Today’s New York Post ran a front-page story with the headline: “Taliban leader was freed from Guantanamo Bay in 2014 swap by Obama.” The main focus of the story is on one of the released Taliban commanders, Khairullah Khairkhwa.
It’s certain that this story will be picked up by other right-wing news outlets and websites. The writer Paul Sperry regularly appears on Fox News, so we can expect to see him interviewed by Hannity or Tucker to spread the disinformation further.
As a retired international news editor and correspondent, I’d like to put a spotlight on this story because it is a journalistic disgrace and prime example of how the right-wing propaganda machine — especially the Murdochs’ News Corp. — works to spread disinformation and deflect blame from their side.
First you have to look closely at who wrote this story. The writer is Paul Sperry — not to be confused with the businessman and sailor who designed the first boat shoe.
Here’s what the Bridge Initiative, a Georgetown University project on Islamaphobia, had to say about Paul Sperry.
“Paul Sperry is an American conservative journalist who previously served as a Washington bureau chief for the right-wing, conspiratorial website, WorldNetDaily. Sperry is a former media fellow at The Hoover Institution and has authored several anti-Muslim books, including Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington. Sperry has a long record of promoting anti-Muslim conspiracy theories. In April 2020, President Donald Trump promoted an anti-Muslim tweet by Sperry about Ramadan and COVID-19.”
The Bridge Initiative Factsheet goes on to note that Sperry wrote numerous articles attacking Democratic politicians such as Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.
He described Obama as the “defender in chief of Islam.” He tweeted that Muslim immigration to the Washington, D.C. suburbs has turned it into “Northern Virginiastan.” He blamed Islamic burial rituals for the spread of Ebola. And he even went after Gold Star parent Khizr Khan, whose son was killed in Afghanistan, as believing that the U.S. Constitution “must always be subordinated” to Sharia law.
So what he wrote in today’s New York Post must be filtered through that Islamophobic lens.
Sperry goes back to President Obama’s 2014 controversial prisoner swap in which five Taliban commanders were released from the Guantanamo Bay prison in exchange for U.S. Army Sgt. Robert “Bowe” Bergdahl, who was captured after leaving his post in Afghanistan. Bergdahl was later court-martialed and pleaded guilty to desertion.
The five Taliban commanders were transferred to Qatar which pledged to keep them from causing any trouble in Afghanistan.
Sperry then makes the outlandish claim that the Taliban commanders “were left free to engineer Sunday’s sacking of Kabul.” “Sacking” is hardly the word to describe how the Taliban gained control of the Afghan capital with almost no resistance and actually cracked down on looters.
Sperry then says the freed detainees used Qatar “as a base to form a regime in exile’ and were “recognized as official representatives of the Taliban during recent ‘peace’ talks.
Now the February 2020 Doha peace agreement was brokered by U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad on behalf of the Trump administration. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo fully endorsed the agreement that committed the U.S. to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan in return for a pledge from the Taliban to enter into peace talks with the Afghan government and to guarantee Afghanistan would not be used as a launching pad for terrorist attacks.
Here’s what Sperry wrote in his hit piece on Presidents Obama and Biden, referring to one of the freed Taliban commanders.
”Earlier this year, one of them, Khairullah Khairkhwa, actually sat across the table from President Biden’s envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in Moscow, where Khairkhwa was part of the official Taliban delegation that negotiated the final terms of the US withdrawal. The retreat cleared a path for the Taliban to retake power after 20 years.”
“I started jihad to remove foreign forces from my country and establish an Islamic government, and jihad will continue until we reach that goal through a political agreement,” Khairkhwa said at the summit.
Now i want to highlight this fact: DONALD TRUMP”S NAME DOES NOT APPEAR ANYWHERE IN SPERRY’S REVISIONIST PROPAGANDA PIECE. Neither does Pompeo’s name.
There is not a single mention that the Trump administration pressed the Afghan government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners as part of the peace negotiations without any representatives of the Afghan government in the room.
Ryan S. Crocker, former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan during President George W. Bush’s administration, told CNN that forcing the Afghan government to accede to the Taliban’s demand to release the prisoners was a huge “demoralizing factor” for the Afghan government and its security forces.”
“We pressed them to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Eventually they did it, and watched them go back into the fight against the people who released them, “ Crocker said. “So this is a year and a half worth of demoralization.”
Nor did Sperry mention anything about Abdul Ghani Baradar, who is the Taliban’s political chief. The Obama administration had the CIA track Baradar down in Karachi in 2010 and persuaded the Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, to arrest him.
In 2018, Trump’s Afghan envoy, remember Zalmay Khalilzad, asked the Pakistanis to release Baradar so he could lead negotiations in Qatar, based on the belief that he would settle for a power-sharing deal, The Guardian reported.
And back to Sperry in the New York Post. He wrote that “the Gitmo catch-and-release policies facilitated the fall of Afghanistan to the enemy that Washington vowed to crush after 9/11.”
Again let’s look at the facts. According to a 2018 Human Rights Watch report the U,S, has transferred 732 prisoners from Guantanamo to their home or third countries, 533 during the George W. Bush administration and 144 during the administration of President Barack Obama.”
Sperry kept the focus of his story only on Khairkhwa, who was released in the Bergdahl prisoner swap. He said Khairkhwa had assured the administration that the Taliban would not launch a spring military offensive if Biden committed to removing all remaining American troops. It was Trump who set a May deadline for withdrawing all U.S. troops, which Biden extended until September.
The remainder of Sperry’s story focuses on Khairkhwa. Sperry describes him as the Taliban’s interior minister who “oversaw enforcement of brutal Islamist punishments” and closely associated with Osama bin Laden.
His Wikipedia biography says Kharikhwa served as the Taliban’s interior minister from 1997-98. He was captured in Pakistan and sent to Guantanamo in 2002.
In 2011, The New York Times reported that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had called for Kharikhwa’s release from the Guantanamo Bay prison so he could return to Afghanistan to join in reconciliation talks.
But Sperry concludes the New York Post piece with this outlandish and baseless assertion:
“If Obama and Biden had left the five Taliban thugs to rot in Cuba, Kabul more than likely would not be back in the clutches of the Taliban right now. And maybe Americans wouldn’t have sacrificed more than 2,400 troops and $1 trillion in vain.”
This is pure propaganda worthy of Joseph Goebbels that the Murdoch-owned New York Post deemed fit to disseminate in an effort to deflect blame for the Afghan fiasco.