By Nick Turse, TomDispatch
This piece first appeared at TomDisaptch. Read Tom
Engelhardt’s introduction here.
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| The National Guard (CC BY 2.0) |
There are hundreds, possibly thousands of U.S.
personnel—the military refuses to say how many—stationed in the ochre-tinted
country of Qatar. Out in the searing heat of the desert, they fly fighter
jets or fix them. They equip and arm troops headed to war.
Some work in a high-tech command-and-control center overseeing U.S. air operations in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and elsewhere in the Greater Middle East. Yet I found myself
sitting in a hotel room in Doha, Qatar’s capital, about 30 miles east of
al-Udeid Air Base, the main U.S. installation in the country, unable to see,
let alone talk, to any of them.
In mid-May, weeks before my arrival in Qatar, I sent a
request to the public affairs office at the base to arrange a visit with the
379th Air Expeditionary Wing, the unit that, according to the military, carries
out a “critical combat mission that spans nearly 6,000 miles from the Horn of
Africa to Northern Afghanistan.” Or at least I tried to. Day or
night, weekday or weekend, the website refused to deliver my message.
Finally, I dug up an alternate email address and sent in my request. Days
passed with no word, without even an acknowledgement. I followed up yet
again and finally received a reply—and then it began.
The initial response came on May 28th from the Media
Operations Chief at Air Forces Central Command Public Affairs. She told
me that I needed to contact the 379th Air Expeditionary Wing’s Public Affairs
liaison, Captain Angela Webb, directly. So I repeatedly wrote to Captain
Webb. No response. On June 10th, I received an email from Susan
Harrington. She was, she told me, “taking over” for Captain Webb.
Unfortunately, she added, it was now far too close to my arrival in Qatar to
arrange a visit. “Due to time constraints,” she wrote me, “I do not think
it will be possible to support this request since we are likely already within
that 30 day window.”
Don’t think I was surprised. By now, I’m used to
it. Whether I’m trying to figure out what the U.S. military is doing in
Latin America or Africa, Afghanistan or Qatar, the response is remarkably
uniform —obstruction and obfuscation, hurdles and hindrances. In
short, the good old-fashioned military runaround. I had hoped to take a
walk around al-Udeid Air Base, perhaps get a glimpse of the jumbotron-sized
screens and rows of computers in its Combined Air and Space Operations
Center. I wanted to learn how the drawdown in Afghanistan was affecting
life on the base.
Instead, I ended up sitting in the climate-controlled
comfort of my hotel room, staring at a cloudless sky, typing these words behind
double-paned glass that shielded me from the 106 degree heat outside. For
my trouble, on my return to the United States, I was detained at Kennedy
Airport in New York by agents of the Department of Homeland Security.
Their question for me: Was I planning to fight against U.S. forces in
Afghanistan?
Base Desires in Africa
If you are an American citizen, you’re really not
supposed to know about operations at al-Udeid Air Base. The men and women
there on your dime can’t even “mention the base name or host nation name in any
unsecured communications.” Instead, they’re instructed to say that they
are at an “undisclosed location in Southwest Asia” instead of “the Deid,” as
they call it.
It isn’t the only base that the Pentagon wants to keep in
the shadows. You’re also not supposed to know how many bases the U.S.
military currently has in Africa. I learned that the hard way. As a
start, let me say that, officially speaking, there is only a single U.S.
facility on the entire continent that the military formally calls a “base”:
Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, a tiny nation in the Horn of Africa. U.S.
Africa Command (AFRICOM) is adamant about this and takes great
pains to emphasize it. Internally, however, they do admit that
they also have forward operating sites (aka “enduring locations”), contingency
security locations (which troops periodically rotate in and out of), and
contingency locations (which are used only during ongoing operations).
But don’t try to get an official list of these or even a simple count—unless
you’re ready for the old-fashioned runaround.
In May 2012, I made the mistake of requesting a list of
all facilities used by the U.S. military in Africa broken down by
country. Nicole Dalrymple of AFRICOM’s Public Affairs Office told me the
command would look into it and would be in touch. I never heard from her
again. In June, Pat Barnes, AFRICOM’s Public Affairs liaison at the
Pentagon, shot down my request, admitting only that the U.S. military had a “a
small and temporary presence of personnel” at “several locations in Africa.”
Due to “force protection” issues, he assured me, he could not tell me “where
our folks are located and what facilities they use.”
That July, with sparing assistance from AFRICOM, I published an article on “Secret Wars, Secret
Bases, and the Pentagon’s ‘New Spice Route’ in Africa,” in which I attempted to
shed light on a growing U.S. military presence on that continent. This
included a previously ignored logistics network set up to service U.S. military operations, with
critical nodes in Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe
in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South
Sudan; and Dire Dawa in Ethiopia. I also drew attention to posts,
airports, and other facilities used by Americans in Arba Minch in Ethiopia,
Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean.
U.S. Africa Command took great exception to this.
Colonel Tom Davis, their director of public affairs, wrote a detailed,
irritated response. I replied
to him and once the dust had settled, I asked him for, among other information,
a full listing of what he called “temporary facilities” as well as all other
outposts, camps, warehouses, supply depots, and anything else that might be
used by U.S. personnel in Africa. He ignored my request. I followed
up. Four days later, AFRICOM spokesman Eric Elliott emailed to say
Colonel Davis was on leave, but added, “Let me see what I can give you in
response to your request for a complete list of facilities. There will
[be] some limits on the details we can provide because of the scope of the
request.”
Were there ever!
That was August 2012. For
months, I heard nothing. Not an apology for the wait, not a request for
more time. A follow-up in late October was ignored. A note in early
November was finally answered by still another AFRICOM spokesman, Lieutenant
Commander Dave Hecht, who said he was now on the case and
would get back to me with an update by the end of the week. You won’t be
shocked to learn that the weekend came and went without a word. I sent
another follow up. On November 16th, Hecht finally responded: “All
questions now have answers. I just need the boss to review before I can
release. I hope to have them to you by mid next week.”
Take a guess what happened next.
Nada. Further emails went unanswered. It was December before Hecht
replied: “All questions have been answered but are still being reviewed
for release. Hopefully this week I can send everything your way.”
He didn’t.
In January 2013, answers to some
other questions of mine finally arrived, but nothing on my request for
information on U.S. bases. By now, Hecht, too, had disappeared and I was
passed off to AFRICOM’s chief of media engagement, Benjamin Benson. When
I asked about the ignored questions, he responded that my request “exceed[ed]
the scope of this command’s activities, and of what we are resourced to
research and provide under the Public Affairs program.” I should instead
file a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In other
words, I should begin what was guaranteed to be another endlessly drawn-out
process.
I was, shall we say,
irritated. Somehow, it had taken six months to get me nothing and send me
elsewhere—and somehow neither Colonel Davis, nor Eric Elliott, nor Dave Hecht
had realized this. I said as much to Benson. He wrote back:
“Lastly, you state, ‘I’ve been led astray for the better part of a year and
intend to write about it’, which of course is your right to do in our free
society. We expect that as a professional, you convey the correct facts, and
ask that you note that we did research, and provide answers to the questions
you posed.”
Well, here you go, Ben. Duly noted.
But of course, the “correct facts” are that neither Benson nor anyone else at
AFRICOM ever provided answers to the crucial basing questions I posed.
And Benson continues not to provide them to this very day.
When we last spoke by telephone,
several weeks ago, I reiterated that I understood he couldn’t offer me a list
of the locations of American bases in Africa due to “security of operations,”
so all I now wanted was a simple count of facilities in Africa. “That’s
tricky. We have teams coming in and out of Africa to different locations
all the time,” he replied. “Places that they might be, the range of possible
locations can get really big, but can provide a really skewed image of where we
are… versus other places where we have ongoing operations. So, in terms
of providing number, I’d be at a loss of how to quantify this.”
It seemed easy enough to me: just
count them and include the necessary disclaimers. So I asked if AFRICOM
kept a count of where its troops were located. They did. So what
was the problem? He launched into a monologue about the difficulty of
ascertaining just what truly constituted “a location” and then told me: “We
don’t have a way that we really count locations.”
It couldn’t have been clearer by
then. They had a count of all locations, but couldn’t count them.
They had lists of where all U.S. troops in Africa were based, but not a list of
bases. It was a classic runaround in action.
The First Casualty
And don’t think that was the worst of it. The most
dismissive response I’ve gotten recently from anyone whose salary we pay to
keep us (nominally) informed about the U.S. military came from Marco
Villalobos, the FOIA manager of U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), responsible
for Central America and South America.
Last year, reports surfaced of civilians killed during operations conducted or overseen by U.S.
personnel in Honduras. In at least one instance, the Honduran Air Force shot down a civilian plane thanks in part, it
seems, to intelligence provided by SOUTHCOM. Since the U.S. military is
heavily involved in operations across Latin America, I requested records
relating to civilian casualties resulting from all operations in the
region.
That was in July 2012. In February 2013, I got a
peculiar response from Villalobos, one I’ve never seen otherwise in hundreds of
replies to FOIA requests that I’ve ever received from various government
agencies. He didn’t say there were no such records. He didn’t tell
me that I had contacted the wrong agency or bureau. Instead, he directed
me to the United Nations Statistics Division for the relevant data.
The trouble is, the U.N. Statistics Division (UNSD)
doesn’t collate U.S. military data nor is it devoted to tracking civilian
casualties. Instead it provides breakdowns of big datasets, like the Food
and Agriculture Organization’s figures on how many hectares of apricots were
harvested in Afghanistan in 2007 (3,400) or the prevalence rate of
contraceptive use for women ages 15 to 49 in Uganda in 2005 (19.7%).
I was surprised to say the least. And I wasn’t
alone. When I checked in with the U.N., the Statistics Division wrote
back: “could you please forward us the email you received from SOUTHCOM in
which they suggest UNSD as a source, so we can contact them if they continue to
give our address out in response to such inquiries which don’t pertain to our
work.”
So I called Villalobos to complain. It wasn’t his
fault, he quickly assured me. The decision had been made, he claimed, by
the director of personnel. I asked for his name, but Villalobos refused
to give it: “He’s not a public person.”
That’s the nature of the runaround. Months later,
you find yourself back in the same informational cul-de-sac. And when it
comes to the U.S. military, it happens again and again and again. I had a
similar experience trying to embed with U.S. units in Afghanistan. I was
rebuffed repeatedly for reasons that seemed spurious to me. As a result,
however, a never-used Afghan visa for that trip sits unstamped in my passport—which
brings me back to my recent trip to Qatar.
The American Taliban?
In the airport upon returning to the United States, I was
singled out by a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent. He directed me to a
“girl” at a far counter. When I got there, I was admonished by her for
being in the wrong place. Finally, I was sent to see a third CBP officer
at a different workstation. Think of it as the runaround before the
runaround.
This agent proceeded to question me about the contents of
my bag, pulled out my papers and began reading them. She also wanted to
know about my profession. I said I was a writer. What did I write
about? National security issues, I told her. She asked what I
thought about national security and the role of the U.S. military in the
world. In my estimation, I said, it tended to result in unforeseen
consequences. “Like what?” she asked. So I described my most recent article on blowback from U.S.
military efforts in Africa.
“I do,” I
replied.
“What are the titles?”
“The latest one is called Kill Anything That Moves.”
“Kill what?”
“Kill Anything That Moves.”
She turned to her computer, promptly Googled the book,
went to the Amazon page, and began scrolling through the customer
reviews. She asked if my book was, as the page said, a New York Times
bestseller. I assured her it was. After a short while, she told me
to stay put and disappeared into a back room with my personal papers—writings,
notes, reading materials. When she returned, she told me that she
couldn’t conduct the rest of my “examination” in public. She would have
to bring me “back.” I asked if there was a problem. No. Could
I have my papers back? The answer was again no.
I was soon deposited in “Area 23” of New York’s John F.
Kennedy International Airport and I was definitely the odd one out. Not
that there weren’t plenty of other people there. The Muslim man in the taqiyah.
Three women in head scarves. Another wearing a niqab.
Everyone’s skin color was at least several shades darker than mine.
I waited for a while, taking notes, before my name was
called by an Officer Mott. The badge on his shirt made that clear, but he
spelled it out for me anyway. “It seems like you’re taking notes on
everything, so I might as well get that out of the way,” Mott said visibly
perturbed, especially when I asked for his full name. “I’m not giving you my first
name,” he said with palpable disgust.
Like the previous CBP agent, he also asked about my
writing interests. I told him it mostly centered on U.S. foreign
policy.
“Are you for or against it?”
“Am I for foreign policy?” I asked.
“Well, I’m reading that your last book is Kill
Anything That Moves. That was about what?”
“The Vietnam War.”
“What about the Vietnam War?”
“Civilian casualties.”
“Sensitive topic,” he said.
“Especially for the Vietnamese,” I replied.
“Well, in this day and age with the whole war going on,
that’s a sensitive issue you’re writing about… Do you get any heat or
problems writing about war and civilian casualties?”
“It comes with the territory,” I told him.
As he typed away at his computer, I asked why I was
singled out. “I think because some of the material you have is of interest…
What you’re writing, traveling with.” I asked how they would know what
was in my bag before I was detained. “Why the officer stopped you is
beyond me, but what the officer discovered is something of interest, especially
for national security… It’s not every day you see someone traveling with
information like this.”
It was probably true. The contents of my bag were
splayed out before us. The most prominent and substantive document was
“Qatar: Background and U.S. Relations,” a report prepared last year by the U.S.
Congressional Research Service.
Agent Mott rifled through my papers, tapped at his
keyboard some more, breathed in deeply and then launched into a series of
questions designed to make sure, he told me, that nothing “jeopardizes our
national security.”
“How long have you been writing about wars and things
like that?”
“About 10 years.”
He did a double take, looked at my passport, and typed
feverishly. “I thought you were younger,” he told me. I took it as
a compliment. He wanted to know if I’d traveled anywhere in the last five
years as he flipped through my passport, filled as it is with visas and entry
and exit stamps from around the world. The answer was obviously
yes. “Pakistan? Afghanistan?” he asked.
Immediately, I thought of the unused Afghan visa in my
passport and started to explain. After instructing me to get a visa, the
U.S. military had strung me along for months before deciding I couldn’t embed
with certain units I requested, I told him.
“Doing journalistic stuff, not fighting with them or
anything like that?”
Fighting? Was I really being accused of heading to
Afghanistan to join the Taliban? Or maybe plotting to launch an insider
attack? Was I really being questioned about this on the basis of having
an Afghan visa and writing about national security issues? “Nope.
I’m a writer,” I told him. “I cover the U.S. military, so I was going to cover
the U.S. military.”
Agent Mott seemed satisfied
enough. He finished his questions and sent me on my way.
The next morning, I checked my
email, and found a message waiting for me. It was from the Media Embed
Chief in Afghanistan. “You are receiving this email because in the past
you have been an embed with ISAF [International Security Force in Afghanistan]
or requested an embed,” it read. “Your opinion and satisfaction are
important to us.”
“You can’t make this shit up,” an
old editor of mine was fond of saying when truth—as it so often does—proves
stranger than fiction. This sequence of events certainly qualified.
I could hardly believe my eyes, but there it was: a link to a questionnaire
about how well served I was by my (nonexistent) 2012 embed in
Afghanistan. Question number six asked: “During your embed(s) did you get
the information and stories you require? If no please state why.”
Let me count the ways.
Nick Turse is the managing editor of
TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation
Institute. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author
most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.
You can catch his conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here. His website is NickTurse.com.
You can follow him on Tumblr and on Facebook.
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Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy
Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
