Inconvenient: List of US Atrocities

[grarpamp]

Detailed Report Exposes CIA-Backed 'Zero Units' In Afghanistan

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/01/12/tracking-cia-backed-zero-units-in-afghanistan/
https://www.propublica.org/article/afghanistan-night-raids-zero-units-lynzy-billing
https://www.propublica.org/article/leahy-law-afghanistan-night-raids-zero-units

In 2019, reporter Lynzy Billing returned to Afghanistan to research
the murders of her mother and sister nearly 30 years earlier. Instead,
in the country’s remote reaches, she stumbled upon the C.I.A.-backed
Zero Units, who conducted night raids — quick, brutal operations
designed to have resounding psychological impacts while ostensibly
removing high-priority enemy targets.

So, Billing attempted to catalog the scale of civilian deaths left
behind by just one of four Zero Units, known as the 02, over a four
year period.
Road to Jalalabad, Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan, 2008. Flickr

The resulting report represents an effort no one else has done or will
ever be able to do again. Here is what she found:

    At least 452 civilians were killed in 107 raids. This number is
almost certainly an undercount. While some raids did result in the
capture or death of known militants, others killed bystanders or
appeared to target people for no clear reason.
    A troubling number of raids appear to have relied on faulty
intelligence by the C.I.A. and other U.S. intelligence-gathering
services. Two Afghan Zero Unit soldiers described raids they were sent
on in which they said their targets were chosen by the United States.
    The former head of Afghanistan’s intelligence agency acknowledged
that the units were getting it wrong at times and killing civilians.
He oversaw the Zero Units during a crucial period and agreed that no
one paid a consequence for those botched raids. He went on to describe
an operation that went wrong: “I went to the family myself and said:
‘We are sorry. … We want to be different from the Taliban.’ And I mean
we did, we wanted to be different from the Taliban.”
    The Afghan soldiers weren’t alone on the raids; U.S. special
operations forces soldiers working with the C.I.A. often joined them.
The Afghan soldiers Billing spoke to said they were typically
accompanied on raids by at least 10 U.S. special operations forces
soldiers. “These deaths happened at our hands. I have participated in
many raids,” one of the Afghans said, “and there have been hundreds of
raids where someone is killed and they are not Taliban or ISIS, and
where no militants are present at all.”
    Military planners baked potential “collateral damage” into the
pre-raid calculus — how many women/children/noncombatants were at risk
if the raid went awry, according to one U.S. Army Ranger Billing spoke
to. Those forecasts were often wildly off, he said, yet no one seemed
to really care. He told Billing that night raids were a better option
than airstrikes but acknowledged that the raids risked creating new
insurgent recruits. “You go on night raids, make more enemies, then
you gotta go on more night raids for the more enemies you now have to
kill.”

Afghan commandos during a night raid, December 2007. Wiki Commons

    Because the Zero Units operated under a CIA program, their actions
were part of a “classified” war, with the lines of accountability so
obscured that no one had to answer for operations that went wrong. And
U.S. responsibility for the raids was quietly muddied by a legal
loophole that allows the C.I.A. — and any U.S. soldiers lent to the
agency for their operations — to act without the same level of
oversight as the American military.
    Congressional aides and former intelligence committee staffers
said they don’t believe Congress was getting a complete picture of the
C.I.A.’s overseas operations. Lawyers representing whistleblowers said
there is ample motivation to downplay to Congress the number of
civilians killed or injured in such operations. By the time reports
get to congressional oversight committees, one lawyer said, they’re
“undercounting deaths and overstating accuracy.”
    U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long relied on night
raids by forces like the 02 unit to fight insurgencies around the
globe. The strategy has, again and again, drawn outrage for its
reliance on sometimes flawed intelligence and civilian death count. In
1967, the C.I.A.’s Phoenix Program famously used kill-capture raids
against the Viet Cong insurgency in south Vietnam, creating an intense
public blowback. Despite the program’s ignominious reputation — a 1971
Pentagon study found only 3 percent of those killed or captured were
full or probationary Viet Cong members above the district level — it
appears to have served as a blueprint for future night raid
operations.
    Eyewitnesses, survivors and family members described how Zero Unit
soldiers had stormed into their homes at night, killing loved ones at
more than 30 raid sites Billing visited. No Afghan or U.S officials
returned to investigate. In one instance, a 22-year-old named Batour
witnessed a raid that killed his two brothers. One was a teacher and
the other a university student. He told Billing the Zero Unit strategy
had actually made enemies of families like his. He and his brothers,
he said, had supported the government and vowed never to join the
Taliban. Now, he said, he’s not so sure.
    Little in the way of explanation was ever provided to the
relatives of the dead — or to their neighbors and friends — as to why
these particular individuals were targeted and what crimes they were
accused of. Families who sought answers from provincial officials
about the raids were told nothing could be done because they were Zero
Unit operations. “They have their own intelligence and they do their
own operation,” one grieving family member remembered being told after
his three grandchildren were killed in an airstrike and night raid.
“The provincial governor gave us a parcel of rice, a can of oil and
some sugar” as compensation for the killings. At medical facilities,
doctors told Billing they’d never been contacted by Afghan or U.S.
investigators or human rights groups about the fate of those injured
in the raids. Some of the injured later died, quietly boosting the
casualty count.

In a statement, C.I.A. spokesperson Tammy Thorp said, “As a rule, the
U.S. takes extraordinary measures — beyond those mandated by law — to
reduce civilian casualties in armed conflict, and treats any claim of
human rights abuses with the utmost seriousness.” She said any
allegations of human rights abuses by a “foreign partner” are reviewed
and, if valid, the C.I.A. and “other elements of the U.S. government
take concrete steps, including providing training on applicable law
and best practices, or if necessary terminating assistance or the
relationship.” Thorp said the Zero Units had been the target of a
systematic propaganda campaign designed to discredit them because “of
the threat they posed to Taliban rule.”

The Department of Defense did not respond to questions about Zero Unit
operations.
Burying civilians in Afghanistan, via Ariana News

With a forensic pathologist, Billing drove hundreds of miles across
some of the country’s most volatile areas — visiting the sites of more
than 30 raids, interviewing witnesses, survivors, family members,
doctors and village elders.

To understand the program, she met secretly with two Zero Unit
soldiers over the course of years, wrangled with Afghanistan’s former
spy master in his heavily fortified home and traveled to a diner in
the middle of America to meet with an Army Ranger who’d joined the
units on operations.

She also conducted more than 350 interviews with current and former
Afghan and American government officials, Afghan commanders, U.S
military officials, American defense and security officials and former
C.I.A. intelligence officers, as well as U.S. lawmakers and former
oversight committee members, counterterrorism and policy officers,
civilian-casualty assessment experts, military lawyers, intelligence
analysts, representatives of human rights organizations, doctors,
hospital directors, coroners, forensic examiners, eyewitnesses and
family members — some of whom are not named in the story for their
safety.
Jan. 1, 2011: U.S. soldier watching as a helicopter provides cover to
an explosive ordnance disposal team in Laghman Province, Afghanistan.
US Army image

While America’s war in Afghanistan may be over, there are lessons to
be learned from what it left behind. Billing writes:

“The American government has scant basis for believing it has a full
picture of the Zero Units’ performance. Again and again, I spoke with
Afghans who had never shared their stories with anyone. Congressional
officials concerned about the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan said
they were startled by the civilian death toll I documented.

As my notebooks filled, I came to realize that I was compiling an
eyewitness account of a particularly ignominious chapter in the United
States’ fraught record of overseas interventions.

Without a true reckoning of what happened in Afghanistan, it became
clear the U.S. could easily deploy the same failed tactics in some new
country against some new threat.”