Satirist and entertainer Harry Shearer makes a good point today on HuffingtonPost.com:
When the Fox network staged a special Veterans’ Day version of its NFL pregame show at Bagram AF Base last Sunday, two hours was apparently not long enough to mention one interesting fact about Bagram: It’s the site of America’s other Gitmo, a prison where detainees have been kept for years outside the purview of U.S. law, outside even the scope of the Supreme Court’s habeas corpus decision on Gitmo detainees.
Interestingly, it was at Bagram that the only detainees (that we know of) to have died while in US custody were kept.
Well settle in Harry, because it seems that Bagram is about to get a little bit hotter.
According to Washington Independent writer Spencer Ackerman this week, Obama has been turning increasingly toward his special operations chiefs for his still-unknown but supposedly hardening Afghan strategy:
Two senior military officers from the shadowy world of Special Operations are playing a large and previously unreported role in shaping the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, a move that underscores that the internal debate has moved past a rigid choice between expansive missions to provide security for Afghan civilians and narrowly tailored missions to find and kill terrorists.
Navy Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) at Ft. Bragg, N.C., and Vice Adm. Robert S. Harward, the deputy leader of the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va., are attending and informing the strategy meetings that the White House began in September to refine its approach in Afghanistan. Both men have deep ties to Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in the war.
Apparently, Adm. Harward is headed to Bagram, and I think it is safe to say he won’t be there to win over any hearts and minds:
In a move signaling his own importance to McChrystal, Harward will arrive in Afghanistan later this month to command a new task force, known as Task Force 435, that will take charge of detention facilities in Afghanistan, “primarily the new one at Bagram that will open this month,†Sholtis said. (snip)
McChrystal’s strategy recommended creating a new command, which Harward will now lead, of “approximately 120 personnel†focused on “defeat[ing] the insurgency through intelligence collection and analysis,†prisoner de-radicalization, and working with the Afghan corrections apparatus to “employ best correctional practices [and] comply with Afghan laws.â€
One cannot read this without being reminded of McChrystal’s own secret special operations task force in Iraq — Task Force 121 — which engaged in reportedly brutal interrogation techniques of prisoners at key undisclosed locations, one of them bearing the endearing nickname of Camp Nama (Nasty-Ass Military Area):
In 2006, Human Rights Watch released a major report based on dozens of interviews with soldiers who had witnessed the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. “No Blood, No Foul” revealed that the elite forces conducting the interrogations at Camp Nama and two other locations, known (among other names) as Task Force 121, committed systematic abuse of prisoners at other facilities across Iraq, leading to at least three deaths. Whether or not he was present during the actual abuse — and it seems unlikely that he would need or want to put himself in that exposed position — as commander of JSOC, Stanley McChrystal oversaw them.
It appears the Obama administration may be trying to have it both ways — engaging in a COIN operation in which the protection of the population supposedly “comes first,” and then unleashing commandos all over Pashstunistan and across the border into Pakistan to try and lay waste to the insurgency, which just so happens to be threaded through the rural civilian population there. Of course, conventional wisdom now says this cocktail of mixed and opposing messages and missions “worked” in Iraq, so why not try it again?