Task Force 121: human rights abuses in Iraq War

[Jan Klimkowski]

So, another "Task Force" in Iraq commits human rights abuses, and the politicians claim they didn't know....

For the Operation Phoenix style death squad known as Task Force 373, or TF 373, see here.

British troops recount human rights abuses at US detention facility in Iraq

British soldiers and airmen tell of prisoners brought in by SAS and SBS snatch squads being hooded and given electric shocks

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Monday 1 April 2013 18.03 BST

An aerial view of Baghdad international airport, where the secret prison known as Camp Nama was based. Photograph: Reuters

British soldiers and air personnel who helped to operate a secretive US detention facility in Baghdad that was at the centre of some of the most serious human-rights abuses to occur in Iraq after the invasion have, for the first time, spoken about abuses they witnessed there.

Members of two RAF squadrons and one Army Air Corps squadron were given guard and transport duties at the secret prison, the Guardian has established. Many of the detainees were brought to the facility by snatch squads formed from Special Air Service and Special Boat Service squadrons. The abuses the soldiers and airmen say they saw included:

 Iraqi prisoners being held for prolonged periods in cells the size of large dog kennels.

 Prisoners being subjected to electric shocks.

 Prisoners being routinely hooded.

 Inmates being taken into a sound-proofed shipping container for interrogation, and emerging in a state of physical distress.

Codenamed Task Force 121, the joint US-UK special forces unit was at first deployed to detain individuals thought to have information about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Once it was realised that Saddam's regime had long since abandoned its WMD programme, TF 121 was tasked with tracking down people who might know where the deposed dictator and his loyalists would be, and then with catching al-Qaida leaders who emerged in the country after the regime collapsed.

Suspects were brought to the secret prison at Baghdad international airport, known as Camp Nama, for questioning by US military and civilian interrogators.

The methods used were so brutal that they drew condemnation not only from a US human-rights body but from a special investigator reporting to the Pentagon.

A British serviceman who served at Nama recalled: "I saw one man having his prosthetic leg being pulled off him, and being beaten about the head with it before he was thrown on to the truck."

On the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, former members of TF121 and its successor unit TF6-26 have come forward to describe the abuses they witnessed, and to state that they complained about the mistreatment of detainees.

It is unclear how many of their complaints were registered or passed up the chain of command.

A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said a search of its records did not turn up "anything specific" about complaints from British personnel at Camp Nama, or anything that substantiated such complaints. Nevertheless, the emergence of evidence of British involvement in the running of such a notorious detention facility appears to raise fresh questions about ministerial approval of operations that resulted in serious human-rights abuses.

Geoff Hoon, defence secretary at the time, insisted he had no knowledge of Camp Nama. When it was pointed out to him that the British military had provided transport services and a guard force, and had helped to detain Nama's inmates, he replied: "I've never heard of the place."

The MoD, on the other hand, repeatedly failed to address questions about ministerial approval of British operations at Camp Nama.

Nor would the department say whether ministers had been made aware of concerns about human rights abuses there.

However, one peculiarity of the way in which UK forces operated when bringing prisoners to Camp Nama suggests that ministers and senior MoD officials may have had reason to know those detainees were at risk of mistreatment.

British soldiers were almost always accompanied by a lone American soldier, who was then recorded as having captured the prisoner.

Members of the SAS and SBS were repeatedly briefed on the importance of this measure.

It was an arrangement that enabled the British government to sidestep a Geneva convention clause that would have obliged it to demand the return of any prisoner transferred to the US once it became apparent that they were not being treated in accordance with the convention.

And it consigned the prisoners to what some lawyers have described as a legal black hole.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Wiki hasn't been overly sanitised yet.

It's gung ho, but the details clearly describe an assassination squad, with direct access to the intelligence of several agencies (gathered by embedded, dedicated, CIA officers), and no meaningful political, military, intelligence or judicial oversight.

Task Force 121 is an example of the United States' 'Joint Task Force' concept of conducting special operations. TF121 is a multi-service force commanded by U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Gregory L. Trebon. The spearhead of the force is a forty-man team made up of operators from the U.S. Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, U.S. Army's Delta Force, U.S. Army's INSCOM intelligence unit, the U.S. Navy's DEVGRU, the CIA's Special Activities Division, and the U.S. Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (a.k.a. SOAR, Nightstalkers.) Other Special Operations contributions will include U.S. Air Force Combat Controllers, and U.S. Air Force Pararescue. On occasions, operators from Coalition nations (particularly Canadian, British, Australian and Polish operators) augment the TF121 and provide direct and indirect operational assistance.
Contents

1 Deployment
1.1 Mission
1.2 Achievements
2 Detainee abuse
3 Cultural references
4 See also
5 References
5.1 Bibliography

Deployment

TF121 is a combination of the now defunct Task Force 5 and Task Force 20, which operated in Afghanistan and Iraq respectively. Acting on the apparent logistic redundancy of keeping two separate task force teams for Iraq and Afghanistan, General John Abizaid decided to combine both teams into a single streamlined force, forming the TF121.[1]

As TF-20, this task force was composed of United States Army Special Forces, Delta Force operators, commandos from the US Navy's DEVGRU and elements of SEAL Team 3, and Army Rangers from the 75th Ranger Regiment.[2]

The force was approximately 1500 soldiers with its own support capabilities.[2]

Special Operations Task Force 20's primary goal was to capture or kill "High-value targets" (HVTs), such as Iraqi Mujahideen leaders and former Ba'ath party regime members and leaders. Task Force 20 operators were directly involved in the 4 hour firefight between 101st Airborne soldiers and Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday and Qusay Hussein. The two sons were killed in the shootout. The apprehending of the most wanted man in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, in Operation Red Dawn directly involved Task Force 121 operators and members of the Army 1st Armored Division, 4th Brigade, 1/1 Cavalry Regiment (Hurricane Troop) and 4th Infantry Division.[3]

Task Force 20 was also involved in what the US military calls a tragic accident on 27 July 2003. At least three Iraqis were killed in western Baghdad's Mansour district, when US soldiers from Task Force 20 opened fire on cars that overshot a military cordon. The drivers apparently had missed the cordon when they turned into the area from an unblocked side street.[4]
Mission

TF121's primary mission is the apprehension of "High Value Targets" or HVTs: key figures in organizations involved in the War on Terror, such as Osama bin Laden, Mullah Mohammed Omar and other senior leaders of Al Qaeda, Taliban and high-ranking officials of the former Iraqi Regime.[5]

The task force has been organized in such a way that it has a close relationship with intelligence personnel (CIA operators are an integral part of the unit) and has timely and unhindered access to any relevant data gathered by intelligence assets in the area. Such an option is invaluable to any Special Operations team, and especially so to one whose primary mission is hunting elusive fugitives whose hideouts change frequently and randomly.[6]

Many TF121 groups are assigned Special Forces CIRA (Communications Intelligence Reconnaissance and Action) operators with expertise in relevant fields. These operators work closely with the intelligence agencies tied to TF121 and work to pinpoint and identify HVTs aggressively.
Achievements

On 21 July 2003, Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a firefight with TF20 operators and soldiers from 101st Airborne. On the 13 December 2003, Operation Red Dawn netted HVT #1, Saddam Hussein. After intelligence narrowed down the target to two possible locations, TF121 coordinated the raid with 600 soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team and Apache Troop 1-1 Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division.
Detainee abuse

According to an internal army investigation leaked to the Washington Post, Task Force 121 was responsible for the illegal abuse of detainees in secret interrogation facilities in Iraq.[7] In 2006, after the unit had changed its name to Task Force 6-26, a Human Rights Watch report recorded evidence of continued abuse, including beatings and waterboarding.[8]
Cultural references

Groove Games' Combat:Task Force 121[9]
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and 3 includes a top secret joint operations task force named "Task Force 141." The primary purpose of the video game's organization, as in its supposed real life counterpart, is to take on and either kill or capture high priority individuals.
The Colbert Report used Task Force 121 as an example of a "secret" task force in its television episode airing on 27 September 2010.

See also

Articles on later incarnations of the same unit, Task Force 145 and Task Force 6-26.
Good informative article on JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) http://www.specialoperations.com/Units/J...fault2.htm

References

^ Urban,Mark Task Force Black p.63
^ a b John Pike (5 August 2003). "Secret task force is spearhead in hunt for Hussein". Globalsecurity.org. Retrieved 19 May 2011.
^ Ann Scott Tyson (24 July 2003). "Anatomy of the raid on Hussein's sons". Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 17 March 2009.
^ Vivienne Walt (4 August 2003). "Bitterness Grows in Iraq Over Deaths of Civilians". Common Dreams (Boston Globe)). Retrieved 17 March 2009.
^ Urban,Mark Task Force Black p.83
^ Urban,Mark Task Force Black p.92
^ White, Josh (4 December 2004). "U.S. Generals in Iraq Were Told of Abuse Early, Inquiry Finds". The Washington Post. Retrieved 8 February 2012.
^ ""No Blood, No Foul": Soldiers' Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq". 23 July 2006. Human Rights Watch. Retrieved 8 February 2012.
^ Groove Media Inc.

[Jan Klimkowski]

And so it came to pass.

TF 121 almost certainly is TF 373.

Or its Big Sister.

They just rebranded it.

Like Union Carbide becoming Dow Chemical after slaughtering several generations of Indians.

Or IG Farben becoming BASF, Bayer and Agfa, as if we'd forget Zyklon B.

The fuckers want us to forget.

[Magda Hassan]

So, another "Task Force" in Iraq commits human rights abuses, and the politicians claim they didn't know....

Geoff Hoon, defence secretary at the time, insisted he had no knowledge of Camp Nama. When it was pointed out to him that the British military had provided transport services and a guard force, and had helped to detain Nama's inmates, he replied: "I've never heard of the place."

......

Nor would the department say whether ministers had been made aware of concerns about human rights abuses there.

......

However, one peculiarity of the way in which UK forces operated when bringing prisoners to Camp Nama suggests that ministers and senior MoD officials may have had reason to know those detainees were at risk of mistreatment.....

https://deeppoliticsforum.com/forums/sho...tish-State
Hoon should be in black hole. Some how despite knowing nothing about any thing that man collected a pay check and had a position in parliament and will receive a pension and have a comfortable retirement unlike the poor Iraqis that were murdered by the British and US military cannon fodder. I suppose it is hard to see any thing happening around you when you have your head so far up George Bush's arse that you can't see day light.

[Magda Hassan]

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/08/24/th...fghan-war/

The Afghan Diaries set off a firestorm when it revealed the suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led death squad, and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict, as Elizabeth Vos reports. 

By Elizabeth Vos
Special to Consortium News

Three months after it published the “Collateral Murder” video, WikiLeaks on July 25, 2010 released a cache of secret U.S. documents on the war in Afghanistan. It revealed the suppression of civilian casualty figures, the existence of an elite U.S.-led death squad and the covert role of Pakistan in the conflict, among other revelations. The publication of the Afghan War Diaries helped set the U.S. government on a collision course with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange that ultimately led to his arrest last month.

The war diaries were leaked by then-Army-intelligence-analyst Chelsea Manning, who had legal access to the logs via her Top Secret clearance. Manning only approached WikiLeaks, after studying the organization, following unsuccessful attempts to leak the files to The New York Times and The Washington Post.

A major controversy surrounding the Diaries’ release were allegations that operational details were made public to the Taliban’s battlefield advantage and that U.S. coalition informants’ lives were put at risk by publishing their names.

Chelsea Maning in 2017. (Vimeo)

Despite a widely-held belief that WikiLeaks carelessly publishes un-redacted documents, only 75,000 from a total of more than 92,201 internal U.S. military files related to the Afghan War (between 2004 and 2010) were ultimately published.

WikiLeaks explained that it held back so many documents because Manning had insisted on it: “We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source.”

Manning testified at her 2013 court-martial that the files were not “very sensitive” and did not report active military operations.

“As an analyst I viewed the SigActs [Significant Activities] as historical data. This event can be an improvised explosive device attack or IED, small arms fire engagement or SAF engagement with a hostile force, or any other event a specific unit documented and recorded in real time.

“In my perspective the information contained within a single SigAct or group of SigActs is not very sensitive. The events encapsulated within most SigActs involve either enemy engagements or causalities. Most of this information is publicly reported by the public affairs office … They capture what happens on a particular day in time. They are created immediately after the event, and are potentially updated over a period of hours until final version is published on the Combined Information Data Network Exchange [CIDNE].

Although SigAct reporting is sensitive at the time of their creation, their sensitivity normally dissipates within 48 to 72 hours as the information is either publicly released or the unit involved is no longer in the area and not in danger.

It is my understanding that the SigAct reports remain classified only because they are maintained within CIDNE … Everything on CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A to include SigAct reporting was treated as classified information.”

Manning testified that the data she leaked had been “sanitized” of sensitive information. She further explained in her court martial, her motive for leaking the documents. She said:

“I believe that if the general public, especially the American public, had access to the information contained within the CIDNE-I and CIDNE-A tables this could spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as [missed word] as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan.

I also believed the detailed analysis of the data over a long period of time by different sectors of society might cause society to reevaluate the need or even the desire to even to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore the complex dynamics of the people living in the effected environment everyday.”

WikiLeaks explained its reasons for publishing Manning’s material:

“The reports do not generally cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations. However when a combined operation involving regular Army units occurs, details of Army partners are often revealed.

For example a number of bloody operations carried out by Task Force 373, a secret U.S. Special Forces assassination unit, are exposed in the Diary — including a raid that lead to the death of seven children. This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.”

Significant Findings:

Covering Up Civilian Casualties

Burying Afghan civilians. (Ariana News)

The Diaries documented cover-ups and misreporting of civilian deaths. The Guardian reported that the files illustrated at least 21 separate occasions in which British troops were said to have shot or bombed Afghan civilians, including women and children. “Some casualties were accidentally caused by air strikes, but many also are said to involve British troops firing on unarmed drivers or motorcyclists who come ‘too close’ to convoys or patrols,” the newspaper reported.

“Bloody errors at civilians’ expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack,” said The Guardian.

The Diaries revealed a cover-up of civilian casualties and possible evidence of war crimes. “These detailed reports show coalition forces’ attacks on civilians, friendly fire incidents and Afghan forces attacking each other – so-called green on green,” The Guardian said.  At least 20 friendly-fire cases were reported. Assange said in a written affidavit given in 2013 that the material documented “detailed records about the deaths of nearly 20,000 people.” 

Pakistan Backing Terror Groups

Taliban in Herat, Afghanistan, 2001. (Wikipedia)

Among the significant revelations of the Afghan War Diaries is the U.S. belief in the covert roles that Pakistan has played in the war.

“More than 180 intelligence files in the war logs, most of which cannot be confirmed, detail accusations that Pakistan’s premier spy agency has been supplying, arming and training the insurgency since at least 2004,” The Guardian reported.

“Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants,” wrote The New York Times on the day the Diaries were published.

Radio Psyops

The Afghan War Diaries illustrated the implementation of U.S. and coalition-backed psyops via Afghani radio stations. 

“Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as “our journalists” and directing them in how to do their jobs.”–Yahoo News, July 27, 2015.

One June 2007 document, classified “Secret,” also describes alleged self-censorship amongst Pakistan’s media:

“Pakistan”s cable television operators report they are under continuing pressure (read “requirement”) to block news broadcasts emanating from three television news networks. Most cable networks are complying with government directives that trickled down to cable owners on June 1. On that day, all cable companies in Pakistan ceased airing ARY news, while AAJ TV became unavailable in 70 percent of the country. (Reftel.) As of 1700 local June 5, ARY was available again throughout Pakistan. We are attempting to ascertain whether the network is self-censoring”

Task Force 373

U.S. Army Special Forces soldier, left, and Afghan National Army commando scan area for enemy activity after taking fire,  Khogyani district, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, March 20, 2014. (U.S. Army photo Spc. Connor Mendez/Released)

The Afghan War Diaries described the activities of Task Force 373, a unit whose existence was unknown prior to WikiLeaks’ 2010 publication. At least 200 incidents involving Task Force 373 were reported to have been found amongst the Afghan War Diaries material.

“The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed ‘black’ unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a ‘kill or capture’ list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list,” reported the The Guardian on the day of the Diaries’ release. 

The article added: “In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”

The Huffington Post also wrote regarding Task Force 373 in the weeks following WikiLeaks’ publication of the files: “The Wikileaks data suggests that as many as 2,058 people on a secret hit list called the “Joint Prioritized Effects List” (JPEL) were considered “capture/kill” targets in Afghanistan. A total of 757 prisoners — most likely from this list — were being held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (BTIF), a U.S.-run prison on Bagram Air Base as of the end of December 2009.”

Reaction From, and Collaboration With, the Press

New York Times front page story on the Diaries.

WikiLeaks’ publication of the Afghan War Diaries was groundbreaking in that it was the first instance of WikiLeaks coordinating with major news organizations such as the The New York Times, Der Spiegel and The Guardian prior t0 publication.

Mainstream media, which since the 2016 U.S. presidential election has taken a sharply critical view of WikiLeaks and Assange, were active participants in publishing the Afghan War Diaries. WikiLeaks gave the Diaries in advance to The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel in an arrangement in which they published articles on the same day WikiLeaks made the archive public.

The Guardian described the project as a “Unique collaboration between the Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel magazine in Germany to sift the huge trove of data for material of public interest and to distribute globally this secret record of the world’s most powerful nation at war.”

Der Spiegel described the process as one of vetting the material and comparing the data with independent reports, and wrote of the consensus between the three outlets working with WikiLeaks: “The publishers were unanimous in their belief that there is a justified public interest in the material because it provides a more thorough understanding of a war that continues today after almost nine years.”

Assange at briefing releasing the Diaries.

In a 2011 interview, Assange talked about his partnerships with corporate media.  “We’ve partnered with twenty or so newspapers across the world, to increase the total impact, including by encouraging each one of these news organizations to be braver,” he said.

“It made them braver, though it did not entirely work in the case of The New York Times. For example, one of the stories we found in the Afghan War Diaries was from “Task Force 373”, a U.S. Special Forces assassination squad.

“Task Force 373 is working its way down an assassination list of some 2,000 people for Afghanistan, and the Kabul government is rather unhappy about these extrajudicial assassinations—there is no impartial procedure for putting a name on the list or for taking a name off the list. You’re not notified if you’re on the list, which is called the Joint Priority Effects List, or JPEL. It’s supposedly a kill or capture list.

“But you can see from the material that we released that about 50 percent of cases were just kill—there’s no option to “capture” when a drone drops a bomb on someone. And in some cases Task Force 373 killed innocents, including one case where they attacked a school and killed seven children and no bonafide targets, and attempted to cover the whole thing up.

“This discovery became the cover story for Der Spiegel. It became an article in The Guardian. A story was written for The New York Times by national security correspondent Eric Schmitt, and that story was killed. It did not appear in The New York Times.”

On the day of the Diaries’ publication, Assange said in a video published by The Guardian: “It is the role of good journalism to take on powerful abusers, and when powerful abusers are taken on there is always a bad reaction. So we see that controversy and we think it is good to engage in, and in this case it will show the true nature of this war.” 

The press response to the publication of the war diaries was far from uniformly positive. 

Maximilian Forte described the issue via Counterpunch: “Wikileaks seems to be depending now on individuals to privately sift through thousands of records, and then to presumably publish their findings outside of newspapers, months from now, about events that happened perhaps years ago. This is great for historians, and not so great for anti-war activists who deal in the immediate, in the present.”

However, such a sentiment dismissed the coordinated release with papers of record from three countries. Anti-war activists and artists did make use of the material, especially using data-visualization techniques.

A televised CBS report aired in the days following the release called WikiLeaks a “shadowy website.”

Reaction from The Military

According Assange’s affidavit, just three days after the July 25 publication of the Afghan War Diaries, the U.S. Department of Defense and the FBI stepped up pre-existing efforts to prosecute Assange and disable WikiLeaks.

Assange said:

“With our publication of the Afghan War Diaries and the news that WikiLeaks intended to publish hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables, U.S. government officials started an attempt to delegitimise the legal protections WikiLeaks enjoys as a publisher by casting WikiLeaks as an adversary opposed to U.S. national interests.

An article published by the Department of Defense on July 29, 2010 has since been deleted, but was retrieved via archiving services. The report states in part:

“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced he has asked the FBI to help Pentagon authorities investigate the leak of the classified documents published by WikiLeaks. Gates and Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, condemned the leak in the strongest possible manner during a Pentagon briefing here today.”

The article said, “Calling on the FBI to aid the investigation ensures that the department will have all the resources needed to investigate and assess this breach of national security, the secretary said, noting that use of the bureau ensures the investigation can go wherever it needs to go.”

In the days following the release, Michael Hayden, a former NSA director who also served as CIA chief under President George W. Bush from 2006 until 2009, called publication of the Diaries a ‘tragedy.’ 

Political Response

The Obama administration’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones called the release “a threat to national security that could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk.” 

Democratic Party Presidential candidate John Kerry called the publication of the Afghan War Diaries “unacceptable and illegal.”

In a press briefing, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that WikiLeaks represented a “very real and potential threat.”

A White House memo sent to reporters shortly after the release of the Afghan war documents was said by Assange to have stated in part: “As you report on this issue, it’s worth noting that WikiLeaks is not an objective news outlet but rather an organization that opposes U.S. policy in Afghanistan.”

The publication of the Afghan War Diaries would form a major part of the U.S. criminal investigation of Julian Assange that the Justice Department announced was underway in December 2010 and would ultimately lead to Assange’s arrest on April 11 of this year.

Elizabeth Vos is a freelance reporter and regular contributor to Consortium News. She co-hosts the #Unity4J online vigil.

This article was first published on May 9, 2019.