Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Time magazine has an article about the prison for detainees at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan, a prison that holds three times as many inmates as Guantanamo Bay and has perhaps an even worse history of abuse and a similar history of locking up innocent people.
The incoming Obama Administration says it wants to shut down the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. But even if Guantánamo closes, the controversial U.S. practice of jailing suspected al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists indefinitely won't end, because such detentions continue on an even greater scale at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, 40 miles north of Kabul. Approximately 250 detainees are currently being held at Guantánamo; an estimated 670 are locked up under similar conditions at Bagram.The Obama transition team has declined to comment on whether U.S. detention policy for enemy combatants will change with a new Administration. Nevertheless, the U.S. military is building a new prison for what it calls "unlawful enemy combatants" at Bagram that won't be finished until Obama is well settled in the White House. "The Obama Administration is inheriting not so much a shrinking Guantánamo as an expanding Bagram," says Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, a nonprofit legal group based in New York City.
There is an ongoing case involving one man held at Bagram after being shifted among various CIA black sites:
Foster and a consortium of other human rights lawyers will be in Federal District Court in Washington on Jan. 7 to demand that those being held at Bagram get the same habeas corpus rights -- the right to know the charges against them, and to be freed if a court deems those charges insufficient -- that the Supreme Court gave Guantánamo detainees last summer. Their case centers on Redha al-Najar, a 43-year-old Tunisian national who has been held without charge in U.S. military custody since May 2002. Al-Najar was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had been living with his wife and child. According to his attorneys, al-Najar spent the next two years being shifted among various CIA "black sites" before ending up at Bagram. They argue he has been held for more than six years, virtually incommunicado and without charges or access to a fair means to challenge his imprisonment. The suit asks the court to order al-Najar's release.
It will be interesting to see what the court does with this one. One of the keys to getting even minimal habeas relief in Guantanamo was based on the fact that the Navy base in Cuba is under full U.S. control. Will they rule the same thing about a prison at a base in Afghanistan in an active war zone? My guess is that they won't.
Either way, there has been a history of abuse at Bagram:
The original U.S. prison, established early in 2002, was the main screening site for those captured by Americans and their allies during initial fighting in Afghanistan. At least two detainees died there in December 2002 after being beaten by U.S. troops. While conditions are said to have improved since then, hundreds of prisoners remain in wire mesh pens edged with coils of razor wire, and earlier this year U.S. military officials revealed that a Bagram interrogator had been convicted of assaulting an Afghan detainee who later died. Just last month, the military issued a statement saying it would investigate whether a pair of U.S. soldiers had abused Afghan detainees.
This base was also mentioned in memos released by the Senate Armed Services Committee as one where the military intentionally hid abused detainees from the Red Cross.
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The documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side" covers the abuse meted out in our Afghanistan prisons, I highly recommend seeing it: http://www.amazon.com/Taxi-Dark-Side-Alex-Gibney/dp/B001BEK8FQ/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1231684438&sr=8-1
We have U.S. soldiers in prison for torturous and even murderous acts, though not the officers and elected officials who established the initial process that resulted in such outcomes. "Taxi" even tells the story of a complete innocent who was tortured and murdered by our soldiers in that prison. This documentary is somewhat redundant to the great PBS produced documentary, "Torturing Democracy", which can be easily viewed online for free, though I recommend watching both: http://www.torturingdemocracy.org/
Also, the NYTs listed Jane Mayer's book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals" as one of only five non-fiction books on its 10 Best Books of 2008, and only one of two nonfiction books covering current events. Mayer's book has become one of the most authoritative books on how and why America tortured, nicely adding to Jack Goldsmith's initial warnings of the unconstitutional policies by Bush by fleshing out how Bush's policy positions turned into torture and murder.
Posted by: Michael Heath | January 11, 2009 9:47 AM