[News] McChrystal Coverup of Special Forces Killings Excluded Key Eyewitnesses
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Jul 7 14:12:52 EDT 2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/porter07072010.html
July 7, 2010
"I Saw Them Taking the Bullets Out of the Body of My Daughter"
McChrystal Probe of Special Forces Killings Excluded Key Eyewitnesses
By GARETH PORTER and AHMAD WALID FAZLY
The follow-up investigation of a botched Special
Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12
that killed two government officials and three
women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Apr.
5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent
Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid.
That implied that the U.S. investigators would
finally do what they had failed to do in the
original investigation - interview the
eyewitnesses. But three eyewitnesses who had
claimed to see U.S. troops digging bullets of the
bodies of three women told IPS they were never
contacted by U.S. investigators.
The failure to interview key eyewitnesses, along
with the refusal to make public any of the
investigation's findings, continued a pattern of
behaviour by McChrystal's command of denying that
the SOF unit had begun a cover-up of the killings immediately after the raid.
Both the original report of the U.S.
investigation and initial NATO report on the Feb.
12 night raid in Gardez remain classified,
according to Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the
officer who was spokesman for McChrystal on the
issue before the general was relieved of his command Jun. 23.
Casting further doubt on the integrity of the
investigation, the officer who carried out the
follow-up investigation was under McChrystal's
direct command after completing the investigation.
As a member of the SOF community who had promoted
night raids as a privileged tactic in his
strategy in Afghanistan, McChrystal had an
obvious personal and political interest in
keeping evidence of an SOF cover-up of the
killings out of any official U.S. report on the Gardez raid.
Even while claiming that he could not reveal
anything about the conclusions of the report,
Breasseale told IPS, "Based on the findings of
this <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>
[]
investigation, I can reaffirm what I wrote on 5
April - there is no evidence of a cover-up."
Breasseale had said in an e-mail to us before
McChrystal was relieved of command that "many"
survivors of the raid were interviewed,
"depending on whether they were available to
speak to the investigating officer".
But the father and mother of an 18-year-old girl
who died from wounds inflicted by the raiders and
the brother of the police officer and the
prosecutor killed in the raid all said in
interviews last week that they had never been
contacted by U.S. investigators about what they
had seen that night. All three gave testimony to the Afghan investigators.
In an interview, Mohammed Tahir, the father of
Gulalai, the 18-year old girl who was killed in
the raid, said, "I saw them taking out the
bullets from bodies of my daughter and others."
Tahir said that he and as many as seven other
eyewitnesses had told interior ministry
investigators about the attempted cover-up they
had seen. But he insisted, "We have never been
interviewed by the U.S. military."
Mohammed Saber, the brother of the two men killed
in the raid - Commander Dawood, the head of
intelligence for a district in Paktia province,
and Saranwal Zahir, a prosecutor - said he had
not been interviewed by any U.S. investigator
either. Saber told IPS, "The Americans were
taking out the bullets from the bodies of the
dead with knives and with other equipment that they always have."
Saber said the U.S. soldiers refused to let
relatives of the victims go to help them as they
lay bleeding to death. Saber said he and other
eyewitnesses were taken to a U.S. base and
detained for three nights and four days.
Sabz Paree, the 18-year-old woman's mother, also
denied being interviewed by U.S. investigators.
"I saw everything," she told IPS. "The Americans
had knives and were taking out the bullets from her."
In response to a request for comment on the
denials by the three family members that they or
other eyewitnesses had been interviewed by the
U.S. investigator, Breasseale wrote in an e-mail,
"All available family members who offered
themselves up to take part in the investigator's
questions when he was there were interviewed during his visit(s)."
Breasseale said the name of the Army colonel in
charge of the investigation would not be made
public for reasons of "privacy". He acknowledged
in an e-mail before McChrystal was relieved of
duty, however, that the officer was under
McChrystal's "operational control", although he
was not at the time he was appointed and during the investigation.
The target of the raid was a young man who had
been at the celebration at the compound but had
not even been detained, according to Mohammed
Saber, who was shown pictures of the target while
being held in detention for four days. The man
turned himself in for questioning a few days
later but was then released without charge, according to Saber.
The International Security Assistance Force
(ISAF), the combined U.S.-NATO command then
headed by McChrystal, issued a statement within
hours of the Feb. 12 raid declaring that the two
men who died in the raid were "insurgents" who
had fired on the raiding party, and that the
troops had found the bodies of three women "tied
up, gagged and killed" and hidden in a room.
Military officials later suggested that the women
- who among them had 16 children - had all been
stabbed to death or had died by other means before the raid.
The officials told reporters the bodies had shown
signs of puncture and slashing wounds from a
knife a claim that appears to support the
eyewitness accounts by family members of the use
of knives by SOF members to dig bullets out of the dead bodies.
The New York Times quoted a family member, Abdul
Ghafar, as recalling that he had seen bullet
entry wounds on the bodies of the three dead
women that appeared to have been scraped out to
remove bullets. "The holes were bigger than they
were supposed to be," Gafar was quoted as saying.
When Jerome Starkey of The Times of London
reported Mar. 13 that more than a dozen people
interviewed at or near the scene of the attack
had said the three women were killed by the
U.S.-NATO gunmen, McChrystal's spokesman, Rear
Adm. Gregory Smith, tried to challenge the accuracy of Starkey's reporting.
On Apr. 4, ISAF admitted for the first time that
the woman had been killed as a result of the SOF
raiders firing on the two men.
However, the ISAF statement suggested that the
U.S. and Afghan investigators had conducted a
"thorough joint investigation" and maintained
that there was no evidence of a cover-up. It
explained the earlier statement about the women
being found bound and gagged as the result of "an
initial report by the international members of
the joint force who were not familiar with Islamic burial customs".
But the head of the Afghan Interior Ministry's
Criminal Investigation Department, Mirza Mohammed
Yarmand, publicly contradicted to the ISAF
statement, telling the New York Times Apr. 4 that
his investigators had gotten eyewitness accounts
from survivors of tampering with the bodies of the dead.
Yarmand told the Times that his investigation had
concluded that "there was evidence of tampering
in the corridor inside the compound by the members" of the SOF raiding unit.
Within 24 hours of the publication of Yarmand's
revelations, McChrystal's spokesman was telling
reporters that McChrystal had ordered a new U.S.
investigation, even as he was continuing to deny
that there any evidence of SOF tampering with the evidence.
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and
journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising
in U.S. national security policy. The paperback
edition of his latest book,
"<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520250044/counterpunchmaga>Perils
of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to
War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.
Ahmad Walid Fazly reported from Kabul.
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