A particularly clear example of civilian deaths caused by negligence on the part of U.S. forces (probably the CIA) is the story of Daraz “tall man” Khan, who was killed along with two others in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan by a missile launched from an unmanned Predator drone aircraft. The NY Times report is excerpted below, followed by my letter to then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Report from SF Chronicle: 2/17/02
Fallout Over Errant Missile
Angry Villagers Say Men Wanting Money Duped U.S.
by Johns F. Burns
NY Times
LALAZHA, Afghanistan — The man they knew in this village as Tall Man Khan never had much in his life but his height, and even that was only about 5 feet, 11 inches.
Then, early last week, he was killed in an American attack on what the Pentagon described as a group of suspected al Qaeda leaders. Government officials noted that one of the targets was tall and was being treated with deference by the others. That gave rise to speculation that the attack might have been directed at Osama bin Laden, who is 6 feet, 4 inches.
Whether Khan was a member of al Qaeda is under investigation in Washington, but in this canyon in the mountains outside of Khost, it is dismissed with laughter by local militiamen.
“This is theater, what the Americans have done here, just theater,” said Amir Khan, a militia commander who lives in a nearby village. “Somebody told the Americans that al Qaeda had been here, probably somebody who wanted the Americans to give him money. But we could have told them that there has been no al Qaeda here in years.”
The attack on Feb. 4 began in an instant, when a button pressed in a remote location launched a Hellfire missile from a pilotless Predator drone at Khan and his friends.
Three Afghan villagers died in the strike, leaving wives and children and a story that may be a parable of what can happen when human error guides the use of modern weaponry. It is also a warning, many Afghans say, that errant bombing and missile strikes by the U.S. may squander some of the jubilant appreciation it has earned in the past months among 20 million Ahghans.
Among the hundreds of Afghan civilians killed in American strikes, some of the most questionable deaths are those of Daraz Khan, the tall man, about 31, and two others, Jehangir Khan, about 28, and Mir Ahmed, about 30, who walked 10 miles up into the snowy mountains a week ago on Monday to collect scrap metal.
The day promised only modest reward — maybe as much as 40 or 50 cents a man for a camel’s load of twisted steel. But here, that is enough to make a difference for three families whose combined savings that day amounted to less than $2.
Suddenly, as the three men were standing on a bluff above the Zhawara caves about 3 pm, the missile came at them out of a clear sky. A Pentagon official said at the time that the team monitoring the images from the drone spotted a tall man and thought he might be a top al Qaeda leader.
On Feb. 11, a week after the attack, the Pentagon’s top military spokesman, Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, told a news conference that the drone had picked up “a meeting on a hillside,” and that CIA surveillance determined that the gathering was “not a surprise, chance encounter, visually,” and that “these are not peasant people up there farming.”
Stufflebeem said an American military team of about 50 men had spent several days at the site collecting evidence, including tissue and bone fragments for DNA testing to identify the victims, apparently by comparing the samples with DNA taken from relatives of bin Laden, and possibly Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is bin Laden’s deputy.
But here in the mountains near Khost, about 150 miles south of Kabul, almost every Afghan in the area — herders, brushwood collectors, militiamen and farmers — easily identified the three victims.
The dead man’s relatives said they had not been visited by Americans or by any Afghan officials and expressed astonishment when they were told the strike was launched because of a suspicion that one of the three was possibly bin Laden.
Shawol Khan, Daraz Khan’s brother, emerged from the mud-walled compound where they lived, along with Daraz Khan’s two wives, and said, “Surely, it was a big mistake of the Americans. They should know that there are no al Qaeda here. We are very poor people, and we know nothing of politics.”
…
A niece of Daraz Khan shouted through a gap in the metal gate, “Why did you do this? Why did you Americans kill Daraz? We have nothing, nothing, and you have taken from us our Daraz. Tell the Americans to come here and help us. We are poor people, we did nothing to deserve this.”
…
After the missile strike, villagers loaded the bodies onto a pickup truck and carried them to the plain for burial the following day. Now, the fresh graves sit just off the road, near a flapping white flag inscribed: “In the name of Allah.”
Letter to U.S. Govt. officials, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
27 February 2002
Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington, D.C. 20301-1000
Secretary Rumsfeld,
Fatal mistakes such as the one described in the attached article are not acceptable.
By remote control, a CIA operator shot a missile at a group of people when all he could see is that one of them was tall and therefore might be Osama bin Laden. In the face of high uncertainty about the identity of his targets, he fired the missile, calculating that if he was right and the people were terrorists, he would be striking an important blow for the U.S., and if he was wrong and they weren’t terrorists, there would be no consequences.
He was wrong. Now three innocent men are dead, and no apologies will bring them back.
There must be consequences for a mistake like this. Someone at the CIA needs to at least lose their job over this, and possibly be charged with manslaughter as well.
Let’s find and bring the September 11 terrorists to justice. Let’s do the same with the murderers of Daniel Pearl. But in doing so, let’s not commit the same sort of crimes we are trying to prevent.
Sincerely,
[Peace Pundit]
