Cloak of secrecy hides abuse in Afghanistan

Part one of a two-part series

GARDEZ, Afghanistan — After completing their deployment to this remote firebase, the Green Berets of ODA 2021 left for home covered in glory.

The 10-member Special Forces team, part of the Alabama National Guard, returned to their families in the spring of 2003 with tales of frenzied firefights and narrow escapes.

But the team also had come home with secrets.

Apparently unknown to Army officials, two detainees had died in the team's custody in separate incidents during the unit's final month in eastern Afghanistan. Several other detainees allege that they were badly beaten or tortured while held at the base in Gardez.

One victim, an unarmed peasant, was shot to death while being held for questioning after a fierce firefight. The other, an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit, died after being interrogated at the firebase. Descriptions of his injuries were consistent with severe beatings and other abuse.

A member of the Special Forces team told the Los Angeles Times his unit held a meeting after the teen's death to coordinate their stories should an investigation arise.

What distinguishes these two fatalities from scores of other questionable deaths in U.S. custody is that they were concealed — not only from the American public but from the military's chain of command and legal authorities.

The deaths came to light only after an investigation by the Los Angeles Times and a nonprofit educational organization, the Crimes of War Project, led the Army to open criminal inquiries. Two years later, the cases remain under investigation and no charges have been filed.

The Los Angeles Times has since reviewed thousands of pages of internal military records showing that prisoner abuse by Special Forces units was more common in Afghanistan than previously acknowledged.

More than a year before the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal broke in Iraq, top officers worried that harsh treatment and excessive detentions could lead to criminal prosecutions.

Early warnings

In one November 2002 correspondence, a high-ranking Special Operations official said military police were detecting "an extremely high level of physical abuse" of detainees transferred from Special Forces field bases to a prison in Bagram.

There also were early warnings from outside sources. In a series of meetings that began in late 2002, officials with the International Committee of the Red Cross told top U.S. commanders in Afghanistan that they had fielded a rash of detainee-abuse reports involving at least five Special Forces firebases, according to previously undisclosed military documents.

The Red Cross representatives protested that the bases had, in effect, become short-term detention centers, without adequately trained personnel or effective monitoring, said several U.S. officials with knowledge of the meetings.

Most bases singled out by the agency were under the control of National Guardsmen with the Alabama-based 20th Special Forces Group. The compound at Gardez, then occupied by ODA 2021, was portrayed as one of the worst. Detainees there alleged they were beaten, kicked, doused with cold water and deprived of sleep for days at a time.

The Army declined to comment on the cases involving ODA 2021 or more generally on allegations of detainee abuse.

Special Forces firebases in Afghanistan — often the first stop in a detainee's journey to a holding facility and possibly on to the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — operated largely beyond the reach of human-rights monitors, journalists and, at times, the military chain of command.

The handling of detainees in Afghanistan became a murky area after President Bush declared early in the war, launched in October 2001, that the Geneva Conventions would not be applied to al-Qaida, and Taliban captives would not be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, detainees were to be treated "humanely," according to a February 2002 White House directive.

"You have so much freedom and authority over there," one member of ODA 2021 said. "It kind of makes you feel like God when you're out there in cowboy and Indian country."

The shooting war was supposedly over when about 300 National Guardsmen of the 20th Group's 1st Battalion arrived in Afghanistan nine months after the U.S.-led coalition forces' ouster of the Taliban regime in December 2001. Nonetheless, it was a dangerous and chaotic time.

Al-Qaida and the Taliban were in flight but not vanquished. It would fall to Special Forces teams such as ODA 2021 to root out al-Qaida and Taliban stragglers and unearth caches of weapons. In Paktia, the province that includes Gardez, the task was complicated by Byzantine local politics.

Controlling trade routes

Tribal warlords and bandits had skirmished for centuries over the inhospitable terrain along the porous border with Pakistan. They had only been emboldened by the power vacuums and shifting alliances created after the U.S.-led invasion.

As in centuries past, power and wealth in the region flowed to those who controlled the trade routes. In 2002, that meant controlling 17 longtime checkpoints along about 50 miles of dusty mountain road between the provincial capitals of Khost and Gardez. For the Americans, securing the checkpoints would help them detect militants' movements and ensure the free passage of troops and supplies. For the warlords, who regularly were accused of extorting cash or produce from truck drivers, the checkpoints afforded a means to pay and feed their militias.

In Gardez, the dusty provincial capital, the ODA settled into an adobe fort the size of a football field. The fortress came under regular attack, most often by Taliban loyalists lobbing missiles from a pair of nearby hilltops. From their earliest days in Gardez, the members of ODA 2021 bristled at being kept on a short leash. They were particularly eager to mount an offensive against their primary nemesis, a renegade warlord named Pacha Khan Zadran.

As the leader of the Zadran tribe, Pacha Khan commanded 300 to 600 armed men and, with U.S. backing, had helped fight the Taliban. He also controlled various checkpoints along the Khost road.

Brutish, mercurial

CIA and Special Forces operatives who dealt with Pacha Khan (or PKZ, as they called him), described him as brutish, mercurial and unstable. But Pacha Khan's stature grew when he became one of the signatories to the December 2001 Bonn agreement that formed the transitional Afghan government. President Hamid Karzai rewarded his support by naming him governor of Paktia, then rescinded the decision after Afghan military commanders in Gardez refused to cede power to the warlord.

Pacha Khan responded by furiously bombarding Gardez in the spring of 2002. U.S. forces were caught in the middle of the rocket attacks and the policy confusion over how to deal with the warlord.

CIA operatives and Special Forces tacticians hatched a number of plans to capture and imprison him, but senior officials in Washington, D.C., always resisted. The warlord was considered "a pseudo political figure" — untouchable unless they could tie him to the Taliban or al-Qaida, according to an official of the Special Operations task force. If they could, he wrote, "the ballgame changes completely."

Five days after the 1st Battalion commander, Lt. Col. Steven Duff, was shot in the leg when his convoy was ambushed during a Thanksgiving visit, a commando task force made an unexpected visit to the Gardez firebase in pursuit of a top-tier target believed to be in the area.

The complex mission called for ODA 2021 to join the operation, but no one had bothered to inform the team. The team's commander, Capt. Michael May, refused to go along because of inadequate planning, according to several 20th Group officials and documents reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

May's refusal infuriated the Delta Force officer in charge of the commando task force, the officials said. Duff later reassigned May to the battalion's operations center in neighboring Uzbekistan.

May's removal heartened those on the team who wanted to conduct more "posse operations" in the manner of the Army's Delta Force and the Navy's SEALs.

Too hungry for a fight

More than 100 miles to the northwest, in Bamian, another Green Beret team was having leadership problems. For many people in ODA 2015, Chief Warrant Officer Kenneth Waller, their team commander, was too hungry for a fight and had a habit of planning risky missions without their input.

Late in November 2002, Waller's team discovered a large cache of weapons in the nearby Kahmard Valley. They linked it to a warlord suspected of supporting al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.

Waller carried the news directly to the task-force commander, Col. James "Greg" Champion, bypassing his 1st Battalion superiors. He argued for a full assault on the area, peppering his entreaties with reminders of Sept. 11 and imploring commanders to "think war." His end runs, and his flamboyant prose, incensed Waller's superiors at headquarters. The operation was scrubbed, redesigned and its planning assigned to a different team.

A sizable contingent of the 2015 team also let battalion leaders know they preferred not to serve under Waller, several members said. It was an almost unthinkable act of mutiny.

Duff relieved Waller of his command in Bamian and ordered him to Gardez as May's replacement. His aides cautioned that Waller would be even less controllable in Gardez and that inserting him into the conflict with Pacha Khan might make things combustible.

Back in Gardez, ODA 2021 was between commanders on the night of Feb. 6, 2003, when the team set out to the nearby village of Neknam to seize two men suspected of having ties to the Taliban.

The first was taken without incident. But before team members could grab the second, they came under intense fire that left two soldiers pinned against a wall. The team responded with small arms and hand grenades.

Because the leaderless team had failed to file proper operational plans, headquarters had no idea who was in command on the ground. Both suspects finally were captured, but the team almost immediately was blistered with high-level criticism. Champion confined the team to its base. But the missteps continued. Two days after the raid, the team in Gardez transferred two detainees to the Bagram Collection Point, a U.S. holding facility. The detainees arrived "bagged," their mouths taped and hoods secured around their necks, according to military documents.

"As you well know," Maj. Jeff Pounding, a Special Operations task-force official, wrote to battalion officials, "this is a significant violation of the PUC [person under U.S. control] handling procedures. Bagram detention facility may be doing an investigation."

Only detainees found to meet Pentagon criteria for prolonged imprisonment, such as those with clear ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban, were to be transferred to Bagram. But given the constant threat of ambush, soldiers' instinct often was to detain first and ask questions later. The Pentagon criteria provided plenty of latitude, allowing the detention of any suspects "who pose a threat" or "who may have intelligence value."

There was supposed to be a 96-hour limit on battlefield detentions. Prisoner transfers to Bagram sometimes were delayed because helicopters weren't available. But at other times, one 20th Group official said, Special Forces teams extended their prisoners' stays in hopes of extracting better intelligence.

U.S. State Department officials in Afghanistan said the teams seemed not to care that their door-kicking roundups and prolonged detentions might stoke local resentment even as the Army was trying to build bridges.

By the end of 2002, the Red Cross had relayed early complaints of prisoner mistreatment to top U.S. military officials in Afghanistan. On Jan. 10, 2003, officials of the organization met with the staff of Lt. Gen. Dan McNeill, commander of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, describing the 20th Group's firebases as some of the worst offenders.

Despite the Red Cross allegations, the 1st Battalion's chief intelligence officer reported back that there were no problems. "I have not witnessed any abuse or maltreatment of PUCs," Capt. Steven Perry wrote. "When they detain a person, I have faith that it is for a very good reason."

On Jan. 24, 2003, McNeill's command reported on its interrogation techniques in a memo to the Pentagon. The list conformed to the Army field manual's approved battlefield methods, but the memo also requested approval of "more aggressive, creative and flexible techniques."

The wish list included food deprivation for as long as 24 hours, sensory overload through loud music and extreme temperature changes, and the use of muzzled dogs to create "controlled fear." Some of the requested procedures might need to be assessed for compliance with Pentagon rules for humane treatment, the memo acknowledged.

Coercive techniques

According to the Red Cross, however, many of the more coercive techniques already were being used at some firebases.

ODA 2021's new commander took charge in Gardez on Feb. 7 as recriminations were still flying from the "time-sensitive PUC operation" in Neknam. For a team chafing at the second-guessing of its missions, Ken Waller's arrival was a welcome relief.

"He wanted to be aggressive," one team member said. "We knew he had problems with his other team, but he fit right in with us."

In mid-February, 12 days after he had taken command, Waller and his team were returning from patrol in a five-vehicle convoy along a road blanketed with 5 inches of snow. Staff Sgt. Mark "Marco" Deliz, a team engineer from Oneonta, Ala., tried to steer precisely through the tread marks carved by the two vehicles ahead. But his front right tire strayed a few inches and hit a land mine.

With blood streaming down his face, Deliz stumbled out the driver's door, brushing the remains of a foot from his lap. It belonged to his teammate and passenger, Scott Barkalow, the 40-year-old intelligence sergeant from Burns, Tenn.

The attack had a profoundly sobering effect on the team. Before the explosion, members had been frustrated by political constraints on their activities. They now shared Barkalow's loss — and some nursed an abiding grudge.

"You get mad when you see your buddies blown up," one team member said. "You stay pissed off about it."