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October 21, 2005

So what's really going on. . . (The Interview with Stephen Dupont)

NOTE: If you are new to this story, you may or may not wish to refer to THIS POST FIRST and then return to this one, but be warned the story is complex and confusing, so if you're looking for easy reading, just stay here.

SUGGESTION: I would recommend that you read the entire article first and then go back through and use the audio and video clips. I think that would be the easiest way to follow this rather complex story.

The purpose of this post is to add to an explanation of what the REAL STORY is with regard to why two Taliban soldiers bodiers were burned in Afghanistan as mentioned in this article and this article, reported by two individuals embedded with an American Airborne unit in Afghanistan. The story orignally "broke" on the Australian program, Dateline. The Dateline piece (which you can view a video clip of HERE (requires Realplayer)) consists of an interview between the show's host and Stephen Dupont, one of the embedded reporters who captured video of the incident. The interview is about 6 minutes long and is a one on one exchange to discuss footage that Dupont took outside the village of Gonbaz, Afghanistan.

We don't know ALOT of "details" about the operation, at this point we are merely analyzing the "Burning Bodies" incident with the broad and small strokes available, but this is what SEEMS to be clear and accurate:

1) Airborne forces had an engagement with Taliban forces on the approximate date of September 30. In this engagement 2 Taliban we're killed. The Taliban corpses were in close proximity to the American airborne unit's position.

2) Additional Taliban forces were "holed up" in the village, hiding amongst a civilian population. The Airborne soldiers had the situation in hand and probably held a perimeter around the village.

3) 24 hours or so after the Taliban were killed, the decision was made to burn the Taliban bodies for hygiene reasons by the Airborne forces on the scene. The Airborne forces burned the bodies and Stephen Dupont there and took video footage of the burning of the Taliban corpses.

4) Later, a Psychological Operations group arrived on the scene. This PsyOps group proceeded to conduct psychological operations against the Taliban forces inside the village with the intent to "Smoke em out" (Dupont's Words) and force the Taliban to come out of the village and attack the Airborne soldiers and PsyOps unit.

5) The methods used to draw out the Taliban forces were VERBAL IN NATURE. The PsyOps operatives used megaphones to broadcast into the village, and the wording of these messages included defamatory statements to the Taliban soldier's honor and statements were made that the burning of the dead Taliban soldiers' bodies took place while they were facing West (toward Mecca).

Now we'll pause for a minute and look at the words of Stephen Dupont. I've got three audio clips from the interview and I've transcribed them to the best of my ability. There might be some slight differences in the transcript due to accents and mumbling, but I think that if you read the transcripts first, then listen to the clips and read along again, you'll find them very close.

Audio Clip 1 - The Different Views (MPG format)
This clip deals with how the two different groups of soldiers viewed the burning of the bodies. It needs to be noted that only the Airborne unit actually took part in burning the bodies, and they did so for hygiene purposes. Now, later (we don't know how long at this time, but LATER), a PsyOps unit arrived in the battlespace. This audio clip from the Dateline broadcast is the Interviewer and Stephen Dupont discussing why the bodies were burnt and how later, the PsyOps unit used the event in their broadcasts via loudspeaker to the hold-out Taliban forces in the village.

The Transcript -

Interviewer: Do you think they understand the significance of what they were doing? I mean the burning of the bodies, pointing towards Mecca, and then actually going to the trouble of reading, to you, in English, the deliberately provocative stuff that they were shouting across the valley to the Taliban

Stephen Dupont: Look, I think the, Airborne unit that were responsible with burning of the two Taliban soldiers, weren’t really thinking in that way. I think that the Psychological Operations unit that did the broadcast, of the incident with the Taliban including some of other broadcasts, ther. .they’re. . I think they are quite well aware of it, these are older guys, I mean that’s their job, they are PsyOps, ya know, they use this as a weapon.

Remember that Stephen Dupont was on the scene, he's there, embedded with these Airborne troops and filming this event. He says quite plainly that the Airborne troops DID NOT view the burning of the bodies as part of the Psychological Warfare. In a little bit we'll see how the Airborne troops did view the burning of the corpses.

We also see that the PsyOps group, in the opinion of Stephen Dupont, who was also on the scene for the later psychological operation, did INTEND to use statements designed to imply that the burning of the bodies was to desecreate them, to humiliate the Taliban soldiers taking refuge in the village. The PsyOps troops are not playing patty-cake here and Dupont realized this. Dupont admits that the PsyOps groups understood that their role was to inflict MENTAL STRESS on the holed up Taliban fighters with the INTENT to provoke them into coming out and fighting the Airborne troops guarding the perimeter. Dupont recognizes that PsyOps is a weapon of war.

Now lets move on to the second clip.

Audio Clip 2 - Two speparate groups (MPG format)
This clip shows how there were two separte groups, the Airborne and the PsyOps, both acting in different roles within the battlespace. Dupont describes what the Airborne troops reasoning was for burning the bodies, and points out that they were not intent on desecration. He also discusses the actions of the PsyOps operatives and their reasons for STATING to the Taliban in the village, that the corpses were desecrated. I identify the Airborne unit in brackets as [Airborne] merely for clarification between the two separate groups.

Transcript

Interviewer: What you seem, what you seem to be saying is that the guys [Airborne] who burned the bodies probably did think that they were doing it for the reasons of hygiene, that tha was mentioned in the story. . .

Stephen Dupont: I believe that and tha was the feeling I got when I climbed up this hill and as I got to the crest of this hill, they [Airborne] started burning the bodies, and of course my initial reaction was, ya know like, my god, I’ve got to film this, this is really important stuff, and uh I’ve gotta I’ve got a, you know, inaudible, it’s my responsibility as a journalist to get some of it. . .

Interviewer: But PsyOps had a different purpose?

Stephen Dupont: I believe so, I think these guys, were, were really kinda, you know they, they said, they said to me, look you know, we’ve been told to burn the bodies, because the bodies have been here for 24 hours and they’re starting to stink, so for hygiene purposes, this is what we’ve gotta do. Later on, when I was down with the Psy Ops operation people, um they used that as a sort of psychological um you know warfare, I guess, you’d call it, they used that fact the Taliban were burned facing West, as they say in the the announcement. . . .

Interviewer: Now would you deliberately say it again to humilack, the Taliban. . .

Stephen Dupont: They deliberately they deliberately wanted to incite that much anger from the Taliban so the Taliban could attack them.

Interviewer: Smoke em out

Stephen Dupont: Smoke em out. They want the Taliban to fight them because they can’t find them otherwise.

So now things are becoming clearer. Stephen says that he does believe that the Airborne unit was burning the corpses of the two Taliban soldiers for hygenic purposes. We can get into rotting corpses later, but for our purposes here, lets keep it simple. The Airborne troops were ordered by their officers in the field to burn the corpses because they had been in the elements for 24 hours and were beginning to smell. Stephen recognizes that this was the intent of the Airborne troops, and it WAS NOT the intent of the Airborne troops to desecrate the bodies. As we'll see a little later, the corpses were NOT placed deliberately facing West (toward Mecca) and that the corpses were merely burned for hygenic purposes.

Now in this clip Dupont also goes into the role and scripting of the PsyOps unit a bit. Dupont recognized again that the purpose of the PsyOps unit is to conduct psychological warfare against the Taliban fighters in the village. Dupont states that for the purposes of the announcements into the village, the PsyOps "used the fact" that they were facing West. Dupont admits that tht PsyOps operatives were intentionally tring to incite anger in the Taliban so that they would come out and fight. That the goal of the announcements by the PsyOps operatives was to "Smoke em out". Note that "used the fact" is a turn of phrase, and does not necessarily mean that the corpses were actually "in fact" facing West, as we'll get into later.

Before we make any conclusions here, lets finish up with the third clip.

Audio Clip 3 - Is Psy Ops Working? (MPG format)

Transcript

Interviewer: Do you think that the Psychological War is working?

Stephen Dupont: Look, I, I think it’s having some, success, I do believe. I think it’s very very slow. But I think there is a certain amount of success, because they are engaging with the enemy, as in, The Taliban. The Americans are, using this, um, you know, psychological warfare, to announce, to make announcements to get the enemy to fight them. It is working on that level. And they are being attacked and so they are responding and they are taking prisoners of war, and so forth. So in the eyes of the Americans and the coalition there is a sense that things are working but it’s very very slow.

Now here we see that Dupont feels that the Psychological Operations are in fact, working. If you view the entire clip (available again HERE (Realplayer Required), you hear more about why Dupont thinks are going slow. He talks about "thousands of caves" and a place that is "like the moon" and talks for a while about the difficulty of finding the Taliban who do not wear uniforms and the Interviewer suggests are like "ghosts". What's at issue in this part though is NOT how fast or slow the war is going, but rather if the actions of American soldiers involved in this event were intailing the desecration of Muslim corpses, or to effectively prosecute a war against and enemy who:

1) Hides among an civilian population in a Village, and
2) Must be drawn out of this civilian population in order to engage and defeat the enemy with as little collateral damage to the village and villagers, who in this case are mostly, if not completely different.

The BIG issue at stake in this latest bruhaha over the burning of Taliban corpses is the tactics that were used to draw the enemy out so that they can be engaged and destroyed, or possibly captured as prisoners of war. It needs to be made clear here that war is not necessarily a spectator sport. To overuse a phrase, "War is HELL!" and warriors need to bring all the force they can to bear against their enemy in order to affect victory over the objective and opposing forces. No one in their right mind would honestly suggest that using loudspeakers and "implying" that desecration of corpses has been done is a "nice" thing to do. However, as Dupont admits, it is working to draw the enemy out so they can be engaged.

I'd suppose that there were alternatives to using the PsyOps operatives to engage the enemy. After all, the Airborne troops that had the Taliban cornered COULD HAVE simply leveled the village. That course of action would have led to the deaths of the villagers, and I think that the commanders on the field should be commended for not opting for that option to deal with the situation.

The troops could have entered the village and searched for the Taliban fighters door to door. They wouldn't be wearing a uniform and would be difficult to identify. A Taliban soldier might hide among a scared population or opted to ambush the American soldiers when they entered the village. This might result in unnecessary American or civilian casualties when a firefight breaks out in the village, and again, this is not the most desirable option.

So what was the decision in the field? The decision was made to engage the Taliban hold-outs using PsyOps techniques. The descision was made to broadcast messages into the town designed to provoke a rage in the enemy, so that he might recklessly engage the American forces and so doing, make a critical tactical mistake, allowing the Americans to defeat the enemy and minimize civilian and American casualties. It seems, that according to Dupont who was on the scene, that this option was the one that the commanders in the field decided to use. Dupont admits that PsyOps are effective if slow, but effective nonetheless.

Now lets just talk straight for a second, and be honest about it. Are the statements the PsyOps operatives used in their announcements "offensive"? Probably. . . and they are designed to be so. The "intent" is to drive the enemy into a rage so they flush themselves out. So harsh words are used, and mean things are said. The intent is to anger the enemy, and the best way in the eyes of the PsyOps opeatives to do that was to insult the Taliban hold-outs in the village. To deman their manhood and bravery, to call them "ladies" and to tease them. The PsyOps operatives also TOLD the Taliban hold-outs that their comrades had been desecrated, that their bodies had been burned while facing West so that they could not enter paradise. IN REALITY HOWEVER, neither the PsyOps, nor the Airborne troops actually desecrated the bodies. They merely made statements that they did. The bodies were not desecrated, they were burned for hygenic purposes, to stop the smell that distracted the American soldiers, and to prevent the spread of possible natural, yet harmful biologic (bacterial and other) agents that would spread into the air around the corpses, could be carried by insects or other pests or could possibly cause other health risks to the soldiers who were preparing to settle in for a bout of blasting insults and rock music into the village via loudspeakers. There was no way for the commanders on the ground to know whether the Audible Siege would last an hour, and evening, a day or a week, but the PsyOps operation was going to move forward. Having rotting corpses lying around your position while the troops awaited the emergence of the Taliban holdouts was not a good idea. You can hear in Duponts statements that the terrain is rugged and burial was probably not a viable option and would waste valuable resources unnecessarily. So the decision was made by the commander of the Airborne unit to burn the bodies in place. If you look at the situation through the eyes of the commander in the field, that was probably the best, if not the most tasteful, descision to make given the circumstances.

Now as I understand it, and I could be wrong, so I'll ask fellow bloggers for a little help here, but it is my belief that when enemy combatant dead are encountered on the field, every reasonable effort should be made to handle the dead with respect to the enemy culture first, and when such accomodation cannot be made, that the burning of corpses for hygenic purposes is acceptable under the Geneva Convention. We should not expect our forces in the field to become undertakers in the middle of a battle, and we should not expect them to work around rotting corpses when a hygenic alternative is available. So we could beat that horse all day, and maybe I'll address that issue in another post, but for this particular post, the intent is to clarify the events, and dispell the myths and untruths that are spreading like wildfire through groups opposed to the war or through the agitation of the media.

The troops that burned the two Taliban corpses DID NOT do so to desecrate the remains of the dead, the burning of the corpses was a hygenic move and NOT a part of the PsyOps plan. The PsyOps operatives did not even participate, nor did they order the desecration of corpses. A commander in the field, presumably the Airborne commander, did order that the corpses be dealt with so that the troops could continue their mission, which was to defeat the enemy. Which is exactly why we put our military in the field, to defeat an enemy. That's what they did. It wasn't pretty, but war rarely is. The psychological weapons employed were strong, and rightly so. When you engage an enemy, your goal is to win the battle, not to make the combat, whether it be physical or mental, fun, or even palatable.

Psychological warfare is an accepted part of war. In comparison to carpetbombing or artillery strikes, it even seems preferable. Civilian casualties are minimized and your enemy fights from a weakened position. Those are both objectives sought by any battlefield commander and that's exactly what occured in this case.

There will be more to come but I'll part with this image.

Now I'm not an expert and I don't pretend to be, I'm just a humble blogger following the evidence as it shows itself, but I do recognize something about this picture that is relevant. It is my belief that the corpse in this picture is NOT facing west. Judging solely by the relationship of the body on the ground and the shadows in the picture, it is my estimation that this body is aligned more on a north-south axis rather than an east-west axis. If other bloggers can offer more definative evidence to support this, please leave a comment or a trackback and I will include it wherever applicable in future posts.

More to come. . . [LATEST UPDATE TO THIS STORY IS HERE.]

--Jason

UPDATE: New post on John Martinkus

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Posted by JasonColeman at October 21, 2005 1:00 AM

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference So what's really going on. . . (The Interview with Stephen Dupont):

» The Interview with Stephen Dupont (embedded journalist) from Theodore's World
Jason has transcribed the interview with the embedded journalist, Steven Dupont. "Stephen says that he does believe that the Airborne unit was burning the corpses of the two Taliban soldiers for hygenic purposes. We can get into rotting corpses later,... [Read More]

Tracked on October 21, 2005 9:51 AM

» Burning Taliban from euphoricreality.net
*************scroll down for updates*************** If this situation goes any further at all, I feel a war comin’ on (Pantano style)… Report Of U.S. Burning Bodies Investigated The U.S. military said such abuse would be “repugna... [Read More]

Tracked on October 22, 2005 12:44 AM

» Taliban cries like beaten dogs over “body desecration” from Cao's Blog
Ok, we have four contractors set on fire in their car, their burned bodies dragged out on camera, one of whom was dragged through the streets of Fallujah. See this video of the terrorists burning the contractors in Fallujah. Then, the perpetrato... [Read More]

Tracked on October 22, 2005 10:50 AM

» They Have No Right To Whine from BIG DOG's WEBLOG
We have heard about the American soldiers who burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters. The man who filmed it has stated that the locals refused to bury the bodies and that they were bloated and stinking so they were burned for sanitation reasons. ... [Read More]

Tracked on October 22, 2005 11:29 PM

» Believe What You Want To Believe–But Be Aware from Chapomatic
One commenter asked me to discuss the Afghanistan burning bodies thing and I demurred. Another brought it up and made some assumptions. Apparently the most useful assumption to make is to wait a few days and see what the correction on page A-12 turn... [Read More]

Tracked on October 23, 2005 10:52 AM

» Burning Bodies Redux from Tough Talk with Colonel Hunt
OK, time to get this one right. Being in combat is very difficult; being in guerilla war is so much worse. There are no battle lines, the bad guys never have uniforms, they seldom stand and fight, they cheat, they cut off your heads, they burn and hang... [Read More]

Tracked on October 23, 2005 2:39 PM

» The Interview with Stephen Dupont (embedded journalist) from Theodore's World
Jason has transcribed the interview with the embedded journalist, Steven Dupont. "Stephen says that he does believe that the Airborne unit was burning the corpses of the two Taliban soldiers for hygenic purposes. We can get into rotting corpses later,... [Read More]

Tracked on February 12, 2006 10:49 AM

Comments

Posted by: Wild Thing at October 21, 2005 10:03 AM

Posted by: joanjett at October 22, 2005 7:22 AM

Posted by: Redhead Infidel at October 25, 2005 9:01 AM

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