US ground forces involved in Afghan firefight

An Afghan girl, wounded in an Oct. 21 US bombing,
lies in a Kabul hospital bed.

Compiled by Sean Marquis

Oct. 24— US special forces have attacked Taliban positions in a nighttime assault, while US airstrikes continued to cause civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

More than 100 US commandos and light infantry Rangers fought with Taliban forces near the regime’s stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, and a military airport 60 miles to the southeast. The US claims some 20 Taliban soldiers were killed, while the Taliban claimed to have killed 20-25 US soldiers in the pre-dawn raid.

The US troops entered and exited Afghanistan via helicopter and returned to the Pakistani airstrip of Dalbandin, 37 miles from the Afghan border, after several hours of fighting.

Two American military personnel were killed and five others were injured when a Black Hawk helicopter involved in support operations in Pakistan crashed at an airbase. The Taliban claimed responsibility, but the US dismissed the assertion.

Two Rangers were hurt parachuting onto the Taliban airfield during the assault.

“These soldiers will not have died in vain,” President George W. Bush said of the attack. “This is a just cause.”

The raids signaled a new phase of the US-led coalition’s war on terrorism, after 13 days of strikes from the air alone. Military sources in America and Britain said the ‘hit and run’ raids would be the first of many and that British troops were now on standby to support further incursions.

The Taliban remained defiant, saying that they had successfully repulsed the US raid and that they might as well give up their Muslim faith as give up the world’s most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.

Two US helicopters came under fire in Pakistan as their crews attempted to retrieve the wreckage of the helicopter that had crashed during the weekend raid, the Pentagon said Tuesday. The retrieval crews returned fire and left the area in Monday’s incident, leaving behind the Black Hawk helicopter it was trying to pick up, said Lt. Col. George Rhynedance, a Pentagon spokesman.

Rhynedance declined to say where Monday’s shooting incident occurred but said it was brief “and what we are considering harassing fire.” He said the United States was asking through diplomatic channels that Pakistan look into it.

In order to de-stabilize Taliban troops, the Pentagon said US propaganda broadcasts began last weekend from a flying radio station, a specially outfitted EC-130, known as “Commando Solo.”

One radio script says, in part: “Our forces are armed with state of the art military equipment. Our bombs are so accurate we can drop them right through your windows. United States soldiers fire with superior marksmanship and are armed with superior weapons.”

Civilians on the ground have a different view of the accuracy of US bombs and marksmanship.

Civilians

Afghan refugees fleeing US air raids said Saturday that US strikes destroyed shopping bazaars in the heart of the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, killing and injuring civilians and spearing people with shards of shrapnel.

“The bazaar around the Keptan intersection in the city center was flattened. My neighbor’s house was destroyed,” said Mohammed Ghaus. There were civilian casualties, he said, but he did not know how many.

Abdul Wadood, 30, said the shopping area in Kandahar’s central Madad district was badly damaged when it was struck by bombs Friday, the Muslim day of prayer.

“My two sons, aged 13 and 15…were both hit in the legs, thighs and arms by metal splinters,” he said.

Wadood and Ghaus said the attacking aircraft appeared to be targeting government offices in the city center, but civilian homes and shops had been hit.

Kandahar has been without power or water for five days as a result of the US bombing. Kabul was also again without power on Thursday. The capital spent most of Tuesday without electricity after the bombing damaged its main power station on Monday.

On Tuesday, the United Nations (UN) confirmed the US was bombing residential areas in Kabul but accused the Taliban militia of being partly to blame because it was hiding troops among those civilian districts.

The UN also revealed US air strikes had destroyed a military hospital in the western city of Herat.

“Several bombs have hit residential areas in Khair Khana,” UN spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker told a press conference in Islamabad. “In addition a residential area called Macroyan has been hit.”

Civilian deaths in both Khair Khana and Macroyan had already been independently confirmed by local people.

At least 10 people, nine of them from the same family, died when a stray bomb struck a neighborhood of Khair Khana on Sunday. Victims in Macroyan have included a seven-year-old girl.

The Taliban claims more than 1,000 civilians have been killed around the country during the air assault.

Offices for CNN and the Arabic-language TV network, Al Jazeera, were bombed Thursday night in Kandahar.

Employees had taken cover outside because of the heavy bombing and were not injured, but the building sustained major damage.

Refugees

Some 100,000 children are likely to die in Afghanistan in the coming winter due to diarrhea, pneumonia and other diseases, according to UNICEF.

There are reports that in the aftermath of the air strikes against Afghanistan, unprecedented levels of child recruitment and mobilization into the ranks of the Afghan militia and the opposition Northern Alliance has been going on unhindered.

UN sources in Pakistan said the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Afghanistan has been in part, caused by the relentless bombing campaign.

Clare Short, Britain’s International Development Secretary, said last week that there was no ‘cause and effect’ between the bombing and the ability of aid agencies to deliver much-needed food and shelter.

Dominic Nutt, a spokesman for the British charity Christian Aid, called Short’s remarks sickening. “Needy people are being put at risk by government spin-doctors who are showing a callous disregard for life,” he said. “To say that there is no link is not just misleading but profoundly dangerous.” Christian Aid reported that 600 people have already died in the Dar-e-Suf region of northern Afghanistan due to starvation, malnutrition, and related diseases.

Michael Huggins, a spokesman for the World Food Program, said the agency’s operation was hampered by a lack of truck drivers willing to carry food through Afghanistan because of the bombing raids, high fuel prices and communication difficulties.

Pentagon buys satellite photos

After media reports of heavy civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the Pentagon is now keeping images from Ikonos, a commercial satellite launched in 1999, out of the hands of the media. With Ikonos imagery, it would be possible to show bodies lying on the ground after last week’s bombing attacks.

Under US law, the Defense Department has legal power to exercise “shutter control” over civilian satellites launched from the US in order to prevent enemies using the images while America is at war. But no order for shutter control has yet been given.

Instead, the Pentagon bought exclusive rights to all Ikonos satellite pictures of Afghanistan from Space Imaging, the company which runs the satellite. The agreement was made retroactive to the start of the bombing raids.

The US military does not need the pictures for its own purposes because it already has seven imaging satellites in orbit, able to take photographic images estimated to be six to 10 times better than Ikonos.

Since images of the bombed Afghan bases would not have shown the position of US forces or compromised US military security, a “shutter control” ban could have been challenged by news media as being a breach of the First Amendment.

Warnings of a ‘blood bath’

Russian veterans of the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan during the 1980s have warned of a “blood bath” if the United States sends in ground forces.

Alexei Zelenyov, a former pilot who fought in Afghanistan, said, “The US special forces will be up against people who have been fighting for 20 years and who have grown up as warriors. When we went into Afghanistan, it took us a year to learn how to fight.”

“The longer the Americans stay in Afghanistan, the stronger local resistance will be, to the point of the Northern Alliance joining forces with the Taliban to repel the ‘invaders’,” said Franz Klintsevich, another Russian Army veteran.

Some Pakistanis agreed with the Russians’ assessment.

Syed Zaheer Ali, who operates the Quetta Chamber of Commerce, said: “If this ends up as a world war, Americans will see things they cannot imagine,” he said. “Vietnam will seem like a picnic in comparison.”

Just outside of Quetta, four young women who run a UN development project said they were prepared to go to Afghanistan to help the war effort.

“What America is doing is totally wrong,” said Ayesha Shah, 22. Her 28-year-old friend, Amna Khan, added: “Who is America to change governments? What about its terror in Vietnam and Iraq?”

Sources: Associated Press, IPS, CNN, Guardian Observer (UK), Agence France Presse

IMF, World Bank move meetings

By Emad Mekay

Washington, DC, Oct. 18 (IPS)— The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meetings, put on hold after last month’s terrorist attacks, are to be held in Ottawa, the Canadian capital, Nov. 17-18.

The meetings originally were scheduled for Washington Sep. 29-30 but were put off in the aftermath of Sep. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, which stands across the Potomac River from downtown Washington.

Activist groups had targeted the meetings for demonstrations but also called off most of their plans following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, symbols of economic globalization and US military power. Some of these groups are now reorganizing for the new talks.

Activists’ demands, enumerated in advance of the aborted DC meetings, have included a stop to structural adjustment programs, debt cancellation for the world’s poorest countries, and a halt to financing for environmentally destructive infrastructure projects. They also have called on the Bank and IMF to open the meetings and allow public participation in decision-making processes.

Soren Ambrose, senior policy analyst with the US 50 Years Is Enough network of groups, says the groups would seek to avoid appearing insensitive to the tragic loss of lives on Sep. 11 and the ensuing concern for public security but that this would not prevent them from expressing views about the negative influence of Bank and IMF policies in developing nations.

“If the Bank and the Fund are being open about their work after September 11 and the violence that’s going on in Afghanistan, then we will be equally open about trying to stop them from causing further damage to poor nations,” said Ambrose.

Merrell Tuck, the World Bank’s deputy chief spokesperson, said the agencies have moved the talks to Ottawa because of security concerns and “out of deference” to the United States.

The agenda for the talks, which traditionally draw finance and planning ministers and central bank governors from the lending institutions’ shareholding nations, will include discussion of the global economic outlook in light of the “tragic events of September 11 and their impact, in particular, on the poorest,” the Bank said in a statement. Bank and IMF officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the meetings also will discuss terrorist funding and steps governments can take to cut off terror groups’ access to capital markets and banks.

Hunt for terrorists leads to assault on human rights

Compiled by Robert Brown

Oct. 24-- In the five weeks since September 11, US law enforcement agencies have detained more than 800 people in their investigation into the hijack-bombings, and more than 150 remain in custody. To date, none of these individuals have been publicly charged in connection with the terror attacks.

The widespread arrests began the day of the terrorist attacks, and the numbers mounted as agents tracked down people through logs of the hijackers’ cellphones, through interviews with their neighbors and through tips phoned in or sent to the FBI’s website. But none of those arrested have been accused of playing a supporting role in the hijackings. Most are being held on unrelated immigration violations, traffic violations or charges of falsifying documents, prompting complaints from civil rights advocates and immigration lawyers.

In the most wide-reaching dragnet in American history, hundreds have been rounded up for minor immigration violations, for having crossed paths with the suspected terrorists, or simply for being Middle-Eastern or Muslim. Some have been held for more than a month with no charges being filed; others have been detained at undisclosed locations, their whereabouts unknown to their families and legal counsel.

The government’s legal mechanism of choice in detaining these individuals has been the use of warrants to hold them as material witnesses.

Most material witnesses in the terrorism investigation are being held in federal prisons in New York, where a federal grand jury investigating the attack on the World Trade Center has been convened.

According to the Washington Post, an unknown number of men with Middle Eastern names are being held in solitary confinement on the ninth floor, locked in 8- by 10-foot cells with little more than cots, thin blankets and, if they request it, copies of the Koran. Every two hours, guards roust them to conduct a head count.

They have no contact with each other or their families and limited access to their lawyers. Their names appear on no federal jail log available to the public. No records can be found in any court docket in New York showing why they are detained, who represents them or the status of their cases.

The nearly absolute secrecy surrounding the detentions is a growing concern to civil libertarians and legal observers who fear basic rights are being violated as authorities pursue the terrorist conspiracy responsible for the attacks in New York and Washington.

“How many are being held? On what basis? What kind of judicial review is available? All of those seem to be important questions to answer,” said Steven R. Shapiro, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Randall B. Hamud, who represents two other material witnesses, and another lawyer who also represents a material witness said they have grown frustrated that their clients are kept incommunicado, denied exercise and provided limited opportunity to shower. Both lawyers maintain that their clients were not involved in the attack. He said, “the federal government was “arresting Arabs all over the country to make the public think they are doing something.”

The lawyers said that the prison is not providing their clients with a basic Muslim diet and that guards unnecessarily bang on steel cell doors every two hours to conduct head counts. One lawyer, who asked that his name not be used, said that the ninth floor wing is uncomfortably cold and that it took him a week to get the prisoner a long-sleeve T-shirt.

“He’s got nothing — no telephone calls, nothing to watch, nothing to read, nobody to talk to,” the attorney said.

Hamud, who agreed to discuss only matters involving his three clients that were public before their cases were sealed, said he also has been frustrated by his inability to obtain information about the cases usually available to defense lawyers.

He said his clients — Al-Salmi, Osama Awadallah and Mohdar Abdallah — were arrested because they were acquainted with three of the hijackers who were briefly associated with San Diego’s Islamic community.

The prisoners cannot use the telephone. On a typical visit to one of his clients, Hamud said, he is searched and locked inside a room, where the two speak through a wire screen. The prisoners are brought to the meeting in shackles, escorted by as many as six guards.

Hamud said that his clients repeatedly asked to contact him during their time in federal custody but that the requests were denied.

They “had asked time and again to call me and they were not allowed to do so,” Hamud said. “Law school doesn’t prepare you for this.”

According to an article in the Oct.21 edition of the Washington Post, federal officials are now considering the use of torture or “truth serum” to extract information from a number of suspects they believe are linked to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Authorities are also considering the possibility of extraditing suspects to allied countries where security forces use torture to obtain confessions or threaten their family members.

In fact, on Oct. 21 the New York Times quoted unnamed American officials as saying that they are increasingly dependent on new evidence from overseas.

Sources: Washington Post, New York Times, Newsday, Wall Street Journal, World Socialist Web Site.