Worse? Than Guantanamo: U.S. Expands Secretive Prison Inside Bagram Air
Base in Afghanistan

The U.S. is holding 500 at the base in wire cages at the Bagram Air
Base, north of Kabul in Afghanistan. Some have been detained for up to
three years. They have never been charged with crimes. They have no
access to lawyers. They are barred from hearing the allegations against
them. Officials describe the jail?s conditions as primitive. We speak
with human rights attorneys Clive Stafford Smith and Michael Ratner.

?While an international debate rages over the future of the American
detention center at Guantanamo 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.?

That is the opening line of a front-page article in Sunday?s New York
Times detailing the US-run prison at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul.
The Times reports that some of the detainees at Bagram have been held
for as long as two or three years. Unlike those at Guantanamo, they
have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against
them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as ?enemy
combatants.? One Pentagon official told the Times the current average
stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.

The numbers of detainees at the base had risen from about 100 at the
start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year. The paper says the
increase is in part the result of a decision by the U.S. government to
shut off the flow of detainees to Guantanamo Bay 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.

While Guantanamo 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.

Citing unnamed military officials and former detainees, the Times
reports that prisoners at Bagram are held by the dozen in wire cages,
sleep on the floor on foam mats and are often made to use plastic
buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, detainees rarely saw
daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard. The U.S.
military on Sunday defended Bagram air base saying detainees there are
treated humanely and provided ?the best possible living conditions.?

But evidence of abuse of prisoners at Bagram has emerged over the
years. In December 2002, two Afghan prisoners were found dead, hanging
by their shackled wrists in isolation cells at the prison. An Army
investigation showed they were treated harshly by interrogators,
deprived of sleep for days, and struck so often in the legs by guards
that a coroner compared the injuries to being run over by a bus. No one
has been prosecuted for the deaths, though both were ruled homicides
and the Army claims the men were beaten to death inside the jail.

We are joined on the line by Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born human
rights lawyer who represents 40 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of
whom passed through Bagram Air Base. He is legal director of the
charity Reprieve. We are also joined by Michael Ratner, president of
the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Clive Stafford Smith, a British-born human rights lawyer who represents
40 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom passed through Bagram Air
Base. He is legal director of the charity Reprieve.
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

AMY GOODMAN: We?re joined on the phone right now from London by Clive
Stafford Smith, a British-born human rights lawyer who represents 40
detainees at Guantanamo Bay, many of whom passed through the Bagram Air
Base. He is legal director of the charity, Reprieve. He joins us on the
phone from London. Welcome to Democracy Now!

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Good morning.

AMY GOODMAN: It?s good to have you with us. Can you tell us what you
know of Bagram?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yes, and, of course, a lot of it is laid out in
the New York Times, but there are some things that are considerably
worse than represented there. For example, there is an area of Bagram
that is not open to the Red Cross, as one of our clients, Mamdou Habib
said. The most frightening moment he had in Bagram was when the Red
Cross came and he didn?t get to see them. And there?s a cellar area in
Bagram, a dark?a place that?s kept perpetually dark, which is where a
number of prisoners are kept away from the Red Cross itself. And, of
course, if you think about being a prisoner in those circumstances,
your natural assumption is if the military doesn?t want the Red Cross
to know you exist, then your fate is probably not going to be a very
pleasant one, and naturally a number of those people have been moved
off and rendered to other countries, where they have been abused. And
some of them we?ve caught up with again in Guantanamo, but many haven?
t. They?ve disappeared.

AMY GOODMAN: We?re also joined in our studio by Michael Ratner,
President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Does the Center
represent people at Bagram?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, like Clive, the Center has many of the similar
clients who have been through Bagram on their way to Guantanamo. And
Moazzam Begg is another one whose story has just come out, how he was
taken to Bagram, beaten, etc., and then went to Guantanamo. We are in
contact with people who have family members, who have people in
Guantanamo, and as Clive said, a lot of this has been known for a
couple?more than two or three years. I mean, the people who were hung
and tortured and killed. The underground prison has been known, and
what?s really incredibly frustrating?you feel like Sisyphus, rolling
the stone up the hill, when you think about finally getting some rights
for people and visits to Guantanamo, and then what happens is the
administration really goes and continues its illegality in other
prisons around the world. So what it really says is that, yes, the
struggle is around one prison like Guantanamo, but we have to really
root out completely what this administration is doing around the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, can you, though, explain? I mean, it sounds like the
reason Bagram is growing is because of all of the international outcry
around Guantanamo, but also Guantanamo?s legal relationship with the
United States on a U.S. air base in Cuba. Can you explain the legality
of Afghanistan, where Bagram is and Guantanamo, these two detention
camps?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, both Clive and I were in the early case about
Guantanamo, in which the U.S. tried to say Guantanamo was like Bagram,
that there were no legal rights there. You couldn?t go to court for
people in Guantanamo. They had no constitutional rights, and the U.S.
said it could do what it wanted to people at Guantanamo. We won a big
case in the Supreme Court, the Rasul case in June of 2004, that opened
the courts to people at Guantanamo and opened them so people like Clive
and Center lawyers could go to Guantanamo.

Even with that, those set of rights, the administration, in the Graham-
Levin Bill and the Detainee Treatment Act, is trying to eliminate even
those rights we won in the Supreme Court. But as far as Bagram is
concerned, the legal position of the administration is similar to what
it was about Guantanamo. There are no legal rights, but they have the
additional argument, that they would make, that because it?s not on a U.
S. permanent military base like the one in Cuba, that there?s even
fewer rights.

I don?t think they?re correct. I think that any person detained
anywhere in the world has a right to go into a court, has a right to be
visited by an attorney, but the administration?s view is whatever
Guantanamo rights are, the rights at Bagram are nil, absolutely none,
and so what they did, according to the Times report, was a few months
after we won the Rasul case, they said they stopped sending people to
Guantanamo and started to send them to other places?Bagram is the one
that we know the most about at this point?because the administration?s
view is that no court, no lawyer, no one, has any right to visit anyone
in Guantanamo?anyone in Bagram, and that nobody?and that the people at
Bagram have no legal rights at all. An extraordinary statement in today?
s world.

AMY GOODMAN: Clive Stafford Smith, your response, and also what is the
role, if any, of Britain in Bagram?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Well, my response is that I think, as Michael and
I and many others have said for a long time, Guantanamo is something of
a distraction. That people?if you think people have been badly treated
in Guantanamo, you should see what?s happened to them in other places,
and what?s of real concern, arising out of the New York Times article,
is this: The Times mentioned one flight. It was actually September 19,
2004 where ten people were brought to Guantanamo. I represent a couple
of those. Of those ten, all of them are extraordinary cases where
people were taken and abused horribly in other places.

One of my clients is Binyam Mohammed. He was rendered to Morocco. We?ve
got the flight logs. We know the very names of the soldiers who were on
the flight, and he was taken there, and he was tortured for 18 months,
a razor blade taken to his penis, for goodness sake, and now the U.S.
military is putting him on trial in Guantanamo. Hassin bin Attash, a 17
year-old juvenile who was taken to Jordan and tortured there for 16
months. There is a series of these people.

Now, what that prompts is this question, that the people who have been
most mistreated in Guantanamo were mistreated elsewhere, and then the
administration took a very small number of them to Guantanamo, but the
vast majority of them are either in Bagram or in these secret prisons
around the world. And most recently, we heard of Poland. We?ve heard of
Morocco. We?ve heard of various places.

What I?m afraid is the truth is that the most shocking abuses have yet
to come to light, that these people are in Bagram and have yet to talk
to anybody, and what the administration is doing is hiding these
ghastly secrets. Now, the question is: What are they going to do about
that? What are they going to do when it becomes necessary at some point
for these prisoners to be given lawyers? There?s a lot of horror
stories, and the administration is just not going to want those horror
stories to come out. So where are these prisoners going to be sent? Are
they going to vanish forever?

And unfortunately, the U.S. administration has shown that it is willing
to send people to Egypt, where they may disappear, to Morocco, where
they get razor blades taken to them, and we?ve got to find out the
names of these people first, because the government won?t tell us, and
then we?ve got to prevent them from being rendered to some country
where they effectively die after a bit of torture.

I?ll be glad to go on to the British part, but I know I have talked too
much. I don?t want to rant on forever.

AMY GOODMAN: Clive Stafford Smith, I wanted to ask you about a piece
that appeared in a paper in your country in the Guardian by Suzanne
Goldenberg and James Meek. It says, ?New evidence has emerged that U.S.
forces in Afghanistan engaged in widespread Abu Ghraib-style abuse,
taking trophy photographs of detainees and carrying out rape and sexual
humiliation. Documents obtained by the Guardian contain evidence that
such abuse took place in the main detention center at Bagram, near the
capital, Kabul, as well at a smaller U.S. installation near the
southern city of Kandahar. A thousand pages of evidence from U.S. Army
investigations released to the ACLU after a long battle, made available
to the Guardian.?

And then inside, it says, ?The latest allegations from Afghanistan fit
a pattern of claims of brutal treatment made by former Guantanamo Bay
prisoners and Afghans held by the U.S. In December, the U.S. said eight
prisoners had died in custody in Afghanistan,? and this is according to
you, ?A Palestinian says he was sodomized by American soldiers in
Afghanistan. Another former prisoner of U.S. forces, a Jordanian,
describes a form of torture which involved being hung in a cage from a
rope for days. Hussein Abdelkader Youssef Mustafa, a Palestinian living
in Jordan, told Clive Stafford Smith he was sodomized by U.S. soldiers
during detention at Bagram in 2002. He said, ?They forcibly rammed a
stick up my rectum?excruciatingly painful. Only when the pain became
overwhelming did I think I would ever scream, but I could not stop
screaming when this happened.??

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yeah, you know, Hussein Mustafa, I met with him
in Jordan, and he was an incredibly credible person. He is a dignified
older gentleman, about now 50 years old, and he wanted to talk about
what had happened to him, but he really didn?t want to talk about that
sexual stuff, and in the end, you know, I said to him, ?Look, you don?t
have to, but it?s very important if things happened, that the story get
out, so they don?t happen to other people,? and in the end he did, and
it was in front of half a dozen people who were just transfixed as he
described how four soldiers took him, one on each shoulder, one bent
down his head and then the fourth of them took this broomstick and
shoved it up his rectum.

Now there was no one in that room?and they were from a variety of
places?who didn?t believe that what this man was saying was true, but I
am afraid, I?ve got to tell you, that that?s far from the worst that?s
happened. When you talk about Bagram, when you talk about Kandahar,
those aren?t the worst places the U.S. has run in Afghanistan. The dark
prison, sometimes called ?Salt Pit,? in Kabul itself, which is separate
from Bagram, has been far worse than that, and I can tell you stories
from there that just make your skin crawl.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don?t you tell us something about this place?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Yeah, I?ll tell you some of the ones, for
example, that Binyam Mohammed told me. He was the man who had the razor
blade taken to him. He was then taken, and again, we can prove it. We?
ve got the flight logs. He was taken on January 25, 2004, to Kabul,
where he was put in this dark prison for five months, and he was
shackled. You just get this vision of the Middle Ages, where he?s
shackled on the wall with his hands up, so he can?t quite sit down. It?
s totally dark in that place.

When the U.S. says that people are being treated nicely in Bagram, you?
ve got to be kidding me. It?s the middle of winter, and they?re
freezing to death, and this man was in this cell, no heating,
absolutely freezing, no clothing, except for his shorts, totally dark
for 24 hours a day with this howling noise around him. They began with
Eminem music, interestingly enough; they played him Eminem music for 24
hours a day for 20 days. Seems to me Eminem ought to be suing them for
royalties over that, but then it got worse and they started doing these
screeching noises, and this is going on 24 hours a day, and in the mean
time they would bring him out very briefly just to beat him, and this
is to try to get this man to confess to stories that they now want him
to repeat in military commissions in Guantanamo, and they want to say,
?Oh, everything?s nice now.?

And what he went through, he said, was far worse than the physical
torture, this psychological torture that some pervert was running in
the dark prison in Kabul was worse to him, and he still suffers from it
day in, day out, because of what it has done to his mind, and this is
the?what we have to remember is there is someone out there who is
thinking this stuff up and who is then saying that we need to do it,
and this isn?t some lowly guard who loses control and does something
terrible that?s physical. I mean, that?s awful. But you?ve got someone
out there who is thinking through how we?re going to torture these
people with this excruciating noise and these other things, and they?re
doing this very, very consciously, and the story has a long way before
it?s going to be out fully.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Michael Ratner, what oversight is there?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, as Clive is saying, there isn?t, and I think, you
know, we?re putting this huge effort into closing down Guantanamo,
which is crucial, obviously, to do. It will be a major victory, but
what we?re running is these so-called ?black sites,? torture chambers
all around the world, and there isn?t any oversight. Our Congress is
just sitting on its hands, not doing anything. The most they ask is
they say, ?Give us a report on black sites.? Even that isn?t getting
through. We have nothing.

This country is running torture chambers around the world right now,
and Clive?s stories, our clients? stories, are incredibly dramatic, and
his point about the psychological torture is crucial. It?s what Clive
is saying, people have thought about this, but this is something that
has been U.S. policy for 40 years of how to really deal with people,
not just physically, but with psychological torture, and one of your
former guests, I think Al McCoy, had this on in A Question of Torture,
saying, this is what really affects people. Physically, yes, hurts
them, but the psychological marks of torture, and when you see the
pictures from Bagram to Guantanamo, you know that this is stuff that is
not just chance or random. This is going by the book.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to talk about this article in the New Yorker that
Jane Mayer had written about Colonel Louie Morgan Banks, a senior Army
psychologist who played a significant advisory role in interrogations
at Guantanamo Bay. Asked to provide details of his consulting work, he
said, quote, ?I just don?t remember any particular cases. I just
consulted generally on what approaches to take. It was about what human
behavior in captivity is like.? Banks has a Ph.D. in psychology from
the University of Southern Mississippi. A biographical statement for an
American Psychological Association Task Force on Psychological Ethics
and National Security, which Banks serves on, mentions that he, quote,
?provides technical support and consultation to all Army psychologists
providing interrogation support.? It also notes that starting in
November of 2001, Banks was detailed to Afghanistan where he spent four
months at Bagram Air Field, quote, ?supporting combat operations
against al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, what?s remarkable about Banks is he also
consulted on Guantanamo. So here you have this guy who is a
psychologist, consulting really on how to break people through
psychological?psychological torture is what I would call it, and then
he goes from Guantanamo to Bagram. This is not chance. This is not a
few bad apples. This is high-level military people working with our
military, our C.I.A., in how to break people through torture.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: When you?re talking ?break people,? and I think
that?s a very important word. You know, people bang on about whether it?
s torture or whether it?s coercion. Well our highest officials have
said that the purpose of all of this is to, quote, ?break? somebody,
and we get people to confess to stuff that?s absolute drivel. You take,
for example, Binyam Mohammed, again. You have a razor blade taken to
you, you have the psychological stuff, you?re going to say anything.

They got Binyam Mohammed to confess that he had dinner with Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed, Ramsey bin al-Shaid, Abu Zubaydah, Sheikh al-Libbi,
and Jose Padilla all together on April 3, 2002, in Pakistan. Well, you
know, quite apart from anything else, two of them, Abu Zubaydah and
Sheikh al-Libbi were in U.S. custody at the time when he confessed to
that and at the time that he was meant to be having dinner, and you
know, this is a guy that didn?t speak Arabic who was meant to be
hobnobbing with half of al-Qaeda. You get this total drivel out of this
breaking of people, and yet, for some reason, the people who are
designing Guantanamo think we should carry on breaking them, as did the
Spanish Inquisition. It?s very odd.

MICHAEL RATNER: That?s correct. I mean, it?s?they break them; they get
drivel; they get false stories, and so what?s going on? What?s going
on, I think, in part, is an attempt to terrorize people, terrorize the
Muslim world and say, ?You come into U.S. hands, and we will terrorize
you.? And that?s what they?re doing.

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Don?t you think though, Michael?I tell you, I
think there?s a slightly bigger danger here, which is the people who
are doing this abuse believe the stuff they get. This is what?s
frightening to me, that we end up making decisions based on this
nonsense.

MICHAEL RATNER: You know, it?s true. They do believe it. I think, when
you talk to your clients or we talk to ours, the people who are
interrogating them actually believe what they?re telling them, even
though it?s utterly and complete drivel.

AMY GOODMAN: We?re going to have to leave it there. Joining us next is
Maher Arar. He is a Canadian citizen who was?well, the U.S. government
calls it ?extraordinary rendition,? others call it ?kidnapped??when he
was transiting through Kennedy Airport from a family vacation to Canada
and sent to Syria, was tortured there and held for almost a year. We
have been speaking with Clive Stafford Smith, a British human rights
lawyer. Michael Ratner will stay with us, President of the Center for
Constitutional Rights.

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