“how america makes its enemies disappear”
by petra bartosiewicz
harper’s magazine, november 2009
back in 2007, i was writing about the large number of people “disappeared” in pakistan under musharraf’s regime. as i talked to different anti-war and student groups, i showed them clips from the excellent documentary “missing in pakistan” by ziad zafar (u can view in full on google videos: http://vodpod.com/watch/361336-missing-in-pakistan-documentary-by-ziad-zafar-2007).
an article in harper’s magazine now exposes the details of those disappearances – how they tie into the global war on terror and how musharraf has confessed as much in his autobiography. this is not the full article (which can be found at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/11/0082719) but it’s an extremely important look into the inner workings of the war on terror. it also brings to light the nefarious collusion between the US government and the military dictatorships it has supported in pakistan.
FROM: “how america makes its enemies disappear” by petra bartosiewicz, harper’s magazine, november 2009
as the “global war on terror” enters its 9th year, under the leadership of its second commander in chief, certain ongoing assumptions have gained the force of common wisdom. one of them, as barack obama explained in a major policy speech last may, is that we have entered a “new era” that will “present new challenges to our application of the law” and require “new tools to protect the american people.” another, as obama made clear in the same speech, is that the purpose of these new tools and laws is “to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.” these positions are appealing, but fail to address what might be thought of as an underlying economic disequilibrium. the continued political appetite for a global war on terror has led to a commodification of “actionable intelligence,” which is a product, chiefly, of human prisoners like aafia siddiqui. because this war, by definition, has no physical or temporal boundaries, the demand for such intelligence has no limit. but the world contains a relatively small number of terrorists and an even smaller number of terrorist plots. our demand for intelligence far outstrips the supply of prisoners. where the united states itself has been unable to meet that demand, therefore, it has embraced a solution that is the essence of globalization. we outsource the work to countries, like pakistan, whose political circumstances allow them to produce prisoners with far greater efficiency.
what the CIA and the FBI understand as an acquisition solution, however, others see as a human rights debacle. just as thousands of political dissidents, suspected criminals, and enemies of the state were “disappeared” from latin america over the course of several decades of CIA funded dirty wars, so too have hundreds of “persons of interest” around the world begun to disappear as a consequence of the global war on terror, which in many ways has become a globalized version of those earlier, regional failures of democracy.
many individual cases are well known. binyam mohamed, an alleged conspirator in jose padilla’s now debunked “dirty bomb plot,” was arrested in karachi in 2002 and flown by the CIA to morocco, where he was tortured for 18 months. he eventually emerged into the non-covert prison system, as a detainee in guantanamo, and was released earlier this year without charge. maher arar, a canadian citizen, was arrested at NYC’s JFK airport in 2002 while on his way home from a vacation, flown by the CIA to a syrian prison, held in a coffin-size cell for nearly a year, and then released, also without charges. saud memon, a pakistani businessman rumored to own the plot of land where the wall street journal reporter daniel pearl was murdered, was arrested in 2003, held by the US at an unknown location until 2006, then ‘released” to pakistan, where in april 2007 he finally emerged, badly beaten and weighing just 80 lbs, on the doorsteps of his karachi home. he died a few weeks later.
the total number of men and women who have been kidnapped and imprisoned for US intelligence-gathering purposes is difficult to determine. apart from iraq and afghanistan, the main theaters of combat, pakistan is our primary source of publicly known detainees – researchers at seton hall university estimated in 2006 that 2/3 of the prisoners at guantanamo were arrested in pakistan or by pakistani authorities – and so it is reasonable to assume that the country is also a major supplier of ghost detainees. human rights watch has tracked enforced disappearances in pakistan since before 2001. the group’s counterterrorism director, joanne mariner, told me that the number of missing persons in the country grew “to a flood” as US counterterrorism operations peaked between 2002 and 2004. in that same 3 year period, US aid to pakistan totaled $4.7 billion, up from $9.1 million in the three years prior to the US invasion of afghanistan. correlation does not prove causation, of course, but pakistan’s former president, pervez musharraf, did claim in his 2006 memoir, “in the line of fire,” that his country had delivered 369 al qaeda suspects to the US for “millions of dollars” in bounties (a boast he neatly elides in the urdu edition).
one reason estimates are so inconclusive, of course, is that the business of disappearance is inherently ambiguous. missing person reports filed in pakistan rarely claim that the detained individual was picked up by the CIA or the FBI. instead, the detainee is almost always arrested by the “city police” or “civilian clothed men” or unidentified “secret agency personnel” who arrive in “unmarked vehicles.” the secretary-general of the pakistani NGO human rights commission, ibn abdur rehman, described the process. “a man is picked up at his house, brought to the police station,” he said. “the family comes with him and are told, ‘he’ll be released in an hour, go home.’ they come back in an hour and are told, ‘sorry, he’s been handed off to the intelligence people and taken to islamabad.’ after that, the individual is never heard from again. when the family tries to file a missing-person report, the police won’t take it, and no one admits to having custody of the person.” some of the disappeared pass directly to US custody and reappear months or years later at guantanamo or bagram air base. others remain captives of pakistan’s multiple intelligence agencies or are shipped to places like uzbekistan, whose torture policies are well-known. others simply vanish, their fate revealed only by clerical errors, or when they turn up dead.
most of the arrests and detentions take place under the auspices of pakistan’s inter-services intelligence (ISI) which the CIA helped expand in the 1980s largely in order to wage a proxy war against soviet forces in afghanistan (where the ISI continues to wield considerable influence). the agency has evolved into a powerful institution with its own agendas and alliances – it has long pursued ethnic separatists in the baluchistan region, for instance, where the human rights commission estimates that at least 600 individuals have disappeared – and the result is that the CIA itself often has little knowledge of the provenance or purpose of a given arrest.