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U.S. Captain Hears Pleas for Afghan Detainee, May 24, 2009
In civilian life, Capt. Kirk Black, shown in Qarabagh, Afghanistan, is a
Baltimore SWAT officer.
GHAZNI, Afghanistan — Capt. Kirk Black, who trains the Afghan police in this impoverished province,
developed a practiced skepticism about claims of innocence during a decade as a Baltimore police officer.
But last January, when relatives of an Afghan imprisoned at the Bagram military detention center begged
him to look into the case, he agreed to listen. Eventually he became convinced that the detention was a
case of mistaken identity and put the family in touch with a lawyer.
Soon, Captain Black was facing a potential legal battle of his own. One of his senior commanders ordered
him not to discuss the case, and the military sent an officer to investigate him. Captain Black retained
military defense counsel.
The Bagram prison — where about 600 people, mostly Afghans, are being held indefinitely and without
charges — is a delicate issue for the Obama administration at a time when it is struggling to come up
with a plan for detainees in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which it intends to close.
The administration has argued that military detainees in Afghanistan may not challenge their detentions
in American courts. A federal judge ruled last month that some Bagram detainees captured outside
Afghanistan had the constitutional right of habeas corpus, citing a Supreme Court ruling. But the new
administration has appealed.
Captain Black’s involvement in the Bagram detainee’s case began in January, while the American officer
was attending a meeting of village elders and leaders. He was approached by relatives of an Afghan
named Gul Khan, who they said had been snatched by American troops in September and imprisoned
at Bagram Air Field, north of Kabul.
The military apparently believed Mr. Khan was a Taliban leader named Qari Idris. But local Afghan officials
told Captain Black it was a case of mistaken identity. Captain Black, believing that he was fulfilling a policy
of the American counterinsurgency by trying to hear out locals with grievances, applied his police training
to the evidence he heard.
“Upon speaking to multiple village elders, family members, the police chief and the subgovernor, I am
convinced that the individual in question is not the person that the government claims,” he wrote in
January to Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer he had met three years earlier during a posting
to Guantánamo. “I am a police officer in the United States, and there is a mass of evidence that this
individual does not need to be held.”
Mr. Stafford Smith, who has agreed to represent Gul Khan pro bono through Kala Khan, his brother,
and is filing a writ of habeas corpus in federal court, provided a copy of the correspondence.
It is impossible to be certain that Mr. Khan has no ties to the Taliban, who have been known to threaten
villagers to lobby for captured fighters’ release. In a case last year, such efforts led to the pardon of
an insurgent leader from northwest Afghanistan who immediately took up arms and killed a dozen
members of the Afghan forces; he was killed by an American airstrike in February.
But in Waghez, the Khan family’s home district in Ghazni Province, officials and elders have rallied to
Mr. Khan’s defense and say the Taliban have not pressed anyone to help him. The district police chief,
Mohammed Juma, says the Khans are poor, nomadic shepherds. “Qari Idris is a different person than
Gul Khan,” he said. “I have proven that Gul Khan is innocent.”
The subgovernor, Abdul Azim, said Qari Idris was probably in Pakistan, where Taliban fighters have
refuge. Mr. Khan “is not working with the Taliban,” Mr. Azim said, adding that two dozen village
elders had signed a petition seeking his release.
Captain Black, 36, who grew up in the Detroit suburbs and attended college in Michigan, joined the
Baltimore police force in 1999. He eventually became a member of its SWAT team. In 2006 he was
deployed to Guantánamo as an Army National Guard officer. “When I got there, I’ll admit I basically
believed everyone there was a terrorist and we had every right to be holding them,” he said. “But
as I learned more about the system, I learned that quite a few of them were just swept up in the
initial invasion.”
He also said he and some fellow officers grew to fear that harmless or innocent detainees were locked
away alongside hard-core jihadists and were vulnerable to conversion. Late last year, Captain Black
was sent to Ghazni Province. He and his fellow officers said they soon ran into limits on how much
they could accomplish. The biggest frustration: provincial government and police officials so steeped in
corruption that they seemed to knock the Americans back every time they tried to take a step forward.
Hearing out Mr. Khan’s family, which had the support of police and other village leaders, struck Captain
Black as a way to build trust and show that the military would look into complaints of wrongful incarceration.
Mr. Khan was detained in September, as he was riding a motorcycle near Ghazni City, 80 miles southwest
of Kabul. He was on his way to meet his brother and help bring livestock to their village when he ran into
Yar Mohammed, a friend and relative, Mr. Mohammed recalled.
Suddenly, five helicopters swooped down. Men in one copter opened fire, Mr. Mohammed said, and bullets
struck the dirt a few feet away. Americans with rifles and helmets leapt out, he said. A translator ordered
the two Afghans to take off their long, flowing shirts, hold their hands up and walk backward toward the
troops. “They beat me very badly, covered my head with a bag and tied my hands,” Mr. Mohammed said.
Flown away, he said, he was eventually locked in a roughly six-feet-square cell with a blanket, a mattress
and a Koran, with the lights always on and a ventilation fan rattling above. Though his nose was broken
during his capture, Mr. Mohammed said he later received medical treatment and was not beaten or
subjected to any “bad behavior” during twice-daily interrogations.
“They asked, ‘Have you seen Taliban?’ and ‘Are you cooperating with the Taliban?’ ” Mr. Mohammed said.
He replied that neither he nor Mr. Khan was. After three weeks, he said, he was taken to a military base
in Sharana, southeast of Ghazni, and released. “Don’t look back,” he said his captors told him. He said
he had not seen Mr. Khan since the day the helicopters swooped down. American military officials in
Washington and Afghanistan either declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries about
Mr. Mohammed’s detention.
Kala Khan said he was able to talk to his brother for 20 minutes in late February, over an Internet video link
provided for Bagram prisoners’ relatives by the Kabul office of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Gul Khan said that interrogators kept showing him a picture of Qari Idris and demanding that he admit it was
a picture of him, his brother said.
“If you find somebody who says he is Qari Idris and that he was working for the Taliban,” Kala Khan said,
“then you can put all my relatives in jail and you can hang all of us.” In March, Captain Black said, he was
ordered by a commander several rungs above him to “toe the party line” and not discuss Mr. Khan’s guilt
or innocence. He was also ordered not to allow two journalists who visited his base to accompany him on
routine trips to Waghez.
A few days later, as part of an official military investigation, a more senior officer unexpectedly arrived
at Captain Black’s base to question him about conversations with Mr. Khan’s family and with this reporter.
The investigating officer also sought a sworn statement from this reporter, who declined.
A military spokesman in Kabul did not respond to questions about why the decision was made to investigate
the captain — or whether he would be punished. American military officials in Afghanistan and Washington
also declined to comment about evidence against Mr. Khan. One official would say only that all Bagram
prisoners were classified as “an imminent danger to the lives of U.S. service members.”
Citing his orders, Captain Black declined to comment about specifics of Mr. Khan’s case. But in an interview
before those orders were issued, he said he was mindful of the danger of incarcerating someone who might
be innocent. “Lock a guy down for 22 hours a day,” he said, “and you are creating a criminal.”
In civilian life, Capt. Kirk Black, shown in Qarabagh, Afghanistan, is a
Baltimore SWAT officer.
GHAZNI, Afghanistan — Capt. Kirk Black, who trains the Afghan police in this impoverished province,
developed a practiced skepticism about claims of innocence during a decade as a Baltimore police officer.
But last January, when relatives of an Afghan imprisoned at the Bagram military detention center begged
him to look into the case, he agreed to listen. Eventually he became convinced that the detention was a
case of mistaken identity and put the family in touch with a lawyer.
Soon, Captain Black was facing a potential legal battle of his own. One of his senior commanders ordered
him not to discuss the case, and the military sent an officer to investigate him. Captain Black retained
military defense counsel.
The Bagram prison — where about 600 people, mostly Afghans, are being held indefinitely and without
charges — is a delicate issue for the Obama administration at a time when it is struggling to come up
with a plan for detainees in the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which it intends to close.
The administration has argued that military detainees in Afghanistan may not challenge their detentions
in American courts. A federal judge ruled last month that some Bagram detainees captured outside
Afghanistan had the constitutional right of habeas corpus, citing a Supreme Court ruling. But the new
administration has appealed.
Captain Black’s involvement in the Bagram detainee’s case began in January, while the American officer
was attending a meeting of village elders and leaders. He was approached by relatives of an Afghan
named Gul Khan, who they said had been snatched by American troops in September and imprisoned
at Bagram Air Field, north of Kabul.
The military apparently believed Mr. Khan was a Taliban leader named Qari Idris. But local Afghan officials
told Captain Black it was a case of mistaken identity. Captain Black, believing that he was fulfilling a policy
of the American counterinsurgency by trying to hear out locals with grievances, applied his police training
to the evidence he heard.
“Upon speaking to multiple village elders, family members, the police chief and the subgovernor, I am
convinced that the individual in question is not the person that the government claims,” he wrote in
January to Clive Stafford Smith, a human rights lawyer he had met three years earlier during a posting
to Guantánamo. “I am a police officer in the United States, and there is a mass of evidence that this
individual does not need to be held.”
Mr. Stafford Smith, who has agreed to represent Gul Khan pro bono through Kala Khan, his brother,
and is filing a writ of habeas corpus in federal court, provided a copy of the correspondence.
It is impossible to be certain that Mr. Khan has no ties to the Taliban, who have been known to threaten
villagers to lobby for captured fighters’ release. In a case last year, such efforts led to the pardon of
an insurgent leader from northwest Afghanistan who immediately took up arms and killed a dozen
members of the Afghan forces; he was killed by an American airstrike in February.
But in Waghez, the Khan family’s home district in Ghazni Province, officials and elders have rallied to
Mr. Khan’s defense and say the Taliban have not pressed anyone to help him. The district police chief,
Mohammed Juma, says the Khans are poor, nomadic shepherds. “Qari Idris is a different person than
Gul Khan,” he said. “I have proven that Gul Khan is innocent.”
The subgovernor, Abdul Azim, said Qari Idris was probably in Pakistan, where Taliban fighters have
refuge. Mr. Khan “is not working with the Taliban,” Mr. Azim said, adding that two dozen village
elders had signed a petition seeking his release.
Captain Black, 36, who grew up in the Detroit suburbs and attended college in Michigan, joined the
Baltimore police force in 1999. He eventually became a member of its SWAT team. In 2006 he was
deployed to Guantánamo as an Army National Guard officer. “When I got there, I’ll admit I basically
believed everyone there was a terrorist and we had every right to be holding them,” he said. “But
as I learned more about the system, I learned that quite a few of them were just swept up in the
initial invasion.”
He also said he and some fellow officers grew to fear that harmless or innocent detainees were locked
away alongside hard-core jihadists and were vulnerable to conversion. Late last year, Captain Black
was sent to Ghazni Province. He and his fellow officers said they soon ran into limits on how much
they could accomplish. The biggest frustration: provincial government and police officials so steeped in
corruption that they seemed to knock the Americans back every time they tried to take a step forward.
Hearing out Mr. Khan’s family, which had the support of police and other village leaders, struck Captain
Black as a way to build trust and show that the military would look into complaints of wrongful incarceration.
Mr. Khan was detained in September, as he was riding a motorcycle near Ghazni City, 80 miles southwest
of Kabul. He was on his way to meet his brother and help bring livestock to their village when he ran into
Yar Mohammed, a friend and relative, Mr. Mohammed recalled.
Suddenly, five helicopters swooped down. Men in one copter opened fire, Mr. Mohammed said, and bullets
struck the dirt a few feet away. Americans with rifles and helmets leapt out, he said. A translator ordered
the two Afghans to take off their long, flowing shirts, hold their hands up and walk backward toward the
troops. “They beat me very badly, covered my head with a bag and tied my hands,” Mr. Mohammed said.
Flown away, he said, he was eventually locked in a roughly six-feet-square cell with a blanket, a mattress
and a Koran, with the lights always on and a ventilation fan rattling above. Though his nose was broken
during his capture, Mr. Mohammed said he later received medical treatment and was not beaten or
subjected to any “bad behavior” during twice-daily interrogations.
“They asked, ‘Have you seen Taliban?’ and ‘Are you cooperating with the Taliban?’ ” Mr. Mohammed said.
He replied that neither he nor Mr. Khan was. After three weeks, he said, he was taken to a military base
in Sharana, southeast of Ghazni, and released. “Don’t look back,” he said his captors told him. He said
he had not seen Mr. Khan since the day the helicopters swooped down. American military officials in
Washington and Afghanistan either declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries about
Mr. Mohammed’s detention.
Kala Khan said he was able to talk to his brother for 20 minutes in late February, over an Internet video link
provided for Bagram prisoners’ relatives by the Kabul office of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Gul Khan said that interrogators kept showing him a picture of Qari Idris and demanding that he admit it was
a picture of him, his brother said.
“If you find somebody who says he is Qari Idris and that he was working for the Taliban,” Kala Khan said,
“then you can put all my relatives in jail and you can hang all of us.” In March, Captain Black said, he was
ordered by a commander several rungs above him to “toe the party line” and not discuss Mr. Khan’s guilt
or innocence. He was also ordered not to allow two journalists who visited his base to accompany him on
routine trips to Waghez.
A few days later, as part of an official military investigation, a more senior officer unexpectedly arrived
at Captain Black’s base to question him about conversations with Mr. Khan’s family and with this reporter.
The investigating officer also sought a sworn statement from this reporter, who declined.
A military spokesman in Kabul did not respond to questions about why the decision was made to investigate
the captain — or whether he would be punished. American military officials in Afghanistan and Washington
also declined to comment about evidence against Mr. Khan. One official would say only that all Bagram
prisoners were classified as “an imminent danger to the lives of U.S. service members.”
Citing his orders, Captain Black declined to comment about specifics of Mr. Khan’s case. But in an interview
before those orders were issued, he said he was mindful of the danger of incarcerating someone who might
be innocent. “Lock a guy down for 22 hours a day,” he said, “and you are creating a criminal.”
