The Clipboard: U.S. prison in Afghanistan grows to fill Guantanamo's role

From an article¹:

While an international debate rages over the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terrorism suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on a U.S. air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees are Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison be built with U.S. aid.

But some of the detainees have already been at Bagram for as long as three years. And unlike those at Guantanamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.

Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a Supreme Court ruling in 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantanamo to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

While Guantanamo offers carefully controlled tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it was opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for members of the International Committee of the Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. (link)

Have we learned nothing????

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Complete text of the article, U.S. prison in Afghanistan grows to fill Guantanamo's role, by Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt

While an international debate rages over the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terrorism suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on a U.S. air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees are Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison be built with U.S. aid.

But some of the detainees have already been at Bagram for as long as three years. And unlike those at Guantanamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.

Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a Supreme Court ruling in 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantanamo to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.

While Guantanamo offers carefully controlled tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it was opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for members of the International Committee of the Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there.

Rougher and more bleak

From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its U.S. counterpart at Guantanamo. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for toilets. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight.

"Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it's a long-term facility without the money or resources," one Defense Department official said.

Former detainees said the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and humans rights groups said reports of abuse had declined steadily since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon's chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles Stimson, declined to be interviewed about Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.

The military's chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say that his command was "committed to treating detainees humanely and providing the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Conventions."

Military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part the result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantanamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not yet been tested in court.

"Guantanamo was a lightning rod," said a former senior administration official who like many of those interviewed would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity. "For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan."

Objections at the Pentagon

Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram's prisoners were not Afghans but foreigners, some of whom were previously held by the CIA in secret interrogation centers. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantanamo because of the possibility that their CIA custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.

Defense Department officials said the CIA's effort to unload some detainees had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terrorism suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department "doesn't want to be the dumping ground," one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. "There just aren't any good options."

A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.

reference=http://www.startribune.com/722/story/270807.html