Peace and Justice Post

US soldiers routinely abuse Afghan civilians locked up at a secret US concentration camp at the Bagram airbase, a report revealed on Thursday.

It was compiled by the New York-based Open Society Foundation, a policy thinktank founded by liberal billionaire George Soros to promote government accountability.

It is based on interviews of 18 detainees who say they passed through the “black jail” in 2009 or 2010.

Former inmates said they had been exposed to excessive cold and light, not given enough food or blankets, deprived of sleep, stripped naked for medical exams and kept from practicing their religion.

Several of those interviewed claimed their cells were so cold that their teeth chattered and they could not sleep.

The blankets they were provided with were not enough to keep warm, they alleged.

“It was like sleeping in the fridge,” one of the former prisoners told the researchers.

Many said they were given food that smelled so bad they were only able to eat the biscuits supplied with their meals.

Bright lights constantly shone and it was difficult to sleep because of the accumulation of light, cold and noise – some from intentionally loud guards.

They were also forcibly stripped for medical exams.

“While detaining authorities have a legitimate and genuine need to conduct medical examinations of detainees upon entry into a facility.

“They must balance this with the fact that Muslims, and Pashtuns in particular, are extremely sensitive about revealing the naked body,” the report stated.

Some detainees charged that the Red Crescent had been blocked from visiting them.

A spokeswoman for the US military task force overseeing detention in Afghanistan denied the existence of any hidden jails and said that all US detention facilities are held to the same strict standards of conduct.

Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen told a meeting of Nato ministers in Brussels on Monday that a Nato summit in Lisbon next month should endorse Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s aim of making Afghan forces take responsibility for all security across the country by 2014.

But Mr Rasmussen stressed that the timing would depend on the readiness of Afghan forces.