Amidst the world’s outrage over the recently uncovered U.S. scandals involving the abuse and torture of detainees in Guantanamo and Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jails- As pressure mounts on Washington to shut down its detention center in Cuba, reports reveal that the U.S. military has expanded another prison in Afghanistan, where some 500 suspects are kept in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges, Aljazeera reported.
The U.S. secret jail in Afghanistan now stands as a rival to Guantanamo Bay with hundreds of inmates in legal limbo, UK’s Telegraph said.
Away from the spotlight currently focused on the U.S. detention camp in Cuba, Bagram, another notorious U.S. base has been discovered in north of Kabul, where the situation resembles the "legal void" that led to the Supreme Court ruling in 2004 which gave Guantanamo prisoners the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, The New York Times quoted Bush administration officials as saying.
Cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul and a screening center, that’s how Pentagon officials describe the detention facility at Bagram.
But although they always argued that most of the suspects the U.S. holds in the detention site there are mostly Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison to be built with U.S. aid, most of the detainees held spent more than two and three years at Bagram, without access to lawyers, or right to hear the allegations for which they’re jailed; only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants."
The Pentagon claims that it worked to better the conditions at Bagram after the violent deaths of two inmates in 2002- however conditions there remain harsher than at Guantanamo.
"Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility and now it's a long-term facility without the money or resources. Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it is worse [than Guantanamo] ," said one Pentagon official who visited the jail.
The number of what Bush’s administration calls “terror suspect” held at Bagram's former Soviet aircraft machine shop have risen from 100 in early 2004 to 600 at times last year, partly, according to U.S. officials, due to a decision by the Bush administration in 2004 to stop sending more prisoners to Guantanamo.
"For some reason people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan"- a former senior administration official.
While members of Congress and journalists have access to Guantanamo, Bagram operates in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. Detainees are denied visits except from members of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The prison authorities also refuse to make public the names of those held there.
The prison was never photographed, even from a distance.
And, according to the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, prisoners are held by the dozen in large wire cages, they sleep on the floor on foam mats and, and until last year, they used plastic buckets for toilets.
Agencies
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