The outrageous case involving three American mercenaries in the imprisonment and torture of Afghans in their own country took an interesting turn on Wednesday when a Kabul court announced its judgement. The trio, a former Green Beret, Jonathan Idema; another ex-serviceman, Brent Bennett; and a documentary filmmaker, Edward Caraballo, were found guilty of running a private jail and illegally detaining and torturing Afghan men, and were awarded eight to ten years of imprisonment.
At least eight Afghan prisoners were recovered from the house where these American mercenaries were arrested after a shoot-out with the security forces.
Idema sought to make a point when he appeared in the court wearing Special Forces style dress - complete with sunglasses and a scarf as well as a US flag pinned to his right shoulder-insisting that the group was in Afghanistan with the approval of the US and Afghan governments to help track down Osama bin Laden, and his Taleban associates. It seems that his story is true, and he and his companions were actually bounty hunters who had set out to catch the world's most wanted man, with the backing of their government, for a reward of $25 million.
The trial judge, however, said that the defendants had failed to provide evidence that they were working with the authorisation of the US or the Afghan government. To this Idema responded with an accusation against the FBI, saying it had withheld evidence to ensure his conviction.
Apparently, it was not what these men were doing, not even how they were doing it - imprisoning and torturing local people - that has worked against them, but the timing of it all. It happened so soon after the US had earned world-wide condemnation for prisoner abuse scandals at the infamous Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons.
Reports coming out of the US prison camp at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan threaten to bring Washington some more international condemnation.
US President George W. Bush, it may be recalled, had arrogated to himself the right, under Military Order No. 1 issued in November 2001, to detain any non-American citizen anywhere in the world for as long as he wanted. Action was soon to follow, and thousands of men were arrested from Afghanistan - mostly in exchange of $5000 bounty - Pakistan and such far off places as Bosnia and Gambia.
More than 600 men, including two teen-aged Afghan boys, have been kept in the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison camp without being formally charged with any offence; and shrouded in secrecy, they have been regularly subjected to inhuman treatment and harshest forms of physical torture in utter disregard of the Geneva Conventions.
In the meanwhile, Bush has gone on to invade and occupy another sovereign country, Iraq. Having partially privatised that war, the US Defence Department awarded a $293 million contract to a private security company, which hired mercenaries to humiliate and torture thousands of Iraqis held at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Little wonder that mercenaries like Idema felt encouraged to commit the same kind of crimes against humanity in Afghanistan, without any fear of retribution. But the photographic evidence of prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib has generated so much international as well as domestic revulsion in the US that it has become increasingly difficult for Bush's men to defend such methods.
Hence, the US government has tried to distance itself from the latest imprisonment and torture scandal in Afghanistan. An American Embassy spokesperson in Kabul said, "We feel that the Afghan government held the trial fairly and in accordance with the Afghan law." Normally, the US government would have defended its citizens against the justice system of a small chaotic country such as Afghanistan regardless of the nature of their offence. But in addition to the prisoner scandals, it is also faced with the dilemma of having to show that the government it has hoisted so painstakingly on the country is not seen as ineffectual.
Hence the expression of trust in the Afghan judicial system. It remains to be seen as to how long Washington can resist the urge to do something to overturn the outcome of the trial its spokesperson says was held fairly.