Afghanistan News March 20, 2005

March 20, 2005

Severe floods claim at least 88 lives, hundreds homeless
March 19, 2005
KABUL (AFP) - Severe floods across much of Afghanistan have killed at least 88 people and left hundreds of people homeless as houses were swept away by the raging waters.

The floods triggered by heavy rain hit the south-central province of Uruzgan, Farah and Ghor provinces in the west and Jawzjan in the north on Friday.

At least 88 people, most of them children, have been confirmed dead but more are feared killed in remote districts which have been cut off, officials said Saturday.

The interior ministry said 85 died in the provincial capital of Farah city, 680 kilometres (425 miles) west of Kabul, and a woman and two children were killed in neighbouring Ghor province.

"At least 21 elders and 64 children were drowned due to floods in Farah city on Friday," ministry press officer Dad Mohammed Rasa told AFP.

The Farah Rod river flows down from the mountains in Ghor through the provincial capital of neighbouring Farah province, but Rasa said authorities in Kabul were still unclear exactly where the worst damage was.

"We are waiting for detailed updates from the provinces," he said.

In Uruzgan scores of houses were destroyed in the capital Tarin Kot, in Khas Uruzgan district and in Chori district, said ministry spokesman Lutfullah Mashal.

"Around 600 houses have been destroyed in the Deh Rawood district of Uruzgan province. They are in severe need of food and tents," Mashal said.

US-led forces stationed in Uruzgan to battle the Taliban used a helicopter to evacuate around 200 people stranded in an island in the middle of a river, said US military spokesman Major Steve Wollman.

Mashal added: "It is almost impossible to send aid overland. Hundreds of people have been airlifted to safer locations."

In Ghor province some 266 families have been displaced due to floods, officials said.

"Some 63 families have been displaced in Chaghcharan, 40 in Charchana district, 100 families in Kanda district and 63 in Shahrak district of Ghor province," Rasa said.

In Jawzjan 100 families -- around 600 people -- have been displaced in Khawaja Du Koh district and over 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres) of farmland has been washed away, he added.

Afghanistan suffered its worst winter for a decade after seven years of drought. Current heavy rains coupled with the melting of thick snow are washing away houses in the war-torn country, which has little infrastructure to cope with rising waters.

At least 580 people have died from disease, avalanches and road accidents during the bitter winter months and many more were feared dead in remote parts of the country.

Health officials say they expected floods following the bitter winter and have already stocked enough medicine for three months in the provinces.

"As the state of emergency was announced a couple of months ago, we expected floods, which is why we decided to send enough medicine to all provinces for cases of emergency," said health ministry advisor Dr. Abdullah Fahim.

Floods kill over 200 in Afghanistan
20 Mar 2005 07:27:33 GMT By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL, March 20 (Reuters) - Floods caused by torrential rains and melting snow have killed more than 200 people and destroyed thousands of homes in several parts of Afghanistan over recent days, officials said on Sunday.

After the worst winter for a decade, there were always fears that the spring thaw would result in flooding from rivers running down from Afghanistan's mountain ranges.

Several hundred people were killed by the severe winter weather and the unlucky country had earlier suffered almost six years of drought.

The area worst hit by flooding was Deh Rawud district in the rugged central Uruzgan province, where the Helmand River burst its banks, destroying villagers' mud walled homes, inundated farmland and swept away cattle, sheep and goats.

"The deaths of 115 people have been confirmed... while thousands of homes have been destroyed,"," Uruzgan's governor Jan Mohammad Khan said, adding that many more people were missing.

U.S. military Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters rescued around 250 people in the Deh Rawud District, some 70 kilometres (43 miles) northeast of the U.S. base at Kandahar, after the Helmand river burst its banks.

As rain continued to pour in Uruzgan, U.N. spokeswoman Ariane Quentier said some five tonnes of food supplies from the World Food Programme were airlifted to the stricken areas along with tents and plastic sheeting, and another five tonnes of food supplies were on the way.

The U.S. military also sent blankets, wheat flour, cooking oil and biscuits, and a spokesman said U.S. forces were on standby, awaiting any further request for assistance from Afghan and U.N. authorities managing the relief effort. The western provinces of Farah and Herat were also hard hit.

In Farah, Governor Assadullah Falah said 68 people died as a result flooding, while officials reported 40 more deaths in Faryab and Ghor provinces.

"We have reports of total destruction of 7,800 houses in Farah," Falah said, adding that large numbers of livestock had been killed.

Some 2,500 houses had collapsed in Herat province. Most houses in Afghanistan are built from mud and are highly vulnerable to flooding.

Local officials also reported an outbreak of dysentery and diarrhoea in Herat's mountainous and inaccessible Pashtun Zarghoon area.

Afghans, Coalition Work to Rid Afghanistan of Weapons
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, March 19, 2005 – Following tips from police and local citizens, U.S. and coalition forces recovered several caches of weapons in Afghanistan this week.
According to Brig. Gen. James Champion, deputy commander of Combined Joint Task Force 76, 43 percent of all weapon caches are turned in by Afghans.

On March 17, Afghan police and coalition forces recovered an anti-personnel mine, a hand grenade and a rocket near Forward Operating Base Salerno in Khowst province. Also in Khowst province, coalition forces found three AK-47 assault rifles, ammunition and 8,000 Pakistani rupees, worth roughly $136.

A search by coalition forces north of Kandahar netted a cache of weapons, money and materials to build homemade bombs. Troops also recovered 25 rocket-propelled grenades, three tank rounds, three mortar rounds and roughly 100,000 Afghani notes worth about $2,300.

In one cache seizure near Gardez in Paktya province, troops secured several rifles, pistols, 1,500 rounds of ammunition and two hand grenades. Another seizure, also near Gardez, turned up a 60 mm mortar, five 82 mm mortars and two 60 mm projectiles. coalition forces found another 33 RPGs and 30 RPG boosters nearby.

In Ghazni province, troops searching an Afghan compound found nine recoilless rifle rounds, 18 RPGs, two boxes of anti-aircraft rounds and 200 AK-47 rounds of ammunition loaded in magazines.

“Every time an Afghan turns over munitions, that’s one more Afghan on the side of peace rather than violence,” Champion said. “Every bomb we find is one less the enemy can use against the Afghan people and coalition forces.”

Ordnance disposal crews secured all the caches.

In other activities, coalition forces and Afghan police east of Gardez discovered and defused an improvised explosive device, built from a rocket, on March 17. In a search north of Kandahar, coalition forces recovered an assortment of materials associated with the construction of IEDs.

According to IED Task Force Afghanistan commander Lt. Col. Jack Knox, 90 percent of the IEDs discovered are reported by Afghan police, civilians and members of the military. Knox said the number of IEDs turned in by Afghans is up by 30 percent since last summer.

“Incidents like these, turning in IEDs and weapon caches, are a measure of how the Afghan people have supported the central government since the presidential election,” he said. It also “shows that the insurgents are isolated,” he added.

(Compiled from Combined Forces Command Afghanistan news releases.)

Salvagers date Afghan Bamiyan Buddhas
United Press International via New Kerala, India
[World News]: BAMIYAM, Afghanistan, March 18 : Archaeologists working at the site of Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas have been able to date the two colossal figures carved from the living rock.

Michael Petzet, president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites which has a team working on the Buddhas, blown up by the Taliban in 2001, said tests using carbon 14 show the smaller of the two Buddhas was completed in 507 A.D.and the larger was completed in 551 A.D.Dating was made possible by testing organic material embedded in the mud plaster with which the rock sculptures were faced.

Petzet said it was previously estimated the figures were chiseled out of the rock cliffs at Bamiyan as early as the third century A.D.

He added the ICOMOS salvagers, who have been working at the site since last summer, believe that piecing together the fragments of the two Buddhas is a feasible proposition using an easily distinguishable modern material to fill in the gaps.Numerous large fragments have been found including one piece weighing 100 tons.

Indian satellites to enable telemedicine in Afghanistan
NEW DELHI, March 19 (Xinhua) -- A three-member Afghan delegation is in Bangalore seeking help to set up a high-tech telemedicine facility in 10 Afghan cities linked via Indian satellites, Indo-Asian News Service reported Saturday.

The satellite-based networks that will be established later this year with the help of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) will offer connectivity to major hospitals in India to improve healthcare in the war-ravaged country.

An ISRO team will visit Afghanistan soon to install the networkat the Indira Gandhi Institute of Chid Health (IGICH) which will be linked with New Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences(AIIMS).

After the recent visits of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to Delhi and Indian foreign minister K. Natwar Singh to Kabul last month, the Afghan health ministry decided to upgrade IGICH with a polyclinic, a diagnostic center and a surgical block, IGICH director Abdul Salam Jalali told media.

After the telemedicine network becomes operational in Kabul, the ISRO and the Afghan health ministry will jointly work on expanding the facility to other provinces.

Afghanistan has a population of 23-25 million, a majority of the people scattered in semi-urban and rural areas where public health system has remained neglected due to the quarter century ofstrife, civil war and Talibanization, Jalali recalled.

Taliban Trek Rocky Road Back to Afghanistan
By CARLOTTA GALL March 20, 2005 The New York Times
HOST, Afghanistan, March 15 - Two men sat in the governor's garden recently, in this unruly province bordering Pakistan, smiling and nodding as they chatted with him. The men are former members of the Taliban who have taken advantage of offers of amnesty in exchange for returning from exile in Pakistan.

"The Taliban are also part of the Afghan population," said the urbane governor of Khost Province, Merajuddin Pathan, explaining why he had welcomed these former Taliban officials. "We want to bring them back for the future of our country and stability. It is very simple. If they accept our laws and our national interest, they can come home."

Yet the government's program of national reconciliation, promised last year by President Hamid Karzai, has not proved so simple. The government has yet to announce the program formally, apparently because of resistance in the cabinet and among ethnic groups that suffered particularly under the Taliban, whose militant Islamic government was ousted with American military help in 2001.

The United States military enthusiastically supports such a program as a strategy to undermine the Taliban-led insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan that has cost up to 1,000 Afghan lives in the last 18 months and killed 30 American soldiers in the last year. Frustrated by the delays, the Americans have started a parallel Allegiance Program. Working closely with provincial officials, the Americans already have accepted 30 fighters with links to the Taliban into the program, requiring them to take an oath of allegiance to the Afghan government and giving them an identification card to guarantee their safety.

Although many senior officials in the frontline provinces were initially skeptical last year when Mr. Karzai spoke of an amnesty for all except the Taliban senior leadership, many of them now voice support for the policy. In the absence of the federal program, some provincial and even national law enforcement officials around the country have been welcoming the former Taliban officials and fighters home if they promise to eschew violence and support the government.

Afghan soldiers in Kandahar in the south who have fought the Taliban for the last three years said recently that reconciliation was the only way to end the insurgency and bring peace. In Khost, villagers and local officials said it was necessary and humane to allow Taliban supporters to return, except for the 30 to 50 senior Taliban members who, the Americans and top Afghan officials agree, should face trial.

In Khost, Mr. Pathan said he had been approached by people representing "more than dozens" of families who want to return home. "We are talking about ordinary people," he said. "They have seen the successful elections, and they want to come home and take part." He said the Taliban, "are losing the war because the people are not on their side."

Yet the reconciliation process has been slow and halting.

The two former Taliban members in Mr. Pathan's garden declined to give their names, saying that their position was still dangerous. They did not fear reprisals from their communities or the Afghan public at large, but from Taliban supporters and "spies" in Pakistan who were opposed to reconciliation. The men said they had not yet brought their families back from Pakistan. They were also trying to persuade friends and relatives to return but it would take time, they said.

"We have to persuade the people sitting out there so they feel comfortable," said one of the men, who said he had worked in a regional political office under the Taliban. "They are hearing that if you go to Afghanistan you will be beaten and put in prison."

"One reason that a lot of people have not joined the process is because, as they say, their friends and relatives are still in Bagram and Guantánamo prisons and they fear they will be arrested and put in jail, too," said the other man of prisons in Afghanistan and Cuba where Afghan prisoners are being held. He said he had been a Taliban recruiter.

The insurgency was not being fought by Afghan Taliban anymore, the first man contended, but by hired mercenaries who were "taking instructions from others," an apparent reference to Al Qaeda.

Mubarak Khan, 20, who also recently returned, said he came back to clear his name and spare his family harassment. He was studying in a religious school in Pakistan last year when American and Afghan forces raided his village near the city of Khost, he said. His cousin Abdul Manan and several other men were arrested, and papers, weapons and other belongings were confiscated.

Mr. Khan's name was on a United States military list of wanted men. Afghan intelligence officials said he was suspected of several attacks in the region, and of killing an intelligence officer. His family urged him to return and take advantage of the amnesty offer, and he now carries a laminated card from the intelligence service that says he has been through the national reconciliation process, is known to the intelligence service and should be accorded cooperation at checkpoints. Back home for two months, he helps on the farm and in the family's pharmacy.

"I understood that if I came back without going through the government, they would arrest me," he said. "I am just a student, I am not a criminal. But they were disturbing my family, and I did not want that."

The American military, recognizing that there is some risk involved, has released a few former Taliban with the assurances of tribal elders that they will vouch for the men's good intentions. Two of those freed have been appointed district police chiefs in the border provinces most prone to Taliban-led incursions. A third man had been accused of involvement in an explosion in Paktika Province last October that killed five people, including a local doctor who was a senior election official.

"We had every reason to keep him detained, but a lot of elders came and promised to keep him restrained," said Col. Gary Cheek, the American commander of eastern Afghanistan. He acknowledged mixed feelings about the release, but he said he was following the local governor's advice.

Four or five former Taliban members completed the allegiance program in his region in recent months, and more would come if the government pushed the program, Colonel Cheek said. "We are not sure that the government is ready to make a commitment yet," he said. "There are pretty deep wounds," he added, saying that some groups in the ethnic mix were opposed to allowing the Taliban to return "with a free rein."

He said he understood the national government's hesitation, especially if it felt the Taliban insurgency was fading on its own. "President Karzai is building a nation, and so why bring in something that can destroy that unity," he said.

'One huge US jail'
Afghanistan is the hub of a global network of detention centres, the frontline in America's 'war on terror', where arrest can be random and allegations of torture commonplace. Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark investigate on the ground and talk to former prisoners
Saturday March 19, 2005 The Guardian (UK)
Kabul was a grim, monastic place in the days of the Taliban; today it's a chaotic gathering point for every kind of prospector and carpetbagger. Foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts have sparked a property boom that has forced up rental prices in the Afghan capital to match those in London, Tokyo and Manhattan. Four years ago, the Ministry of Vice and Virtue in Kabul was a tool of the Taliban inquisition, a drab office building where heretics were locked up for such crimes as humming a popular love song. Now it's owned by an American entrepreneur who hopes its bitter associations won't scare away his new friends.

Outside Kabul, Afghanistan is bleaker, its provinces more inaccessible and lawless, than it was under the Taliban. If anyone leaves town, they do so in convoys. Afghanistan is a place where it is easy for people to disappear and perilous for anyone to investigate their fate. Even a seasoned aid agency such as Médécins Sans Frontières was forced to quit after five staff members were murdered last June. Only the 17,000-strong US forces, with their all-terrain Humvees and Apache attack helicopters, have the run of the land, and they have used the haze of fear and uncertainty that has engulfed the country to advance a draconian phase in the war against terror. Afghanistan has become the new Guantánamo Bay.

Washington likes to hold up Afghanistan as an exemplar of how a rogue regime can be replaced by democracy. Meanwhile, human-rights activists and Afghan politicians have accused the US military of placing Afghanistan at the hub of a global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado and allegedly subjected to torture. The secrecy surrounding them prevents any real independent investigation of the allegations. "The detention system in Afghanistan exists entirely outside international norms, but it is only part of a far larger and more sinister jail network that we are only now beginning to understand," Michael Posner, director of the US legal watchdog Human Rights First, told us.

When we landed in Kabul, Afghanistan was blue with a bruising cold. We were heading for the former al-Qaida strongholds in the south-east that were rumoured to be the focus of the new US network. How should we prepare, we asked local UN staff. "Don't go," they said. None the less, we were able to find a driver, a Pashtun translator and a boxful of clementines, and set off on a five-and-a-half-hour trip south through the snow to Gardez, a market town dominated by two rapidly expanding US military bases.

There we met Dr Rafiullah Bidar, regional director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, established in 2003 with funding from the US Congress to investigate abuses committed by local warlords and to ensure that women's and children's rights were protected. He was delighted to see foreigners in town. At his office in central Gardez, Bidar showed us a wall of files. "All I do nowadays is chart complaints against the US military," he said. "Many thousands of people have been rounded up and detained by them. Those who have been freed say that they were held alongside foreign detainees who've been brought to this country to be processed. No one is charged. No one is identified. No international monitors are allowed into the US jails." He pulled out a handful of files: "People who have been arrested say they've been brutalised - the tactics used are beyond belief." The jails are closed to outside observers, making it impossible to test the truth of the claims.

Last November, a man from Gardez died of hypothermia in a US military jail. When his family were called to collect the body, they were given a $100 note for the taxi ride and no explanation. In scores more cases, people have simply disappeared.

Prisoner transports crisscross the country between a proliferating network of detention facilities. In addition to the camps in Gardez, there are thought to be US holding facilities in the cities of Khost, Asadabad and Jalalabad, as well as an official US detention centre in Kandahar, where the tough regime has been nicknamed "Camp Slappy" by former prisoners. There are 20 more facilities in outlying US compounds and fire bases that complement a major "collection centre" at Bagram air force base. The CIA has one facility at Bagram and another, known as the "Salt Pit", in an abandoned brick factory north of Kabul. More than 1,500 prisoners from Afghanistan and many other countries are thought to be held in such jails, although no one knows for sure because the US military declines to comment.

Anyone who has got in the way of the prison transports has been met with brutal force. Bidar directed us to a small Shia neighbourhood on the edge of town where a multiple killing was still under investigation. Inside a frozen courtyard, a former policeman, Said Sardar, 25, was sat beside his crutches. On May 1 2004, he was manning a checkpoint when a car careened through. "Inside were men dressed like Arabs, but they were western men," he said. "They had prisoners in the car." Sardar fired a warning shot for the car to stop. "The western men returned fire and within minutes two US attack helicopters hovered above us. They fired three rockets at the police station. One screamed past me. I saw its fiery tail and blacked out."

He was taken to Bagram, where US military doctors had to amputate his leg. Afterwards, he said, "an American woman appeared. She said the US was sorry. It was a mistake. The men in the car were Special Forces or CIA on a mission. She gave me $500." Sardar showed us into another room in his compound where a circle of children stared glumly at us; their fathers, all policemen, were killed in the same incident. "Five dead. Four in hospital. To protect covert US prisoner transports," he says. Later, US helicopters were deployed in two similar incidents that left nine dead.

In his builders' merchant's shop, Mohammed Timouri describes how he lost his son. "Ismail was a part-time taxi driver, waiting to go to college," he says, handing us a photograph of a beardless, short-haired 19-year-old held aloft in a coffin at his funeral last March. "A convoy delivering prisoners from a facility in Jalalabad to one in Kabul became snarled up in traffic. A US soldier jumped down and lifted a woman out of the way. She screamed. Ismail stepped forward to explain she was a conservative person, wearing a burka. The soldier dropped the woman and shot Ismail in front of a crowd of 20 people."

Mohammed received a letter from the Afghan police: "We apologise to you," the police chief wrote. "An innocent was killed by Americans." The US army declined to comment on Ismail's death or on a second fatal shooting by another prison transport at the same crossroads later that month. It also refused to comment on an incident outside Kabul when a prison patrol reportedly cleared a crowd of children by throwing a grenade into their midst. However, we have since heard that the CIA's inspector general is investigating at least eight serious incidents, including two deaths in custody, following complaints by agents about the activities of their military colleagues.

There are insurgents active in the Gardez area, as there are throughout the south of Afghanistan, remnants of the old order and the newly disaffected. Every morning it takes Afghan police several hours to pick along the highway unearthing explosives concealed overnight. And so it was mid-morning before we were able to leave town, crawling over the Gardez-Khost pass, some 10,000ft high. No one saw us slipping on to the fertile Khost plain, where Osama bin Laden once had his training camps - the camps were destroyed by US cruise missiles in August 1998. Today a shrine to Taliban loyalists still greets travellers to the city, although no one here would say they preferred the old life.

US Camp Salerno, the largest base outside Kabul, dominates the area around Khost. Inside the city, Kamal Sadat, a local stringer for BBC World Service, told how he was detained last September and found himself locked up in a prison filled with suspects from many countries. "Even though I showed my press accreditation, I was hooded, driven to Salerno and then flown to another US base. I had no idea where I was or why I had been detained." He was held in a small wooden cell, and soldiers combed through his notebooks, copying down names and phone numbers. "Every time I was moved within the base, I was hooded again. Every prisoner has to maintain absolute silence. I could hear helicopters whirring above me. Prisoners were arriving and leaving all the time. There were also cells beneath me, under the ground." After three days, Sadat was flown back to Khost and freed without explanation. "It was only later I learned that I had been held in Bagram. If the BBC had not intervened, I fear I would not have got out." After his release, the US military said it had all been a misunderstanding, and apologised.

Camp Salerno, which houses the 1,200 troops of US Combined Taskforce Thunder, was being expanded when we arrived. Army tents were being replaced with concrete dormitories. The detention facility, concealed behind a perimeter of opaque green webbing, was being modernised and enlarged. Ensconced in a Soviet-era staff building was the camp's commanding officer, Colonel Gary Cheeks. He listened calmly as we asked about the allegations of torture, deaths and disappearances at US detention facilities including Salerno. We read to him from a complaint made by a UN official in Kabul that accused the US military of using "cowboy-like excessive force". He eased forward in his chair: "There have been some tragic accidents for which we have apologised. Some people have been paid compensation."

We put to him the specific case of Mohammed Khan, from a village near the Pakistan border, who died in custody at Camp Salerno: his relatives say his body showed signs of torture. "You could go on for ages with a 'he said, she said'. You have to take my word for it," said Cheeks. He remembered Khan's death: "He was bitten by a snake and died in his cell." He added, "We are building new holding cells here to make life better for detainees. We are systematising our prison programme across the country."

For what reason? "So all guards and interrogators behave by the same code of behaviour," the colonel said. Is it not the case that an ever-increasing number of prisoners have vanished, while others are being shuttled between jails to keep their families in the dark? Cheeks moved towards his office door: "There are many things that are distorted. No one has vanished here ... Look, the war against the Taliban is one small part. I want the Afghan people with us. They are the key to ending conflict. If they fear us or we do wrong by them, then we have lost."

However, many Afghans who celebrated the fall of the Taliban have long lost faith in the US military. In Kabul, Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights Commission, told us, "Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has spawned serious human rights abuses, a system of which Afghanistan is but one part." In the past 18 months, the commission has logged more than 800 allegations of human rights abuses committed by US troops.

The Afghan government privately shares Nadery's fears. One minister, who asked not to be named, said, "Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability."

What has been glimpsed in Afghanistan is a radical plan to replace Guantánamo Bay. When that detention centre was set up in January 2002, it was essentially an offshore gulag - beyond the reach of the US constitution and even the Geneva conventions. That all changed in July 2004. The US supreme court ruled that the federal court in Washington had jurisdiction to hear a case that would decide if the Cuban detentions were in violation of the US constitution, its laws or treaties. The military commissions, which had been intended to dispense justice to the prisoners, were in disarray, too. No prosecution cases had been prepared and no defence cases would be readily offered as the US National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers had described the commissions as unethical, a decision backed by a federal judge who ruled in January that they were "illegal". Guantánamo was suddenly bogged down in domestic lawsuits. It had lost its practicality. So a global prison network built up over the previous three years, beyond the reach of American and European judicial process, immediately began to pick up the slack. The process became explicit last week when the Pentagon announced that half of the 540 or so inmates at Guantánamo are to be transferred to prisons in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

Since September 11 2001, one of the US's chief strategies in its "war on terror" has been to imprison anyone considered a suspect on whatever grounds. To that end it commandeered foreign jails, built cellblocks at US military bases and established covert CIA facilities that can be located almost anywhere, from an apartment block to a shipping container. The network has no visible infrastructure - no prison rolls, visitor rosters, staff lists or complaints procedures. Terror suspects are being processed in Afghanistan and in dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia in the southern Indian Ocean. Those detained are held incommunicado, without charge or trial, and frequently shuttled between jails in covert air transports, giving rise to the recently coined US military expression "ghost detainees".

Most of the countries hosting these invisible prisons are already partners in the US coalition. Others, notably Syria, are pragmatic associates, which work privately alongside the CIA and US Special Forces, despite bellicose public statements from President Bush (he has condemned Syria for harbouring terrorism, for aiding the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime, and most recently has demanded that Syrian troops quit Lebanon).

All the host countries are renowned for their poor human rights records, enabling interrogators (US soldiers, contractors and their local partners) to operate. We have obtained prisoner letters, declassified FBI files, legal depositions, witness statements and testimony from US and UK officials, which document the alleged methods deployed in Afghanistan - shackles, hoods, electrocution, whips, mock executions, sexual humiliation and starvation - and suggest they are practised across the network. Sir Nigel Rodley, a former UN special rapporteur on torture, said, "The more hidden detention practices there are, the more likely that all legal and moral constraints on official behaviour will be removed."

The only "ghost detainees" to have been identified by Washington are a handful of high-profile al-Qaida operatives such as Abu Zubayda, Bin Laden's lieutenant, who vanished after being picked up by Pakistani authorities in Faisalabad in March 2002. In June of that year, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Zubayda was "under US control". He did not say where, although sources in the Pakistani government said Zubayda was being held at a CIA facility in their country.

In May 2003, Bush clarified the fate of Waleed Muhammad bin Attash, an alleged conspirator in the USS Cole bombing, who disappeared after being arrested by police in Pakistan in April 2003. Bush described Attash as "a killer ... one less person that people who love freedom have to worry about"; he is also one more person who has never appeared on a US prison roll.

In June 2004, a senior counterterrorism official in Britain confirmed that Hambali (a nom de guerre) - accused of organising the October 2002 Bali bombings and unseen since Thai police seized him in August 2003 - was "singing like a bird", apparently at the US base on Diego Garcia.

Evidence we have collected, however, shows that many more of those swept up in the network have few provable connections to any outlawed organisation; experts in the field describe their value in the war against terror as "negligible". Former prisoners claim they were released only after naming names, coerced into making false confessions that led to the arrests of more people unconnected to terrorism, in a system of justice that owes more to Stanley Milgram's Six Degrees Of Separation - where anyone can be linked to everyone else in the world in as many stages - than to analytical jurisprudence.

The floating population of "ghost detainees", according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000.

The roots of the prison network can be traced to the legal wrangles that began as soon as the first terror suspects were rounded up just weeks after the September 11 attacks. As CIA agents and US forces began to capture suspected al-Qaida fighters in the war in Afghanistan, Alberto Gonzales, White House counsel, looked for ways to "dispense justice swiftly, close to where our forces may be fighting, without years of pre-trial proceedings or post-trial appeals".

On November 13 2001, George Bush signed an order to establish military commissions to try "enemy belligerents" who commit war crimes. At such a commission, a foreign war criminal would have no choice over his defence counsel, no right to know the evidence against him, no way of obtaining any evidence in his favour and no right of attorney-client confidentiality. Defending the commissions, Gonzales (now promoted to US attorney general) insisted, "The suggestion that [they] will afford only sham justice like that dispensed in dictatorial nations is an insult to our military justice system."

When the first prisoners arrived at Guantánamo Bay in January 2002, Donald Rumsfeld announced that they were all Taliban or al-Qaida fighters, and as such were designated "unlawful combatants". The US administration argued that al-Qaida and the Taliban were not the official army of Afghanistan, but a criminal force that did not wear uniforms, could not be distinguished from civilians and practised war crimes; on this basis, the administration claimed, it was entitled to sidestep the Geneva conventions and normal legal constraints.

From there, it was only a small moral step for the Bush administration to overlook the use of torture by regimes previously condemned by the US state department, so long as they, too, signed up to the war against terror. "Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and even Syria were all asked to make their detention facilities and expert interrogators available to the US," one former counterterrorism agent told us.

In the UK, a similar process began unfolding. In December 2001, the then home secretary David Blunkett withdrew Britain from its obligation under the European human rights treaty not to detain anyone without trial; on December 18, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act was passed, extending the government's powers of arrest and detention. Within 24 hours, 10 men were seized in dawn raids on their homes and taken to Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons (some of them will have been among those released in the past week).

Subsequently the Foreign Office subtly modified internal guidance to diplomats, enabling them to use intelligence obtained through torture. A letter from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office directorate sent to Sir Michael Jay, head of the diplomatic service, and Mathew Kidd of Whitehall liaison, a euphemism for MI6, suggested in March 2003 that although such intelligence was inadmissible as evidence in a UK court, it could still be received and acted upon by the British government. The government's attitude was spelt out to the Intelligence and Security Committee of MPs and peers by foreign secretary Jack Straw who, while acknowledging that torture was "completely unacceptable" and that information obtained under torture is more likely to be embellished, concluded, "you cannot ignore it if the price of ignoring it is 3,000 people dead" [a reference to the September 11 attacks].

One former ambassador told us, "This was new ground for the FCO. As long as we didn't do it, we're OK. But by taking advantage of this intelligence, we're encouraging the use of torture and, in my opinion, are in contravention of the UN Convention Against Torture. What worried me most was that information obtained under torture, given credence by some gung-ho Whitehall warrior, could be used to keep another poor soul locked up without trial or charge."

Although the true extent of the US extra-legal network is only now becoming apparent, people began to disappear as early as 2001 when the US asked its allies in Europe and the Middle East to examine their refugee communities in search of possible terror cells, such as that run by Mohammed Atta in Hamburg which had planned and executed the September 11 attacks. Among the first to vanish was Ahmed Agiza, an Egyptian asylum seeker who had been living in Sweden with his wife and children for three years. Hanan, Agiza's wife, told us how on December 18 2001 her husband failed to return home from his language class.

"The phone rang at 5pm. It was Ahmed. He said he'd been arrested and then the line went dead. The next day our lawyer told me that Ahmed was being sent back to Egypt. It would be better if he was dead." Agiza and his family had fled Egypt in 1991, after years of persecution, and in absentia he had been sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court. Hanan said, "I called my mother-in-law in Egypt. Finally, in April, she was allowed to see Ahmed in Mazrah Torah prison, in Cairo, when he revealed what had happened."

On December 18 2001, Agiza and a second Egyptian refugee, Mohammed Al-Zery, had been arrested by Swedish intelligence acting upon a request from the US. They were driven, shackled and blindfolded, to Stockholm's Bromma airport, where they were cuffed and cut from their clothes. Suppositories were inserted into both men's anuses, they were wrapped in plastic nappies, dressed in jumpsuits and handed over to an American aircrew who flew them out of Sweden on a private executive jet.

Agiza and Al-Zery landed in Cairo at 3am the next morning and were taken to the state security investigation office, where they were held in solitary confinement in underground cells. Mohammed Zarai, former director of the Cairo-based Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, told us that Agiza was repeatedly electrocuted, hung upside down, whipped with an electrical flex and hospitalised after being made to lick his cell floor clean. Hanan, who was granted asylum in Sweden in 2004, said, "I can't sleep at night without expecting someone to knock on the door and send us away on a plane to a place that scares me more than anything else. What can Ahmed do?" Her husband is still incarcerated in Cairo, while Al-Zery is under house arrest there. There have been calls for an international independent investigation into the roles of the Swedish, US and Egyptian authorities.

We were able to chart the toing and froing of the private executive jet used at Bromma partly through the observations of plane-spotters posted on the web and partly through a senior source in the Pakistan Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). It was a Gulfstream V Turbo, tailfin number N379P; its flight plans always began at an airstrip in Smithfield, North Carolina, and ended in some of the world's hot spots. It was owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, incorporated in Delaware, a brass plaque company with nonexistent directors, hired by American agents to revive an old CIA tactic from the 1970s, when agency men had kidnapped South American criminals and flown them back to their own countries to face trial so that justice could be rendered. Now "rendering" was being used by the Bush administration to evade justice.

Robert Baer, a CIA case officer in the Middle East until 1997, told us how it works. "We pick up a suspect or we arrange for one of our partner countries to do it. Then the suspect is placed on civilian transport to a third country where, let's make no bones about it, they use torture. If you want a good interrogation, you send someone to Jordan. If you want them to be killed, you send them to Egypt or Syria. Either way, the US cannot be blamed as it is not doing the heavy work."

The Agiza and Al-Zery cases were not the first in which the Gulfstream was used. On October 23 2001, at 2.40am at Karachi airport, it picked up Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiologist who had been arrested by Pakistan's ISI and was wanted in connection with the USS Cole attack. On January 10 2002, the jet was used again, taking off from Halim airport in Jakarta with a hooded and shackled Mohammed Saeed Iqbal Madni on board, an Egyptian accused of being an accomplice of British shoe bomber Richard Reid. Madni was flown to Cairo where, according to the Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners, he died during interrogation.

Since then, the jet has been used at least 72 times, including a flight in June 2002 when it landed in Morocco to pick up German national Mohammed Zamar, who was "rendered" to Syria, his country of origin, before disappearing.

It was in December 2001 that the US began to commandeer foreign jails so that its own interrogators could work on prisoners within them. Among the first were Haripur and Kohat, no-frills prisons in the lawless North West Frontier Province of Pakistan which now hold nearly as many detainees as Guantánamo. In January, we attempted to visit Kohat jail, but as we drove towards the security perimeter our vehicle was turned back by ISI agents and we were escorted back to the nearby city of Peshawar. We eventually located several former detainees, including Mohammed, a university student who described how he was arrested and then initially interrogated in one of many covert ISI holding centres that are being jointly run with the CIA. Mohammed said, "I was questioned for four weeks in a windowless room by plain-clothed US agents. I didn't know if it was day or night. They said they could make me disappear." One day he was bundled into a vehicle. "I arrived in Kohat jail. There were 100 prisoners from all over the Middle East. Later I was moved to Haripur where there were even more."

Adil, another detainee who was held for three years in Haripur after illegally crossing into Pakistan from Afghanistan, where he had escaped from the Taliban, says, "US interrogators came and went as they pleased." Both Mohammed and Adil said they were often taken from the hot cell and doused with ice-cold water. Adil says, "American women ordered us to get undressed. They'd touch us and taunt us. They made us lie naked on top of each other and simulate acts."

Mohammed and Adil were released without charge in November 2004 but, according to legal depositions, there are still 400 prisoners detained in the jails at the request of the US. Among them are many who it is extremely unlikely took part in the Afghan war: they are too young or too old to have been combatants. Some have taken legal action against the Pakistani authorities for breach of human rights.

A military intelligence official in Washington told us that no one in the US administration seemed concerned about the impact of the coercive tactics practised by the growing global network on the quality of intelligence obtained, although there was plenty of evidence it was unreliable. On September 26 2002, Maher Arar, a 34-year-old Canadian computer scientist, was arrested at New York's JFK airport as a result of a paper-thin evidential chain. Syrian-born Arar told us, "I was pulled aside by US immigration at 2pm. I told them I had a connecting flight to Montreal where I had a job interview." However, Arar was "rendered" in a private jet, via Washington, Portland and Rome, landing in Amman, Jordan, where he was held at what a Jordanian source described as a US-run interrogation centre. From there, he was handed over to Syria, the country he had left as a 17-year-old boy. He says he spent the next 12 months being tortured and in solitary confinement, unaware that someone he barely knew had named him as a terrorist.

The chain of events that led to Arar's arrest, or kidnapping, began in November 2001, when another Canadian, Ahmad Abou El-Maati, from Montreal, was arrested at Damascus airport. He was accused of being a terrorist and asked to identify his al-Qaida connections. By the time he'd endured two years of torture, El-Maati had reeled off the names of everyone he knew in Montreal, including Abdullah Almalki, an electrical engineer. Almalki was arrested as he flew into Damascus airport to join his parents on holiday in May 2002, and would spend the next two years being tortured in a Syrian detention facility.

Almalki knew Arward Al-Bousha, also from Ottawa, who in July 2002, upon arriving in Damascus to visit his dying father, was also arrested. El-Maati, Almalki and Al-Bousha all knew Maher Arar by sight through Muslim community events in Ottawa. After his release from jail in Syria, uncharged, in January 2004, El-Maati admitted that he had erroneously named Maher Arar as a terrorist to "stop the vicious torture". Arar, who was eventually released in October 2003 after a Syrian court threw out a coerced confession in which he said he had been trained by al-Qaida, told us, "I am not a terrorist. I don't know anyone who is. But the tolerant Muslim community I come from here in Canada has become vitriolic and demoralised." Arar's case is now the subject of a judicial inquiry in Canada, but since his release and that of Al-Bousha and Almalki, another five men from Ottawa have been detained in Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Five days after the US supreme court ruled in July 2004 that federal courts had jurisdiction over Guantánamo, Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old computer programmer from Karachi, disappeared during a business trip to Lahore. He was not taken to Guantánamo. His father Hayat told us that he learned of his son's fate after a neighbour called on August 2 to say that US newspapers were running a story about "the capture of a figure from al-Qaida in Pakistan" who had led "the CIA to a rich lode of information". An unnamed US intelligence official claimed Naeem Noor Khan operated websites and email addresses for al-Qaida. The following day Pakistan's information minister trumpeted the ISI's seizure of Naeem Noor Khan on behalf of the US on July 13. The prisoner had "confessed to receiving 25 days of military training from an al-Qaida camp in June 1998". No corroborative evidence was offered.

Babar Awan, one of Pakistan's leading advocates, representing the family, said he had learned from a contact in the Pakistani government that Naeem Noor Khan was wanted by the US, having been named by one of a group of Malaysian students who had been detained incommunicado and threatened with torture in Pakistan in September 2003. Awan said, "The student was subsequently freed uncharged and described how he was threatened until he offered the names of anyone he had met in Pakistan. There is no evidence against Naeem Noor Khan except for this coerced statement, and even worse he has now vanished and so there is no prison to petition for his release."

Khan had been swallowed up by a catch-all system that gathers up anyone connected by even a thread to terror. Unable to distinguish its friends from its enemies, the US suspects both.

Dawn broke on the festival of Eid and four US army vehicles gunned their engines in preparation for a "hearts and minds" operation in Khost city, Afghanistan. A roll call of marines, each with their blood group scrawled on their boots, was ticked off and we were added to the muster. The convoy hurtled towards the city. Men and boys began to run alongside. First a handful and then a dozen. The crowd was heading for a vast prayer ground, and soon there were thousands of devotees in brand newEid caps and starched shalwas marching out to pray. The US Humvees pulled over. The armoured personnel carriers, too. A dozen US marines stepped down, eyes obscured by goggles, faces by balaclavas.

They fell into formation and stomped into the crowd while a group of Afghan police looked on incredulously. "Keep tight. Keep tight. Keep looking all around us," a US marines captain shouted. More than 10,000 Pashtun men were now on their knees praying as a line of khaki pushed between them.

An egg flew. Then another. "One more, sir, and the guy who did it is going down," a young sergeant mumbled, as the disturbed crowd rose to its feet. Bearded men with Kalashnikovs emerged from behind a stone wall and edged towards us, cutting off our path. The line of khaki began to panic, and jostled the children. "Back away, back away now," shouted the sergeant. Suddenly an armoured personnel carrier roared to meet us. "Jump up, people," the captain shouted, and the convoy sped back to Camp Salerno.

And perhaps this event above all others - of a nervous phalanx of US marines forcing its way across a prayer ground on one of the holiest, most joyous days in the Islamic calendar, an itching trigger away from a Somalian-style dogfight of their own making - is the one that encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with the global war against terror. The US army came to Afghanistan as liberators and now are feared as governors, judges and jailers. How many US marines know what James Madison, an architect of the US constitution, wrote in 1788? Reflecting on the War of Independence in which Americans were arbitrarily arrested and detained without trial by British forces, Madison concluded that the "accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny"

Afghan women to visit Fremont later this month
News-Messenger reports
Ten Afghan women business leaders will visit Fremont March 28 as part of an exchange training program in Northwest Ohio. They will be the guests of WSOS Community Action Commission for the day.

The women are in the United States as part of a leadership training program developed by the Great Lakes Consortium for Training and Development. The group will participate in a roundtable discussion with people from the business community of Sandusky County. The discussion will begin at 10 a.m. at the Pontifex Café, 416 W. State St., Fremont. The women will also visit various small businesses in Fremont.

The program is aimed at enhancing the entrepreneurial skills of the women so that they can return to Afghanistan with information that they can share with their peers and help develop and improve the business environment in their home communities. It also hopes to lay the foundation of a network of support and long-term cooperation among the Afghan women and others in Northwest Ohio.

The GLC, which is administered by WSOS Community Action Commission, Inc., is a collaborative effort of the University of Toledo, Bowling Green State University, Lourdes College, the Medical College of Ohio and WSOS.

The delegation's visit to the United States is the result of a grant from the U.S. State Department, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, Office of Citizen Exchanges and a cooperation between the consortium partners in Northwest Ohio and Reconstruction Authority for Afghanistan.

For more information on the delegation, call Joyce Huntley at 419-334-8911.

Afghan amnesty program in limbo
By Carlotta Gall The New York Times
Khost, Afghanistan - Two men sat in the governor's garden recently, in this unruly province bordering Pakistan, smiling and nodding as they chatted. The men are former members of the Taliban who have taken advantage of offers of amnesty in exchange for returning from exile in Pakistan.

"The Taliban are also part of the Afghan population," said the urbane governor of Khost Province, Merajuddin Pathan, explaining why he had welcomed these former Taliban officials. "We want to bring them back for the future of our country and stability. It is very simple. If they accept our laws and our national interest, they can come home."

Yet, the government's program of national reconciliation, promised last year by President Hamid Karzai, has not proved so simple. The government has yet to announce the program formally, apparently because of resistance in the Cabinet and among ethnic groups that suffered under the Taliban, whose militant Islamic government was ousted with American military help in 2001 after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The U.S. military enthusiastically supports such a program as a strategy to undermine the Taliban-led insurgency in southern and eastern Afghanistan that has cost up to 1,000 Afghan lives in the last 18 months and killed 30 American soldiers in the last year.

Frustrated by the delays, the Americans have started a parallel allegiance program.

Although many senior officials in the frontline provinces were initially skeptical last year when Karzai spoke of an amnesty for all, except the Taliban senior leadership, many of them now voice support for the policy. In the absence of the federal program, some provincial and national law enforcement officials have been welcoming the former Taliban officials and fighters home if they promise to eschew violence and support the government.