The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads | Hacker News Reader

The CIA’s Afghan Death Squads

theintercept.com

115 pointspimpampum52 comments

This happens in every American war. The perpetrators are often promoted and encouraged.

And the media often is involved in the “coverup”.

In Indonesia the CIA orchestrated rebels and then a coup that resulted in the killing of over 3 million locals. And mainstream American media were involved in the cover up.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Indonesia

https://www.workers.org/indonesia/chap2.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/th...

Other massacre examples that had coverups and denials:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_massacre

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mỹ_Lai_massacre

FWIW the gist of the opening chapter of Confessions of an Economic Hitman, set in Indonesia, was confirmed for me by an Indonesian diplomat.

> Wait! Before you go on about your day, ask yourself: How likely is it that the story you just read would have been produced by a different news outlet if The Intercept hadn’t done it?

Gotta say this article goes above and beyond to document what happens in these pointless permawars used to justify (U.S) military spending.

They just censored Greenwald so much he quit so .. funny that

Let’s put the validity of what Greenwald wanted to publish aside for a second. The relationship between an editor and a writer is always one of mutual cooperation and agreement. Not that the editor always must agree with what the author writes, but that there is mutual agreement over the standards of what is being published.

Greenwald and the intercept reached an irresolvable position regarding publishing standards, so they went their separate ways. Greenwald now publishes elsewhere.

You seem to be implying a publication exercising their editorial privilege is proof that they lack integrity. Maybe the intercept is in fact a corrupt publication, but that depends entirely on your judgement of their decision not to publish what Greenwald wanted to publish.

The USA does not promote peace nor democracy. This is not the result of good intentions gone awry. This is exactly what is intended.

We really have learned nothing from Vietnam. There, too, unrestricted murder of children was justified as removing future enemies.

There's corruption in our bureaucracies and most Americans are blissfully unaware of it. Whose responsibility is it to inform Americans on this point and why have they failed to do so?

What corruption? This is all intentional. America benefits greatly from mass murder & destruction of countries who are insufficiently deferential to the hegemony. Countries can't keep natural resources to themselves; American corporations must be let in to siphon wealth back to the imperial core. Don't like it? Enjoy having your economy destroyed & government overthrown. With a few generations' worth of atrocities just for good measure.

No it doesn't. An elite class of beltway insiders benefits to the detriment of the greatest portion of the American public. We've spent trillions on war and what return has the average American seen? Middle class is squeezed out. And no, our economy does not recoup as much as we spend on unproductive wars. Our economy was fine when we were non-interventionist.

> what return has the average American seen?

A return to the polls to vote for more of the same!

> when we were non-interventionist

When exactly was that? Was it when the US was only indirectly involved via education, assistance, and spook-craft? When it was only involved in "police actions" and not wars? Are we strictly speaking about the US government or also US corporations? The US has always been involved in foreign conflicts from the start.

> A return to the polls to vote for more of the same!

Actually no, in 2008 Obama won a solid victory while sounding notes of change and ending the wars. Then he got elected and did what he was put there to do, which was sell the people out.

The elites have been exercising their veto over the peace vote since 11/22/63.

The basis for the US being in Afghanistan is allowing the 9/11 operatives to train there, and yet we haven't bombed Florida (where they also trained).

And at no point since this madness started has there ever been a declaration of what "victory" looks like.

But yeah, let's celebrate the troops! Hooray for our warriors who "keep America safe". Let's pour even more money into this madness and wave the flag, shall we?

Actions like these damage American moral authority in the region, and frankly within the American populace as well.

I often wonder where passionate distrust of the government has emerged from in recent years, and it is probably things like this which disillusion readers.

I was born/raised in the USA, and it's obvious that this OP is an American.

> Actions like these damage American moral authority in the region

America (well, technically, the federal government of the United States of America) has not had an ounce of credibility in 15 years, at least.

It's laughable to assume otherwise.

The USA has 5% of the global population. The rest of the 95% of the globe's population harbors no illusions about "American moral authority".

This article, and the story it contains, is abhorrent. Disgusting. Saddening. America is breeding, and paying, war criminals.

I have friends/family in the military. I don't talk to most of them anymore.

How can I pretend to be friends with people who are part of a system of global oppression, murder, and violence?

Please get rid of all your cobalt-containing electronics.

You're part of a system of African child slave labor.

Most cobalt is from DRC and almost all cobalt from there is derived from child labor. It isn't slave labor; they get paid, though low wage. However child labor is bad as it is. It isn't as simple as boycotting though; families depend on the income. They shouldn't; children should go to school.

That's why the Fair Cobalt Alliance (FCA) [1] was initiated.

[1] https://www.theimpactfacility.com/commodities/cobalt/fair-co...

American moral authority has been dead since the Vietnam war, if not the Korean war. The sheer quantity of war crimes committed was astonishing. Most people know about My Lai, but that was just an incident which managed to break through into American awareness - it wasn't unusual, it was more like the norm.

Nobody ever faced consequences for any of it.

I gotta be honest, the idea that things like this "damage American moral authority" is just such a purely America-centric view. Americans truly have no idea how they are perceived by the rest of the world. Across the globe, polls consistently show America is viewed as the greatest threat to world peace.

And yet more than a million people migrate here every year. They must not be good students of history.

That has nothing to do with it. Economic migration does not say anything about the moral authority of the USA, it mainly says that the USA is better off economically than many other places in the world (not in the least because of the mess the USA is creating in some of those countries).

Which side of a gun do you want pointed at you?

American moral authority is mostly an American thing. The rest of the world has not believed in that concept since the end of World War II, because that's when America was seen as having it, and after that they did what they could to get rid of it with a small 'up' during the Berlin airbridge period.

The death squad sort of thing is part of why I believe Smith is an unreliable narrator in 1984. Real regimes don't mildly torture problematic people and then keep them around at length, as if they were boys[1] enforcing a boarding school hierarchy, instead they get rid of them shortly and cheaply, for instance by one-way helicopter rides.

[1] although the very puerile "it's no fun ruling unless the ruled know you're doing it" is the only explicit answer the book gives to the question posed by where Goldstein's text is left hanging: of what does "...the original motive, the never-questioned instinct that first led to the seizure of power and brought doublethink, the Thought Police, continuous warfare, and all the other necessary paraphernalia into existence afterwards..." really consist?

> Real regimes don't mildly torture problematic people and then keep them around at length, as if they were boys[1] enforcing a boarding school hierarchy

That's precisely how it's done in China and North Korea, as well as many other places, and almost every terror regime in history. It's also used in America whenever prosecutors / prison operators want to "send a message."

There's great value in keeping a population cowed when a small percentage of them can recount the horrors they've suffered for disobedience to authority. Execution is only reserved for actual threats to the regime, and the odd show trial.

And that's nothing new. One of the most famous examples in History is Caesar's cruelty act when the Gaul was almost totally conquered. He wanted to discourage the few inhabitants that may rebel against Rome's authority, so he "resolved to deter others by inflicting an exemplary punishment on these. Accordingly he cut off the hands of those who had borne arms against him." Thousand of men were mutilated and scattered across Gaul to send this terrifying message.

The main account about this is in the last chapter of Bellum Gallicum, probably written by one of his lieutenants. A translation to English: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Commentaries_on_the_Gallic_Wa... from the Latin: http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/caesar/gall8.shtml#44

Regimes that execute at all, judicially or extrajudicially, are outside the pale from where I sit.

What's with the ridiculous amount of "Smith is an unreliable narrator" narrative all of a sudden? Seems like every time 1984 is mentioned, you get a comment about "Smith and unreliable narrator"?

> Real regimes don't mildly torture problematic people and then keep them around at length

"Mildly torture"? Did we read the same book? The torture in 1984 was as systematic and torturous as possible. Of course it's fiction, but nothing mild about it. Also, death squads are used by regimes that are unstable or fighting for power. Like in afghanistan. The totalitarian state described in 1984 was the opposite of afghanistan - completely secure.

Also, Smith wasn't in the "real world" with a "real regime", it's fiction. I hope you realize that. He is narrating a fictional world. So it's rather absurd to claim that he is an unreliable narrator because he isn't narrating the real world. By that logic, every narration in fiction is unreliable and as a consequence makes the claim about unreliable narration absurd.

Because it's the same poster. Least I recall recently reading the concept here a few days ago and found it odd too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25405731

Yes, mostly me, best summarised for the moment at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737728 (tl;dr: of the two fictions, Smith et.al. require far more suspension of disbelief than Goldstein)

As for Smith's torture, I see:

Part 3, Chapter 1: hit on the elbow

Part 3, Chapter 2: beaten, but apparently not enough to break bones. Screamed at, but mostly questioned (not giving leave to urinate is another detail that makes me think Orwell was writing cathartically about his public school days. See "Such, Such Were The Joys".)

Part 3, Chapter 3: restrained. a "dial" of unclear action. scars of unknown origin (and we know that Smith already suffered from varicose lesions well before)

Part 3, Chapter 4: mention of dentures (but had he lost teeth from torture, or from his poor living conditions beforehand?)

Part 3, Chapter 5: failure to be tortured by rats

That's a lot of alleged hours of O'Brien's time, which presumably would be spent (as O'Brien, unlike Smith, got excellent marks on his A levels, thereby getting into the Inner Party) doing something of value for Oceania, rather than enabling Smith's narcissism. It's obvious Smith doesn't have any useful information to give up. How much of an example "pour encourager les autres" could Smith possibly be, considering the oh-so wide, expansive, nature of his circle of friends and acquaintances? The O'Brien of Part 3 is also cardboard, and reminds me of nothing so much as Johnny Hale from "Such, Such Were The Joys".

Consider also:

No sensory deprivation, no waterboarding. Nothing that approaches even Korean-War-era physiological-limit techniques.

Unreliable narrator [0] is literary device that any writer can chose to use, it has nothing to do whether the described events are facts or fiction: it can be used for both. I don't think at all that 1984 uses this technique, but if it did it could be interpreted that Smith was receiving mild torture but describing it as brutal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator

I know what an unreliable narrator is. There are hints/clues within the story to show why the narrator may be unreliable. You can't say a narrator is unreliable because the fictional world does not align with the real world. That's my point.

It would be like saying bilbo baggins is an unreliable narrator in lord of the rings because magical rings don't exist in the real world. Absurd. But you could say the narrator in fight club may be unreliable since its revealed he has mental issues and the stories don't line up within the movie/book.

I agree, it is absurd to say that 1984 uses an unreliable narrator (and any other Orwell writings for that matter, it's just not his style).

It's not absurd because in 1984, Goldstein's writing shows evidence of thinking like Orwell (based on Orwell's other writing) and evidence of rational thought processes, while Smith is an extremely dislikable protagonist, a wannabe acid-throwing murderer[1], which makes me think he's cardboard, suitable for the "fast-forward".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737728

[1] part II chap 8. By comparison with 1984, the FBI usually gets violent nutcases to come up with their own scenarios without such explicit prompting, but in real life these sorts of people are not lacking for supposing that (their often paranoidly fictional) ends justify the (thankfully equally fictional, at least when they procure "bombs" from HumInt sources) means, either.

> the FBI ... but in real life

You really are failing to understand the criticism. You can't claim a narrator is unreliable because the fiction doesn't align with reality. That's not how that works.

You do realize that 1984 was written in the 1940s predicting describing a fictional world nearly 50 years in the future?

It's a simple concept you are intentionally ignoring. If you want to claim "unreliable narrator", you need to show that within the fictional world. You can claim it because the fictional world doesn't match the real world. Because using that absurd logic, everything is unreliable.

Except Goldstein, another character in the same work, does align with reality...

Maybe Orwell's point was that you don't need the death squads to manage tyranny.

Orwell is not subtle enough for this. In "1984" (spoiler), the tyranny wins because they manage to torture the main characters so much that their spirits were permanently broken. If memory serves right, that was the end of the story.

For a classical tyranny were deaths squads are almost never necessary, because mass control is extremely efficient, "Brave New World" is better suited.

Except "Brave New World" isn't a tyranny at all. The only person who comes to a poor end is the savage, precisely because he refused the offer (which Mond envies) of going to the islands.

Mond also summarises why contemporary people are so willing to follow visions like ISIS or QAnon:

"Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand."

(NB that BNW was written after WWI, 1984 after WWII, which may, beyond the temperaments of their authors, also explain how the visions got so much darker. Note also that Huxley wrote a much-less-famous utopia near the end of his life.)

I think it's one of the tools that regimes use. Not neccessarily on everyone, but in certain settings and scenarios. China for example has "reeducation" camps that brainwash/torture people.

It's scary how a government with such seemingly innocent goals as maintaining the prosperity its citizens can end up doing such horrible senseless things.

It seems 100% counterproductive. It looks like checks and balances don't work that well after all.

I'm starting to see the benefits of small government. The case for a decentralized, citizen-driven monetary system is also increasingly strong. Reduction of government and monetary reform must go together or else we risk corporations or some other large bureaucratic organisations replacing the government and end up doing the same kinds of senseless things.

An economy should not support such massive and immoral waste of human lives and productive capacity.

Ah a classic of American foreign policy.

It's a shame that an escalation in civilian deaths is viewed as an evil, but that there are civilian deaths to escalate is viewed as a necessity of foreign policy.

Or, you know, the Intercept article is primarily reporting on the current state of affairs (under Trump's watch), and specifically on a spike in civilian deaths in 2019. Not every article has to cover the entire war.

> The period in which The Intercept documented the escalation of violence in Wardak falls neatly between the first round of formal U.S.-Taliban talks in late 2018 and the signing of the Doha agreement early this year. The rate of 01 night raids, and the number of civilians killed as a result, fell dramatically last winter and stopped almost entirely this spring.

The timeline of the article is December 2018 through September 2019, when Trump was Commander-in-Chief. Does it not make sense then that he would be more pertinent to the story? I think it provides the correct historical context when it makes sense in the reporting.

And why would anyone need to draw their "own conclusions" when Greenwald has been very explicit as to why he left.

From the article, it appears these death squads and their attacks occurred primarily during the Trump administration, as a result of a shift in policy: "Pompeo, then-director of the CIA, indicated that the agency, too, would pursue a more hawkish posture. The CIA, he said, “must be aggressive, vicious, unforgiving, relentless." And:

"The period in which The Intercept documented the escalation of violence in Wardak falls neatly between the first round of formal U.S.-Taliban talks in late 2018 and the signing of the Doha agreement early this year."

I can hardly say I know enough to clear Bush or Biden of using death squads, but it does seem like the major escalation and change in tactics occurred between January 21, 2017 and today.

It's a tough ugly war with no good options. I absolutely agree that this type of death squad summary execution crap is unacceptable. It's less reported now, but the taliban use the same type of tactics of fear to project control over the population. Leaving a power vacuum for the taliban will also lead to atrocities and medieval rules for the female population. I'm sure the military industrial complex has played some role in this war, but there really are lots of people in our military trying to be honorable and do the right thing.

The US brought the practice of Bacha bazi[1] back into the mainstream with the tasset approval of the US military (basically US service members aren't permitted to interfere or discourage it). It was banned and severely punished under the Taliban.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacha_bazi

Again, not saying both sides are without fault, but everyone seems to ignore the fact that the taliban do horrible shit too. What do the taliban do to girls that go to school?

The war is not black and white; good versus evil. Almost nothing in the world is that simple and straightforward. Do you honestly think it would become a great place to live if the US just withdrew?

This is not a competition to count up who did more worse stuff. We as a country have been caught in a slippery slope with no easy completely morally correct way out. The fact is that we are in the war now and playing monday morning quarter back does nothing.

I'm sure that our country didn't think their actions of having americans in saudi arabia would have pissed off Osama and the countless other hijackers bad enough that they attacked us on 9/11. But the fact is they did, then the Taliban provided safe haven for them and our only option to try to avoid similar attacks in the future was to go in and get rid of the safe haven. If we leave now, the taliban will take over and it will be a safe haven again. If we stay, our fellow americans continue to die in an ugly horrible war.

Where was the easy right morally correct answer in any of that that was readily apparent at the time?

Maybe one easy right morally correct answer would have been to have not given manpads to the Taliban in the 80's?

Maybe, but I think its debatable and not exactly black and white. We were terrified of communism and communist countries haven't exactly turned out to be a bastion of humanity. Again, I think it was a shit situation with shit choices. They were our allies. Russia was invading and slaughtering them. Would the "right" thing to do really be to let it continue and not help them?

Certainly debatable, by all means. As to a bastion of humanity, I see that the people of the Warsaw Pact countries managed, once they decided their System wasn't doing what they'd been brought up to believe it should, to change it with very little violence.

In a better world, the soviets would have done all the hard work to introduce minor things like school for girls[1] to afghanistan in the early eighties, and then it would have gone capitalist along with the rest of the ex-soviet -stans, nearly bloodlessly, in the early nineties.

Help afghanis, yes. Help the taliban? That was a poor, even a foreseeably poor, decision.

[1] for an idea of the variation in that part of asia, compare music videos from tajikistan and from iran, for example...

Yes, those countries absolutely turned out well, but at the time it wasn't clear that communism was going to fall and that the outcome for any of those countries could be positive at all. The counter point to the countries that exited communism well are the autocratic countries like Russia, Belarus and China. Also, at the time, I can understand the extreme fear of communism that the leaders in America had at the time. It was the cold war, we know of nothing similar to the persistent existential threat of armageddon that people on both sides of the conflict experienced every day. People were scared, it seems rational that both sides pushed hard to prevail and they each tried to pick the least shitty option out of a set of shitty options.

Also, what other options did we have to help afghanis at the time? There were definitely numerous cons to supporting the taliban, but weren't they the most capable organization at waging war in the area at the time? I guess we could have tried to find more moderate opposition to the Russians but that would have come at the cost of having less capable opposition to the Russians.

I'm sure that some of our leaders, members of the CIA, and soldiers may have been corrupt and self serving in their decisions but I would argue that a majority of them were rational and honorable individuals who were doing their best to uphold the oaths they made to protect America. They were figuratively and some times literally giving their lives to something they truly believed in. It doesn't seem right to cast them all under the bus and say they were corrupt evil individuals without exercising empathy and contemplating what they knew at the time and the choices that were laid out in front of them.

Yeah, I tend to forget that anti-communism was so strong and so reflexive a tenet of US foreign policy that they were willing to support the Khmer Rouge on that basis.

(I'm not attempting to say that people were making corrupt decisions, I'm sure they were trying to do their best. What I'm attempting to say is that "providing advanced technology to people whose values are entirely contrary to yours" is not only in retrospect stupid, but should have been notably stupid at the time as well.)

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