Guantanamo II

[kpete]

An Afghan Prison Expands, Filling Guantánamo's Role

By TIM GOLDEN and ERIC SCHMITT
Published: February 26, 2006
While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo 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.

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.

........................

From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/international/26bagram.html?hp&ex=1140930000&en=5ecf85c2251c315d&ei=5094&partner=homepage
via:http://bornatthecrestoftheempire.blogspot.com/2006/02/guantanamo-ii.html

[joeunderdog]

1. Guantanomore.

Hypocrisy of Democracy, Part Deux

[Jack Rabbit]

2. Did The New York Times just now discover Bagram?

Perhaps they've all been getting their information from Judy Miller's sources over there.

[neweurope]

3. It's still good to have it mentioned again.

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Remember Fallujah

Bush to The Hague!