dalili dropped by the firebase to offer congratulations. He reported that President Hamid Karzai was "very pleased," the summary said.

    The team's intelligence reports about the operation flashed across computer screens at the Army's operations center in Bagram, said someone who was present. They also were distributed to NATO forces.

    As required, the team reported the detentions to the 20th Group's 1st Battalion, and the information was passed along to the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force, the command over all Special Forces in Afghanistan.

    The detainees were "still undergoing interviews," the team reported after a day, adding, "A lot of intelligence is being generated for follow-on operations."

    Under Army procedures, Parre and his men should either have been released after four days or sent to a holding facility in Bagram if interrogations yielded evidence of ties to the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

    Internal military records show that after two days of questioning, the Americans did not plan to send the detainees to Bagram. They had been notified earlier in their tour that the arrival of battered prisoners at that base might prompt an investigation, according to the records.

    But ODA 2021 also was reluctant to transfer the detainees to local police custody. A March 6 communique from the Special Forces team expressed doubts about the Gardez police chief's loyalty and reliability and said ODA 2021 was working with the governor to find other ways to keep the Sato Kandaw detainees in custody.

    At a meeting of security authorities in Gardez, Mike from ODA 2021 warned the police chief and the other local commanders that he would kill them if they released his prisoners, according to U.N. officials who reacted angrily to the blunt talk.

    For the moment, however, Parre and his men remained in custody at the firebase, and the beatings continued.

    Mission to Wazi

    A week after their successful Sato Kandaw operation, Waller and ODA 2021 were ready to push farther into Pacha Khan country. Col. Champion approved plans for what the team described as a simple reconnaissance patrol of the Wazi district.

    However, there are indications Waller wanted his team to be prepared for more.

    He borrowed two soldiers from another Special Forces team, a security detachment generally excluded from combat operations. And he tried unsuccessfully to enlist members of a commando unit that reported to a different chain of command.

    Waller's men loaded an extra machine gun into each truck and stacked in so much ammunition that there was little room for their feet. "We were going hunting this time," one team member said.

    If they left Gardez looking for a fight, they found it with Pacha Khan's men on the road outside Wazi.

    In his post-battle reports, Waller took obvious relish in describing one of his team's kills to his battalion commander, Lt. Col. Steven W. Duff, who had been wounded in the Thanksgiving ambush in the same region.

    Waller told Duff that the team's weaponry sergeant, Joseph T. "Todd" Henderson, "got one of the bastards associated with shooting you. The bastard nearly exploded as the shell ripped through his chest cavity."

    The team leader said that his weaponry sergeant "takes this personally since he was on your convoy when you were shot.... Sorry we could not have got them all."

    Waller concluded: "This team does not have any [sissies]. You should have seen them laughing during the fight .... Told you we would find them."

    The day's events at Wazi had not ended with the shooting of Wakil Mohammed. The victim's brother, Jan, was taken into custody along with a neighbor, Dawood Khan.

    Both men told The Times that while held overnight in Gardez, they were forced to kneel and press their foreheads against a wall. Every time they sat back, they said, they were kicked in the small of the back and the chest.

    "At first they didn't ask us any questions," Mohammed said. "Everyone who was there took turns kicking me, and when I fell on the ground from the blows they started to stomp on me. We were forced to stay on our knees, and my knees were injured from the stones on the ground. I felt really bad pain in my chest."

    He said the Americans eventually asked him about his brother, but he couldn't concentrate. "I kept seeing my brother's face and the gunshot in his mouth," he said.

    Dawood Khan said his interrogators asked whether Mohammed was one of Pacha Khan's commanders. "I told them, 'No, he has no connection,' " he said.

    He said that after being beaten he was twice dunked in a tub of icy water and submerged to the verge of drowning. He said he and Mohammed were forced to stay awake through a cold night.

    The two villagers were released the next day with clean sets of clothing. A report to headquarters described them as cooperative.

    Heroes and "Idiots"

    Waller's bosses at battalion headquarters were thrilled the team had escaped casualties in the attack at Wazi. The National Guardsmen had "performed heroically," a battalion operations officer wrote to Waller, encouraging him to nominate his men for battlefield awards.

    He did, later nominating every soldier in the fight, including himself, for either the Silver or Bronze Star, according to military documents.

    But in the same laudatory message, the operations officer informed Waller that he had recommended his removal from command of ODA 2021 for, "among other things, the extremely unprofessional remarks" in his reports.

    "This is yet another example in a long line of incidents with you that has resulted in this battalion, and more importantly, your teams looking like idiots instead of getting the recognition they rightfully deserve," the battalion officer wrote.

    By this time, Champion's 20th Special Forces Group was in the process of turning over the Special Operations task force to its replacement, the 3rd Special Forces Group, based at Ft. Bragg. The new guys were regular Army all the way, and they did not much care for Waller's references to the air "snapping like Rice Crispies" or the team's "angelic bubble" of protection, the operations officer wrote.

    "All they see is that we are a Guard unit operating unprofessionally in a combat zone," he wrote. "If Champion wasn't in command yesterday, you would be in a world of shit right now."

    A Death in Gardez

    In Gardez, the days of detention for Parre and his men continued to mount.

    Parre said he believed his brother, Jamal, was subjected to the harshest interrogation because, at only 18, he was perceived to be the most vulnerable. When he first saw Jamal a few days after their capture, his brother's body was already black and blue and swollen, Parre said.

    He said Jamal told him the Americans had forced him to stand with arms and legs outstretched as they took turns beating him. He was moaning about the pain in his kidneys and back, Parre said.

    On the afternoon Jamal died - Parre fixes the date at March 16, 2003, though that could not be verified - he saw two men assisting his brother, who was having difficulty walking. There was no interpreter, Parre said, so he and an American soldier pantomimed their way through a discussion of Jamal's condition.

    First the American jabbed a finger into his arm to show that Jamal had been given an IV drip, Parre said. Then he shook his head to suggest it hadn't worked. He pumped his fist like a heart, and again shook his head negatively. Parre said he didn't fully understand at the time, but he feared the worst. Eventually, he was escorted into a tent to see his brother.

    "I thought he was smiling at me, and so I smiled back," Parre recounted. "I thought Jamal wanted to tell me that I was worrying for nothing. And I went to him and shook him and said, 'Jamalah, Jamalah,' and then I realized that he had been martyred."

    Parre adjusted the body so that Jamal's head pointed to Mecca, and started to cry.

    Later that night, Parre said, several Americans entered the tent, put their hands over their hearts and offered condolences. But he said the man he knew as Mike asserted that Jamal had died of an illness, not at the hands of the Americans.

    "No, my brother was healthy," Parre said he responded. "His brain, his heart, his legs, he was not sick. He had no history of sickness or injury in any part of his body. He died because of your cruelty."

    ODA 2021 held a team meeting shortly after Jamal's death, according to an American soldier based in Gardez. The team was advised that the Afghan had died of a sex-related infection that shut down his kidneys, the soldier said. The point of the meeting, he said, was "to make sure everybody's on the same sheet of paper - this is what happened to the man," in case there was an investigation.

    Capt. Craig Mallak, medical examiner for the U.S. armed forces, said Naseer's death was never reported to his office. He said it would have been required unless the detainee was deemed to have died of natural causes. Authorities at a civilian hospital in Gardez, where Naseer's body was transferred, said they performed no autopsy.

    A hospital worker who prepared the body for burial said in an interview that "it was completely black." Hajji Abdul Qayum said Jamal's face was "dark and looked like it was burned." He said it was "completely swollen, as were his palms, and the soles of his feet were swollen double in size."

    "I have no idea what he might have been beaten with," the hospital worker said.

    Naseer's mother, Kajala, also viewed her son's body before burial. She told Afghan military investigators that "the entire body was full of injuries."

    Dr. Michael Baden, a prominent forensic pathologist who works for the New York State Police, said the descriptions were inconsistent with death by organ failure. "You can't confuse those," he said. "It sounds very much like blunt trauma."

    Scars, No Charges

    After Jamal died, Gov. Dalili arranged for the late-night transfer of the body to the local hospital, according to an Afghan military inquiry. He also ordered the transfers of Parre and his men to the local jail.

    There, local physician Aziz Ulrahman examined the prisoners and described them as battered and bruised, with seeping, unbandaged wounds. He said Parre's feet were black. "We have no terminology for that," he said. "It was caused by blunt-force trauma."

    A few days later, a delegation from Afghanistan's Judicial Reform Commission happened to visit the Gardez police station and came face to face with Parre and his men. The delegation, which included a representative from the Italian Embassy and several Afghan jurists, did not report the prisoners' condition, although witnesses said it was discussed.

    A political officer with the U.N. mission in Afghanistan was with the group and interviewed Parre and his men. He wrote a detailed memo noting that one Afghan soldier had died in U.S. custody and raising the possibility that Special Forces might have been involved in "cruel and inhuman treatment" of detainees.

    Though his memo cautioned that the detainees' accounts should not be taken at face value, it said their wounds and injuries "seemed consistent with their accounts of beating and torture." He recommended that the U.N. report the incident for investigation.

    There is no record that U.N. officials informed U.S. or coalition authorities about the Gardez case for at least 13 months, if at all.

    Several U.N. officials acknowledged that the report seemed to have fallen into "a black hole" after making its way to the mission's headquarters in Kabul, the Afghan capital.

    It was only in the spring of 2004, U.N. officials said, that they forwarded the information to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. However, Zalmay Khalilzad, who was then the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said he had no recollection of hearing about the case, and no mention of the death was found in embassy records, a spokesman said.

    Both Lakhdar Brahimi, head of the U.N. assistance mission when Jamal Naseer died, and his successor, Jean Arnault, declined to comment on the U.N.'s handling of the matter.

    Parre and his companions were later moved secretly to a civilian prison in Kabul, still without any formal charges. Afghan military prosecutors immediately launched an investigation into their unexplained detention.

    That inquiry produced a 117-page report asserting that the detainees had been tortured and that there was a "strong probability" that one of the men had been "murdered." The report speculated that the prolonged imprisonment was intended to give the detainees' wounds time to heal.

    When the Afghan attorney general ordered all seven released, it came after 58 days of captivity. No charges were ever filed against any of the men.

    The Last Laugh

    It wasn't long after Parre and his men were ousted from Sato Kandaw that ODA 2021 got word that Pacha Khan had reclaimed the checkpoint. The team mounted another patrol to the mountain pass, where a confrontation on the road erupted in gunfire.

    The circumstances remain in dispute. ODA 2021 reported that an enemy vehicle had come barreling toward the American convoy and that the driver had been "engaged and killed," while five other men escaped.

    According to Pacha Khan's family, the driver was on his way to get food for the checkpoint's soldiers. The dead driver was the warlord's eldest son, Jalani Khan. His body was left on the roadside.

    Several days later, the team reported that every checkpoint along the road from Khowst to Gardez seemed to be clear. Pacha Khan's influence was waning, and much of the credit went to Waller's team.

    "The guys in Gardez ... are having a significant effect on the area," an official with the Special Operations task force wrote to colleagues.

    But with tensions inflamed by the killing of Pacha Khan's son, and with the 20th Group about to head home, Champion reined in the team. Waller's proposals for two patrols targeting the warlord were rejected.

    The commander's "gut reaction," explained a March 28 note to Duff from Champion's staff, "is that Chief Waller is just out looking for another fight with PKZ, whom we've been told to back off of .... The [commander] is concerned that guys are rattling the tree, but what they are getting is criminal elements [versus terrorists], and we are not cops."

    As they packed their gear in early April, the 20th Group's field commanders were frustrated to be leaving the warlord at large.

    "Pacha Khan Zadran is probably now laughing at the Americans," the commander of the Special Forces team in Khowst wrote to superiors.

    Maj. Rick Rhyne, the incoming 3rd Group operations chief, shrugged off the complaint.

    "There is a reason, most likely political, that we cannot touch him," he wrote. "He can laugh all he wants to."