By Jill McLauglin
As an activist and organizer against the U.S. war/ occupations and torture I see the potential for truly changing the world as it now is as we approach the 10 year old U.S. war and occupation of Afghanistan. This feeling of excitement and the sense there is something beautiful and big blowing in the air from witnessing the Occupy Together movement grow and stand it’s ground since it’s first Occupation at Wall St.
The young people who started the Occupy Together movement in response to very real situation of corporate greed and economic inequality are not buying the “this is the way it is and will always be so don’t bother lifting your heads, raising your voices, or using your imagination because those who have the power are too powerful and will squash you. ” They are not deterred by the scorn and cynicism from passive onlookers, mainstream media snarkiness, the disdain of political pundits, or police brutality. They see a grave injustice and want to do something other than wait for the next election.
Seeing all these occupations against corporate greed and corruption form across the country I’m struck by the parallels of the people here and the people in Afghanistan. Many here have suffered job loss, home foreclosures, loss of health care, or the inability to pay for an education and people in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world who have suffered under the brutal U.S. war and occupation.
For the people of Afghanistan this has resulted in loss of homes, little or no access to food and water, illnesses and injuries which cannot be readily treated or not at all. Through 3 brief stories one can see that it really is the case that things are the same there as in here due to the imperialist-capitalist system with the U.S government at it’s helm.
Story One: He was just trying to make it in the world but he was tortured to death
In the U.S. war in Afghanistan the U.S. military detained thousands of people. Some were sent to Bagram Detention Center or to secret black sites were they were tortured. Some were eventually sent to Guantanamo Bay Detention center in Cuba.
One particular story has haunted me after having seen Alex Gibney’s documentary, Taxi To The Darkside. It is the heart wrenching story of a 22 year old Afghan man named Dilawar. Like many here who are struggling just to survive and provide for themselves and their families and make a life for themselves, Dilawar struggled too. He was a failed peanut farmer with a wife and child to care for. In order to help him his brothers bought him car so that he could begin work as a taxi driver. Just three weeks later Dilawar was picked up by U.S. troops with four others and sent to Bagram Detention facility and five days later he was dead. Dilawar had coronary heart disease which lent itself to making Dilawar more vulnerable to dying from the abuse and torture he suffered at the hands of U.S. troops. Autopsy reports reveal that his legs were so badly beaten beaten that they were pulpified. Doctors said that that had he live his legs would have had to have been amputated. Tim Golden’s article in the New York Times gives a glimpse of Dilawar and what led to his being detained:
On Dec. 5, one day after Mr. Habibullah died, Mr. Dilawar arrived at Bagram.
Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi.
Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk.
“He was a shy man, a very simple man,” his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.
On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar’s mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.
At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.
Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint. They confiscated a broken walkie-talkie from one of Mr. Dilawar’s passengers. In the trunk, they found an electric stabilizer used to regulate current from a generator. (Mr. Dilawar’s family said the stabilizer was not theirs; at the time, they said, they had no electricity at all.)
The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack. Mr. Dilawar and his passengers spent their first night there handcuffed to a fence, so they would be unable to sleep. When a doctor examined them the next morning, he said later, he found Mr. Dilawar tired and suffering from headaches but otherwise fine.
Mr. Dilawar’s three passengers were eventually flown to Guantánamo and held for more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at Guantánamo. While all of them said they had been beaten, they complained most bitterly of being stripped naked in front of female soldiers for showers and medical examinations, which they said included the first of several painful and humiliating rectal exams.
“They did lots and lots of bad things to me,” said Abdur Rahim, a 26-year-old baker from Khost. “I was shouting and crying, and no one was listening. When I was shouting, the soldiers were slamming my head against the desk.”
For Mr. Dilawar, his fellow prisoners said, the most difficult thing seemed to be the black cloth hood that was pulled over his head. “He could not breathe,” said a man called Parkhudin, who had been one of Mr. Dilawar’s passengers.
Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the “noncompliant” ones.
When one of the First Platoon M.P.’s, Specialist Corey E. Jones, was sent to Mr. Dilawar’s cell to give him some water, he said the prisoner spit in his face and started kicking him. Specialist Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man.
“He screamed out, ‘Allah! Allah! Allah!’ and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god,” Specialist Jones said to investigators. “Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny.”
Other Third Platoon M.P.’s later came by the detention center and stopped at the isolation cells to see for themselves, Specialist Jones said.
It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out ‘Allah,’ ” he said. “It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes.”
In a subsequent statement, Specialist Jones was vague about which M.P.’s had delivered the blows. His estimate was never confirmed, but other guards eventually admitted striking Mr. Dilawar repeatedly.
Many M.P.’s would eventually deny that they had any idea of Mr. Dilawar’s injuries, explaining that they never saw his legs beneath his jumpsuit. But Specialist Jones recalled that the drawstring pants of Mr. Dilawar’s orange prison suit fell down again and again while he was shackled.
“I saw the bruise because his pants kept falling down while he was in standing restraints,” the soldier told investigators. “Over a certain time period, I noticed it was the size of a fist.”
As Mr. Dilawar grew desperate, he began crying out more loudly to be released. But even the interpreters had trouble understanding his Pashto dialect; the annoyed guards heard only noise.
“He had constantly been screaming, ‘Release me; I don’t want to be here,’ and things like that,” said the one linguist who could decipher his distress, Abdul Ahad Wardak.
Bagram Detention Facility has been expanded, Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility is still open, and there are many secret black sites that exist.
Story Two: What if it was your wedding was attacked by a drone?
In 2008 there was an increase in the use of predator drones by the U.S. military. A drone is unmanned plane operated remotely from places as far as Nevada. The U.S. of drones have decreased but have instead increased since then. Predator drones are used when the U.S. military suspects that a large group of people in one area may be Taliban or Al Queda fighters. Predator drones are often sent to an area whee U.S. troops have come under fire. The problem is that the drones cannot distinguish which group of people might be hostile and which is not. As results hundreds of civilians including many children have been killed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Several Afghan Wedding Parties have been attacked because of the inability to distinguish between groups of fighters and groups of civilians. The reason given for continuing the use of predator drones is that the U.S. claims that the drones have hit Taliban and Al Queda targets. It does matter to them that large numbers of civilians have been killed.
Story Three: Little Boys Gathering Wood To Keep Their Homes Warm Are Cold In Their Graves
In March of this year nine little boys were sent to gather wood to keep their homes warm…only one survived. As they were gathering the wood they were suddenly fired upon by a U.S. Apache helicopter. Hemad, the only boy to survive the attack described what happened:
“We were almost done collecting the wood when suddenly we saw the helicopters come,” said Hemad, who, like many Afghans, has only one name. “There were two of them. The helicopters hovered over us, scanned us and we saw a green flash from the helicopters. Then they flew back high up, and in a second round they hovered over us and started shooting. They fired a rocket which landed on a tree. The tree branches fell over me and shrapnel hit my right hand and my side.”
From these stories one can get a sense that the people of Afghanistan are just trying to make it not unlike the 99% here. These stories are just a glimpse of the crimes the U.S. government has committed in Afghanistan and continues to commit. The corporations that the Occupy Together movement are protesting profit from the very crimes that our government commits against humanity. The war and occupation of Afghanistan is an immoral and illegitimate one where thousands have been, displaced, tortured and killed under the guise of the war on terror. This is a war for U.S. empire and not one to keep us safe or liberate the people of Afghanistan as the U.S. government would like us to believe.
This is all being done in our name. As people here in the United States who are taking to the streets to demand an end to greed and inequality we have a moral responsibility to demand an end to the war and occupation in Afghanistan and stop it’s widening into Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. “People over Profit” needs to include “People over U.S. Empire” and we all have to say “Not in Our Name” Another slogan I hear over and over again from the protesters in the Occupy Together movement from the protest of 1968 Democratic National Convention is “The Whole World Is Watching”. Yes as the Occupy Together movement grows the whole world is watching…and waiting and hoping that we the people of this country have their backs. Join in the protests October 6th through 8 against this 10 years too many war and demand that it end.
JIll McLaughlin is a member of the World Can’t Wait Steering Committee.