Al-istiqamah: Filmmaker
Jamie Doran’s documentary Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death
provides numerous eye-witnesses who give credible accounts
that US Special Forces ordered that the prisoners who did
survive the container convoy despite a lack of air, water
and food be taken into the desert. US Special Forces subsequently
stood by and watched as survivors were shot by Afghan allied
soldiers and hastily buried. How far up the chain of command
do you believe that such tactics were authorised?
Andy Worthington: I’m not sure. Clearly something vile happened
between Kunduz, where thousands of Taliban soldiers surrendered
– and others, like the Tipton Three and other civilians, were
rounded up – and Sheberghan. Hundreds, or possibly thousands
of prisoners died in containers en route, primarily through
suffocation, but no inquiry has ever taken place to ascertain
how many people died, or how much truth, if any, there is
to claims made in Doran’s film that, as you put it, US forces
“stood by and watched as survivors were shot by Afghan allied
soldiers and hastily buried.” The mass graves are there; of
that there’s no doubt, but my feeling is that the Americans’
local commanders on the ground were shocked by the number
of corpses in the containers, and that, in a demonstration
of the callousness of war – and a desire to hide the evidence
as quickly as possible – they disposed of not only the dead,
but also some of those who were seriously wounded. I’m not
trying to justify this by any means, but I think it would
be foolish to pretend that horrendous actions don’t take place
in wartime. I don’t think that the decision to stand by –
or even to assist in killing the wounded, if that’s what happened
– was dictated at the highest levels of the administration.
If it happened, I suspect that it was a battlefield decision.
Al-istiqamah: You
present accounts of aid workers, religious students and teachers
captured by the Northern Alliance and subsequently sold to
the US. How many of these men were simply in the wrong place
at the wrong time?
Andy Worthington: It’s difficult to say
with absolute certainty because one of the most fundamental
problems with Guantánamo is the lack of due process:
a trial before an impartial judge, cases presented by the
prosecution and defence, a jury and a verdict. What happened
at Guantánamo, after the Supreme Court ruled in June
2004 – two and half years after the prison opened – that the
prisoners had habeas corpus rights (the right to challenge
the basis of their detention) was that, instead of being able
to pursue their cases in a US court, as the Supreme Court
clearly intended, they were subjected to the corrupt and largely
one-sided CSRT process.
In examining the tribunal transcripts, it’s
often difficult to establish clear story lines, especially
as many of the prisoners refused to take part, and therefore
were unable even to challenge the allegations and present
their own version of events. However, my detailed analysis
of the documents, and in particular the chronology I was able
to establish – who was captured where; in Afghanistan, crossing
into Pakistan, in Pakistan or, in rather fewer cases, in seventeen
other countries around the world – plus the information in
the several hundred transcripts of those who agreed to take
part in their CSRTs and ARBs, enabled me to come up with what,
I think, is the best estimate.
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