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AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Spencer Ackerman into this conversation. You have a new piece in Zeteo headlined “He Killed for the CIA in Afghanistan. Trump Blames Afghan Culture Instead of Langley’s.” Can you elaborate?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yes. Your guests have spoken very eloquently about the betrayal and the dishonor that the collective guilt of Afghan refugees ascribed by the Trump administration for this horrific murder is having.
What we’re focusing on less is that the person — what we’re focusing on less is that the person who committed, allegedly, these crimes, Lakanwal, had a gun put in his hand when he was a child by the CIA. Apparently, when he was 14 or 15, he was brought into the Zero Unit number 03 around Kandahar. Apparently his brother told The New York Times — apparently his brother, The New York Times reported, was a deputy commander of this unit. This unit was a death squad. The United States made this person into a child soldier, and now is experiencing what I think is one of the most horrifically bright-line cases of imperial blowback that we’ve seen throughout the “war on terror.”
If the United States wants to find out whose culture is responsible for this horrific crime, it needs to start by knocking on doors at Langley and, as well, the Afghans who ran the U.S.-backed Afghan intelligence service known as the NDS. It was this culture of violence, of impunity, of murder for political reasons that had a specific role — we’ll find out more at trial — of shaping Lakanwal and his circumstances.
To blame the Afghans who came here as refugees, desperate, overwhelmingly, as your guests said, who worked with the United States, who served the U.S. war effort, is perverse. And it is ultimately a cover for allowing the U.S. to continue to create death squads, to outsource its most murderous and its most despicable wartime actions to locals, who then it can blame them for.
AMY GOODMAN: I was thinking about Timothy McVeigh, who was on the Highway of Death in Iraq.
SPENCER ACKERMAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: He comes back from there. He blows up the Oklahoma City building. He kills what? Something like 169 people. No one said then that all white Christian men should be imprisoned, let alone deported. But your thoughts on those kind of comparisons?
SPENCER ACKERMAN: I think what we are really seeing is the horrific consequences of a violent, exploitative and extractive U.S. foreign policy once again — not for the first time, but once again — coming home. If the United States actually cherishes the lives of these West Virginia National Guardsmen, who should not have been in D.C. in the first place to backstop ICE — that’s its own issue — but if the United States values their lives and values the lives of other service members and other Americans,