Are Congress people aware?? As a matter of fact Bagram may even be worse than GITMO (and Abu Ghraib) given the torture stories coming from ex-inmates there and at least two reported deaths by torture.
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During his imprisonment at the compound, Mustafa estimated that he was interrogated about 25 times. Sometimes, he said, the soldiers forced him to kneel on a concrete floor with a bag over his head. Other times they woke him from sleep or interrupted him in prayer. He said he occasionally heard detainees screaming and concluded that they were being beaten. Then one day, he recalled, “an American soldier took me blindfolded. My hands were tightly cuffed, with my ears plugged so I could not hear properly, and my mouth covered so I could only make a muffled scream. Two soldiers, one on each side, forced me to bend down, and a third pressed my face down over a table. A fourth soldier then pulled down my trousers. They rammed a stick up my rectum.”
Mustafa said that he was not told why he was brutalized. “The Americans never said anything about why they were doing it to me, so I had to think for many hours and days later, to try to work out what was going through their minds,” he told Stafford Smith, pressing the tips of his broad fingers together. “I think maybe they wanted to make me so embarrassed that it would live with me for the rest of my life.” He said other prisoners told him that they had experienced similar treatment.
Americans, and the world, have become accustomed to accounts like Mustafa’s in connection with Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. But his story hints at another scandal—one that has received little sustained media attention and sparked no public outrage. Over the past three years, numerous reports—from Afghan and American human rights groups, and from the Pentagon itself—have documented allegations of abuse inside U.S. compounds in Afghanistan. Hundreds of prisoners have come forward, often reluctantly, offering accounts of harsh interrogation techniques including sexual brutality, beatings, and other methods designed to humiliate and inflict physical pain. At least eight detainees are known to have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, and in at least two cases military officials ruled that the deaths were homicides. Many of the incidents were known to U.S. officials long before the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted; yet instead of disciplining those involved, the Pentagon transferred key personnel from Afghanistan to the Iraqi prison. “Had the investigation and prosecution of abusive interrogators in Afghanistan proceeded in a timely manner,” Human Rights Watch executive director Brad Adams noted in an open letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last fall, “it is possible that…many of the abuses seen in Iraq could have been avoided.”
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/03/03_2005_Bazelon.htmlPlease Rate This Up....
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061001/ap_on_re_as/afghanistan_prisonInmates detail U.S. prison near Kabul
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.
Originally intended as a short-term holding pen for al-Qaida and Taliban suspects later shipped to Guantanamo, Bagram has expanded and acquired its own notoriety over abuse allegations though attracting much less international attention than the U.S. detention facility in Cuba.
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