US expands prison in Afghanistan

The US military is about to complete a $60m expansion to its prison at
the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where it holds more than 600 so-
called enemy combatants.

The near doubling of the prison's size comes as Robert Gates, the US
denfence secretary, prepares to "refine" the US postion on its use of
Bagram and other facilities, including Guantanamo Bay, on Firday.

Gates, along with Eric Holder, the US attorney general, has been tasked
with carrying out a review to determine the fate of detainees held in
the US facilities.

Barack Obama, the US president,  has been widely praised for moving to
shut down the US prison at Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, within days of
taking office last month.

But with his move to send 17,000 more US troops to Afghanistan to shore
up US operations there, the Bagram prison looks set to become more
visible and controversial.

US expands Afghanistan detention centre

Rumi Nielson-Green, a spokeswoman for the US military, told Al Jazeera
that the detainees held at Bagram were "unlawful enemy combatants".

"They are individuals who have been removed from the battlefield
because they are dangerous to our forces or our coalition partners,"
she said.

Basic rights urged

Amnesty urged Obama to continue its break from his predecessor's
"unlawful detention policies" by ensuring "all US detentions in
Afghanistan comply with international law" and giving the detainees
access to US courts to challenge their detentions.



US jail allegations


- US accused of extraordinary rendition - sending suspects to foreign
countries for torture and interrogation

- Suspects sent to secret prisions have no rights under US law

- Poland and Romania reported to host secret CIA jails between 2003 and
2005

- Rights activists claim "black sites" existed in Morocco, Djibouti and
Thailand

- President Obama has ordered a review of detention practices


"Judicial review is a basic safeguard against executive abuse and a
protection against arbitrary and secret detention, torture and other
ill-treatment and unlawful transfers from one country or government to
another," Amnesty said.



"In the absence of judicial oversight, detainees in Bagram, as at
Guantanamo, have been subjected to just such abuses - even children
have not been spared."

The rights group says most of the 615 detainees being held at Bagram
without access to courts or legal counsel are Afghan nationals, and
some have been held for years.

While the Obama administration has committed itself to resolving the
240 or so Guantanamo cases within a year, it has not stated its
intentions on Bagram.

John Bates, a US district court judge who is hearing petitions filed by
four detainees held at Bagram for years, has given the administration
until Friday to "refine" its position on the use of Bagram air base as
a detention facility and whether it believes the detainees can
challenge their detention in US courts.

The administration of George Bush, Obama's predecessor, had argued that
as "enemy combatants", Bagram detainees had no right to challenge their
detention in US courts ? the same argument it made concerning detainees
at Guantanamo.

But the US Supreme Court ruled last year that inmates at Guantanamo had
the right to challenge their detentions in US courts, a ruling that
rights groups hope will be extended to Bagram detainees.

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US-AFGHANISTAN: Bagram, Worse Than Guantanamo?
By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Jan 12 (IPS) - While millions know that the administration of
George W. Bush has left Barack Obama with the job of closing the U.S.
prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, relatively few are aware that the new
president will also face a similar but far larger dilemma 7,000 miles
away.

That dilemma is what to do with what has become known as "the other
GITMO" - the U.S.-controlled military prison at Bagram Air Base near
Kabul in Afghanistan - and the estimated 600-700 detainees now held
there.

The "other GITMO" was set up by the U.S. military as a temporary
screening site after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan overthrew the
Taliban. It currently houses more than three times as many prisoners as
are still held at Guantanamo.

In 2005, following well-documented accounts of detainee deaths, torture
and "disappeared" prisoners, the U.S. undertook efforts to turn the
facility over to the Afghan government. But due to a series of legal,
bureaucratic and administrative missteps, the prison is still under U.
S. military control. And a recent confidential report from the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has reportedly
complained about the continued mistreatment of prisoners.

The ICRC report is said to cite massive overcrowding, "harsh"
conditions, lack of clarity about the legal basis for detention,
prisoners held "incommunicado" in "a previously undisclosed warren of
isolation cells" and "sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in
violation of the Geneva Conventions". Some prisoners have been held
without charges or lawyers for more than five years. The Red Cross said
that dozens of prisoners have been held incommunicado for weeks or even
months, hidden from prison inspectors. According to Hina Shamsi of the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "Bagram appears to be just as
bad as, if not worse than, Guantanamo. When a prisoner is in American
custody and under American control, our values are at stake and our
commitment to the rule of law is tested."

She told IPS, "The abuses cited by the Red Cross give us cause for
concern that we may be failing the test. The Bush administration is not
content to limit its regime of illegal detention to Guantanamo, and has
tried to foist it on Afghanistan."

She added: "Both Congress and the executive branch need to investigate
what's happening at Bagram if we are to avoid a tragic repetition of
history."

But most observers believe the solution is more likely to come in the
courts and to be inextricably linked to recent judicial decisions
affecting prisoners at Guantanamo.

Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that foreign nationals held as
terrorism suspects by the U.S. military at Guantanamo have a
constitutional right to challenge their captivity in U.S. courts in
Washington. Last week, a federal judge began exploring whether this
landmark decision also applies to Bagram.

Like Guantanamo, Bagram was set up as a facility where battlefield
captives could be held for the duration of the "war on terrorism" under
full military control in an overseas site beyond the reach of U.S.
courts.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly thwarted the campaign to insulate
Guantanamo from the courts' review. But the Justice argument is that
none of those rulings has any application to Bagram, and that the
federal judge should dismiss the legal challenges by Bagram detainees
by finding that U.S. courts have no jurisdiction over them.

But lawyers for four Bagram prisoners who have been held in detention
since at least 2003 contend that recent Supreme Court Guantanamo
decisions also apply to Afghanistan. They are also arguing that another
Supreme Court decision - Munaf v. Geren - extended habeas rights to a U.
S. military facility in Baghdad.

Barbara Olshansky of the Stanford Law School represents three of the
four men who brought the court action. She said "there is no more
complete analogy or mirror to Guantanamo than this (case)."

While U.S. District Judge John D. Bates has not ruled on the
government's motion to dismiss the four Bagram cases, he said during
the court hearing, "These individuals are no different than those
detained at Guantanamo except where they're housed."

In its motion to dismiss the cases, the Justice Department argued that
Bagram is so much a part of ongoing military operations that there
simply is no role for U.S. courts to play. "To provide alien enemy
combatants detained in a theater of war the privilege of access to our
civil courts is unthinkable both legally and practically," the
government's brief claimed.

The government claims the U.S. does not have nearly the control over
the Bagram Airfield as it does over Guantanamo Bay, and thus the
reasoning of the Supreme Court in extending habeas rights to Guantanamo
should not apply to Bagram.

It also noted that Bagram is in the midst of a war zone; Guantanamo is
not. It asserted that civilian court review of Bagram detentions would
actually compromise the military mission in Afghanistan.

The Munaf decision also has no application to Bagram, the government's
motion contended, because that involved U.S. citizens, not foreign
nationals.

Lawyers for the Bagram detainees noted that some of them have been held
for more than six years, so any argument the Justice Department might
have made against habeas rights abroad has now lost its force "after so
much time has passed."

They say the issue "is whether the Executive can create a modern-day
Star Chamber, where it can label an individual an 'enemy combatant' or
'unlawful enemy combatant,' deny him any meaningful ability to
challenge that label, and on that basis, detain him indefinitely,
virtually incommunicado, subject to interrogation and torture, without
any right of redress."

Bagram, their brief contended, "is not a temporary holding camp,
intended to house enemy soldiers apprehended on the battlefield, for
the duration of a declared war, finite in time and space." It said the
"war on terror" as conceived by the government is "unlimited in
duration and global in scope".

It also noted that, unlike Guantanamo, Bagram is a permanent prison.
Thousands of individuals from all over the world have been taken to the
airfield prison, and nearly 700 remain there now, and it is being
expanded with a new prison to hold more than 11,000.

Moreover, they argued, Bagram detainees do not even have the minimal
procedural guarantees to have their captivity reviewed that Guantanamo
prisoners have in the so-called "Combatant Status Review Tribunals."
The military does not operate CSRTs as Bagram.

Lawyers for the four men - two Yemeni, one Tunisian and one Afghan -
said none was captured while in battle or otherwise directly aiding
terrorist groups.

The Justice Department argued that releasing alleged enemy combatants
into the Afghan war zone, or even diverting U.S. personnel there to
consider their legal cases, could threaten security.

"What evidence is there to believe they would return to the
battlefield?" Judge Bates asked Deputy Assistant Attorney General John
O'Quinn. "They were not on the battlefield to begin with."

While there is no timetable for a court ruling, it is clear that it
will not come during the waning days of the Bush administration. Like
the issue of how to close Guantanamo, the Bagram issue will be left to
the new presidency of Barack Obama to solve.

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