A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo

This is from The New York Times:

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror 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 an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, 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 landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.

While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.

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 counterpart in Cuba. 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 latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.

"Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it's a long-term facility without the money or resources," said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, "Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it's worse."

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

The military's chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say repeatedly 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 Convention."

Other 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 a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo 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 been tested in court.

Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.

So now we have a new prison that can rival even that of Gitmo. It is amazing the lengths that the Bush administration will go towards violating even basic human rights or legal rights, all for their Great War on Terrorism. Of course, the military will not comment on the situation at Bagram, nor will they allow anyone to visit the facilities. The last thing the military wants is another Abu Ghraib to further inflame the Middle East. Continuing on:

But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.

Wary of further angering Guantánamo's critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.

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

Yet Bagram's expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration's continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.

Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram's prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.

Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.'s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror 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 Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

The problem with the Bush administration is that they don't want to release anyone from these prisons. If the reports of torture and prisoner abuse among these secret CIA prisons are true, then releasing these individuals in Afghanistan, or any Middle Eastern country will provide ready-made foot soldiers for al Qaida. Also, how many of these individuals that are held in these prisons are actual al Qaida soldiers, or are they innocent civilians who were swept up by U.S. forces at the urging of local and tribal leaders who wish to purge their local political opponents? I can't say. But any individuals who are released from these black prisons, will not have any love for the United States and are perfect candidates for al Qaida recruitment. So we have to build more secret prisons, to hold more prisoners, who still have no political or legal rights--and will be subjected to torture by the American military and CIA officials.