Bagram: Still There

There’s a good piece by Tim Golden in today’s Times about the detention center at Bagram, where conditions are even more bleak than at Guantanamo; conditions are overcrowded (the population having increased from around 100 to nearly 700 since 2002), detainees have no access to lawyers, and the the US continues in many instances to prevent the Red Cross access to prisoners in a timely fashion. Moreover, as Emily Bazelon among others reported nearly three years ago, there’s no question that the US has used torture at Bagram as well as other facilities in Afghanistan. And the Jacoby Report, the only official investigation into these abuses, was so heavily redacted as to be nearly useless — at least to anyone who might be interested in how detainees are defined, what kinds of interrogations tactics were approved, what oversight measures might have been in place to prevent abuses, and so on.

The Bush administration vaguely claims (as it does with Gitmo) that it would prefer to shut down the facility and turn over the mostly Afghan prisoners to the Karzai government, but the Times article makes it clear that this won’t be happening any time soon. There are several reasons for this, but among the more telling points made in the piece, Golden reports that while a new Afghan-run facility has been completed, the US won’t turn over the detainees unless Afghanistan promises to replicate the legally dubious system created by the Bush administration.

Yet even before the construction began in early 2006, the creation of the new Afghan National Detention Center was complicated by turf battles among Afghan government ministries, some of which resisted the American strategy, officials of both countries said.

A push by some Defense Department officials to have Kabul authorize the indefinite military detention of “enemy combatants” — adopting a legal framework like that of Guantánamo — foundered in 2006 when aides to President Hamid Karzai persuaded him not to sign a decree that had been written with American help.

On the one hand, it’s instructive to note that the Afghan government seems to be pushing back on this; I’m sure the weakness of the state itself (rather than any devotion to principle) explains the resistance. Still, the apparent permanence of the Bagram facility is an appalling prospect.