Collateral Damage: Eight-year-old Ismutula Taj was injured by a stray bomb.

Deadly Deception

Afghan civilians keep dying, the Pentagon keeps denying

By David Corn

My fantasy of the week: Donald Rumsfeld meets a young Afghan boy named Noor Muhammad. At the start of the daily Pentagon press briefing on Dec. 4, the defense secretary delivered a short lecture on the subject of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. “One of the unpleasant aspects of war is the reality that innocent bystanders are sometimes caught in the crossfire,” Rumsfeld said, “and we’re often asked to answer Taliban accusations about civilian casualties. Indeed one of today’s headlines is, ‘Pentagon Avoids Subject of Civilian Deaths.’

“The short answer,” Rumsfeld continued, “is that that’s simply not so.”

He then proceeded to prove, in a way, the offending headline’s point.

“With the disorder that reigns in Afghanistan, it is next to impossible to get factual information about civilian casualties,” Rumsfeld said. “First, the Taliban have lied repeatedly. They intentionally mislead the press for their own purposes. Second, we generally do not have access to sites of alleged civilian casualties on the ground. Third, in cases where someone does have access to a site, it is often impossible to know how many people were killed, how they died, and by whose hand they did die.”

Look at the World Trade Center, Rumsfeld declared. The number of dead there keeps shifting.

“If we cannot know for certain how many people were killed in Lower Manhattan, where we have full access to the site, thousands of reporters, investigators, rescue workers combing the wreckage, and no enemy propaganda to confuse the situation, one ought to be sensitive to how difficult it is to know with certainty, in real time, what may have happened in any given situation in Afghanistan,” Rumsfeld said.

“What we at the Pentagon try to do is to tell the press what we do know that’s accurate, and we try to say what we don’t know,” he continued “We lost thousands of innocent civilians on Sept. 11, and we understand what it means to lose a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a son or a daughter, and we mourn every civilian death.”

Rumsfeld’s remarks, seemingly heartfelt, were actually an exercise in profound cynicism. If we can’t count the dead in New York, how can you expect us to know anything about civilian casualties in Afghanistan? The defense secretary portrayed it as an impossible task, and he suggested that claims of civilian casualties were only coming from Taliban scumbags. Of course you can’t believe them.

But as Rumsfeld was talking, Washington Post reporter Susan Glasser was filing a piece based on a visit to Jalalabad’s Public Hospital No. 1.

In the previous four days, the hospital had taken in 36 patients who said they were victims of the U.S. bombing strikes targeting villages southwest of Jalalabad, in an area where Osama bin Laden and al Qaida remnants are thought to be hiding in cave compounds. The hospital had also received 35 dead.

One of the injured was Noor Mohammed, who had lost both eyes and both arms.

Noor, who is somewhere between 10 and 12 years old, told his uncle he heard the sound of an airplane overhead, ran from his room, and did not know what happened next.

Asked how he felt, the boy whispered, “I feel cold and I cannot talk.” Glasser found other wounded children from families who claimed they had been struck by bombs while in their mud houses.

Two days earlier, the New York Times had run a dispatch (in a not-too prominent spot) from Tim Weiner, reporting that, according to witnesses and local officials, U.S. bombers flying over this area of Tora Bora had struck three villages, killing dozens of civilians. Weiner quoted the local law and order minister and the region’s defense minister, who each maintained such attacks had occurred. Survivors interviewed by Weiner spoke of horrific devastation in these areas.

“The village is no more,” said a man named Khalil. “All my family, 12 people, were killed. I am the only one left in this family. I have lost my children, my wife. They are no more.” Another survivor said she had lost 38 relatives; another estimated up to 200 were dead.

The Pentagon denied everything. Weiner quoted Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, chief spokesman for the Central Command, asserting that American bombers had hit their targets 20 miles away from these villages: “If we had hit a village causing widespread death that was unintended, we would have said so. We have been meticulous reporting whenever we have killed a single person.” (Interest declared: Weiner is a friend. He can be trusted to suss out a difficult situation.)

The day after Weiner’s account appeared, at the Pentagon briefing, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem was questioned about the reports of civilian deaths around Tora Bora. He replied, “I have seen the press reports about alleged civilian casualties, and I would just ask us all to remember that this was orchestrated by the Taliban, and therefore it’s not clear to us in fact were there innocent civilians who in fact may have been injured.” (Note the double “in fact.”)

The Dickensian-named admiral added, “We know for a fact that these were legitimate military targets in that area that were struck. We know that there was terrific traditional, consistent planning to ensure that only these targets were struck. We know there were no off-target hits, so there were no collateral damage worries in this series of strikes. And therefore I can’t comment on the civilian casualties because I don’t know them to be true.”

A few moments later, he added, “I find it a little bit suspect to hear that villages are being flattened.”

Yet Richard Lloyd Parry, a reporter for the London-based Independent, visited the area and found homes replaced by craters, a cemetery containing 40 freshly dug graves (some, he was told, contained only body parts), and a fragment bearing the words “Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM 114.”

Truth is often difficult to ascertain in war. But it is clear that Stufflebeem and Rumsfeld were not speaking truthfully. The reports of these casualties were not “orchestrated by the Taliban.” In fact, as the admiral might say, the information was coming from officials of a government that replaced the Taliban.

What, then, to make of Noor Muhammad and his tale? And the others who tell of hearing airplanes and being bombed in their homes?

If Rumsfeld and Stufflebeem are to be believed, it must be that Noor and the rest were all participating in an elaborate and sophisticated propaganda campaign that entailed faking craters, persuading anti-Taliban officials who are working with American forces to lie to benefit the Taliban, enlisting dozens of persons with God-awful injuries for the con, and encouraging children to tell false stories about how they came to be harmed.

The reports filed by Weiner, Glasser, and Parry demonstrate that Rumsfeld was engaging in champion dissembling when he maintained the Pentagon cannot possibly keep track of civilian casualties in wild and wooly Afghanistan.

The U.S. military may not be able to discern figures with the same precision it claims for its bombing. Yet in many instances it can determine if civilian casualties have happened by doing what Weiner and the other reporters did: asking people on the ground.

Instead, in this latest episode, the Pentagon rushed out a denial that does not hold and then further insulted local Afghan officials and survivors by dismissing their reports as Taliban disinformation–and waited for that news cycle to whiz by.

I would like to watch Rumsfeld and Stufflebeem tell the eyeless and armless Noor Muhammad he’s lying.

It is not, as Rumsfeld asserted, “impossible to get factual information about civilian casualties.” His military just hasn’t bothered. It could start by sending someone to interview Noor and his fellow survivors.

David Corn is the Washington editor of The Nation.

From the December 13-19, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Lesson Plan

Military recruiters go to school

By Tara Treasurefield

“Recruiters are basically bounty hunters,” says Shepherd Bliss, a Vietnam veteran and Sonoma County environmental activist. “They don’t warn young people about two big consequences of going into the military: chemical exposure and post traumatic stress.”

Bliss strongly objects to amendments to the pending federal education bill that will guarantee military recruiters access to all high schools in the nation and to all student directory information.

According to the U.S. Senate, as many as one in four high schools in the country now withhold student information from the military or bar military recruiters from campus. But that won’t be possible when the law changes. Since the education bill has already passed both houses of Congress and is in joint conference committee, the new rules will probably be approved by the end of the year.

“Giving military recruiters such access transforms the schools into breeding places for soldiers, rather than places for education about democracy, which is what they should be,” Bliss says.

But North Bay school administrators generally see military service as a viable career option. Scott Lane, principal of Laguna High in Sebastopol, says Laguna encourages recruiters to talk to interested students during non-class time, but doesn’t allow them to speak to classes, make formal presentations to the full student body, or initiate contact with students. Student information is confidential, unless parents ask the school to release it.

When the law changes, Laguna will release records for all students. “I’m interested in protecting privacy rights,” Lane says. “I hope the addresses are used to send information, and not to solicit or bother.”

Carl Wong is Superintendent of the Petaluma Joint Union High School District, where military recruiters visit campus career centers and participate in Career Day. Like schools in the West County, Petaluma treats student contact information as confidential. When the law changes, Wong says the district will assess its options. “We will refer to our legal counsel to render an advisory, and adopt board policy accordingly,” he explains.

Tamalpais High School District in Marin will also seek counsel. Chris Anderson, Assistant Superintendent of the Tamalpais district, says, “Sometimes these things get passed and there’s a conflict between different laws.”

Sonoma High School already provides military recruiters with a master list of student contact information. “If a parent objects, we remove their child’s name from the list,” says principal Bob Kruljac. Sonoma High will disregard parental objections when the law changes.

With a visitor’s pass at San Marin High, military recruiters can walk around campus and approach students during lunch. But San Marin doesn’t release student contact information, according to Principal Greg Duffy. “The parent community wants their privacy protected,” Duffy says. San Marin policy will change when the law changes.

Is there a place for peace advocates, as well as military recruiters, at the nation’s schools? Absolutely, says Gulf War veteran James Madison, founder of Veterans Teaching Peace in Schools. “For all the trampling of our civil rights that is going on right now, I still have a basic faith in America’s ability to adhere to the Constitution.” Madison says that VTPS presentations are well received by students.

North Bay schools are likely to welcome VTPS and similar groups. Doria Trombetta, co-principal of El Molino High in Forestville, says, “During the Gulf War, we had speakers from all sides at lunch.”

The Tamalpais district also allows campuses to be used as open forums, and teachers in the Tamalpais district and at San Marin High and other schools invite speakers to air controversial issues in class.

Trombetta is particularly sensitive to the value of respecting differing views. Her husband belongs to Veterans for Peace, and her son is at West Point. “I never want to see a generation demonized the way Vietnam veterans were,” Trombetta says. “Nor do I want to feel that there is necessarily one right decision for all students.

“I want students to see a wide range of opinions and come to their own decisions about what’s right and wrong.”

From the December 6-12, 2001 issue of the Northern California Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.