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UNITE! Info #158en: Kama Ado - US: "nothing happened"
[Posted: 06.12.01]

Note / Anmerkung / Note / Nota / Anmärkning:
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INTRO NOTE:

Concerning what is really taking place in the aggression by,
above all, the US imperialists against Afghanistan, "justified"
by their own atrocities against the people in the USA on 11.09,
the US military and governmental authorities are taking even
greater "care" than in the earlier and equally infamous wars
of aggression of theirs to prevent information from reaching
the public, in the USA and all over the world, and to dissemi-
nate lies about it.

One small glimpse of what *is* going on in Afghanistan now,
and has been in the last two months, and of how this is "re-
ported" or "commented on" by the US authorities, the readers
of the UK newspaper The Independent could get from an article
in the 04.12 issue of that paper. I'm reproducing that article
here, as sent by Miroslav Antic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> to the
mailing list AntiNATO [HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK] on 05.12.

End of intro note



[QUOTE:]


Published on Tuesday, December 4, 2001 in the Independent/UK

A VILLAGE IS DESTROYED. AND AMERICA SAYS NOTHING HAPPENED.
By Richard Lloyd Parry in Kama Ado, Afghanistan


The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb
at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road.
Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday
and again the following day, it was a large village with a
small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery
on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and
identical. And the village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.

        {Picture text:
        Residents of Kama Ado, Afghanistan, survey the damage
        to a house Monday, Dec. 3, 2001. Provincial officials
        brought reporters to see what they said was the de-
        struction done by U.S. bombs at Kama Ado. One resi-
        dent, Kamal Huddin, said 115 of the 300 residents were
        killed. In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm.
        John Stufflebeem told reporters he had seen no evi-
        dence to support reports of U.S. bombs striking civi-
        lian villages in the area. (AP Photo/Yola Monakhov)}

Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the
earth. The rest are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard
boxes. At the moment when nothing happened, the villagers of
Kama Ado were taking their early morning meal, before sunrise
and the beginning of the Ramadan fast. And there in the rubb-
le, dented and ripped, are tokens of the simple daily lives
they led.

A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the blast;
a collection of charred cooking pots; and the fragments of an
old-fashioned pedal-operated sewing machine. A split metal
chest contains scraps of children's clothes in cheap bright
nylon.

In another room are the only riches that these people had, six
dead cows lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And
all this is very strange because, on Saturday morning - when
American B-52s unloaded dozen of bombs that killed 115 men,
women and children - nothing happened.

We know this because the US Department of Defence told us so.
That evening, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports
of civilian casualties in eastern Afghanistan, explained that
they were not true, because the US is meticulous in selecting
only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al-
Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject
have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of
that initial decisive statement: "It just didn't happen."

So God knows what kind of a magic looking-glass I stepped
through yesterday, as I travelled out of the city of Jalalabad
along the desert road to Kama Ado. From the moment I woke up,
I was confronted with the wreckage and innocent victims of
high-altitude, hi-tech, thousand-pound nothings.

The day began at the home of Haji Zaman Gamsharik, the pro-
Western anti-Taliban mujahedin commander who is being dis-
creetly supplied and funded by the US government. The previous
day I had followed him around Jalalabad's mortuary, where
seven mutilated corpses were being laid out - mujahedin sol-
diers of Commander Zaman who had been killed when US bombs hit
the government office in which they were sleeping. And now, it
had happened again.

There they were in the back of three pick-up trucks - seven
more bloody bodies of seven more mujahedin, killed when the
guesthouse in which they were sleeping in the village of Landi
Khiel was hit by bombs at 6.30am yesterday morning.

Commander Zaman is a proud, haughty man who fought in the
mountains for years against the Soviet Union, but I've never
seen him look so vulnerable. "I sent them there myself yester-
day,'' was all he could say. "I sent them for security.''

But the commander provided us with mujahedin escorts of our
own, and we set off down the road to Landi Khiel. We found the
ruins of the office where the first lot of soldiers had died,
and the guesthouse where they perished the previous morning.
And there, in the ruins of a family house, was a small frag-
ment of nothing. It was the tail-end of a compact bomb. It
bore the words "Surface Attack Guided Missile AGM 114", and a
serial number: 232687. It was half-buried in the remains of
the straw roof of a house where three men had died: Fazil
Karim, his brother Mahmor Ghulab, and his nephew Hasiz Ullah.
"They were a family, just ordinary people," said Haji Mohammed
Nazir, the local elder who was accompanying us. "They were not
terrorists - the terrorists are in the mountains, over there."

So we drove on in the direction of the White Mountains, where
hundreds of al-Qa'ida members, and perhaps even Osama bin
Laden himself, are hiding in the Tora Bora cave complex. A
B-52 was high in the sky; a billow of black smoke was visible,
blooming out of the valley. Something, surely, was happening
over there. And then we reached the ruins of Kama Ado. Among
the pathetic remains I found only one sinister object ­ an old
leather gun holster with an ammunition belt. It is conceivable
that a handful of al-Qa'ida members had been spending the
night there, and that US targeters learnt of their presence.

But after 22 years of war, almost every Afghan home contains
some military relic, and the villagers swore they hadn't seen
Arab or Taliban fighters for a fortnight. Certainly there
could not have been enough terrorists to fill the 40 fresh
graves. One person told me a few holes contained not intact
people, but simply body parts.

We had been warned that white faces would meet an angry re-
ception in the village where nothing happened, but I encoun-
tered despair and bafflement. I had only one moment of real
fear, when an American B-52 flew overhead. We halted our con-
voy, clambered out of the cars and trotted into the fields on
either side. The plane did a slow circle; I was conscious of
electronic eyes looking down on us, the only traffic on the
road. Then, to everyone's relief, the bomber veered away.

Before we left the city, an American colleague in Jalalabad
telephoned the Pentagon and informed them of our plans to
travel to the village where nothing happened. I can't help
wondering, in these looking-glass times, what that B-52 would
have done to our convoy if that telephone call had not been
made. Perhaps nothing would have happened to me too.

© 2001 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd


[END OF QUOTE]



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