Kevin Sieff
By Kevin Sieff
Of all the challenges the US faces as it winds down the Afghanistan war, the most difficult might be closing the prison nicknamed “The Second Guantanamo.”
The US holds 67 non-Afghan prisoners there, including some described as hardened Al Qaeda operatives seized from around the world in the months after the 9/11 attacks. More than a decade later, they’re still kept in the shadowy facility at Bagram air base outside Kabul.
Closing the facility presents many of the same problems the Obama administration has encountered in its attempt to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba. Some US officials argue that Bagram’s resolution is more complicated — and more urgent. The US transferred the Afghan inmates to local authorities this year. But figuring out what to do with the foreign prisoners is proving to be a bigger hurdle to shutting the US jail. “Is there a plan? No. Is there a desire to close the facility? Yes,” General Joseph Dunford, the US veteran in Afghanistan, said.
With the US’ nearly 12-year fight in Afghanistan due to end next year, the State Department and the Pentagon have been unable to come up with a strategy for the trial or repatriation of men from more than a dozen countries at Bagram. The population in the prison is growing because of the apprehension of foreign fighters in joint US-Afghan Special Forces operations. The newest detainee was sent to Bagram last month.
None of the prisoners has been formally tried. Many have been cleared for release by informal military review boards, but most were never freed.
Because the centre is on Afghan soil, US forces are technically obliged to shutter it when their combat role formally ends in December 2014. But some US officials and politicians say that would pose an enormous security risk. The best solution, they say, is to keep the facility open under US oversight, possibly for decades. It is not clear that the Afghans will permit that.
As at Guantanamo, US officials have deemed a portion of Bagram prisoners too much of a threat to send home to countries that can’t or won’t keep them locked up. Officials worry that it might not be possible to convict the men in US courts, because evidence could be classified or seen as weak. “They’re too dangerous to let go,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a reservist Air Force lawyer appointed last month by Dunford to consider solutions to the detention dilemma. “We’re a nation without an available jail in the war on terror, and we need to fix that,” Graham said.
Keeping a US-run prison in Afghanistan beyond 2014 would require the permission of President Hamid Karzai, who has staunchly resisted US-run detention facilities. The US has hit stumbling blocks in negotiating a long-term security agreement with Kabul. The Afghan government this year agreed to allow the US to continue operating the centre at Bagram for “third-country nationals” — mostly Pakistanis — in exchange for handing over the Afghan prisoners, now in a separate facility. But Afghan officials, including Karzai, assumed the US would relinquish its prison by 2014.
A handful of detainees have been repatriated, in part because of Pakistan’s reluctance to provide security guarantees required under US legislation. US law also mandates that before a prisoner’s release, the Pentagon must assess “the threat posed by the individual and the security environment of the country to which the individual is to be transferred.” Such studies can take months.
“For the past decade, the US has been able to hide Bagram behind the shield of military conflict in Afghanistan,” said Tina Foster, Director of the International Justice Network, which represents more than 30 detainees. “What’s happening is that the shield is disappearing and what’s left is the legacy of the second Guantanamo, which is going to last beyond the Afghan war.” Lawyers such as Foster who represent clients at Bagram and Guantanamo describe the situation at the Afghan prison as far more opaque. For years, there were allegations of torture at Bagram, many later borne out in military reports that were made public. US officials say the conditions have improved. Although attorneys say they haven’t heard the same accusations from detainees since 2008, they say they have a limited view into the facility.
Unlike at Guantanamo, detainees in Afghanistan have no right to habeas corpus, a point Foster is arguing in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The Pentagon says it expect most detainees to be transferred to their countries “once those countries have provided us assurances that they will take steps to mitigate the threat these individuals pose,” said Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman. “In some cases, we may seek to have individuals prosecuted for war crimes or violations of US or Afghan law.” But none of the detainees captured abroad since 9/11 has been tried in military commissions in the US. Some can’t be tried by the Afghans because they didn’t violate Afghan law.
Graham said it would be foolish to assume that all detainees could be sent to their countries or tried before the end of next year. Last year, some of the first Pakistani detainees were repatriated after a year of fraught negotiations. According to their attorneys, one was a 14-year-old boy picked up in a US-led night operation and the other was an employee of an Afghan military base whose colleagues had turned him in after a personal dispute. “If it takes a year to release those guys, whose innocence was never in dispute, what does it say about the prospect for the others?” asked Sarah Belal, the lead attorney for Justice Project Pakistan, which has advocated repatriation of Pakistani detainees at Bagram.
Until at least 2007, the US snatched high-level terrorism suspects in Pakistan and brought them across the Afghan border and, eventually, to Bagram. Others were kidnapped across the Middle East, Asia and Europe and taken to the facility in the early years of the past decade.
Yemeni Amin Al Bakri was seized by US agents while he was on a business trip in Thailand. Fadi Al Maqaleh disappeared from his home in Yemen in 2004, when he was a high school student, and later turned up at Bagram.
Both have been cleared for release on three occasions, beginning in 2010, according to Pentagon records. But the Obama administration has declined to repatriate them because of concerns that Yemen might release potential terrorists without a trial. WP-BLOOMBERG
By Kevin Sieff
Of all the challenges the US faces as it winds down the Afghanistan war, the most difficult might be closing the prison nicknamed “The Second Guantanamo.”
The US holds 67 non-Afghan prisoners there, including some described as hardened Al Qaeda operatives seized from around the world in the months after the 9/11 attacks. More than a decade later, they’re still kept in the shadowy facility at Bagram air base outside Kabul.
Closing the facility presents many of the same problems the Obama administration has encountered in its attempt to close down the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in Cuba. Some US officials argue that Bagram’s resolution is more complicated — and more urgent. The US transferred the Afghan inmates to local authorities this year. But figuring out what to do with the foreign prisoners is proving to be a bigger hurdle to shutting the US jail. “Is there a plan? No. Is there a desire to close the facility? Yes,” General Joseph Dunford, the US veteran in Afghanistan, said.
With the US’ nearly 12-year fight in Afghanistan due to end next year, the State Department and the Pentagon have been unable to come up with a strategy for the trial or repatriation of men from more than a dozen countries at Bagram. The population in the prison is growing because of the apprehension of foreign fighters in joint US-Afghan Special Forces operations. The newest detainee was sent to Bagram last month.
None of the prisoners has been formally tried. Many have been cleared for release by informal military review boards, but most were never freed.
Because the centre is on Afghan soil, US forces are technically obliged to shutter it when their combat role formally ends in December 2014. But some US officials and politicians say that would pose an enormous security risk. The best solution, they say, is to keep the facility open under US oversight, possibly for decades. It is not clear that the Afghans will permit that.
As at Guantanamo, US officials have deemed a portion of Bagram prisoners too much of a threat to send home to countries that can’t or won’t keep them locked up. Officials worry that it might not be possible to convict the men in US courts, because evidence could be classified or seen as weak. “They’re too dangerous to let go,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a reservist Air Force lawyer appointed last month by Dunford to consider solutions to the detention dilemma. “We’re a nation without an available jail in the war on terror, and we need to fix that,” Graham said.
Keeping a US-run prison in Afghanistan beyond 2014 would require the permission of President Hamid Karzai, who has staunchly resisted US-run detention facilities. The US has hit stumbling blocks in negotiating a long-term security agreement with Kabul. The Afghan government this year agreed to allow the US to continue operating the centre at Bagram for “third-country nationals” — mostly Pakistanis — in exchange for handing over the Afghan prisoners, now in a separate facility. But Afghan officials, including Karzai, assumed the US would relinquish its prison by 2014.
A handful of detainees have been repatriated, in part because of Pakistan’s reluctance to provide security guarantees required under US legislation. US law also mandates that before a prisoner’s release, the Pentagon must assess “the threat posed by the individual and the security environment of the country to which the individual is to be transferred.” Such studies can take months.
“For the past decade, the US has been able to hide Bagram behind the shield of military conflict in Afghanistan,” said Tina Foster, Director of the International Justice Network, which represents more than 30 detainees. “What’s happening is that the shield is disappearing and what’s left is the legacy of the second Guantanamo, which is going to last beyond the Afghan war.” Lawyers such as Foster who represent clients at Bagram and Guantanamo describe the situation at the Afghan prison as far more opaque. For years, there were allegations of torture at Bagram, many later borne out in military reports that were made public. US officials say the conditions have improved. Although attorneys say they haven’t heard the same accusations from detainees since 2008, they say they have a limited view into the facility.
Unlike at Guantanamo, detainees in Afghanistan have no right to habeas corpus, a point Foster is arguing in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The Pentagon says it expect most detainees to be transferred to their countries “once those countries have provided us assurances that they will take steps to mitigate the threat these individuals pose,” said Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman. “In some cases, we may seek to have individuals prosecuted for war crimes or violations of US or Afghan law.” But none of the detainees captured abroad since 9/11 has been tried in military commissions in the US. Some can’t be tried by the Afghans because they didn’t violate Afghan law.
Graham said it would be foolish to assume that all detainees could be sent to their countries or tried before the end of next year. Last year, some of the first Pakistani detainees were repatriated after a year of fraught negotiations. According to their attorneys, one was a 14-year-old boy picked up in a US-led night operation and the other was an employee of an Afghan military base whose colleagues had turned him in after a personal dispute. “If it takes a year to release those guys, whose innocence was never in dispute, what does it say about the prospect for the others?” asked Sarah Belal, the lead attorney for Justice Project Pakistan, which has advocated repatriation of Pakistani detainees at Bagram.
Until at least 2007, the US snatched high-level terrorism suspects in Pakistan and brought them across the Afghan border and, eventually, to Bagram. Others were kidnapped across the Middle East, Asia and Europe and taken to the facility in the early years of the past decade.
Yemeni Amin Al Bakri was seized by US agents while he was on a business trip in Thailand. Fadi Al Maqaleh disappeared from his home in Yemen in 2004, when he was a high school student, and later turned up at Bagram.
Both have been cleared for release on three occasions, beginning in 2010, according to Pentagon records. But the Obama administration has declined to repatriate them because of concerns that Yemen might release potential terrorists without a trial. WP-BLOOMBERG
