A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26
By Tim
Golden and Eric Schmitt The New York Times
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.
Privately, some
administration officials acknowledge that the situation
at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal
void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June
2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to
challenge their detention in United States courts.
While Guantánamo 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. 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.
"Bagram was never meant
to be a long-term facility, and now it's a long-term
facility without the money or resources," said one
Defense Department official who has toured the detention
center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the
official added, "Anyone who has been to Bagram would
tell you it's worse."
Former detainees said the
renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human
rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined
there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon's chief
adviser on detainee issues, Charles D. Stimson, declined
to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention
officials at the United States Central Command, which
oversees military operations in Afghanistan.
The military's chief
spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also
refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say
repeatedly that his command was "committed to
treating detainees humanely, and providing the best
possible living conditions and medical care in accordance
with the principles of the Geneva Convention."
Other military and
administration officials said the growing detainee
population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners
at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last
year, according to military figures, was in part a result
of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of
detainees into Guantánamo 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.
Until the court ruling, Bagram
functioned as a central clearing house for the global
fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel
there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected
terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere,
sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo
for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the
rest.
But according to interviews with current and former
administration officials, the National Security Council
effectively halted the movement of new detainees into
Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House
on Sept. 14, 2004.
Wary of further angering
Guantánamo's critics, the council authorized a final
shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram,
the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted
to review and approve any Defense Department proposals
for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from
military officials in Afghanistan and one formal
recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such
proposals have been considered, officials said.
"Guantánamo was a
lightning rod," said a former senior administration
official who participated in the discussions and who,
like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter
in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of
the secrecy surrounding it. "For some reason, people
did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan."
Yet Bagram's expansion,
which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees
seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in
releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores
the Bush administration's continuing inability to resolve
where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.
Military officials with access to
intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of
Bagram's prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other
foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in
secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other
countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had
been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to
Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A.
custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.
Defense Department officials
said the C.I.A.'s effort to unload some detainees from
its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some
officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected
to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by
the intelligence agency. The Defense Department
"doesn't want to be the dumping ground," one
senior official familiar with the interagency debates
said. "There just aren't any good options."
A spokesman
for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.
Conditions at Bagram
The rising number of
detainees at Bagram has been noted periodically by the
military and documented by the International Committee of
the Red Cross, which does not make public other aspects
of its findings. But because the military does not
identify the prisoners or release other information on
their detention, it had not previously been clear that
some detainees were being held there for such long
periods.
The prison rolls would be
even higher, officials noted, were it not for a Pentagon
decision in early 2005 to delegate the authority to
release them from the deputy secretary of defense to the
military's Central Command, which oversees the 19,000
American troops in Afghanistan, and to the ground
commander there.
Since January 2005, military
commanders in Afghanistan have released about 350
detainees from Bagram in conjunction with an Afghan
national reconciliation program, officials said. Even so,
one Pentagon official said the current average stay of
prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months. Officials said most of the current
Bagram detainees were captured during American military
operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country's
restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004. "We ran a couple of
large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during
which we captured a large number of enemy
combatants," said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was
the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan
at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, "Our
system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value
turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the
numbers we were bringing in." General Olson and other military
officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a
consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center
at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same
time to move detainees more quickly out of "forward
operating bases," in the Afghan provinces, where
international human rights groups had cited widespread
abuses.
At Bagram, reports of abuses
have markedly declined since the violent deaths of two
Afghan men held there in December 2002, Afghan and
foreign human rights officials said. After an Army investigation, the
practices found to have caused those two deaths
the chaining of detainees by the arms to the ceilings of
their cells and the use of knee strikes to the legs of
disobedient prisoners by guards were halted by
early 2003. Other abusive methods, like the use of
barking attack dogs to frighten new prisoners and the
handcuffing of detainees to cell doors to punish them for
talking, were phased out more gradually, military
officials and former detainees said. Human rights officials and former
detainees said living conditions at the detention center
had also improved.
Faced with serious
overcrowding in 2004, the military initially built some
temporary prison quarters and began refurbishing the main
prison building at Bagram, a former aircraft-machine shop
built by Soviet troops during their occupation of the
country in the 1980's. Corrals surrounded by stacked
razor wire that had served as general-population cells
gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold
no more than 15 detainees, military officials said. The
cut-off metal drums used as toilets were eventually
replaced with flush toilets. Last March, a nine-bed infirmary
opened, and months later a new wing was built. The
expansion brought improved conditions for the more than
250 prisoners who have been housed there, officials said.
Still, even the Afghan
villagers released from Bagram over the past year tend to
describe it as a stark, forsaken place. "It was like a cage,"
said one former detainee, Hajji Lalai Mama, a 60-year-old
tribal elder from the Spinbaldak district of southern Afghanistan
who was released last June after nearly two years.
Referring to a zoo in Pakistan, he added, "Like the
cages in Karachi where they put animals: it was like
that."
Guantánamo, which once kept
detainees in wire-mesh cages, now houses them in an
elaborate complex of concrete and steel buildings with a
hospital, recreation yards and isolation areas. At
Bagram, detainees are stripped on arrival and given
orange uniforms to wear. They wash in collective showers
and live under bright indoor lighting that is dimmed for
only a few hours at night. Abdul Nabi, a 24-year-old mechanic
released on Dec. 15 after nine months, said some
detainees frequently protested the conditions, banging on
their cages and sometimes refusing to eat. He added that
infractions of the rules were dealt with unsparingly:
hours handcuffed in a smaller cell for minor offenses,
and days in isolation for repeated transgressions.
"We were not allowed to talk
very much," he said in an interview.
The Rights of Detainees
The most basic complaint of
those released was that they had been wrongly detained in
the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said
they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by
the local police after demanding bribes they could not
pay. Human rights lawyers generally
contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo,
in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to
detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the
Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases
from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling,
which is now the subject of further litigation, remains
uncertain.
As at Guantánamo, the
military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to
ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants.
Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the
prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been
criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.
The two sets of panels that
review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign
military advocates to work with detainees in preparing
cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the
allegations against them, call witnesses and request
evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels
have concluded that the accused should be released.
The Bagram panels, called Enemy
Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees.
Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually
thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the
accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot
appear before the board, officials said. "The
detainee is not involved at all," one official
familiar with the process said. An official of the Afghan
Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai,
noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts
were all limited by law in how long they could hold
criminal suspects.
"The Americans are
detaining people without any legal procedures," Mr.
Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. "Prisoners
do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their
innocence."
Under a diplomatic
arrangement reached last year after more than a year of
negotiations, Afghan officials have agreed to take over
custody of the roughly 450 Afghan detainees now at Bagram
and another 100 Afghans held at Guantánamo once
American-financed contractors refurbish a block of a
decrepit former Soviet jail near Kabul as a high-security
prison.
Because of the $10 million
prison-construction project and an accompanying American
program to train Afghan prison guards, both of which are
to be completed in about a year, military officials in
the region have abandoned any thought of sending any of
the Afghan detainees at Bagram to Guantánamo. Still,
many details of the deal remain uncertain, including when
the new prison will be completed, which Afghan ministry
will run it and how the detainees may be prosecuted in
Afghan courts.
Pentagon officials said some
part of the Bagram prison would probably continue to
operate, holding the roughly 40 non-Afghan detainees
there as well as others likely to be captured by American
or NATO forces in continuing operations.
Prisoner
Transfers Stalled
Until now, military
officials at both Bagram and Guantánamo have been
frustrated in their efforts to engineer the transfer to Cuba
of another group of the most dangerous and valuable
non-Afghan detainees held at Bagram, Pentagon officials
said. Three officials said commanders at
Bagram first proposed moving about a dozen detainees to
Guantánamo in late 2004 and then reiterated the request
in early 2005. In an unusual step last spring, the
officials added, intelligence specialists based at
Guantánamo traveled to Bagram to assess the need for the
transfer.
But as Central Command
officials were forwarding a formal request to the
Pentagon for the transfer of about a dozen high-level
detainees, at least one of them, Omar al-Faruq, a former
operative of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from the
Bagram prison with three other men. Mr. Faruq had first
been taken to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives in late summer
2002, but was removed from the prison about a month
later, a soldier who served there said. Two officials familiar with
intelligence reports on the escape said that last July,
after Mr. Faruq had been returned to Bagram by the
C.I.A., he and the other men slipped out of a poorly
fenced-in cell and, in the middle of the night, piled up
some boxes and climbed through an open transom over one
of the doors.
In August, weeks after the
escape, a Defense Department working group called the
Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command's
recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees
to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter
said. Since then, the recommendation has
languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it
had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to
forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H.rumsfeld out
of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would
stoke international criticism.
"Out of sight, out of
mind," one of those officials said of the Bagram
detainees.
Carlotta Gall,
Ruhullah Khapalwak and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed
reporting from Afghanistan for this article.
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