WASHINGTON, July 18, 2009
Captive Soldier Appears on Taliban Video
Soldier Says on Tape that He's Scared He 'Won't Be Able to Go Home'
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CBS News recovered leaflets handed out to locals containing this blunt warning: "If you do not free the American soldier then you will be hunted." (CBS)
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This video frame grab taken from a Taliban propaganda video released Saturday, July 18, 2009 shows an American soldier who went missing from his base in eastern Afghanistan June 30 and was later confirmed captured. (AP Photo/Militant Video)
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The American soldier who went missing June 30 from his base in eastern Afghanistan and was later confirmed to have been captured, appeared on a video posted Saturday to a Web site by the Taliban.
Two U.S. defense officials confirmed to The Associated Press that the man in the video is the captured soldier. The video provide the first glimpse the public has had of the missing soldier.
The soldier is shown in the 28-minute video with his head shaved and the start of a beard. He is sitting and dressed in a nondescript, gray outfit. Early in the video one of his captors holds the soldier's dog tag up to the camera. His name and ID number are clearly visible. He is shown eating at one point and sitting on a bed.
The soldier, whose identity has not yet been released by the Pentagon pending notification of members of Congress and the soldier's family, says his name, age and hometown on the video, which was released Saturday on a Web site pointed out by the Taliban. Two U.S. defense officials confirmed to The Associated Press that the man in the video is the captured soldier.
The soldier said the date is July 14. He says he was captured when he lagged behind on a patrol.
He is interviewed in English by his captors, and he is asked his views on the war, which he calls extremely hard, his desire to learn more about Islam and the morale of American soldiers, which he said was low.
Asked how he was doing, the soldier said on the video:
"Well I'm scared, scared I won't be able to go home. It is very unnerving to be a prisoner."
He begins to answer questions in a matter-of-fact and sober voice, occasionally facing the camera, looking down and sometimes looking to the questioner on his left.
He later chokes up when discussing his family and his hope to marry his girlfriend.
"I have my girlfriend, who is hoping to marry," he said. "I have a very, very good family that I love back home in America. And I miss them every day when I'm gone. I miss them and I'm afraid that I might not ever see them again and that I'll never be able to tell them that I love them again and I'll never be able to hug them."
He is also prompted his interrogators to give a message to the American people.
"To my fellow Americans who have loved ones over here, who know what it's like to miss them, you have the power to make our government bring them home," he said. "Please, please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home. It is America and American people who have that power."
The video is not a continuous recording — it appears to stop and start during the questioning.
It is unclear from the video whether the July 14 date is authentic. The soldier says that he heard that a Chinook helicopter carrying 37 NATO troops had been shot down over Helmand. A helicopter was shot down in southern Afghanistan on July 14, but it was carrying civilians on a reported humanitarian mission for NATO forces. All six Ukrainian passengers died in the crash, and a child on the ground was killed.
On July 2, the U.S. military said an American soldier had disappeared after walking off his base in eastern Afghanistan with three Afghan counterparts and was believed to have been taken prisoner. A U.S. defense official said the soldier was noticed missing during a routine check of the unit on June 30 and was first listed as "duty status whereabouts unknown."
Details of such incidents are routinely held very tightly by the military as it works to retrieve a missing or captured soldier without giving away any information to captors.
But Afghan Police Gen. Nabi Mullakheil said the soldier went missing in eastern Paktika province near the border with Pakistan from an American base. The region is known to be Taliban-infested.
The most important insurgent group operating in that area is known as Haqqani network and is led by warlord Siraj Haqqani, whom the U.S. has accused of masterminding beheadings and suicide bombings including the July 2008 attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed some 60 people. The Haqqani group also was linked to an assassination attempt on Afghan president Hamid Karzai early last year.
On Saturday, a U.S. military official in Kabul, Col. Greg Julian, said the U.S. was "still doing everything we can to return him safely."
Julian said U.S. troops had distributed two flyers in the area where the soldier disappeared. One of them asked for information on the missing soldier and offered a $25,000 reward for his return. The other said "please return our soldier safely" or "we will hunt you," according to Julian.
© MMIX, The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Michelle Obama tells how her role as the First Lady has changed her perspective.
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His coworker talks about this soldier in a very humanizing way. He's just an ordinary person that deserves to be rescued!
The media is no one's intentional pawn, anyways. There have been times that, personally, I have wished that the media would have kept their collectively large traps shut. You are definately right, though. That alone will never stop the military. If, during the Cold War, no one had ousted the dictatorship there, maybe we wouldn't have as much trouble from them.
Although I fully agree woth the rest of your statements, I believe that the military system could use a little help clearing some of the unneccesary red tape. My family and I recently were shipped to India, and the ammount of paperwork that we had to repeat because it wasn't "current enough" was quite exasperating. The papers themselves had a label saying that they would be good for up to a year. But the personnel recieving said they were only good for six months. This was but a recent example of the many things the military could change if and when they found the time.
As a rule, however, as an organization, I have never been prouder to have served with any better.
Thank you very much for being one of the few voices of reason on this entire page.
just shackle him and waterboard him because Chenney said it's not torture.
My parents were both in the military, dad in EOD, so they both did quite a few tours in Iraq. Dad woulda been the most targeted. So I know only too well the feeling that comes with having loved ones in dangerous places. But, in killing, nay, murdering people, even if "they started it" is unequivocally wrong. We are all grown ups here, no? So, maybe, third grader's logic should have stopped applying years ago.
All of you who speak of bombing the place flat have no clue what you would be doing to these people! If we were to drop leaflets warning the innocents to leave, who might also read them? The terrorists, no? Who would have more means to beat a hasty retreat? The terrorist, with their jeeps and such, of the innocents, burdened with their possessions, sick, elderly, CHILDREN? The terrorists would be gone the second the first leaflet found it's way in to their dirty hands.
That also raises the question of where the hell the refugees go. They wouldn't be able to go back for a good while. Which province would they burden? One, the same one as the terrorists most likely; and two, one that probably has alraedy taken in it's share of refugees. So what next? Bomb that place too? There are even more innocents packed in and less escape. But again, the terrorists hightail it out of there! ALL THIS DOES IS KILL THE INNOCENTS! Given, it MAY kill one or two terrorists, but the civilian loss is too high to justify it. How many of you soldiers saw small children die after a car-bomb, RPG, suicide bomber blew up a target? Do you think that just because you can't see them means they couldn't have died?
But I digress.
I hope that this changes your mind and melts some of you posters more stupid bravado. If you so desperately wish to take human life, as advised before, sign yourself up for a tour. See for yourself that they are still people. They just have different ideologies.
"We can learn a lot from crayons. Some are pretty. Some are colorful. But they all live in the same box."
And crayons don't fight.
But, I live in a real world.
I would almost agree with you, except for the fact that America had become that way long before Bush, Remember Reagan's "freedom fighters"? Iran-Iraq? Vietnam? Korea? Cambodia? Japan and Europe?
Just as unprincipled, warmongering, and totalitarian as under Bush, and has been a debtor nation since august 19, 1972. I would posit therefore that America has been this way for quite some time.
You might call it denigration, but history calls it truth.
What, this tape was a public service ?
"It doesnt matter how you do the interrogation. It only matters how you do the verification."
So, it doesn't matter how the Taliban does the interrogation of the U.S. prisoner as long as they think there is information available. And, it only matters how they do the verification. Nice.
Nice.
I think keeping your sex life private whether you are homosexual or heterosexual is the thing to do. Your sex life does not define you as a person. Your character and actions do.
"No one interrogates anyone unless they think there is information available."
Funny stuff. I'm not talking just about interrogation. I'm talking about torture. And, you're extremely naive. Many times, torture and interrogation is used to get the victims to admit to falsehoods to justify specific actions. For instance, we tortured Iraqi prisoners to get them to admit to false associations between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. We tortured Iraqis in an attempt to create more phony evidence of an association between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein with the intention of buttressing one of the rationales used to sell the bogus Iraqi threat to the American people. And, the captured American soldier may know of plans for future attacks on the Taliban. So, is the Taliban justified in using waterboarding to try and get information from him? It doesn't matter if the prisoner doesn't know anything. It only matters if he's suspected of knowing anything. Suspicion was all we needed to waterboard some of the people we waterboarded. If the Taliban waterboards this prisoner, would you call it torture?
It's kind of like "indirect fire" or "friendly fire" deaths, all just words used to dismiss incompetence.
By the way..... given 6 hours, how many people do you think could evacuate from New Orleans? Even an idiot like you might actually be able to answer that question! Next, compare that with the much larger region in southern Afghanistan, where the fastest transport most people have is their legs.
The sad truth is that millions of Americans think exactly like you. You don't care about anyone except yourselves, and you're too stupid to understand your hypocrisy.
Hallelujah! Some voice of reason! Thank you for not being predjudiced!
And, no, I don't think it would be fair to bomb New Orleans.
Who was it that offered santuary to Osama and allowed him to grow to an organization that could pull off 9/11 ? The Taliban. Who are the Taliban, - Afghanainees (sp).
And, I don't think it would be fair to carpet bomb a part of Afganistan either, but I certainly would deal very harshly with his captors if they became known to me and he was killed while in captivity.
If you find this "sad truth" that millions of Americans believe in to be wrong after 9/11, well, you must be well qualified to identify stupid people, as you have yourself to use as a model for comparison.
BTW, searching out and destroying those that would destroy you is NOT hypocrisy.
We're thankful you aren't in the USA too.
This is a living example of reasons not to do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Life is too valuable.
As long as it is someone else's life, it is expendable, even for false reasons.
Well Sherlock, who sent them over there in the first place?
As for the daily death count, it is easily available.
What I find funny about you neos is that for you the war was cool when Bush was doing it, but now you complain as if there is something wrong with it.
Pitiful shmucks, the time to complain was when Bush was spreading the lies that led up to sending troops there in the first place.
If it was so "the right thing to do" under Bush, then why do you now object to it?
"Pitiful shmucks, the time to complain was when Bush was spreading the lies that led up to sending troops there in the first place."
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brianbwb-2009, look in the mirror for the smuck!
Your ignorant is astounding, we're there in respond to the attack on NY, 9/11/01.
Your confusion on a false belief sets you down the beaten path. As a typical liberal, you should be open-minded to re-educate yourself.
EVERYTHING he says is calculated.
Review your post again and get some geography lessons.
You libs are dumb enough to believe if we treated them right then they will respond in kind......you think they'll go against their god?
OR being forced to become a Muslim.
Besides. I think it is far more fitting that the two individuals responsible for the failure of the war in Afghanistan (Bush/Cheney, by going to Iraq instead) should pay the price. We should have been out of Afghanistan years and years ago. Would have, had we not invaded Iraq instead. This soldier's blood is directly on their hands - Bush, Cheney and the neocons for failing the American people and their military.
Maybe if we drop Rush Limpbaugh without a parachute, the splat will be so disgusting and demoralizing, and so widespread that the Taliban will run, holding their noses, back to the caves of Kandahar.
You are not prohibited from being in the Service (lie one on your part.)
You just aren't allowed to make an issue of being a gay soldier. They want you to concentrate on being a soldier, not a gay activist.
Your coming out of the closet on this site FINALLY points out your issue with Bush and Cheney.
So I understand Barry has the same gay policy in the service.
How's that "hope" and "change" workin out for ya ?
Fooled at the polls again, huh ?
YEah those Dems will tell you waht ever you want to hear, just to get your vote.
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