Former Afghan Detainees Speak Out About U.S. “Acts Of Torture”
By Ryan Grim at Huffington Post
Abdul Raqeeb, a former prisoner held for two years by US forces in Afghanistan, is speaking out against his brutalization at the hands of his captors.
The International Justice Network, in papers filed in an effort to free Raqeeb, charge that his “custodians have subjected him to acts of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, and outrages upon his personal dignity.”
Raqeeb was released without explanation, on August 13, 2009, from a military prison in Bagram that continues to hold hundreds of Afghans without charges.
Now freed, Raqeeb recounted his experience in a new video interview with Brave New Foundation’s project Rethink Afghanistan.
Raqeeb, whose brother Noor was also taken but released after a much shorter period, is telling his story just as President Obama is reportedly preparing to announce an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, which polls show a majority of Americans believe is not worth fighting.
Obama is expected to announce his decision next week. Due to a scheduling conflict, he bumped his decision up on the calendar — the week after next, he is flying to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Price.
The Washington Post delicately described the contradiction as one of a series of “public relations challenges if they happened too close to the presentation of an expanded war effort.”
Obama, noted the paper, “likely wanted as many days as possible between the troops announcement and the date in mid-December when he is to travel to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize.”
Watch Raqeeb and his brother tell their story:
Two Former Bagram Detainees Held Without Charge Describe Torture and Wrongful Imprisonment
Watch the video at Democracy Now!
The Obama administration has promised to begin moving the 700 odd men held in the Bagram prison in Afghanistan into a new 60 million dollar facility by next month. But in a video released by Brave New Films, two men who were held in the notorious detention center ask how much of a difference this will make when its unclear why people were arrested in the first place. The two brothers Abdel and Noor Raqeeb, say they were held without formal charges, tortured, only to be released with an apology for being mistaken for Taliban spokesperson.
Abdel Raqeeb was released this August after being detained for 2 years and allegedly tortured. Upon his release he was told he had been mistaken for a Taliban spokesman. His brother Noor Raqeeb imprisoned for 10 days in 2007 was told he too had been picked up on the same mistaken assumption.
The Obama administration has promised to begin moving the 700 odd men held in the Bagram prison in Afghanistan into a new 60 million dollar facility by next month. But in a video released by Brave New Films today, two men who were held in the notorious detention center ask how much of a difference this will make when its unclear why people were arrested in the first place.
Abdel Raqeeb was released this August after being detained for 2 years and allegedly tortured. Upon his release he was told he had been mistaken for a Taliban spokesman. His brother Noor Raqeeb imprisoned for 10 days in 2007 was told he too had been picked up on the same mistaken assumption. The brothers were interviewed by filmmaker Anita Sreedhar last month.
Matthew Hoh, Daniel Ellsberg Discuss Aghanistan, Vietnam Wars
Matthew Hoh and Daniel Ellsberg recently sat down for a conversation about the war in Afghanistan.
Matthew Hoh made headlines late last month when he resigned from the U.S. State Department. Hoh, 36, became the first known U.S. official to resign in protest over the war in Afghanistan. Ellsberg, gained notoriety in 1971, after he leaked parts of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times as part of an effort to end the Vietnam War, a war that he argued was “a wrongful war.”
Below are two clips from Hoh and Ellsberg’s exchange documented by Brave New Films.
Both wonder what the US is doing in Afghanistan, arguing that American hubris is one of the things keeping the country from learning the lessons of the Soviets’ War in Afghanistan.
Watch
Watch
Robert Baer: “Afghanistan Is Making Us Less Safe”
Former CIA officer and author Robert Baer argues that “Afghanistan is a quagmire that everyone wants us in,” in a new video segment from the Brave New Foundation’s “Rethink Afghanistan” project.
Baer observes that Russia and Iran are seeking expansion and are happy that US troops are stuck in Afghanistan, whilst it is in Al Qaeda’s interests for the US to be in a war where Muslim civilian casualties are unavoidable.
“Afghanistan is making us more unsafe,” he says.
Employers Pressure Doctors, Workers to Stay Mum on Workplace Injuries
More than two-thirds of injured or sick workers in a recent survey feared employer discipline or even losing their jobs if their injuries were reported, a new study from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed today.
The GAO surveyed more than 1,000 occupational health practitioners and found:
- More than two-thirds observed worker fear for reporting an injury or illness.
- A third said they were pressured by employers to provide insufficient treatments to workers to hide or downplay work-related injuries or illnesses.
- More than half of practitioners said they were pressured by an employer to downplay an injury or illness so it wouldn’t be reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s official log that tracks workplace injuries and illnesses.
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the GAO report confirms what rank-and-file workers, local union safety activists and workplace safety professionals have long said:
Employer policies and practices that discourage the reporting of workplace injuries and illnesses are widespread and are undermining the safety and health of America’s workers….These destructive and discriminatory practices must be stopped.
Injury and illness records help OSHA allocate its resources, accurately target its inspections and evaluate the success of efforts to improve workplace health and safety. Employers underreport injury and illness rates because lower rates likely lead to fewer inspections, improve their competitiveness when bidding for new contracts and lower their workers’ compensation costs.
Democrats to Obama: Get Out of Afghanistan
The California Democratic Party speaks with an loud voice in national politics.
It is, by any reasonable measure, the biggest party in the biggest state in the nation.
And it is a well-organized, forward-looking organization that since the 1950s has had a tradition of delivering vital messages from the base to national Democratic leaders. Indeed, in the 1960s, California Democrats were among the first and loudest critics of President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to expand the war in Vietnam. They were not merely opposed to the war; they were worried, wisely, that committing resources, governing energy and political capital to an unwise and unnecessary war would undermine the ability of an otherwise popular Democratic president to deliver on his ambitious domestic agenda.
With their history and their heft in mind, it is reasonable to say that when California Democrats take a strong stand on a contentious issues, it matters — both as a signal with regard to popular sentiment within the party and as an indicator of the issues that could cause political headaches for a Democratic president.
So what does the California Democratic Party have to say about the global conflict that many believe could be for Barack Obama’s presidency what Vietnam was for Lyndon Johnson’s?
“End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan.”
That’s the title of a resolution endorsed over the weekend by the 300-member executive board of the California party.
The resolution calls for establishing “a timetable for withdrawal of our military personnel” and seeks “an end to the use of mercenary contractors as well as an end to air strikes that cause heavy civilian casualties.”
In place of a continuing U.S. military presence, the California Democrats are urging Obama “to oversee a redirection of our funding and resources to include an increase in humanitarian and developmental aid.”
That’s sound advice for a president who is wrestling with the issue of how to respond to a request from some military commanders for a surge of more troops into what looks to a many savvy observers like a quagmire.
Among those speaking for the resolution was former Marine Corporal Rick Reyes, who described how his experience in Afghanistan led him to the conclusion that the U.S. occupation was illegitimate. “There is no military solution in Afghanistan,” said Reyes, a Los Angeles native. “The problems in Afghanistan are social problems that a military cannot fix.”
An Afghanistan and Iraq veteran, Reyes was particularly blunt in his criticism of the corrupt regime of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
The veteran told members of the California party’s executive board that: “We dishonor the patriotism and the sense of justice of our brave men and women by sending them to fight, proclaiming that they sacrifice for democracy and national security when really they struggle and die in support of nothing more than a proven criminal regime.”
In addition to bringing Reyes to the executive committee session, proponents of the resolution showed clips of Robert Greenwald’s groundbreaking documentary “Rethink Afghanistan” to drive home their points.
The resolution was co-authored by writer and filmmaker Norman Solomon, key player in the “Health Care Not Warfare” campaign of Progressive Democrats of America who was an Obama delegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, along with Karen Bernal, who chairs the party’s Progressive Caucus, and congressional candidate Marcy Winograd.
Winograd, who is challenging Democratic Congresswoman Jane Harman, a war supporter, in a 2010 primary in a Los Angeles area district, called on state parties across the country to send similar anti-war messages.
“We need progressives in every state Democratic Party to pass a similar resolution calling for an end to the U.S. occupation and air war in Afghanistan,” said Winograd. “Bring the veterans to the table, bring our young into the room, and demand an end to this occupation that only destabilizes the region. There is no military solution, only a diplomatic one that requires we cease our role as occupiers if we want our voices to be heard. Yes, this is about Afghanistan — but it’s also about our role in the world at large. Do we want to be global occupiers seizing scarce resources or global partners in shared prosperity? I would argue a partnership is not only the humane choice, but also the choice that grants us the greatest security.”
Around the Nation
By Katrina vanden Heuvel at The Nation
…That investigative reporting was on full display here in the last week, as Reporter Aram Roston (supported by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute) revealed that money is flowing from the Pentagon to insurgents in Afghanistan, including the Taliban. We’re literally paying insurgents to let our supply lines pass, so that our soldiers have supplies to fight insurgents. It’s an outrage, and it demonstrates once again the folly of escalation in the region as President Obama nears his fateful decision. Here’s MSNBC’s Ed Schultz and Brave New Film’s Robert Greenwald discussing the story:
http://youtu.be/paL4dzxyUrM
Robert has been outspoken in his effort to encourage America–and the Obama Administration–to “Rethink Afghanistan.” We appreciate his work, and the efforts of Schultz, The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, and leading newspapers around the world (including The Guardian) who have helped move Aram Roston’s story into the mainstream in the Afghanistan strategy debate.
Democratic Party Weighs Afghanistan Withdrawal Resolution
By Mike Copass at Liberty One Media
SAN DIEGO — While the Administration mulls four different levels of troop escalation in Afghanistan, the California Democratic Party today presented a very different position, as the party took a step towards rejecting any further U.S. military expansion in the war-torn Central Asian republic. On Saturday, a committee of the party’s executive board voted in support of a resolution which calls for an end to the 8-year military intervention in Afghanistan, including demands for a cessation of the aerial bombing campaign.
This stance represents the first significant opposition to the Administration’s current Afghanistan military policy from within the President’s own political party.
Noting that polls “show a majority of Americans are increasingly disturbed about the toll” of wounded and traumatized American troops, the resolution renews the call for a time-table for a withdrawal of U.S. combat forces, adding a demand to “end to the use of mercenary contractors, as well as an end to the air war on civilian populations, and urges our President to oversee a redirection of our funding and resources to include an increase in humanitarian and developmental aid.” (full text can be found here.)
The testimony of war veteran Rick Reyes was seen by many as instrumental to building broad support for the policy position. The former U.S. Marine Reyes declared his concerns that the policies of the last eight years have failed. “There is no military solution in Afghanistan. The problems in Afghanistan are social problems that a military cannot fix.”
Reyes, who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq, told the committee:
“We dishonor the patriotism and the sense of justice of our brave men and women by sending them to fight, proclaiming that they sacrifice for democracy and national security when really they struggle and die in support of nothing more than a proven criminal regime.”
After his testimony to the Democratic Party’s executive board, Corporal Reyes spoke to the Progressive Caucus, citing his recent experience meeting with legislators in Washington D.C. The 29-year old former Marine urged members of Congress to rethink their Afghanistan positions before approving any further emergency appropriations. Reyes’ lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill were joined by former female Afghanistan Parliament member Malalai Joya.
A native of Los Angeles, Reyes served tours of duty in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. Reyes had previously testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 2009 — precisely 38 years to the date after a young Vietnam veteran named John Kerry posed his own question to the Senate, “How do you ask a person to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Reyes is motivated by his concerns for the safety and well-being of his fellow Marines. “Congress must hear more voices like ours before escalating this war any further. More veterans need to speak out.”
The Afghanistan resolution’s co-authors are prominent members of the Democratic Party of California, and include Progressive Caucus Chair Karen Bernal and Congressional Candidate Marcy Winograd. Joined by the party’s Women’s Caucus, Bernal and Winograd held a forum called “Exiting Afghanistan,” featuring clips from the new Robert Greenwald documentary “Rethink Afghanistan.” Resolution co-author and journalist Norman Solomon also recounted his experience meeting with displaced Afghanis living in a wretched refugee camp outside of Kabul. Solomon, a Sonoma County resident, served as a delegate for Barack Obama at the party’s 2008 nominating convention in Denver.
Having passed through the resolutions committee successfully, the timely Afghanistan de-escalation resolution now goes to a Sunday floor vote of the Democratic party’s executive board.