From left, UAF Chancellor Brian Rogers, journalist Willy Stern, and Mike Sfraga, UAF vice chancellor for students and UA Geography Program director, pause just before Stern's lecture at UAF on Nov. 4.Stern was embedded with the Joint Task Force 435. Delivering his lecture in a helmet and Kevlar vest, out of respect for the troops, he began by asking any military people in the audience to stand. The audience applauded the servicemen, servicewomen, and veterans. “I am humbled in the face of people who know what war is like; I’m just a journalist.”
Focusing on one person’s tale, Stern talked about Amanuela, a 26-year-old, unemployed, illiterate man in Afghanistan. “Last November he woke up, got with his buddies and went to kill coalition soldiers.”
Amanuela and his partners loaded dynamite, AK 47s, and rocket launchers onto a dirt bike and attempted to ambush U.S. soldiers. “The morning was very quiet and beautiful,” Stern said. “This is one of the most beautiful places in the world.”
The next thing on the horizon was an Apache attack helicopter. “It’s a beautiful thing,” Stern said.
Two of the Afghanis were killed, one was injured, and Amanuela had only surface injuries. “The sergeant screams ‘put down your weapons!’ There’s a language barrier here,” Stern said. With his injured buddy now also dead, only Amanuela was left. He dropped the AK 47 and raised his hands, the universal sign of surrender. The sergeant faced a decision as old as war itself: murder the surrendered enemy, let him go, or take him prisoner. “Our detentions policy kicked in and within 25 minutes a helicopter was on the ridge with medics on board. Amanuela got the same treatment our guys get.”
He was flown to a field detention site, one of nine in Afghanistan. They are in unmarked trailers that soldiers walk by all day long without realizing what is housed in the buildings.
Inside there are five cells formed from plywood, a medical room, and a space for guards. Each cell has a mat, the Koran, an arrow pointing the way to Mecca, and a sign with the Geneva Code regulations written in Pasho and Dari, the primary languages of the insurgents.
Amanuela was interviewed by a trained Special Forces investigator, and quickly gave up valuable information that could save lives of Coalition forces. “He talked because we treated him well,” Stern said. He was held there about five days before being safely transported to the U.S.’s large detention facility at Bagram Airfield, north of Kabul.
Stern switched gears, telling how in October and November of 2009 the New York Times and the Washington Post ran articles detailing alleged abuses in the secret prisons. “These stories make wonderful reading,” Stern said. “They are provocative, entertaining, gripping and, as far as I can tell, factually untrue. There is no evidence (of abuse) but two of the most respected newspapers printed this horsepucky.”
This happens in part because the insurgency is sophisticated, Stern said. “They go to the media and tell a story about abuse until they find one journalist gullible enough to run it.”
The Pentagon’s “no comment” policy is mostly to blame, Stern said. “After 9-11 the Pentagon said nobody could talk about interrogation of prisoners ever. The insurgency is using this against us.”
Stern had previously made key connections when he was in Iraq writing a story for Runner's World magazine. Those relationships proved invaluable to him getting invited to visit the secret prisons. He is the only journalist to have done so.
“We built a $60 million state-of-the-art facility at Bagram and this is where we put the killers trying to kill us,” Stern said. The prisons have 40-inch flat-screen TV’s, vocational training, a fleet of golf carts, hot water, and excellent medical care. The prisoners also get three meals a day and learn to read and write while incarcerated. “There is a commitment at the highest level of the Pentagon to treat prisoners well,” he said.
“The average stay is 24 months and the average weight gain is 36 pounds,” Stern said.
The U.S. soldiers guarding the prisoners sleep 40 to a tent and must walk 200 yards through mud and snow to get to a latrine. Other prisoners in Afghanistan—the rapists, murderers and thieves—end up in the Afghan prison system. Here they are housed 20 people to a cell with open ditches for sewage systems.
Stern estimated that 712 prisoners are being held in the Bagram facility today and that the U.S. has let some 2,500 go over time. Usually when released, prisoners are entrusted to their village elders for guidance. “We are trying to win their hearts and minds,” Stern said.
“Afghanistan is a very tribal country,” he said. “Their loyalties are intense and local.”
That Stern has been the sole journalist allowed into the prisons is a sad situation, he said. “It’s shortsightedness on the part of the Pentagon. They should allow more people in.”
Stern, who called himself “an Alaskan trapped in a Lower 48 body,” has been paddling rivers in the Brooks Range on and off for the past 20 years.
He said he would love to return to the war zone but his wife and children are, quite reasonably, not so enthusiastic about it. “There’s no more exhilarating way to spend time than with our troops, watching what they do.”
Stern closed the lecture by saying, “Here I stand, a somewhat failed and ambivalent Jew from the Lower 48 here in northern Alaska, and I’d like to say God bless America and God bless our troops.”
The lecture was sponsored by the UA Geography Program and UAF Student Services.
Further reading:
Prisons 'humane' in Afghanistan, journalist tells UAF, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, by Christopher Eshleman, Nov. 6, 2010
Stern Talk Afghani Prisons, UAF Sun Star, by JR Ancheta, Nov. 9, 2010
Video of lecture: http://www.alaska.edu/oit/cts/streaming/archive/2010/chancellor/willystern.html
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