By Stephen Foley, Independent UK. Posted February 22, 2009.
The Afghan air base is to undergo a $60 million expansion, allowing it to hold five times as many prisoners as remain at Gitmo.
a month after signing an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, President Barack Obama has quietly agreed to keep denying the right to trial to hundreds more terror suspects held at a makeshift camp in Afghanistan that human rights lawyers have dubbed “Obama’s Guantanamo.”
In a single-sentence answer filed with a Washington court, the administration dashed hopes that it would immediately rip up Bush-era policies that have kept more than 600 prisoners in legal limbo and in rudimentary conditions at the Bagram air base, north of Kabul.
Now, human rights groups say they are becoming increasingly concerned that the use of extra-judicial methods in Afghanistan could be extended rather than curtailed under the new U.S. administration. The air base is about to undergo a $60 million expansion that will double its size, meaning it can house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo.
Apart from staff at the International Red Cross, human rights groups and journalists have been barred from Bagram, where former prisoners say they were tortured by being shackled to the ceiling of isolation cells and deprived of sleep.
The base became notorious when two Afghan inmates died after the use of such techniques in 2002, and although treatment and conditions have been improved since then, the Red Cross issued a formal complaint to the U.S. government in 2007 about harsh treatment of some prisoners held in isolation for months.
While the majority of the estimated 600 prisoners are believed to be Afghan, an unknown number — perhaps several dozen — have been picked up from other countries.
One of the detainees who passed through the Afghan prison was Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who is expected to return to the UK this week after his release from Guantanamo Bay. Mr. Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, head of a legal charity called Reprieve, called President Obama’s strategy “the Bagram bait and switch,” where the administration was trumpeting the closure of a camp housing 242 prisoners, while scaling up the Bagram base to house 1,100 more.
“Guantanamo Bay was a diversionary tactic in the ‘War on Terror’,” said the lawyer. “Totting up the prisoners around the world — held by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, Djibouti, the prison ships and Diego Garcia, or held by U.S. proxies in Jordan, Egypt and Morocco — the numbers dwarf Guantanamo. There are still perhaps as many as 18,000 people in legal black holes. Mr. Obama should perhaps be offered more than a month to get the American house in order. However, this early sally from the administration underlines another message: it is far too early for human rights advocates to stand on the USS Abraham Lincoln and announce, ‘Mission Accomplished.'”
Four non-Afghan detainees at Bagram are fighting a legal case in Washington to be given the same access to the U.S. court system that was granted to the inmates of Guantanamo Bay by a controversial Supreme Court decision last year. The Bush administration was fighting their claim.
Two days into his presidency, Mr. Obama promised to shut Guantanamo within a year in an effort to restore America’s moral standing in the world and to prosecute the struggle against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.” But on the same day, the judge in the Bagram case said that the order “indicated significant changes to the government’s approach to the detention, and review of detention, of individuals currently held at Guantanamo Bay” and that “a different approach could impact the court’s analysis of certain issues central to the resolution” of the Bagram cases as well. Judge John Bates asked the new administration if it wanted to “refine” its stance.
The response, filed by the Department of Justice late on Friday, came as a crushing blow to human rights campaigners. “Having considered the matter, the government adheres to its previously articulated position,” it said.
Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, the New York human rights organisation representing the detainees, warned last night that “by leaving Bagram open, the administration turns the closure of Guantanamo into essentially a hollow and symbolic gesture.”
She said: “Without reconsidering the underlying policy, which has led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the indefinite detention of hundreds of people all these years, then we are simply returning to the status quo. The exact same thing that had the world up in arms has been going on at Bagram since even before Guantanamo.
“People have been tortured to the point that they have died; it is a rallying cry for those who oppose the U.S. actions in Afghanistan; it is not strategic for the U.S.; and, more importantly, holding people indefinitely, regardless of who they are and regardless of the facts, is completely inconsistent with everything we stand for as a country.”
The Department of Justice would only say that the legal briefs in the Washington case “speak for themselves.” It says Bagram is a special case because, unlike Guantanamo, it is sited within a theatre of war.
Mr. Obama has pushed out the wider questions about the U.S. policy on detaining terror suspects and supporters of the Taliban in Afghanistan until the summer, ordering a review that will take six months to complete.
The administration is weighing the likely increase in prisoners from an expanded fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, against the international perception that it is embedding extra-judicial detention into its policies for years to come.
The Case for a Truth Commission
February 22, 2009By Patrick Leahy, Time, Thursday, Feb. 19, 2009
More than 30 years ago, a special Senate investigation peered into abuses that included spying on the American people by their own government.
The findings by Senator Frank Church’s committee, drawn from testimony spanning 800 witnesses and thousands of pages of government documents, revealed how powerful government surveillance tools were misused against the American people. For instance, the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation spent more than two decades searching in vain for communist influence in the NAACP and infiltrated domestic groups that, for example, advocated for women’s rights. The Church committee’s work led to creation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and later to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act–reforms that largely held until the Bush years. (See George W. Bush’s biggest economic mistakes.)
The parallels with today are clear, and so are the lessons. Then, as in recent years, some were willing, in the name of security, to trade away the people’s rights as if they were written in sand, not stone. For much of this decade, we have read about and witnessed such abuses as the scandal at Abu Ghraib, the disclosure of torture memos and the revelations about the warrantless surveillance of Americans.
So what is to be done about the abuses of the Bush years? Some say do nothing, and a few Senators even tried to make Attorney General Eric Holder promise in his confirmation hearings to launch no prosecutions for Bush-era lawbreaking. At the opposite end of the spectrum, others say that even if it takes many years and divides the country and distracts from the urgent priority of fixing the economy, we must prosecute Bush Administration officials to lay down a marker. The courts are already considering congressional subpoenas that were issued earlier as well as claims of privilege and legal immunities. Those cases will stretch out for some time, as would prosecutions–taking even a decade or longer. Moreover, it is easier for prosecutors to net those far down the ladder than those at the top, who set the tone and the policies.
There is another option, a middle ground whose overarching goal is to find the truth: we need to get to the bottom of what happened–and why–to make sure it never happens again.
One path to that goal is to appoint a truth-finding panel. We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair-minded and without an ax to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth. People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments but to assemble the facts. If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecution in order to get to the whole truth.
During the past several years, the U.S. has been deeply divided. This has made our government less productive and our society less civil. President Obama is right in saying that we cannot afford extreme partisanship and debilitating divisions. As we commemorate the Lincoln bicentennial, there is a need, again, “to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Rather than vengeance, we need an impartial pursuit of what actually happened and a shared understanding of the failures of the recent past.
This is not a step to be taken lightly. We need to see whether there is interest for this in Congress and the new Administration. We need to work through concerns about classified information and claims of Executive privilege. Most of all, we need to see whether the American people are ready to take this path.
In the meantime, Congress will work with the Obama Administration to fix those parts of our government that went off course. But to repair the damage of the past eight years and restore America’s reputation and standing in the world, we should not simply turn the page without being able first to read it. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll showed that more than 60% of Americans agree that investigating the failed national-security policies of the past eight years should be considered.
Two years ago, I described the scandals of the Bush-Cheney-Gonzales Justice Department as the worst since Watergate. They were. We are still digging out from the debris. We need to get to the bottom of what went wrong after a dangerous and disastrous diversion from American law and values. The American people have a right to know what their government has done in their names.
Leahy, a six-term Democratic Senator from Vermont, is a former prosecutor and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee
Share this:
Tags: Abu Ghraib, Bush Administration officials, Bush-era lawbreaking, scandals of the Bush-Cheney-Gonzales, Sen. Patrick Leahy, surveillance of Americans.
Posted in Commentary, Human rights, USA | 1 Comment »