" I knew people died because of what I did, but I needed the money"

[dixiegrrrrl]

the confession of a Pakistani youth who was paid by our government to place homing devices
in Taliban houses so drones could locate and bomb them.

"19 year-old Habibur Rehman made a videotaped “confession” of planting such devices, just before he was executed by the Taliban as an American spy.
“I was given $122 to drop chips wrapped in cigarette paper at Al Qaeda and Taliban houses,” he said. If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars.”

But Rehman says he didn’t just tag jihadists with the devices.
“The money was good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money,” he added.

Which raises the possibility that the unmanned aircraft — America’s key weapons in its covert war on Pakistan’s jihadists and insurgents — may have been lead to the wrong targets."

The homing/spy devices are about as big as double A battery.
See article about how they are used to locate and target drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And how innocent people become the targets.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/spy-chips-guiding-cia-drone-strikes-locals-say/#ixzz0mVd37tk5


and see accompanying article which points out the CIA is operating the drones:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/drone-pilots-could-be-tried-for-war-crimes-law-prof-says/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29#ixzz0mUe9gcqX

[no limit]

1. Well this confession was forced out of him. Not sure if it's very reliable

though I wouldn't be shocked if it were true and I think this type of thing was documented before.

[Turbineguy]

2. He could have

had a successful career on Wall Street if this is true.

[dogday]

3. Or the Insurance companies for that matter

killing indiscriminately for the money. Reminds me of the Insurance Companies.

[superduperfarleft]

10. Or the military. n/t

[Llewlladdwr]

26. Yeah, all us military types are just mad dog killers. NT

[Toots]

44. What is the "Spirit of the Bayonet"

:shrug:

[The Damned]

33. BANG!

You nailed it!

[NeedleCast]

4. I'm sure that confessions made at gunpoint are valid

[RaleighNCDUer]

5. OTOH, if you know they're going to kill you anyway, why lie? nt

[NeedleCast]

6. Because there are ways to die and some are a lot more painful than others

This was a Taliban tactic we heard about a lot in Afghanistan. Confess to a crime (even if you weren't guilty) and you'll be granted a quick death. Say anything else and they kill you nice and slow...and maybe kill a few family members too.

Not saying this is what happened, but we're talking about the Taliban after all.

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. OK, there is that, but do you think the Taliban would really push a

false confession that exonerated the US for mistaken targeting of civilians, putting all the blame on the kid? The US drones were bombing what they believed to be legitimate targets, and the confession makes it clear it was NOT the fault of the US (except in instituting the 'pay for target' deal in the first place). I don't see what the Taliban would gain by it.

[glitch]

9. Imposing the death sentence for entire families based on the judgment of a paid kid

doesn't exactly absolve the US.

[RaleighNCDUer]

12. Hello? He was told to mark legitimate targets. The drones attacked

the marked targets. The drones, the US forces, did NOT mark the targets. It was NOT a matter of spy-eyes misidentifying a target. If the kid didn't mark them, they would not be hit.

The civilians were killed by the kid's targeting them. The US forces had no reason to believe they were not legitimate targets. The US was not 'imposing a death sentence for entire families' - it was attacking targeted enemies.

Was it a stupid program, and a fucked up operation? Of course. The difference is, the US forces thought they were doing the right thing, while the kid knew he was doing the wrong thing.

Intent counts. The most the Taliban can make of this is as an example of American stupidity, not American malice.

[glitch]

25. Stupid, or war crime? FYI collective punishment on civilians = war crime.

Oh, and hello! :hi:

edit: and for intent to even kind of work you have to prove due diligence. How likely is that with paid to target? Take your time, think about it.

[RaleighNCDUer]

32. It is NOT collective punishment if they thought it was a LEGITIMATE TARGET.

If they KNEW they were targeting innocent civilians, THAT is collective punishment and a war crime.

It may be a stupid war, but the people over there are NOT stupid - they know that deliberatly targeting civilians is counter-productive.

And you CAN have proper intent WITHOUT having 'due diligence' - after all, if the target is in the middle of Taliban territory and no troops are going to get with 30 miles of the target, just how the fuck are they going to exercise 'due diligence'? They HAVE to trust that their agents are legit. They did not INTEND to bomb civilians. They INTENDED to bomb Taliban. Their tactics are fucked up and they trusted the wrong guy, but their INTENT was on the level.

Maybe you need to look up 'intent' in the dictionary, and then YOU think about it.

[MUAD_DIB]

17. I don't see what the Taliban would gain by it....

For starters the Taliban would get publicity out of it.

"Deal with the west and you will die."

[RaleighNCDUer]

23. Of course they gain by the execution, and the public terror it causes, to

keep people from working with the Americans - but if they wanted a false confession they'd have the kid confess to targeting civilians at the US request, putting the onus on the occupation instead of on the kid. They wouldn't even have to come up with a 'why' - simply saying "they told me to" would be more than sufficient to rally people against the occupation.

Look, I'm not defending the operation. I'm simply saying there is no reason to believe it is a false confession. The kid orchestrated the killing of civilians for his own profit, and the Americans obliged him. That's bad enough.

[MUAD_DIB]

29. You should have stopped after...

"Of course they gain by the execution, and the public terror it causes, to keep people from working with the Americans..."


That's it in a nutshell.

[RaleighNCDUer]

31. Are you being deliberately stupid?

The claim was that it was a FALSE CONFESSION. This so-called false confession took blame OFF the Americans and put it on a 'renegade' Pakistani. His admission was that he did it for greed. That makes him a common criminal and takes it OUT of the realm of politics and resistance to occupation - therefore it does NOT help the Taliban in ANY way - IF it was a false confession.

Logic, then, (ever hear of it) takes us to it being a TRUE confession. Which was the ONLY fucking point I was making.

[axollot]

53. Exactly. Plus why would the Taliban care if it wasn't hurting them too?

It is possible they forced this kid to say something? Yes - everyone knows confessions under duress are dubious at best. I think the US through the drone attacks have hurt the Taliban tho.
We need reliable people on the ground, not paid kids to act like spies. If not - then time to gtfo.

Cheers
Sandy

[NeedleCast]

22. I'm addressing that US forcers are paying people to run around marking targets

Because it seems like a fantasically bad idea, and not just for the one that may have happened in the OP.

I'm not saying the military isn't capable of fantastically bad ideas though.

[RaleighNCDUer]

34. I absolutely agree, it is a very bad idea - particularly when a similar

program of paying for living, breathing AQ and Taliban wound up putting hundreds of innocents in prison while those who turned them in collected the bounty. I'm just saying there is no reason to doubt the validity of the kid's confession, particularly as it did, in a way, exonerate the Americans from the bombing of civilians, making HIM responsible for targeting random innocents. Ultimately, the Americans are responsible for setting up a fundamentally flawed system ripe for abuse - but any individual incident should be properly pinned on the guy who told them where to aim the bombs when there was no way to verify the legitimacy of the target.

[JoeyT]

39. Which would be a lot easier to act morally superior about

if we hadn't done more or less the same thing.
Except the killing part. We just kept on torturing people regardless of what they confessed to.

[MUAD_DIB]

14. Or if you though they might let you live, or they tortured you, then you'd

say anything they wanted you to.

Example: GITMO.

[RaleighNCDUer]

24. Then for propaganda purposes they have him put ALL the blame on the US -

making up crap like "I was told to do it or my father would be sent to Gitmo".

He confessed to targeting non-targets for his own profit. That makes him a thief, a murderer, and a collaborator, and the blame is centered on him, not on the US. This actually does help exonerate the US, because if someone was wondering why his family home was hit by the Americans he might have been thinking it was because of American imperialism hitting targets at random, and now he knows it was a deliberate act by a greedy kid.

[MUAD_DIB]

28. There's no such thing as bad propaganda.

And the Taliban kills another that they can tag as an agent of the US.

[RaleighNCDUer]

37. Bullshit. Think it through. Civilian X over there is incensed that the

Americans bombed his family home for no reason. Then this comes out, and he finds out there WAS a reason - some kid pointed out his house to collect a bounty. His house would have never been bombed if not for the kid. Now, instead of a generalized rage against the Americans, which the Taliban can use and work with, he has a focused rage against this one kid, which the Taliban CANNOT use as it falls back into tribal, clan, village vendetta territory. Civilian X is far more likely to seek out the kid's family for revenge than the Americans who paid the kid - he knows that the Americans were simply being used by the kid as an ATM.

And, propaganda that doesn't work is BAD propaganda. Propaganda that is so ineffective that it shows the propagandist to be a fool is BAD propaganda. OF COURSE there is such a thing as bad propaganda.

[Johonny]

51. well didn't we just go through about a million posts on how accurate

confessions done under torture are? Are you arguing Cheney and Bush did the right thing? Because countless studies say the confessions they obtained were worthless. I'm sorry if I doubt this story given how the information was obtained, but all the proof seems to lie on the side of not believing information given under torture.

[Johonny]

50. sshhhh people want to believe.

I mean we always accept these confessions when it's our own soldiers right?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

8. Our humanitarian CIA would never resort to such things. Just look at their record...oh, wait.

[dixiegrrrrl]

16. No one seems to notice or care that it is the CIA doing the killing

by controlling drones.
I guess I should be happy we have dispensed with the pretense that the CIA was not actively
engaged in anything like that.

I guess.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

19. Tom Clancy has his followers on DU.

You know, those CIA killers, are really nice guys with wives and kiddies and puppies.

[miscsoc]

11. if he did actually put the devices in innocent peoples homes for cash

he's a full blown murderer.

have no idea how likely it is that he actually did though

[AnArmyVeteran]

13. Did he come from Wall Street? They do anything to make money too.

No difference in targeting people to be blown up and destroying the financial lives of people resulting in death because they have no jobs or health insurance.

[jtrockville]

18. My first thought when I read the OP title: ENRON

[Uncle Joe]

15. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, dixiegrrrrl.

[dixiegrrrrl]

30. You are welcome, Joe.

Some people do seem to be missing the point, tho.

In Iraq, the US paid a bounty for "terrorists".
They ended up with a lot of admittedly innocent people who were turned in for the bounty.
Few years later, lots of news stories about that oops.

So, having no apparent learning curve, run the same game in Afghanistan.

" No one could have foreseen...."

[Greyhound]

20. "Nobody could've predicted..."

How pathetic. Military Intelligence is still an oxymoron.
:kick: & R

[Robb]

21. Except for that's not how the targeting works, it's a good story. nt

[druidity33]

41. how DOES it work then? nt.

[Robb]

42. Depends on the munition

...but in general either active radar homing or forward looking infrared guidance. The days of needing a homing beacon or painting a target with a laser are long gone, especially with a boutique weapons platform like the Predators and Reapers.

That said, the notion that anyone could plant a chip in your pocket that would follow you around, biding its time until BAM! you get hit? Were I running things, I'd spend exactly zero time trying to dispel the notion, and even play it up in-theater. Paranoia is a powerful weapon with secretive groups, especially with often-conflicting goals.

Not that I know anything about this kind of stuff. :D

[druidity33]

43. but why not?

"The days of needing a homing beacon or painting a target with a laser are long gone, especially with a boutique weapons platform like the Predators and Reapers."

We still use grenades, right? Maybe painting targets this way is cheaper? Maybe we don't have enough Intelligence on the ground to paint our own targets? I think if they could employ this technique in an array of techniques in the "WOT", they would. So, why wouldn't they?

:shrug:

[Robb]

45. Well, yes, we could drop grenades from Predators.

But there's no advantage to doing so, and it wouldn't work very well. On the other, there's no indication the drone strike program is particularly concerned about budget.

AdFLIR doesn't need assets on the ground, you might be surprised at how clear the images have become in the last 20 years. Remember the guy on the bridge during Desert Storm? Imagine being able to read the date on a coin in his hand, while traveling 5 times the speed of sound. Wouldn't that be something. Missile tech hasn't stood still.

Anyhow, the homing beacon thing an interesting notion, like I said, from a "spook the bad guys" perspective. Any additional time they spend being sneaky they aren't spending planning or attacking, IMO.

[druidity33]

47. just because

we can see what kind of coin someone is holding, doesn't mean we know if he's a "bad guy". Our HUMINT on the ground is WOEFULLY inadequate. What good is having precise targeting capabilities when you can't figure out who to strike? And obviously, i wasn't saying we'd be throwing grenades from Predators. I was saying just because a technology is old, doesn't mean it is useless.

[Robb]

52. First off

Our intelligence in the area we're talking about is very good, head and shoulders above the Afghanistan conflict. Information in that area is relatively easy to come by, because they're used to not worrying about who knows they're there.

We know exactly who the "bad guys" are in North and South Waziristan. Hell, I know who they are. Waliur Rehman, Mullah Nazir, Baitullah Mehsud, the Haqqani network guys, Hafiz Gul Bahadar, Abu Kasha. We have pictures in the public sphere of probably 80% of the Tehrik-i-Taliban leadership that hangs out there, I think we can safely assume the CIA has more and better ones. The public know where most bases are, and when the CIA thinks big fish are home, they hit them.

The "drone" program is the source of much moral dilemma, as it should be, but it can't be argued against from a failure/success standpoint, because it's successful. Just over a thousand militants killed in 5 years by it, and less than 100 are even claimed to be civilians by the locals or whoever. We don't have that good a record in any other program at the moment, nothing near.

A picture is worth a thousand words, and 10-year-old missiles take amazing pictures. To say nothing of whatever's mounted on the front of Reapers these days taking a look before the missile is fired.

I'm not saying it's impossible some homing technology is being employed, I'm just saying it's really, really unlikely. I'll put it another way: CIA pilots tend to fly the latest and greatest, and the President himself ramped up the operational tempo of this program. I would expect whatever's being flown and fired is better than I think.

Sorry, long-winded answer. Short: I don't put much stock in this story, but I like that it's spreading.

[geardaddy]

27. The title sounds like an episode of * on Taxicab Confessions. n/t

[proteus_lives]

35. Not surprising. This is what intelligence agencies do.

CIA does it, MI6 does it, MSS does it, DGSE does it, Mossad does it, ISI does it, FSB does it.

It's how the game is played. The CIA is paying people to do things, the Taliban/Al Qaeda is paying people to do things.

[Hannah Bell]

36. " I knew people died because of what I did, but I needed the money"

could come from the lips of most big business & political leaders

[Incitatus]

38. Just like the same shit that happened with Abu Ghraib

[KG]

40. unlike those bloodthirsty taliban, americans are justified in killing innocent civilians

:eyes:

[Nuclear Unicorn]

46. To Those Equating Acts of War to Wall Street: Enough

I'm no fan of Wall Street. The sooner this country has single-payer healthcare, fair wages, open unionization, civil rights for all Americans the sooner we can all feel proud.

But trading stocks IS NOT the moral equivalent of fire bombing people or decapitating people. They may deserve to be put out of business but they aren't the same as people who partake in wholesale violence.

If Wall Street brokers are the same as the Taliban than 9/11 was jsutified and I am not prepared to say that no matter how much I believe there is economic injustice still to overcome. I still remember people leaping to their deaths rather than being burnt alive in the towers.

War is an ugly dirty business. The OP proves it. The war we are fighting now should be ended. They stay in their home and we stay in ours.

But this sick idea that stock brokers and insurance actuaries might as well be incinerating and dismembering people is insane. It'd be absolutely devastating to lose a home do to medical expenses but it's better than having the door to that home kicked in and watching your family be raped and murdered before they saw through your throat.

[The Stranger]

48. Random murders.

This smacks of the Khmer Rouge-type madness.

[closeupready]

49. What's the big deal? These aren't real people we're talking about; they're

brown/muslim/terrorists, or would be if they had the chance, I'm sure. :sarcasm:

[Larry Ogg]

54. If you knew what the genesis of evil was, who would you blame?

How the smart bombs and drones got to their targets is not as important as too why, especially when the crime is precipitated or the results of another crime and then another etc… It’s like a crime within a crime within a crime! For instance, I wont mention any names but, a prominent politician basically once said that she would put impeachment on the table if someone could show her that the unelected occupant of the White House did something wrong, and going on she said, “the reasons we went into war was based on a false premise” (aka a big fat lie); but I guess that wasn’t reason enough to hold someone accountable.

So now we have as a result of this big fat lie, devastated countries, millions of dead, homeless refugees, orphans and let’s not forget the psychopaths out to make a quick buck by becoming somebody’s hero.

Eventually you get to a story about some stupid 19 year old sociopath who was executed for allegedly getting paid by some psychopath serial killer that works for the CIA; his job was to place homing devices around the homes of the alleged enemy and other boogie men. Then eventually we get to the point as to who needs to be blamed when a bunch of, maybe millions of innocent people who are unable to defend themselves are killed by the smart bombs, bullets and drones that fall like rain.

And now, as we ask ourselves who needs to be blamed, shouldn’t we be looking at the big picture? And maybe we should ask what changes in recent history would have prevented these smart bombs and drones falling in the first place? Or do we just spend our time deciding on some singular event far removed from the original crime that started it all?

One last thing! When you find the genesis of evil, i.e. where it all started, don’t be surprised to find but a handful of very rich and powerful pathological liars and predators just out for a little fun and profit as they hide their sorry asses behind the ideologies of both church and state, of the which will never - even when there is just cause – hold these sorry fucks accountable…

Who do you blame?

[tblue37]

55. Many of the prisoners held in Gitmo are innocent people who were denounced or turned over to

US forces by people (often warlords) who had a grudge against them or who wanted to collect th bounty that was paid for turning over people for imprisonment.