Parwan Detention Facility
Situated next to the Bagram Air Base in the Parwan Province of Afghanistan, the prison was built by the U.S. during the George W. Bush administration.
[9] During an interview on Now on PBS, Chris Hogan, a former interrogator at Bagram, described the prisoners' cells as they were in early 2002:[11] I can't speak to what the conditions may be like now.
It's very similar, incidentally, to the conditions that the soldiers lived in; almost identical.According to an article by Tim Golden, published in the 7 January 2008 issue of The New York Times, captives in the Bagram facility continued to be housed in large communal pens.
Brigadier General Mark Martins, Bagram's commandant, told reporters that the facility had always met international and domestic standards.
[18] In May 2010, nine Afghan former detainees reported to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that they had been held in a separate facility (known as the black jail) where they had been subject to isolation in cold cells, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture.
Rasul v. Bush determined that the Executive Branch lacked the authority, under the United States Constitution, to suspend the right for detainees to submit writs of habeas corpus.
Nor do they have the right to Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which Guantánamo detainees won in the 2004 Supreme Court ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld.
[26][27] The decision was reversed on 21 May 2010, the appeals court unanimously ruling that Bagram detainees lacked the right to habeas corpus hearings.
[28] There is a reason we have never allowed enemy prisoners detained overseas in an active war zone to sue in federal court for their release.
It simply makes no sense and would be the ultimate act of turning the war into a crime.On 15 January 2008, the ICRC and the U.S. military set up a pilot project to let certain well-behaved prisoners not in solitary confinement in Bagram to communicate with visitors over a video link.
[needs update] In August 2009, a general in the United States Marine Corps Reserve filed a 700-page report on the Bagram internment facility and its captives.
According to Chris Sands, writing in The National, General Stanley McChrystal wrote in a leaked report: Committed Islamists are indiscriminately mixed with petty criminals and sex offenders, and they are using the opportunity to radicalise and indoctrinate them ... hundreds are held without charge or without a defined way ahead.
[2] On 12 September 2009, it was widely reported that unnamed officials told Eric Schmitt of The New York Times that the Obama administration was going to introduce new procedures to allow captives held in Bagram, and elsewhere in Afghanistan, to have their detention reviewed.
To adopt Gitmo-like procedures seems to me like sliding in the wrong direction.According to Radio Free Europe, Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific director, Sam Zia Zarifi, paraphrasing Major General Douglas M. Stone's report on the US's detentions in Afghanistan: "pointed out that the lack of a legal structure for Bagram means that it is undermining the rule of law in Afghanistan and it has caused a lot of resentment among Afghans.
According to the document, the U.S. will continue to provide logistical support for 12 months and a joint US-Afghan commission will decide on any detainee releases until a more permanent pact is adopted.
[45][49] A further clause provides for a committee, made up of the Afghan defense minister and the commander of the American military in Afghanistan, to decide jointly on releases.
[57] "We transferred more than 3,000 Afghan detainees into your custody ... and ensured that those who would threaten the partnership of Afghanistan and coalition forces will not return to the battlefield," said Col. Robert Taradash, the only U.S. official at the ceremony.
[55][57] "There are concerns on the U.S. side about division in the Afghan government over internment and that it is not constitutional," said Rachel Reid, a senior policy adviser on Afghanistan for the Open Society Foundations.
[55][51] An editorial in Hasht-e Sobh newspaper noted: "The government has not had a good track record in maintaining inmates and prisons in recent years ...
"[58] On November 18, 2012, Afghanistan's president Karzai accused US forces of continuing to capture and detain Afghans in violation of the handover agreement signed earlier in 2012.
He had the distinction of being the first CIA prisoner held at an Afghanistan facility called detention site Cobalt—notorious in U.S. security circles as “the Salt Pit.” The Tunisians were repatriated.
