Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [300]
Though isolated cases of abuse and mistreatment of detainees have occurred in every war, American military forces have a long record of restraint and professionalism when it comes to holding captured enemies. After his army’s success on the frozen fields outside Princeton, New Jersey, George Washington issued unequivocal orders on the treatment of captured British soldiers: “Treat them with humanity, and Let them have no reason to Complain of our Copying the brutal example of the British army in their Treatment of our unfortunate brethren.”9 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Dick Myers and I wanted to make sure that the military upheld this high tradition. Even while fighting an enemy whose use of brutality was the norm, we insisted on aligning our military’s conduct with the humane principles on which our Republic was founded.
In November 2001, a violent rebellion of Taliban and al-Qaida detainees in northern Afghanistan brought into focus the dangers and difficulties of managing fanatical killers in custody. General Rashid Dostum, an ethnic Uzbek Northern Alliance commander, as well as a powerful and tough warlord, held several hundred Taliban and al-Qaida foot soldiers in Qala-i-Jangi, a nineteenth-century mud-and-brick fortress near Mazar-e-Sharif.* Among the Qala-i-Jangi prisoners that November was an English-speaking man who looked out of place. His name was John Walker Lindh, and he would become known as “the American Taliban.”
During the questioning of Lindh and his fellow prisoners, two CIA agents asked him about his background and the circumstances of his capture on the battlefield among the al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. In the middle of the interrogation, a detainee leaped toward the two American intelligence operatives, touching off a prisonwide rebellion. The ensuing battle pitted Dostum’s few Northern Alliance guards, a handful of British Special Air Service (SAS) troops, U.S. Special Forces, and the two CIA agents against several hundred Taliban and al-Qaida, many committed to fighting to the death. The battle raged for three days. The prisoners managed to capture a Northern Alliance cache of weapons—including AK-47s, rocket launchers, mortars, and grenades.10 U.S. AC-130s and Black Hawk helicopters came to support the pinned-down coalition forces while Taliban and al-Qaida fighters held out in the basement of Qala-i-Jangi.11 Only when they were flushed out of the fortress with water did the fighting end. Before the battle there had been three hundred al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners, but only eighty-six emerged to surrender.12
The battle led to the deaths of some forty Northern Alliance soldiers, while another two hundred were injured.13 U.S. and British Special Forces also had taken casualties. Johnny Micheal Spann, one of the two CIA officers at Qala-i-Jangi prison that weekend, was killed in action in the first minutes of the battle, becoming the first American to die in combat operations in Afghanistan.14 His body was booby-trapped with a hidden grenade by the al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners so those recovering his remains would be wounded or killed. The episode was another reminder that many of those detained were there for a reason—they were violent, vicious, and would not hesitate to kill again.
After the toppling of the Taliban, there was no central government in Afghanistan and no functioning criminal justice or prison systems. As coalition forces eliminated pockets of resistance in the early weeks of January 2002, the Northern Alliance was holding hundreds of suspected al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners—including the survivors of the battle at Qala-i-Jangi prison. Most detainees were vetted informally and sent home; others were permitted to join the