“Objectivity” or Spinelessness?
February 7, 2008 By Scott Horton
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002331
Some months back I had a public discussion with Ethan Bonner, one of the
international
editors at the New York Times, concerning the paper’s re****ting out of
Pakistan and
Afghanistan. My view was that the actual re****ting the paper was producing
out of the region
was superior—the best, I thought, of any American publication. That’s
largely thanks to
Carlotta Gall. I’ve known Carlotta, albeit at a distance, for more than a
decade and she’s
one of only three or four journalists who really knows this region and
covers it
effectively. Beyond that, she’s one of the bravest women I’ve ever met and
a person with a
ferocious dedication to the truth. But the balance of the team is also
superior. So much for
the re****ting team.
But then we come to the editorial desk. That was, I thought, operating far
below the level
of the team in the field. The Times didn’t appreciate the worth of its
assets on the ground,
didn’t take the appropriate steps to display what it had, and failed to
act to protect its
re****ters. In fact at the time, I was miffed because two Times re****ters
had been roughed up
by Pakistani security forces. I learned about it immediately, spoke with
the Committee to
Protect Journalists, and several judges and lawyers in Pakistan, wrote and
talked about it.
And a number of other journalists did likewise. The Gray Lady, however,
kept her silence for
a period of two weeks. It was not a very dignified performance.
And today we see an encore in editorial infamy.
I commented on a recent story authored by Gall and Worthington on Tuesday,
“Time Runs Out
for an Afghan Held by the U.S.,”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/world/asia/05gitmo.html?_r=3&sq=Guantanamo&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
concerning the death in Guantánamo detention of Abdul Razzaq Hekmati. This
was an im****tant
article in several respects. First, it put a human face on one of the
prisoners held in
Guantánamo who was held unjustly and who died in wrongful and ignominious
captivity. Second,
and the point on which I focused in my piece, it pointed to the smoldering
conflict between
the Karzai Government and the United States over detention policy.
Everyone who works this
turf and deals with the Karzai Government’s representatives knows about
this issue, but
there seems to be a conspiracy of silence surrounding it, since it rarely
gets re****ted. I
saw a series of statements and sentiments attributed to Afghan Government
officials which I
had heard with my own ears in the prior few weeks. I was pleased to see
this finally work
its way into the public record. But to my astonishment, today this
“editor’s note” was
posted under the article:
A front-page article on Tuesday described the problems of the
tribunals at the American
military base in Guantánamo, as seen through the failure to resolve the
case of Abdul Razzaq
Hekmati, an Afghan war hero who died there Dec. 30 after a five-year-long
detention. The
article quoted several Afghan officials who said they were prepared to
offer evidence that
he was falsely accused, but were never given a chance to do so. Andy
Worthington, a
freelance journalist who worked on the article under contract with The New
York Times and
was listed as its co-author, did some of the initial re****ting but was not
involved in all
of it, and The Times verified the information he provided. That included
the fact of Mr.
Hekmati’s death, and the content of transcripts released by the Pentagon
showing that the
accusations against Mr. Hekmati had been made by unidentified sources and
that the tribunal
at Guantánamo had never called outside witnesses requested by detainees.
Mr. Worthington has written a book, “The Guantánamo Files: The
Stories of the 774
Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison,” in which he takes the position
that Guantánamo is
part of what he describes as a cruel and misguided response by the Bush
Administration to
the Sept. 11 attacks. He has also expressed strong criticism of Guantánamo
in articles
published elsewhere. The editors were not aware of Mr. Worthington’s
outspoken position on
Guantánamo. They should have described his contribution to the re****ting
instead of listing
him as co-author, and noted that he had a point of view.
Having dealt with Guantánamo and re****ting on Guantánamo since the camp
was opened, I have a
pretty good guess what happened. A call came to the New York Times from a
Bush
Administration figure complaining bitterly about the article, and
viciously attacking
Worthington. Since the Bu****e attack dogs rarely do anything halfway, I’d
wager Worthington
was tarred as some sort of barking leftist kook. And the Times editors,
rather than stand up
for their writers on a superior story, did what they usually do. They
displayed cowardice
under fire. They opted to buy peace with the powers that be by assailing
their own writer.
So we see a note in which Worthington’s views on Guantánamo are described
as “outspoken” and
the Times distances itself from them.
What’s really going on here? The Bush Administration has fed the media the
most vitriolic
propaganda about the Guantánamo camps for over six years. The detainees
were labeled as “the
worst of the worst” and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was
quoted saying they
were the kind of people “who would gnaw their way through cables to make a
plane crash.”
These claims were re****ted without contradiction or criticism. They were
untrue and known to
the government officers who uttered them to be untrue. In the Times view,
however,
Government officials are free to lie without contradiction. Moreover,
Administration policy
continues to be to deny the basic humanity of the prisoners, to tar them,
to deny them their
identity. Nothing could be a greater threat to these dissemblers than
****ning a light on
their lies by telling the real story of a detainee. Alex Gibney’s Oscar
nominated “Taxi to
the Dark Side” does exactly that with two other Guantánamo detainees,
arrested and ****pped
off because they were passengers in Dilawar’s taxi, on their way back to
Yacubi after a day
in the market. Gibney’s work rests very heavily on the first-rate
re****ting of Gall and her
colleague Tim Golden, first published in the Times. The story that Gall
and Worthington
presented exposed a similar lie, and it produced a retaliation. The Times
editors are not
forthcoming enough to give an honest account of what happened; they are
focused on
accommodation with the Pentagon’s PR machine, and they are prepared to
sacrifice good
journalistic ethics to get it.
The still more preposterous aspect of the “note” is the suggestion that
there is something
“outspoken” in calling to close Guantánamo and labeling the facility what
it is. The posture
adopted in Worthington’s book is indeed very radical. Among the radicals
who have embraced
it are the American Bar Association, Pope Benedict XVI, the Archbishop of
Canterbury, the
Dalai Lama, Chancellor Angela Merkel, the English Lord Chancellor, Lord
Falconer, and
hundreds of other political and spiritual leaders around the world. Come
to think of it, the
list of radicals includes the editorial board of the New York Times.
This “note” is a badge of shame for the New York Times. It shows a paper
whose editors
operate to demonstrably lower standards than the journalists they employ.
The editors
promised that in the wake of the gross mistakes they made in the run-up to
the Iraq War,
they would reform and demonstrate a higher level resistance to efforts at
undercover
manipulation by the Government. On that promise, their integrity hangs.
But they are failing
in it.
-------------------------------------------------
February 5, 2008
Time Runs Out for an Afghan Held by the U.S.
By CARLOTTA GALL and ANDY WORTHINGTON
Editors' Note Appended
KABUL, Afghanistan — Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was regarded here as a war hero,
famous for his
resistance to the Russian occupation in the 1980s and later for a daring
prison break he
organized for three opponents of the Taliban government in 1999.
But in 2003, Mr. Hekmati was arrested by American forces in southern
Afghanistan when,
senior Afghan officials here contend, he was falsely accused by his
enemies of being a
Taliban commander himself. For the next five years he was held at the
American military base
in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he died of cancer on Dec. 30.
The fate of Mr. Hekmati, the first detainee to die of natural causes at
Guantánamo, who
fruitlessly recounted his story several times to American officials,
demonstrates the
enduring problems of the tribunals at Guantánamo, say Afghan officials and
others who knew him.
Afghan officials, and some Americans, complain that detainees are
effectively thwarted from
calling witnesses in their defense, and that the Afghan government is
never consulted on the
detention cases, even when it may be able to help. Mr. Hekmati’s case,
officials who knew
him said, shows that sometimes the Americans do not seem to know whom they
are holding.
Meanwhile, detainees wait for years with no resolution to their cases.
In response to queries, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, Cynthia O. Smith,
said the military
tribunals at Guantánamo contained “significant process and protections,”
including the right
to call witnesses.
While Ms. Smith would not discuss specifics, she said that there was
nothing to indicate
that Mr. Hekmati’s case was handled improperly, and that detainees at
Guantánamo were given
a range of protections, including “the op****tunity for a detainee to be
heard in person,
call witnesses and present additional information that might benefit him.”
Whether those protections are sufficient has been widely debated and is
now being considered
by the United States Supreme Court. In the tribunals, which consider only
whether detainees
have been properly classified as enemy combatants, detainees are not
allowed to have lawyers
or see the evidence against them. The Supreme Court case will decide
whether they have the
right to broadly appeal their detentions in federal court.
Of the 275 detainees at Guantánamo, at least 180 have sought to challenge
their detentions.
Several high-ranking officials in President Hamid Karzai’s government say
Mr. Hekmati’s
detention at Guantánamo was a gross mistake. They were mentioned by Mr.
Hekmati in his
hearings and could have vouched for him. Records from the hearings show
that only a cursory
effort was made to reach them.
Two of those officials were men Mr. Hekmati had helped escape from the
Taliban’s top
security prison in Kandahar in 1999: Ismail Khan, now the minister of
energy; and Hajji
Zaher, a general in the Border Guards. Both men said they appealed to
American officials
about Mr. Hekmati’s case, but to no effect.
“What he did was very im****tant for all Afghan people who were against the
Taliban,” Hajji
Zaher said of Mr. Hekmati’s role in organizing his prison break. “He was
not a man to take
to Guantánamo.”
Hajji Zaher, whose father served as vice president under Mr. Karzai for
six months, warned
that the case of Mr. Hekmati, who is widely known here by his nickname,
Baraso, would
discourage Afghans from backing the government against the Taliban. “No
one is going to help
the government,” he said.
Mr. Hekmati never had a lawyer, said Zachary Katznelson of Reprieve, a
British charity that
represents a number of Guantánamo detainees. At his October 2004 review
hearing, Mr. Hekmati
specifically asked that Hajji Zaher and Mr. Khan be contacted to act as
sup****ting witnesses.
The military tribunal president said the Afghan government did not respond
to requests to
locate the men, and ruled that they were “not reasonably available.”
Although both men are well known to the American authorities in
Afghanistan, both Hajji
Zaher and Mr. Khan said the American authorities had never asked them to
appear.
Unidentified Accusers
In Mr. Hekmati’s tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004 to *****s his status as an
enemy combatant,
American officials accused Mr. Hekmati of a variety of charges made by
unidentified sources,
and referred to him only as Abdul Razzaq, his first names, which are
common in Afghanistan.
According to transcripts released by the Pentagon, the United States
military charged, among
other things, that Mr. Hekmati was “high in the Al Qaeda hierarchy,” acted
as a smuggler and
facilitator for it, and was “part of the main security escort for Osama
bin Laden.” He was
also accused of attending a terrorist training camp near Kandahar and of
involvement in
assassination attempts against Afghan government officials.
He was also identified as a senior leader of a 40-man Taliban unit, and
even as supreme
commander in Helmand Province.
That last allegation was rebutted by another unidentified detainee, who
explicitly stated
that Mr. Hekmati looked nothing like the Taliban commander and that the
commander was “not
the same person as the detainee,” according to the transcript.
Mr. Hekmati denied the charges, too, saying he did not even live in
Afghanistan after the
1999 prison break, when he ran afoul of the Taliban. He insisted that most
of the
allegations had been directed against him by two of his personal enemies.
The first was Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, the post-Taliban governor of
Helmand Province, who,
Mr. Hekmati said, was directly responsible for his arrest after he
re****ted the governor for
corruption and for protecting a number of senior Taliban members in
Helmand.
The second was Mohammed Jan, a distant cousin who had falsely denounced
him as part of a
long-running family feud. “It was one person who gave them wrong
information and just
because of this wrong person, I am here,” Mr. Hekmati pleaded at his
October 2004 review
hearing.
“They can’t prove anything against me because I never did anything wrong,”
he went on. “The
person that was giving you all that wrong information, this is the person
that killed my two
brothers, my sister, my father and two of my sons.”
Mr. Akhundzada denied any part in Mr. Hekmati’s arrest, attributing it to
a mistake by
American Special Forces. He said they were often fed false information.
But friends of Mr. Hekmati said he was arrested in 2003 by Afghan forces
in the provincial
capital, Lashkar Gah, during Mr. Akhundzada’s tenure and later turned over
to American forces.
Mr. Hekmati maintained that he was opposed to the Taliban, whom he
described as “dangerous
and dirty people” who had deviated from Islam.
“Taliban and Al Qaeda are the same,” he said at his review board hearing
in September 2005.
“When I’m against Taliban I’m going against Al Qaeda. There’s an
expression in Pashto that
you cannot hold two watermelons in one hand at the same time.”
The only allegation that he accepted was that he had worked as a truck
driver for the
Taliban, but he said he had been forced to work for them three months a
year, as every
able-bodied man was during the Taliban’s rule.
Several people in Afghanistan, including Hajji Mir Wali, a member of
Parliament, and Mullah
Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who was held
in a cell next to
Mr. Hekmati in Guantánamo for three months in 2003, confirmed that he was
a truck driver for
the Taliban government in the 1990s.
But Mullah Zaeef said Mr. Hekmati could never have worked for the Taliban
again after 1999,
such was their fury over the prison break he organized.
Hajji Wali, who knew Mr. Hekmati well, said: “It was the Americans’
mistake. I know he had
no relations with the Taliban.”
Yet the Americans on his tribunal and review boards seemed unaware of how
significant the
prison break was, or how im****tant were the men he had helped escape and
whom he had asked
to be called as witnesses.
The Prison Break
The 1999 escape was a deep humiliation for the Taliban government, which
blocked roads and
searched houses across the country for days afterward and offered $1
million for the capture
of the escapees. Two of Mr. Hekmati’s relatives were badly tortured by the
Taliban after the
prison break as the Taliban looked for information.
Two of the men Mr. Hekmati freed, Mr. Khan and Hajji Zaher, returned to
the battlefield to
lead forces against the Taliban. They both received significant American
sup****t in 2001 and
worked with Special Forces units.
A third man who escaped with them was another commander of the
anti-Taliban Northern
Alliance, Gen. Mohammed Qasim.
According to Mr. Hekmati’s account in his hearing in September 2005, he
organized the escape
because he opposed the Taliban’s “ruthlessness and injustice.”
Mr. Hekmati said he had written a letter outlining his escape plan, which
his son,
Hekmatullah, who worked as an intelligence officer at the Taliban’s high
security prison,
smuggled in to Mr. Khan. Mr. Khan then put Mr. Hekmati in touch with his
own son, who gave
him $20,000 to buy a Toyota Land Cruiser for a getaway vehicle.
Mr. Hekmati said that because his son was trusted by the Taliban, he was
able to walk the
three prisoners out one night to where he was waiting in the dark with the
vehicle.
Hekmatullah corroborated much of his father’s account in an interview in
2002.
The men escaped to Iran, where Mr. Khan provided Mr. Hekmati and his
family with a house and
financial sup****t in return for his daring. Mr. Hekmati said he returned
to Afghanistan only
in 2002, after the Taliban were toppled and Mr. Karzai’s interim
government was installed.
Within a year, he was arrested.
The Military Tribunals
In a re****t in February 2006 based on an analysis of do***ents released by
the Pentagon,
researchers at Seton Hall University School of Law, in Newark, concluded
that no outside
witnesses had ever been called to appear at Guantánamo. Lt. Col. Stephen
E. Abraham, a
former United States intelligence officer who had worked on the tribunals,
stepped forward
last June to criticize the tribunals.
In a submission to the Supreme Court, he condemned them for relying on
generalized evidence
that would have been dismissed by any competent court, and as being
devised to rubber-stamp
the administration’s assertion that the detainees had been correctly
designated “enemy
combatants” when they were captured and that they could be held
indefinitely.
In a second submission, to the United States Court of Appeals for the
District of Columbia
Circuit in November, Colonel Abraham explained that he was “not aware of
any realistic
attempts” to “identify or even attempt to bring before the tribunal
witnesses or their
statements,” and concluded that the whole process “was designed to conduct
tribunals without
witnesses other than the accused detainee.”
That is one of the reasons Afghan officials have asked that Afghan
detainees be transferred
from Guantánamo to Afghanistan. “Of course a judicial process needs
witnesses and do***ents
and evidence,” Minister of Justice Mohammad Sarwar Danish said. “Most of
these cases have
not come to trial, and are not proceeding, and that is why we asked them
to be moved here.”
After Mr. Hekmati was arrested, two of the men he broke out of prison, Mr.
Khan and Hajji
Zaher, said they appealed to American and Afghan officials for his
release. “I asked
President Karzai to help, but unfortunately it did not help,” Mr. Khan
said. He said he also
asked the American ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, Zalmay
Khalilzad, with no result.
“We did try but it was not working,” Hajji Zaher said in a phone
interview. “When they are
sending someone to Guantánamo, they have their own rules.”
After Mr. Hekmati’s death at Guantánamo, his body was returned to
Afghanistan and quietly
buried in an unmarked grave in Kandahar on Jan. 8. His family did not dare
attend the
funeral, fearful of both the Taliban and the Americans, friends said.
As the Taliban has reasserted itself in much of southern Afghanistan, Mr.
Hekmati’s son
remains in hiding. Neither he nor any relative or elder of their tribe
collected his
father’s body.
“He is caught in the middle,” said Hajji Wali, a family friend. “He is
scared of the Taliban
and scared of the government and the Americans, because the Americans took
his innocent
father and they could take him, too.”
Editors' Note: February 7, 2008
A front-page article on Tuesday described the problems of the tribunals at
the American
military base in Guantánamo, as seen through the failure to resolve the
case of Abdul Razzaq
Hekmati, an Afghan war hero who died there Dec. 30 after a five-year-long
detention. The
article quoted several Afghan officials who said they were prepared to
offer evidence that
he was falsely accused, but were never given a chance to do so.
Andy Worthington, a freelance journalist who worked on the article under
contract with The
New York Times and was listed as its co-author, did some of the initial
re****ting but was
not involved in all of it, and The Times verified the information he
provided. That included
the fact of Mr. Hekmati’s death, and the content of transcripts released
by the Pentagon
showing that the accusations against Mr. Hekmati had been made by
unidentified sources and
that the tribunal at Guantánamo had never called outside witnesses
requested by detainees.
Mr. Worthington has written a book, “The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of
the 774 Detainees
in America’s Illegal Prison,” in which he takes the position that
Guantánamo is part of what
he describes as a cruel and misguided response by the Bush administration
to the Sept. 11
attacks. He has also expressed strong criticism of Guantánamo in articles
published elsewhere.
The editors were not aware of Mr. Worthington’s outspoken position on
Guantánamo. They
should have described his contribution to the re****ting instead of listing
him as co-author,
and noted that he had a point of view.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/world/asia/05gitmo.html?_r=3&sq=Guantanamo&st=nyt&oref=slogin&scp=2&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a new page describing the social aspects of American Fascism at
http://politicsusaweb.com/RootsOfFascism.html
Multiculturalism will not move us out of the fascist slough we are in:
Back to the Enlightenment!
http://www.politicsusaweb.com/BackToTheEnlightenment.html
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still the most concise explanation of how we are who we are:
"Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of
the progress
of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her August claims,
have been
born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating,
all-absorbing,
and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do
this or it
does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who
profess to favor
freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without
plowing up the
ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean
without
the awful roar of its many waters."
"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and
it may be
both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing
without a
demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will
quietly
submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong
which will
be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with
either words
or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the
endurance of those
whom they oppress."
---Frederick Douglass
Source: Douglass, Frederick. [1857] (1985). "The Significance of
Emancipation in the West Indies." Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3,
1857; collected in pamphlet by author.
http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
A reasonably just and well-ordered democratic society might be possible,
and . . . justice as fairness should have a special place among the
political
conceptions in its political and social world. . . [M]any are prepared to
accept the
conclusion that a just and well-ordered democratic society is not
possible, and even
regard it as obvious. Isn't admitting it part of growing up, part of the
inevitable
loss of innocence? But is this conclusion one we can so easily accept?
The answer we give to the question of whether a just democratic
society is
possible and can be stable for the right reasons affects our background
thoughts and
attitudes about the world as a whole. And it affects these thoughts and
attitudes
before we come to actual politics, and limits or inspires how we take part
in it. . .
If we take for granted as common knowledge that a just and well-ordered
democratic
society is impossible, then the quality and tone of those attitudes will
reflect that
knowledge. A cause of the fall of Wiemar's constitutional regime was that
none of the
traditional elites of Germany sup****ted its constitution or were willing
to cooperate
to make it work. They no longer believed a decent liberal parliamentary
regime was
possible. Its time had past.
The regime fell first to a series of authoritarian cabinet governments
from 1930 to
1932. When these were increasingly weakened by their lack of popular
sup****t,
President Hindenburg was finally persuaded to turn to Hitler, who had such
sup****t and
whom conservatives thought they could control.
~ John Rawls "Political Liberalism" pg. lx
______________________________________________________________________________
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