US raiders hid killings, says Afghan official
By Gareth Porter
WASHINGTON - The head of the Afghan Ministry of Interior investigation said
publicly for the first time that his investigators had accepted the testimony
of family members of the victims of the February 12 raid by United States
Special Operations Forces (SOF) that the US troops had dug bullets out of the
bodies of their victims in an apparent effort to cover up the killings and that
General Stanley McChrystal had agreed with the team's conclusions.
Mirza Mohammad Yarmand, head of the criminal investigation department in the
ministry, told Inter Press Service (IPS) in an interview this week that the
ministry's investigation had found
"evidence of tampering at the scene by the patrol members", which had
"confused" North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) investigators about the
incident.
"We accepted the claim of the family members [of victims] that NATO soldiers
had dug the bullets out of the bodies," said Yarmand, "but we could not confirm
it, because we were not able to do an autopsy on the bodies". The family
members, like most Afghans, had not allowed the autopsies on the victims, he
explained.
Yarmand said, "In the end, NATO accepted our findings, and General McChrystal
agreed with the conclusions of our team."
Yarmand's comments represented the first accusation on the record by an Afghan
official involved in the investigation that US SOF personnel had tried to cover
up the evidence of the killings of three women. An unnamed senior Afghan
official had been quoted as making similar comments in a story by Jerome
Starkey of The Times of London April 4.
McChrystal, commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF),
has portrayed the Afghan investigation as having concluded that the joint force
carrying out the raid was responsible for the deaths of all five civilians but
not that it had sought to cover up the killings.
In a statement issued on April 4, the ISAF said, "While investigators could not
conclusively determine how or when the women died, due to lack of forensic
evidence, they concluded that the women were accidentally killed as a result of
the joint force firing at the men."
The statement makes no explicit mention of the issue of a cover-up, but it
implicitly denies Starkey's report that same day quoting a "senior Afghan
official" involved in the investigation as saying that US Special Forces had
dug bullets out of the wounds of the victims and then washed the wounds with
alcohol.
McChrystal's spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale told IPS on Monday,
"I can tell you unequivocally that there was no evidence of a cover-up."
After appearing to be in agreement with the Afghan investigation's conclusions,
however, McChrystal abruptly reversed course on Tuesday to announce another
investigation aimed at straightening out what were now described as conflicting
accounts of what happened.
Breasseale told IPS in an e-mail on Tuesday that McChrystal had "ordered the
subsequent investigation in order to reconcile certain aspects between the two
investigations".
One indication that the decision to begin another investigation was made
hastily is that McChrystal made the announcement before deciding who would
carry it out. Breasseale acknowledged in the e-mail to IPS that "the
investigating authority is yet to be appointed", adding, "We anticipate the
appointment happening soon."
Whether McChrystal sees the new investigation as a way of accepting the
conclusion that SOF personnel tried to hide the evidence of the killing of the
three women or as a way of distancing ISAF from the Afghan investigation's
conclusion remains unclear.
McChrystal has been a strong proponent of SOF night raids as a military tactic
since taking over as ISAF commander in June 2009.
He now seems intent, however, on differentiating the conclusions reached by
NATO from those of the Afghan investigation. What had been called a "thorough
joint investigation" of the bloody killings in the April 4 release is now being
identified as two very separate and even conflicting investigations.
Breasseale told IPS in an e-mail on Tuesday that ISAF and the Ministry of
Interior "had conducted a joint fact finding assessment of the situation, but
produced separate investigation reports".
There was nothing in the April 4 statement suggesting any need for further
investigation.
McChrystal had been briefed by Afghan officials on their investigation in "late
March", according to spokesman Breasseale, as reported by CNN on Tuesday.
Despite the knowledge of that investigation's conclusion which contradicted the
public posture of ISAF on the deaths of all five of the victims of the raid,
however, McChrystal had made no move to reveal anything about the investigation
until Sunday night.
Even as the new investigation was being announced, McChrystal's spokesman
Breasseale was continuing to defend the official claim that no evidence of a
cover-up has emerged.
In an e-mail response to a question from IPS about how it was possible that the
US SOF personnel had killed the women but believed they had been killed before
the raid, Breasseale suggested that the joint force had not discovered the
bodies for some extended period of time after beginning their search of the
compound.
"Your question assumes that the ground force went directly into the room where
the women were," he wrote. "I can tell you that there were other members of the
extended friends and family of the owners of the compound present as well as
various other rooms and buildings in the compound."
Family members have told reporters a very different story, however. A male
relative of the victims of the raid who watched them bleed to death told CNN in
an interview published on Tuesday that the attacking force "did not allow him
to take the wounded to the hospital".
A similar account was given by family members to a United Nations investigating
team, as reported by Starkey in the Times on March 16. The family members said
the police commissioner and the 18-year old girl who were killed died hours
later and might have survived had they been taken to a hospital immediately.
US and Afghan forces refused to get them to a hospital immediately, according
to their account.
An earlier story by Starkey in The Times on March 13 reported the testimony of
family members of the victims who witnessed the raid, contradicting the
original ISAF claim that the bodies of three women had been found "tied up,
gagged and killed".
McChrystal's response to the earlier story had been to issue a denunciation of
Starkey's charge of a "cover-up" as "categorically false". The March 13 ISAF
statement explained that the initial account of the women's deaths, which had
come from the commander on the scene, had been "based on a lack of
understanding of local burial practices".
The April 4 statement repeated the explanation used in the March 13 statement,
signaling McChrystal's readiness to defend the raid against any cover-up
charge.
(Ahmad Walid Fazly reported from Kabul.)
Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing
in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book,
Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was
published in 2006.
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