by Damozel | So. It's another letdown for human rights advocates -- especially the lawyers defending detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. One told BBC News that "the new White House was endorsing the view of the old one, that prisons could be created and run outside the law." In other words, Bagram detainees can be held without due process for as long as the military thinks they might be a threat to security --- in a prison that "has been since the very beginning one of the main models for the
extralegal detention of prisoners and the torture techniques used
elsewhere." (Newhoggers)
Obama's DoJ is saying that Bagram is different from Guantanamo "because it is in an overseas war zone and prisoners there are being held as part of ongoing military action." (BBC News)
Oh, that's all right then.
At Newshoggers, BJ says:
Memo to the Obama administration: Gitmo was symbolic of the abuses of the Bush administration and their contempt for transparency, international treaties, and the rule of law. That you've decided to close said prison is nice, but you're not going to get many props if all you are actually doing is changing the physical location of where the US is ignoring transparency, international treaties, and the rule of law.
End these activities. The sooner the better.
Yes, because what America stands for really shouldn't change depending on geographical location. Professor Barbara Olshansky, lawyer for four of the Bagram detainees spoke to BBC News.
Prof Olshansky said the conditions at the Bagram facility, which is near the Afghan capital, Kabul, were worse than those at Guantanamo Bay, adding that there was a lack of due process available to detainees.
"The situation in Bagram is so far from anything like meeting the laws of war or the human rights treaties that we're bound to," she told the BBC.
"There are no military hearings where the detainees can present evidence," she added. "Torture has led to homicides there that have been admitted by the US."
"It's quite a severe situation, and yet the US is planning a $60m new prison to hold 1,100 more people there."
Indeed. Here's a June 16, 2008 McClatchy report -- "US Abuse of Detainees was routine at Afghanistan Air Force Bases" -- which followed McClatchy's eight-month investigation:
The guards kicked, kneed and punched many of the men until they collapsed in pain. U.S. troops shackled and dragged other detainees to small isolation rooms, then hung them by their wrists from chains dangling from the wire mesh ceiling...
Nazar Chaman Gul, an Afghan who was held at Bagram for more than three months in 2003, said he was beaten about every five days. American soldiers would walk into the pen where he slept on the floor and ram their combat boots into his back and stomach, Gul said. "Two or three of them would come in suddenly, tie my hands and beat me," he said....
When the kicking started, Gul said, he'd cry out, "I am not a terrorist," then beg God for mercy. Mercy was slow in coming. He was shipped to Guantanamo around the late summer of 2003 and imprisoned there for more than three years.
According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Gul wasn't a member of al Qaida or of the extremist Taliban regime that ran Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. At the time he was detained, he was working as a fuel depot guard for the U.S.-backed Afghan government...
The eight-month McClatchy investigation found a pattern of abuse that continued for years. The abuse of detainees at Bagram has been reported by U.S. media organizations, in particular The New York Times, which broke several developments in the story. But the extent of the mistreatment, and that it eclipsed the alleged abuse at Guantanamo, hasn't previously been revealed.
Guards said they routinely beat their prisoners to retaliate for al Qaida's 9-11 attacks, unaware that the vast majority of the detainees had little or no connection to al Qaida. (More; emphasis added)
They weren't disciplined because Bush loosened standards on treatment of "enemy combatants." (McClatchy) Even when a man died the perpetrators weren't disciplined.
The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when U.S. soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists.
Dilawar died on Dec. 10, seven days after Habibullah died. He'd been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was "falling apart" and had "basically been pulpified," said then-Lt. Col. Elizabeth Rouse, the Air Force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.
Had Dilawar lived, Rouse said in sworn testimony, "I believe the injury to the legs are so extensive that it would have required amputation."
After Habibullah died, a legal officer for U.S. forces in Afghanistan asked two military police guards at Bagram to demonstrate how they'd chained detainees' wrists above their heads in a small plywood isolation cell.
"Frankly, it didn't look good," Maj. Jeff Bovarnick, the legal adviser for the Bagram detention center from November 2002 to June 2003, said during a military investigation hearing in June 2005.
"This guy is chained up and has a hood on his head," Bovarnick continued. "The two MPs that were demonstrating this took about five minutes to get everything hook(ed) up; and I was thinking to myself, if this was a combative detainee, it must have been a real struggle for them to get him to comply, and the things they must have been doing to make him comply." (More; emphasis added)
Meanwhile, the Pentagon -- reporting on itself -- has concluded that its Gitmo proceedings meet Geneva Convention standards and are perfectly humane within those standards, thanks. Or, as James Joyner puts it at Outside the Beltway, "The Department of Defense has reviewed itself and found that it’s doing nothing wrong."
At Comments from Left Field, Kathy observes:
The New York Times has the story.
But it makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read parts of it.
The report, by Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, the vice chief of naval operations, describes steps that could be taken to allow detainees to speak to one another more often and to engage in group activities, the government officials said. For years, critics have said that many detainees spend as many as 23 hours a day within the confines of cement cells and often were allowed to exercise alone in fenced-off outdoor pens....
One Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities involved in challenging the White House plan to close the prison, argued that the report showed that the Bush administration had created a humane detention camp. (NYT)
I know of at least one Gitmo guard who begs to differ.
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Will Obama Administration Consider Preserving CIA Renditions as Anti-Terrorism Weapon?
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Bush Admits to Approving Torture, Questionably Claims that Good Intel was Gained
The Torture Administration
Bagram Detainees? Scott Evil, of the Austin Powers movies, might know one way to "process" them:
Scott Evil: Wait, aren't you even going to watch them? They could get away!
Dr. Evil: No no no, I'm going to leave them alone and not actually witness them dying, I'm just gonna assume it all went to plan. What?
Scott Evil: I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds, I'll get it, I'll come back down here, BOOM, I'll blow their brains out!
Dr. Evil: Scott, you just don't get it, do ya? You don't.
Posted by: flowerplough | February 21, 2009 at 10:25 PM