when will Obama close this horror?

[ensho]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KC07Df03.html


Bush's living legacy at Bagram prison



Just when you think you've woken up from a bad dream …

When it comes to offshore injustice and secret prisons, especially our notorious but little known prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, let's hope the Barack Obama years mean never having to complete that sentence.

-snip-

Bad times at Bagram
Still, ever since the Oval Office changed hands in January, I've had a nagging feeling that something was amiss. And when I finally focused on it, a single question kept coming to mind: Whatever happened to the US prison at Bagram?

-snip-

But what else did I know? Thanks to New York Times reporters Carlotta Gall, David Rohde, Tim Golde, and Eric Schmitt, as well as to Alex Gibney's documentary film Taxi to the Dark Side, I knew that two Afghans, Dilawar and Jullah Habibullah, had been beaten to death by US Army interrogators at the prison in December 2002. I also knew that the use of such beatings, as well as various other forms of torture, had been normalized at Bagram at the very beginning of the Bush administration's long march of pain that led to Guantanamo and then on to Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq as well as foreign torture chambers.

From the 2004 Church Report (written by Naval Inspector General Admiral T Church), I knew that military interrogators and guards at Bagram had been given next to no relevant training for the mission of detention and interrogation. I knew as well that a secret CIA prison was allegedly located apart from the regular detention cells at Bagram. I knew that military officials had declared that the interrogation techniques at Bagram seemed to work better than those being used at Guantanamo in the same period. And that after the Supreme Court issued a decision in 2004 to allow prisoners at Guantanamo to challenge their detentions, the prison population at Bagram began to grow.

-snip-

It turns out that we can say very little with precision or confidence about that prison facility or even the exact number of prisoners there. News sources had often reported approximately 500-600 prisoners in custody at Bagram, but an accurate count is not available. A federal judge recently asked for "the number of detainees held at Bagram Air Base; the number of Bagram detainees who were captured outside Afghanistan; and the number of Bagram detainees who are Afghan citizens," but the information the Obama administration offered the court in response remains classified and redacted from the public record.

-snip-

We do know that a planned expansion of the facility is underway and will - if President Obama chooses to continue the Bush project there - enable up to 1,100 prisoners to be held (a step which will grimly complement the "surge" in American troops now underway in Afghanistan). There are no figures available on how long most of Bagram's prisoners have been held - although some, it seems, have been imprisoned without charges or recourse for years -- or how legal processes are being applied there, if at all. Last spring, the International Herald Tribune reported that Afghans from Bagram were sometimes tried in Afghan criminal proceedings where little evidence and no witnesses were presented.
-snip-
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what's wrong with Obama that this wasn't shut down the same time as Gitmo. is he in the grip of our Military neo con officers? if he is, how do we rescue him?

[FudaFuda]

1. Gitmo isn't closed.

you said:
what's wrong with Obama that this wasn't shut down the same time as Gitmo.

but Gitmo isn't closed, yet. It's supposed to be closed this year.

[ensho]

2. you know what I meant - but I'll say it different

why didn't he announce the closing of Bagram and any other criminal military prisons we have, the same time he announced gitmo?