The 9/11 Wars (105 page)

  
25
.
A good example was the extremely successful Afghan-government-run and World-Bank-funded National Solidarity Programme, which offered grants and loans to village committees for local infrastructure or training projects.

  
26
.
Author interview with Malalai Kakar, Kandahar, November 2003.

  
27
.
Author interview, Bagram, Afghanistan, May 2003.

  
28
.
These are figures for the Department of Defense Base Budget. If what are known as emergency supplementals are included they rise to $316 billion and $345 billion respectively. Figures provided by the Department of Defense, July 2009.

  
29
.
Dobbins,
After the Taliban
, p. 140

  
30
.
Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 142.

  
31
.
Ricks,
Fiasco
, p. 44.

  
32
.
Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 119. The figure for Northern Ireland includes both British troops (not technically international) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary. See James T. Quinlivan, ‘Burden of Victory: The Painful Arithmetic of Stability Operations’,
RAND Review
, vol. 27, no. 2 (summer 2003), pp. 28–9.

  
33
.
Bush,
Decision Points
, p. 207. Bob Woodward,
Bush at War
, Simon and Schuster, 2003, pp. 82–3. In fact, both had misread Afghan history and its present. The Soviets in fact had maintained a relatively light footprint, and it was their lack of an effective counter-insurgency strategy that had been the problem, not the number of their troops.

  
34
.
Dobbins,
After the Taliban
, p. 130. Feith says this was not the case but is less convincing.

  
35
.
Author interview with Ron Nash, British ambassador in Kabul, 2002–3, July 2009.

  
36
.
The warlords and their militias, despite being seen by most Afghans as the principal threat to their security, were often hired by US troops and especially the CIA as their local eyes, ears and often hands as well. They included individuals like Pacha Khan Zadran, who by the spring had taken to mortaring the town of Gardez after being dumped as a client by the Americans. In the important Helmand province, which has a population of over a million and was crucial both as a centre of the opium trade and as a fief of the Taliban, the only foreign soldiers were around sixty American special forces and a couple of hundred regulars who conducted nocturnal raids to pick up suspected ‘AQT’.

  
37
.
Jason Burke and Peter Beaumont, ‘West pays warlords to stay in line’,
Observer
, London, July 21, 2002. Jones,
In the Graveyard of Empires
, p. 130. Antonio Guistozzi,
Empires of Mud
, Hurst, 2009, pp. 89–91.

  
38
.
Worthington,
The Guantanamo Files
, pp. 19–25. Yusef al-Rabesh, author interview, Riyadh, June 2011.

  
39
.
According to an affidavit filed in a US court by his attorney, US soldiers ‘blindfolded Mr. Lindh, and took several pictures of Mr. Lindh and themselves with Mr. Lindh. In one, the soldiers scrawled “shithead” across Mr. Lindh’s blindfold and posed with him … Another told Mr. Lindh that he was “going to hang” for his actions and that after he was dead, the soldiers would sell the photographs and give the money to a Christian organization.’ Human Rights Watch,
The Road to Abu Ghraib
, June 2004, p. 20.

  
40
.
See David Rose, ‘See how MI5 colluded in my torture: Binyam Mohamed claims British agents fed Moroccan torturers their questions’,
Daily Mail
, March 8, 2009, for what was happening by spring 2002.

  
41
.
Ian Cobain, ‘The truth about torture’,
Guardian
, July 8, 2009. The British MI6 officers received legal advice that they were not obliged to intervene to prevent abuse.

  
42
.
Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, ‘U.S. decries abuse but defends interrogations’,
Washington Post
, December 26, 2002, Human Rights Watch,
The Road to Abu Ghraib
, p. 23. Freedman,
A Choice of Enemies
, p. 395. Bush signed the directive at a private meeting with Cheney apparently without even sitting down.

  
43
.
Douglas Jehl and Andrea Elliott, ‘Cuba base sent its interrogators to Iraqi prison’,
New York Times
, May 29, 2004.

  
44
.
These details come from Chris Mackey and Greg Miller,
The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War against al Qaeda
, Little, Brown and Company, 2004. Also Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed,
Composite Statement: Detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay
, Centre for Constitutional Rights, New York, July 26, 2004.

  
45
.
Worthington,
The Guantanamo Files
, pp. 81–99, 176.

  
46
.
With intelligence operatives and guards all searching to ‘improve’ their methods to meet the huge demands for information, there was an inevitable logic of escalation.

  
47
.
Stephen Grey,
Ghost Plane
, Hurst, 2006, pp. 250–56.

  
48
.
‘New’ in recent times. Waterboarding had been used in the Second World War by Japanese soldiers.

  
49
.
See Jane Mayer,
The Dark Side
, Doubleday, 2008. David Rose, ‘Tortured reasoning’,
Vanity Fair
, December 16, 2008. Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, ‘Interrogation memos detail harsh tactics by the C.I.A.’,
New York Times
, April 21, 2009. Scott Shane, ‘2 suspects waterboarded 266 times’,
New York Times
, April 19, 2009. In May 2008, Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice inspector general, reported that, as he recovered in the hospital from the bullet wounds sustained when he was captured, Abu Zubaydah had cooperated with two FBI agents but was then handed over to the CIA, who, according to Fine, felt they ‘needed to diminish his capacity to resist’. Bush discussed Abu Zubaydah’s treatment in 2006, saying: ‘As his questioning proceeded, it became clear that he had received training on how to resist interrogation. And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures … The procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.’ Even before it had been declared legal in a secret finding by Justice Department lawyers in August, it appears probable that Abu Zubaydah was already being subjected to the practice of waterboarding. The newly hired consultants proved highly inventive. At one point they asked for permission to play on Abu Zubaydah’s phobia of stinging insects by introducing a harmless bug into his cell and telling him it was dangerous. Their request provoked extraordinary legal contortions as the CIA tried to get permission from lawyers at the Ministry of Justice, who eventually decided that, though Abu Zubaydah’s interrogators could not tell the suspect that the insect was venomous because it was illegal to threaten prisoners with imminent death, they could place Abu Zubaydah in a ‘confinement box’ with a harmless insect if he was told nothing about it. The CIA proposed using a caterpillar. In the end, the plan was abandoned. Mike Isikoff and Evan Thomas, ‘The lawyer and the caterpillar’,
Newsweek
, April 18, 2009.

  
50
.
Author interview with Haji Ghalib, former police chief of Khogani and Guantanamo detainee, Kabul, August 2008.

  
51
.
Worthington,
The Guantanamo Files
, pp. 174, 188–9.

  
52
.
Author telephone interview with Omar Deghayes, April 2010.

  
53
.
Amnesty International,
Secret Detention in CIA
‘Black Sites’
, November 8, 2005. See also Stephen Grey’s very useful
Ghost Plane
. Jason Burke, ‘Secret world of US jails’,
Observer
, June 13, 2004. Stephen Grey, ‘United States: Trade in torture’,
Le Monde Diplomatique
, April 2005. Dana Priest, ‘CIA holds terror suspects in secret prisons’,
Washington Post
, November 2, 2005.

  
54
.
‘Ex-CIA contractor guilty of assault’, Associated Press, August 16, 2006. ‘Two soldiers reprimanded for assaults’,
Los Angeles Times
, January 27, 2007.

  
55
.
Author interview, London, July 2009. British intelligence officials also visited these facilities, though their superiors claim they did not take part in any mistreatment of suspects. ‘We just couldn’t imagine that the Americans would be doing this,’ said one. ‘We simply had no idea it was going on,’ Sir John Scarlett, deputy head of MI6 at the time, later claimed. However, a series of legal cases in the UK – such as that of Binyam Mohammed – showed that MI6’s sister service MI5 had been at the very least complicit in some abuse. One charge was that the service supplied information with the express aim of helping questioners get more out of suspects who were held in atrocious conditions and often seriously tortured. Nor evidently was MI6 likely to refuse information that it felt was tainted by torture, as Scarlett explained to the author in July 2009, arguing that to do so would be dangerous and counterproductive.

  
56
.
Author interview with Haji Rohullah, Kabul, August 2009.

  
57
.
Haji Shahzada, Guantanamo Bay, Summary of Evidence, January 12, 2005. See Worthington,
The Guantanamo Files
, p. 250.

CHAPTER 5: THE WAR IN IRAQ I: THREATS, FALSEHOODS AND DEAD MEN

    
1
.
Estimates of the Iraqi dead range from 160,000 to 250,000.

    
2
.
See the controversial but useful UNICEF Report,
Situation Analysis of Children and Women in Iraq
, April 30, 1998. Also Jason Burke,
The Road to Kandahar
, Penguin, 2006, Chapter 4, for the author’s reporting of the humanitarian situation in Iraq in the late 1990s.

    
3
.
There remained a small number of Shia at senior levels in the Ba’ath Party.

    
4
.
See the excellent International Crisis Group report,
Iraq Backgrounder: What Lies Beneath
, October 1, 2002 for a useful exploration of some of these themes.

    
5
.
Powell went into great detail, speaking of the efforts to acquire centrifuges, the 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons agent, the mobile launchers. United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq Where Substantiated by
US
Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information
, June 2008, pp. 3, 17, 25, 30.

    
6
.
David Kay, testimony before the US Committee on Armed Services, January 28, 2004.
Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq’s WMD, Charles Duelfer
, September 30, 2004. Freedman,
A Choice of Enemies
, p. 424. These statements were examined and subsequently corroborated by the Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, presented March 31, 2005.