Inmates detail U.S. prison near Kabul (Gitmo at Bagram)

[leftchick]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061001/ap_on_re_as/afghanistan_prison

KABUL, Afghanistan - Capt. Amanullah, a former mujahedeen commander, smooths his black beard with his palm and gives a deep and ironic laugh as he recounts his 14 miserable months in Bagram, the U.S. prison for terror suspects in Afghanistan.

"There were lots of stupid questions and accusations with no proof," said the 56-year-old veteran of combat against the Soviet occupation. He insists he was there only because Afghan rivals lied about him to the U.S. Army.

He's far from alone in his assertion of innocence — or his inability to make that heard for so long. Like many who have passed through the secretive jail set up after the fall of the Taliban regime, Amanullah found himself entangled in a system where he had no protection and no rights, and not even the pressure of public scrutiny that helped inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or Abu Ghraib, Iraq.

"There's been a silence about Bagram, and much less political discussion about it," said Richard Bennett, the chief U.N. human rights officer in Afghanistan.

<snip>

Bagram's estimated 500 inmates are mostly Afghans, but also are believed to include Arabs, Pakistanis and some Central Asians. They wear the same orange jump suits and shaven heads as the "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo, but lack even the scant legal rights granted to the inmates at that facility, such as the right to appear at military hearings that assess whether they pose a security threat. In some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four years, rights workers say.

[Drum]

1. Kick n Rec!

Get the news out, folks, THESE are the wedge issues, the contradictions that can sink the GOP war-mongers for real!

:kick:

[leftchick]

2. thanks

I posted this in GD with no response. It kills me how the foley shit blacks out all of the torture news. This is serious stuff that needs to be uncovered.

[Drum]

3. True dat.

Thanks for keeping your eye on the ball, leftchick.

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[Straight Shooter]

4. This info has been out for quite some time

I may be mistaken, but Bagram is also the compound that could not house enough Afghan prisoners, and many were shot while being transported in containers, or they suffocated. I cannot find a direct link, but maybe someone else can. The article I reference in this post is just the tip of the iceberg.

June 26, 2003: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0626-02.htm

"Privately, the Americans admit that torture, or something very like it, is going on at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where they are holding an unknown number of suspected terrorists.

Al-Qa'ida and Taliban prisoners inside this secret CIA interrogation center - in a cluster of metal shipping-containers protected by a triple layer of concertinaed wire - are subjected to a variety of practices. They are kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles. They are bound in awkward, painful positions. They are deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights. They are sometimes beaten on capture, and painkillers are withheld.

The rhetoric of the "war on terror" is everywhere being used by governments as the pretext for untrammeled action against rebels and dissidents. The interrogators call these "stress and duress" techniques, which one former US intelligence officer has dubbed "torture-lite". Sometimes there is nothing "lite" about the end results. The US military has announced that a criminal investigation has begun into the case of two prisoners who died after beatings at Bagram. More covertly, other terrorist suspects have been "rendered" into the hands of various foreign intelligence services known to have less fastidious records on the use of torture.

What is perhaps most disturbing about all this is that the US officials who have leaked the information have not done so out of a need to expose something that they see as shameful. On the contrary, they have made it clear that they wanted the world to know what is going on because they feel it is justified."

[leftchick]

5. yes, the torture & deahs have been going on for years at Bagram

Bagram prisoner abuse: report implicates top military brass


http://www.hindu.com/2005/05/22/stories/2005052204911300.htm

WASHINGTON: A report on a military investigation into two killings of detenus at a U.S. prison in Afghanistan has produced new evidence of connivance of senior officers in systematic prisoner abuse.

The investigation shows the military intelligence officers in charge of the detention centre at Bagram airport were redeployed to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003, while still under investigation for the deaths of two detenus months earlier.

Despite military prosecutors' recommendations, the officers involved have yet to be charged.

The Bagram case also suggests that some of the prison guards were given little if any training in handling detenus, and were influenced by a White House directive that ``terrorist'' suspects did not deserve the rights given to prisoners of war under the Geneva convention.

The prosecution dossier from the army's investigation into Bagram, leaked to the New York Times, deals with the deaths of detenus Dilawar and Habibullah (both, as is common for Afghans, taking a single name).

Dilawar was a taxi driver who appears to have driven past a U.S. military base soon after a rocket attack. Habibullah was handed over to the U.S. by an Afghan warlord, and was identified as the brother of a Taliban commander. Both men were seized in late 2002, interrogated, beaten and killed in a hangar used for holding detenus who were being vetted for dispatch to Guantanamo Bay.

:cry:

[leftchick]

6. I am kicking this

for the tortured. :(