If you’re looking for pieces on Jack Idema and his team, please click on this link.

Karzai’s National Army made history today; they turned their guns on and shot at American soldiers, killing two, injuring 7 others. The Americans were killed and wounded while they were in the midst of transferring Gitmo prisoners to Pulacharke.

Original painting by Ghulam M. Shabnam, compliments of Soj from Flogging the Simian whose Jack Idema bashing blog seems to have been miraculously pulled from the ash heap of internet history.

Update May 7: Stand by

See this map of pulacharke and this map of the Gitmo plans.
I can’t get them re-sized so you can read them, unfortunately.

Idema, as you can see, is housed in a relatively different area than the rest, and it is known (and was even broadcast at Flogging the Simian) - as the “political prisoner” area of the prison. (I’m also looking for verification of this because things might have changed between 2004 when Soj put up that post and May of 2007) His Red Cross ID card identifies him as a political prisoner, you can see a copy of it, and his being identified on the prison roster as a political prisoner, here.

What I want to concentrate on here is how Pulacharke is laid out, and where Chaar block is; the block where the Al Q terrorists are going to be transferred to.

For the sake of conversation, if you follow the green line, you’ll see “Block 4″ or “Block-e-Chaar”. It is also known as “Block-e-Jinaa’e” (Criminals Block) because this is where most “regular” criminals are housed. These would be your thieves, robbers, etc. as opposed to the “political” prisoners.

Soon, that block will be loaded with Al Qaeda members transferred from Gitmo, because it’s stood empty awaiting their arrival for months now.

The US has spent 7 million dollars to build Chaar Block at Pulacharke. The Americans have been building that block in Afghanistan in order to move prisoners from Gitmo to Pulacharke, with the goal of rendering them in Afghanistan, outside the jurisdiction of American law and the U.S. Justice System. It made little sense to move them from Afghanistan when the terrorists were captured on the battlefield in that country. The Gitmo detainees caught in the battlefield [except for a few exceptions] a) are not American citizens b) are al Qaeda terrorists and/or operatives and c) they have good intelligence we should get from them about Al Qaeda, its structure, who they reported to, intel on funding, and getting the names of others so we can capture more.

The problem was, as some see it, that the FBI and the lawyers defending the terrorists didn’t want to go through the trouble and expense of flying to Kabul from Washington, or Washington to Kabul, because it was a long [and dangerous] flight. The FBI and the DOJ insisted that a prison for them was established closer in proximity to the United States, which is why they have them housed at Guatanamo Bay, Cuba.

This was purely a convenience to the people in involved, not out of necessity.

They established camp X-Ray - but there were a lot of terrorists; too many to send there. So, in order accomplish this feat, they released thousands of terrorists and kept the worst ones at Gitmo. This is purely for the convenience of the Americans, so they could fly back and forth from Washington to Guantanamo Bay early in the week, and then return home on a Friday night. But the scrutiny from journalists, leftist organizations and legal pleadings from the supreme court and the calls to shut down Gitmo, put them in a position where they were forced to look at an alternative. So, they hired an Afghan construction company to rebuild Char block at Pulacharke, under the guise of reconstructing the block as a drug block, or a narcotics block. It was the “anti-narcotics block”. That wasn’t true; it was actually for the return of the Gitmo detainees.

Char Block at Pulacharke was empty all this time - for 18 full months after being finished. The reason for this was - the Northern Alliance weren’t going to allow America to bring Al Qaeda to Pulacharke while Jack Idema was still at Pulacharke. Jack should have been gone months ago, but he’s not. So the American government started bringing them in, the first group, to my understanding, or one of the first groups, according to my sources, was brought there today.

The guards for Chaar block are not the same as the guards for the rest of Pulacharke, or the guards who are guarding Jack Idema, who are our former allies, from the Northern Alliance; Massoud’s mujahideen. The guards to oversee the Al Qaeda terrorists are instead from Karzai’s well-paid and supposedly well-trained Afghan National Army. They’re paid infinitely more than the Ministry of Justice, or the UFMF. They’re the highest paid soldiers in Central Asia. They’re paid 10 times the rate of a ministry of interior soldier.

But this is inconsequential to the story, it just gives you a little bit of background.

Today, the Americans transferred Al Qaeda terrorist killers to Pulacharke to Chaar block. The National Army, we don’t know why, then turned around and aimed their guns on the Americans who were performing the transfer and tried to kill them all. A Colonel and a Sergeant are dead, and seven five are wounded. Karzai’s fancy National Army shot and ran. The Northern Alliance or UFMF soldiers guarding the wall, were able to contain the Al Qaeda terrorists, otherwise they would have escaped, too. (confirmed at Centcom’s website [thanks Jo], although the numbers don’t appear to jibe)

Karzai’s pashtun national army - turned their guns on Americans today. The Americans were armored up with machine guns and pistols, and they are dead. It seems to me that you shouldn’t send a kid in to do a man’s job, or an amateur to do a professional’s job, this kind of thing is going to happen. I feel bad for their families, but…the American military and/or DOJ and the rest ought to learn a serious lesson from all of this.

Have the UFMF ever turned their guns on Americans? Have Massoud’s mujahideen ever turned around and started shooting at the people they were fighting alongside during the 2001/2002 war? Perhaps the American government ought to really consider what it is they’ve done when they turned their backs on our former allies and decided to support a president in Afghanistan who has no qualms about extending an olive branch to the Taliban, and releases terrorists in ‘amnesty’ agreements.

But then, the American government itself released many of these dangerous terrorists in order to decrease their numbers, so they could accommodate them at Guantanamo Bay, and pacify the lawyers and others who would be shuttling back and forth.

This info is from SF in Kabul and a few others, who are and have become completely reliable sources for news coming out of Afghanistan and breaking news out of Afghanistan over the last few years. The ludicrous position that Americans were put in today would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. The deaths of any soldier is tragic, but soldiers who are not trained and not experienced enough to realize the nuances of life in Afghanistan are going to face some harsh realities. Just as in the case of Michael Spann, I don’t think they should have been put in such a precarious and dangerous position. Trusting Karzai’s national army is a terrible mistake that could cost you your life; they are pashtun, and some believe that the word ‘pashtun’ is synonymous for ‘taliban’.

We can look back to just a few days ago when Karzai warned that the ‘deaths of civilians’ must end.

Reuters Kabul, May 3: President Hamid Karzai warned yesterday that Afghan patience was wearing thin over the killing of civilians by Western forces hunting Taliban fighters.

Karzai said further deaths would lead to bad consequences.

(Emphasis mine.) Perhaps his National Army sent us today a followup to that message.

Should we be trusting, knowing what we know of today’s incident, the Afghan National Army with Al Qaeda prisoners at Pulacharke? Should we be trusting that they will not shoot at American soldiers, ISAF, NATO, or others? These are questions I hope the powers-that-be are asking.

Note: Pol-i-charkhi has a number of spellings, but news reports of Gitmo detainees being transferred at some point to Pol-i-charkhi that I could google up last year are completely gone.

Here are a few of them:

Voice of America (story of the Taleban escaping Pulacharke in January of 2006)

Afghan officials say they expect the United States to soon transfer at least 100 suspected Taleban militants from the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Afghanistan - although no specific dates have been given.

Fox News (same story about the Taleban escaping Pulacharke in January)

The breakout comes as authorities are refurbishing part of the prison to improve security ahead of the return of Afghan terror suspects being held in U.S. military custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The U.S. and the Afghan government said in August that Afghans held at Guantanamo and elsewhere would be sent back to Afghanistan, but didn’t say when.
….

Hundreds of detainees were classified as “enemy combatants” and transferred to Guantanamo, while others were detained at Policharki, or at a large detention facility at Bagram, the U.S. military’s headquarters north of Kabul.