The prison never conformed to the Geneva Conventions, which were, essentially, discarded when the Bush administration decided to hold prisoners in its “war on terror” as “illegal enemy combatants,” and have never been reinstated. Moreover, the prisoners remained beyond the law even when the Supreme Court granted habeas corpus rights to the Guantánamo prisoners in June 2004, and again in June 2008, after Congress had tried to remove these rights in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (PDF).

In March 2009, in Washington D.C., District Judge John D. Bates briefly brought this era of secrecy and unaccountability to an end, granting the habeas corpus petitions of three foreign prisoners — Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian seized in Karachi, Pakistan in May 2002; Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni gemstone dealer seized in Bangkok, Thailand in late 2002; and Fadi al-Maqaleh, a Yemeni seized in 2004.

Although Judge Bates ruled that the habeas corpus rights granted by the Supreme Court to the Guantánamo prisoners extended to the foreign prisoners in Bagram, because “the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same,” the Obama administration appealed, and had its appeal granted by the D.C. Circuit Court in May 2010.

This ruling failed to take into account that Judge Bates had not ruled in favor of a fourth man, Pacha Wazir (aka Haji Wazir), an Afghan, deciding that the fate of Afghan prisoners ought to involve negotiations between the US and Afghan governments. Wazir, it turned out, had been seized in the United Arab Emirates, where he ran a chain of hawala banks, in 2003, and rendered to a CIA black site prior to his arrival at Bagram, on suspicion that he was a banker for Osama bin Laden. In June 2011, former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle wrote a book, The Interrogator: An Education, in which he explained that he had established that Wazir was not bin Laden’s banker, but stated that his findings were ignored, and Wazir was not released from Bagram until February 2010.

For the other prisoners, Judge Bates also found that the review process introduced under President Bush at Bagram was both “inadequate” and “more error-prone” than the review process introduced at Guantánamo, and, also found that it “falls well short of what the Supreme Court found inadequate at Guantánamo.” In response, the Obama administration introduced a review process modeled on the review process at Guantánamo that the Supreme Court found inadequate, and this is the process that has been used ever since to decide what should happen to the 645 prisoners who were held in September 2009 (according to the first unclassified prisoner list, released in January 2010), and the thousands of prisoners held in the last two and a half years.

By January this year, the Washington Post reported that 2,600 prisoners were held in Bagram — or, more specifically, in the replacement facility, renamed the Parwan Detention Center, which opened in December 2009. In addition, as the Post described it on January 5, President Karzai “called for the United States to hand over its biggest military prison in Afghanistan within a month,” stating that “Afghan government investigators had found violations of the Afghan constitution and international human rights conventions at the prison.” He “did not provide details of the alleged violations, but he said in a statement that they constituted a ‘breach of Afghan sovereignty.’”

President Karzai was drawing on a US memorandum publicly issued two years ago, in which officials stated that they expected the Parwan facility to be transferred to Afghan control in early 2012, although US officials have pointed out that any proposed transfer is subject to “demonstrated capacity,” and the Afghan government does not have a good track record to date.

Nevertheless, in sounding out the possibilities of closing the Parwan facility, the Obama administration is finally addressing the problems presented by the foreign prisoners. A year ago, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First visited Parwan and discovered that 41 prisoners came from outside Afghanistan, and were still held, even though “more than a dozen” had been recommended for release. One story she heard concerned Hamidullah Khan, a Pakistani who was just 16 years old when he was seized in the summer of 2008. When he was allowed to communicate with his family, in 2010, he explained that his case had been reviewed, and he had been recommended for release, but he was still held.

Eviatar added that the foreign prisoners were “from Pakistan, Tunisia, Kuwait, Yemen and even Germany,” but could not find any explanation for why, even when cleared, they were still held. She noted that “one soldier complained about how frustrating it is to be unable to tell innocent prisoners when they’ll be going home, or what’s causing the holdup,” and that US officials in Afghanistan had only been able to state that the problem was “somewhere in Washington.”

In the Washington Post last week, Peter Finn and Julie Tate reported that Washington was finally dealing with the problem. Noting that the foreign prisoners now “number close to 50″ and “were in some cases picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan and in others detained in third countries and taken to the prison by the CIA, according to US and foreign officials,” they wrote that, with a handover of the prison now on the cards, “American officials believe that Afghan authorities are unlikely to have any interest in either continuing to hold the foreigners or in putting them on trial.”

The officials added that, by starting the process of repatriating foreign prisoners now, they were hoping not only to successfully “negotiate transfers with the detainees’ home countries,” but also to “arrange for post-transfer monitoring, and secure diplomatic assurances that detainees will not be abused when they return home.”

They added that a “small number” of those currently held “may be deemed to pose a terrorist threat, requiring their continued detention or close supervision by their home country if released,” and also explained that some of the men are Yemeni, “complicating their possible repatriation,” because, in response to the failed airline bomb plot in December 2009 by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man recruited in Yemen, President Obama issued a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis, “because of concerns about the security situation in Yemen,” which still stands to this day.

As the Post described it, the Parwan prison holds “up to two dozen Arabs of various nationalities, according to administration and foreign officials,” although the rest are Pakistanis, and it was noted that the first to be released may well be one of these men, Yunus Rahmatullah.

Seized in Iraq by British Special Forces in 2004, he was subsequently handed over to US forces and rendered to Bagram by the CIA, where his detention went largely unnoticed until lawyers in the UK — at solicitors Leigh Day & Co. and the legal action charity Reprieve — succeeded in convincing the Court of Appeal to grant him a writ of habeas corpus and to order the British government to take custody of him. As the Post described it, his lawyers “argued in the British courts that the transfer violated a memorandum of understanding between the US and British militaries, and was a grave violation of the Geneva Conventions because it involved the removal of a civilian from the war theater.” The judges added that if foreign secretary William Hague and defense minister Philip Hammond failed to secure his release, the court would “be moved to commit you to prison for your contempt in not obeying the said writ.” A deadline of February 14 was set for Rahmatullah’s release.

The UK government has appealed the ruling, although ministers have asked for the Obama administration to arrange for Rahmatullah to be returned to Pakistan, which, as the Post put it, “would satisfy the court and his lawyers.” The British court also made a point of noting that, back in 2010, a review board at Bagram had cleared Rahmatullah for release.

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s legal director, said, “It would make no sense for the Obama administration to ratify this Bush-era war crime. Under the Geneva Convention, Yunus Rahmatullah is Britain’s responsibility and should never have been sent to Bagram in the first place. The man is cleared, his family are waiting, and Pakistan is apparently happy to have him — it’s high time to send him home.”

The Post noted that another Pakistani, Amanatullah Ali, who was also picked up by British forces in Iraq, is seeking his release through the US courts, and that seven Pakistanis in total, including Yunus Rahmatullah and Hamidullah Khan, are suing the Pakistani government “either for its alleged role in their capture or for failing to secure their release.”

US officials, stating that they were prepared to release Rahmatullah, nevertheless played down the role of the British court, and also “said that any transfer home has been complicated by the deterioration in relations between the United States and Pakistan.” One official said, “We will do this on our timetable.”

However, it appears that this is not entirely true, and that the days of holding prisoners at Bagram whether or not they have been cleared for release — as at Guantánamo, where 89 of the remaining 171 prisoners have been cleared, but are still held — are coming to an end. For the foreign prisoners held at Bagram without rights for up to ten years, the potential end of this long-running saga of injustice is to be welcomed.

POSTSCRIPT: At the time of publication, an Internet search revealed to me that I had missed an Associated Press story from last April in which it was reported that Amin al-Bakri, Redha al-Najar and Fadi al-Maqaleh had all been cleared for release from the Parwan prison.

The AP noted that al-Bakri, who was 42 years old, had a review board hearing in August 2010, and, in October, “was handed a paper saying he was going to be released to his home country,” but in April 2011 he was still seeking his release via the US courts. Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at the City University of New York who filed the appeal, said, ”Amin has been there for almost a decade of his life,” adding that he “should never have been there in the first place. He has never been a threat to the United States.”

The AP also reported that Redha al-Najar, who was 45 years old, had been cleared for release to Tunisia. His lawyer, Tina Foster of the International Justice Network, “said she learned through al-Najar’s family that the military planned to release him and send him to Tunisia, his country of birth, instead of Pakistan where he was picked up,” but added that he did not want to go to Tunisia. Foster also explained that Fadi al-Maqaleh had also been cleared for release but was still being held.

In addition, the AP report noted: “Also waiting to walk free is Jan Sher Khan, who has been detained for six years. He was 15 when he disappeared from his village near Kohat, Pakistan, in the spring of 2005. He never came home from classes at his high school and ended up at Bagram. According to court papers filed seeking his release, his family believes he was seized by someone seeking thousands of dollars in reward money advertised for the capture of suspected members of al-Qaida or the Taliban. On Jan. 10 [2011], the US government confirmed that Khan had been cleared for release.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

That all changed when the Bush administration threw out the Geneva Conventions, equated the Taliban with al-Qaeda, and decided to hold both soldiers and terror suspects as “illegal enemy combatants,” who could be imprisoned indefinitely without charge or trial, and with no rights whatsoever.

The Bush administration’s legal black hole lasted for two and a half years at Guantánamo, until, in Rasul v. Bush in June 2004, the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of granting habeas corpus rights to prisoners seized in wartime, recognizing — and being appalled by — the fact that the administration had created a system of arbitrary, indefinite detention, and that there was no way out for anyone who, like many of the prisoners, said that they had been seized by mistake.

This was not the end of the story, as the Bush administration fought back, Congress attempted to strip the prisoners of their habeas rights in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (PDF), and the Supreme Court had to revisit the prisoners’ cases in June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, reiterating that they had habeas corpus rights, and that those rights were constitutionally guaranteed.

Unfortunately, although this ruling enabled some of the Guantánamo prisoners to secure their release via the US courts, by having their habeas corpus petitions granted, the appeals court in Washington D.C. (the D.C. Circuit Court) has been fighting back, gutting habeas corpus as a remedy by insisting, ludicrously, that the government’s evidence, however obviously unreliable, should be given the presumption of accuracy.

While this continues to be fought over, the bigger problem is that the entire rationale for Guantánamo has never been adequately challenged. The basis for holding prisoners is the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed the week after the 9/11 attacks, which authorizes the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

in June 2004, while granting the Guantánamo prisoners habeas rights, the Supreme Court also confirmed, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, that the AUMF allows prisoners to be detained until the end of hostilities, thereby confirming the AUMF as an alternative to the Geneva Conventions, without anyone in a position of authority being required to explain why the Geneva Conventions no longer apply to soldiers, and why terror suspects are being held as “warriors,” rather than as criminals.

With this fundamental misconception — or this warped reshaping of the rules governing detention — which was at the heart of the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” and is confirmed in the continued reliance on the AUMF by all three branches of the government, it is no wonder that it has become impossible to even mention the fact that wartime detentions used to accord with the Geneva Conventions, and it has also become impossible for advocates of federal court trials for criminals to win out over those calling for military commission trials instead, even though hundreds of terror suspects have been successfully prosecuted in federal courts in the last ten years, as opposed to just six in military commission trials.

The result of this unilateral rewriting of the rules governing wartime detentions is that soldiers remain held at Guantánamo where they are lazily, but dangerously regarded as terrorists, and the wartime prisoners held in actual combat zones — at Bagram, for example — are not held according to the Geneva Conventions, but are detained arbitrarily, and are then subjected to invented review boards so that the military can decide what to do with them. This ought to be a cause for alarm, but it is apparently taken for granted.

In addition, the result of the insistence that terror suspects must not be tried in federal courts has had far-reaching effects that, in the last few weeks, have been causing great consternation to libertarians and liberals alike.

On the face of it, this consternation is well-founded. In provisions inserted by Congress into the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act, lawmakers insisted on creating legislation that makes it mandatory for terror suspects to be held in military custody, without charge or trial, and not to be allowed anywhere near the federal court system.

The mere fact that lawmakers could have worked themselves up into enough of a frenzy to pass this legislation is profoundly depressing, of course, but as Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck explained in an article for the Lawfare blog on December 31, intense negotiations between the administration and Congress, with input from numerous deeply concerned groups and individuals, succeeded in watering down the intent behind this provisions so that it is not really appropriate for critics to wail that the NDAA will allow Americans to be held indefinitely in military custody. As they explained:

[S]ection 1022 purports to establish a presumption in favor of indefinite military detention, rather than criminal arrest and prosecution, for some future foreign al-Qaeda suspects. In the President’s words, it is in this respect “ill-conceived and will do nothing to improve the security of the United States,” and “is unnecessary and has the potential to create uncertainty.” Fortunately, amendments adopted late in the legislative process … will, we think, ensure that section 1022 is mostly hortatory, and will in practice allow the President to adhere to his commitments that “suspected terrorists arrested inside the United States will — in keeping with long-standing tradition — be processed through our Article III courts, as they should be”; that “our military does not patrol our streets or enforce our laws — nor should it”; and that “when it comes to US citizens involved in terrorist-related activity, whether they are captured overseas or at home, we will prosecute them in our criminal justice system.”

Even so, as Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck also explained, drawing on comments made by Raha Wala of Human Rights First, “the very existence of section 1022 might give a future Administration a slight measure of political cover if it decides to reverse President Obama’s policy and begin to detain in military custody persons such as another Abdulmutallab, who are captured in the United States.”

This is a reference to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the failed Christmas 2009 plane bomber, whose recent trial and successful conviction confirmed that the advocates for military custody are driven not by common sense but by irrational fears — or cynical fearmongering. The courts are perfectly capable of safely and effectively prosecuting terror suspects, and lawmakers’ attempts to insist otherwise, if left unchallenged, were likely to have been dangerously counterproductive rather than helpful.

Nevertheless, while obvious disaster appears to have been averted, the huge outpouring of alarm regarding the perceived plan to imprison Americans indefinitely without charge or trial ignores two fundamental issues that still need addressing: firstly, that President Obama has shown himself more than willing to dispose of US citizens he regards as troublesome not by imprisoning them, but by assassinating them in drone strikes; and, secondly, that the foreign victims of the indefinite detention that lawmakers have shown themselves so desperate to revive still need Americans to care about their plight, to bring to an end the unjust situation that has existed for the last ten years, and to cut off the possibility that lawmakers, or the executive branch, can decide in future to revisit these dreadful policies and to revive them again.

As Marty Lederman and Steve Vladeck noted, drawing on an article in the New York Review of Books by David Cole:

David Cole is surely correct that Subtitle D (“Counterterrorism”) [PDF] of the NDAA contains some very troubling provisions — especially sections 1026 and 1027, which continue the deeply unfortunate and counterproductive authorities in current law prohibiting the use of funds to build a facility in the US to house GTMO detainees and to transfer any such detainees to the US for any reason, including criminal trial; and section 1028, which continues the current statutory requirement that the Secretary of Defense must make onerous certifications regarding the receiving nation’s security measures before any GTMO detainee can be transferred to another country. These provisions will continue to prevent the closure of the detention facility at Guantánamo, notwithstanding the President’s view, which we share, that “the prison at Guantánamo Bay undermines our national security, and our nation will be more secure the day when that prison is finally and responsibly closed.”

These are valid points indeed, and with the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo taking place next week, it is important for US citizens to recall that the fount of the recent hysteria directed, initially, at Americans as well as foreigners, is the enduring legacy of the Bush administration at Guantánamo, where these dark desires have been inflicted on foreign Muslims for the last ten years, and where the will to close this dangerous aberration is lacking in both the administration and in Congress.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Despite being held for nearly eight years, Yunus, also known as “Saleh Huddin,” was held incommunicado, unable even to contact his family, for six years, and has only recently been allowed to establish telephone contact with his relatives. Reprieve noted its lawyers and investigators had been “told by multiple sources that, as a result of his abuse in UK and US custody, he is in catastrophic mental and physical shape, and now spends most of his time in the mental health cells at Bagram.”

As Reprieve explained, this “historic decision” also “marks the first time any civilian legal system has penetrated Bagram, a legal black hole where nearly three thousand prisoners — many rendered from all over the world — have been unlawfully held by the US military for up to a decade.” Unlike at Guantánamo, itself an opaque and unjust facility, but one where civilian lawyers have had access since the Supreme Court granted the prisoners habeas corpus rights in June 2004, no civilian lawyer has ever been allowed into Bagram, which, as Reprieve described it, “is notorious for torture and homicides and has been called ‘Guantánamo’s Evil Twin.’”

This is indeed a remarkable development, as the Bagram prisoners have been abandoned by the US courts, despite winning a remarkable — and entirely appropriate — victory in April 2009, when, in the District Court in Washington D.C., Judge John D. Bates granted habeas corpus rights to three foreigners rendered to Bagram from other countries, and held for many years, asserting that the circumstances in which they were held were essentially the same as those in Guantánamo. However, in May 2010, that ruling was reversed on appeal, leaving the prisoners still stranded by the Obama administration, in what Judge Bates described as “a ‘black hole’ for detainees in a ‘law-free zone.’”

The UK Court of Appeal’s ruling — by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, Lord Justice Maurice Kay and Lord Justice Sullivan — came in response to a habeas corpus application by Reprieve, in which it was noted that the British government had “repeatedly refused to help Yunus,” even though the Abu Ghraib scandal was made public just weeks after his detention.

Reprieve noted that British officials “failed to get him back and said nothing when they learned he had been sent illegally to Bagram,” even though the British government “has always had the clear power to get Yunus back, under the Geneva Conventions and under the relevant ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ which grants control over the prisoner to the UK and explicitly requires Yunus to be returned to UK custody on request.”

Describing the history of Britain’s shameful role in Yunus’ long years of abuse, Reprieve explained:

In February 2009, after years of government denials that the UK had been involved in any rendition operations, then-Secretary of State for Defence John Hutton announced to Parliament that UK forces had captured two men in Iraq in February 2004, and handed them to US forces. In subsequent statements to Parliament, the government revealed that in March 2004, British officials had become aware of the US intention to transfer the men from Iraq to Afghanistan.

The British government admitted its complicity in crime (kidnapping, otherwise called rendition), admitted it was wrong, and appeared to apologize. Yet it did not and refused to identify the men — a crucial step if they are to be reunited with their basic human rights. Indeed, the government has apparently done nothing over the past seven years to ensure that they receive legal assistance.

Reprieve led a complicated and expensive search for the identity of these men, which covered three continents over ten months. One of the men has been identified as Amanatullah Ali and the other as Yunus Rahmatullah.

A spokesperson for Leigh Day also explained how difficult it was to actually represent Yunus Rahmatullah, because of the Obama adminstration’s refusal to allow any lawyer to visit Bgaram. Yunus, the spokesperson said, was “prevented from speaking with or instructing lawyers,” so instructions to act on his behalf “were received through his cousin, who has intermittent communication with the client through the International Committee of the Red Cross.”

In the ruling, Lord Neuberger said there was “a substantial case for saying that the UK government is under an international legal obligation to demand the return of the applicant, and the US government is bound to accede to such an request,” leading Reprieve to state that there was, therefore, “no reason” to think that the US government will not comply with the court’s request.

Reprieve also noted that the US government has already acknowledged that it no longer wishes to hold Yunus. At Bagram, his case was assessed by a Detainee Review Board on June 5, 2010, in which it was concluded that his continued imprisonment was “not necessary.” The review process at Bagram was established by President Obama — and was copied from the system introduced by the Bush administration at Guantánamo, which was described as “inadequate” by the Supreme Court — but, instead of being released, he continues to be held.

As Reprieve noted, “There is therefore no lawful basis for his imprisonment, as the UK government has admitted to the court. The UK therefore has the right — and the duty — to send Yunus home.” Reprieve also stated that, although the British government “has repeatedly declined to state on what legal basis Yunus was rendered, the Geneva Conventions define his rendition as a “grave breach” — that is, a war crime — about which the UK appears to have known in advance,” adding, “The Court of Appeal acknowledges this, and has said the UK may be required under international law to get Yunus out of Bagram — or face being in grave breach of the Geneva Conventions.”

The Court gave the British government just seven days to secure Yunus’s release, or to explain to the court why they cannot do so, and Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s director, said, “Yunus Rahmatullah’s mother cries herself to sleep at night because the United Kingdom wrongfully arrested her son and has refused to facilitate his release. The legal black hole of Bagram is antithetical to the rule of law, and Guantánamo’s evil twin. The Court of Appeals is right to recognize this injustice and the British government must now do the decent thing, which it has so far repeatedly refused to do — help Yunus return home.”

In addition, Yunus’ solicitor at Leigh Day, Jamie Beagent, said, “This judgment affirms that our client remains the responsibility of the UK under international law. The government must now accept its responsibilities and seek the return of Mr. Rahmatullah from US detention, under the terms of its agreements with the United States.” He added, “We hope that the writ of habeas corpus will finally bring to an end our client’s nightmare of indefinite detention without charge in appalling conditions at Bagram.”

Back in May 2010, Yunus’s mother, Fatima Rahmatullah, issued the following statement:

Yunus is the youngest and closest son to my heart. I lost my other son, his only brother, in a tragic accident. Now, Yunus is my only hope in life. I see him in my dreams; I pray daily that I will see him in my waking hours again. Our family was shocked when we learned that the British government might have been behind Yunus’ disappearance. I am told the British government has refused even to confirm that Yunus was the person they seized six years ago. As a mother, this is a position that I struggle to understand.

As well as tackling the British government’s responsibility for Yunus Rahmatullah, Reprieve is also involved, in Pakistan, with the organization Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), fighting what it describes as “a ground-breaking case filed on behalf of seven Pakistanis imprisoned in Bagram Air Base, which challenges the Pakistan government over their role in renditions.”

In addition to Yunus Rahmatullah, the case also involves Awwal Khan, Hamidullah Khan, Abdul Haleem Saifullah, Fazal Karim, Amal Khan and Iftikhar Ahmad, who were “abducted from Pakistan and taken to Bagram, where they have been kept without charge or trial since 2003.” Reprieve added, “One prisoner is merely 16 years of age and was seized two years ago at the age of 14. Another was not permitted to speak to his family for six years, and is believed to be in a grievous physical and psychological condition.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Bringing the war to an end ought to be a priority for the American people on a number of fronts.

Firstly, the war is unwinnable. Ousting al-Qaeda from Afghanistan may have been a success, but the battle for hearts and minds was lost early on, through bombing raids that killed thousands of civilians, and the casual and imprecise violence that led to the imprisonment and abuse of hundreds of Afghan Taliban conscripts in Guantánamo and Bagram. To topple the Taliban, the US worked with brutal warlords, whose corruption, in many cases, had prompted the rise of the Taliban in the first place, and although the Taliban were ousted from power, the pointless diversion into Iraq was ruinous for the muddled and ill-conceived nation-building mission in Afghanistan.

Secondly, the cost is astronomical. According to the Cost of War project, the total cost to date is over $460 billion — and a useful breakdown of that figure, including some mention of what it could have been used to fund instead, is available here.

Thirdly, the loss of life is unforgivable. 1,407 US military personnel have been killed in Afghanistan since “Operation Enduring Freedom” began, and 14,342 have been wounded. Up to 29,000 Afghan civilians have been killed as a result of U.S-led military actions, and hundreds of thousands wounded and displaced.

A fourth reason to end the war, which is generally less well known (or at least less thought about), is because it led to the creation of Guantánamo, where a small number of terror suspects are held along with Taliban foot soldiers and innocent men seized by mistake, but all of the 779 prisoners held throughout the prison’s history were deprived of their rights and designated as “enemy combatants” without rights, who could be abused with impunity.

171 of these men are still held, even though only 36 of them have been proposed for trials, and there is no sign of when, if ever, the rest will be released. An end to the war will bring to an end the US government’s claim that it can justify holding prisoners at Guantánamo forever because of the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress the week after the 9/11 attacks, which is used to justify the detention of prisoners seized in the “war on terror.” With the end of the war, and the end of the AUMF, the US government will have to explain how long the war in which the prisoners were seized will actually last.

A fifth reason to end the war is to close the US prison at Bagram airbase, and, as with Guantánamo, to ensure that, in future armed conflicts, the US government once more offers the protections of the Geneva Conventions to those seized in wartime. Instead, those in Bagram are still held arbitrarily, without even the compromised habeas corpus rights given to the Guantánamo prisoners by the Supreme Court (and since gutted by the D.C. Circuit Court). At Bagram, the prisoners have nothing but a periodic military review process that has nothing to do with the Geneva Conventions.

In launching the “Stop the Machine! Create a New World!” campaign, activist and author David Swanson wrote:

When other nations’ governments go off track, their people do something about it. In Tunisia and Egypt people have nonviolently claimed power in a way that has inspired Americans in Wisconsin and other states, as well as the people of Spain and the rest of the world.

Washington, D.C. is the weakest point in our democracy, without which state-level reform cannot succeed. Most Americans want our wars ended, our corporations and billionaires taxed, and our rights expanded rather than curtailed. We want our money invested in jobs and green energy, not a global military that can’t stop itself. Our government in Washington goes in the opposite direction, opposing popular will on these major issues, regardless of personality or party.

This will not be another rally and march on a Saturday, make home movies, pat ourselves on the back, and go home. We are coming to Washington to stay.

The organizers — Maria Allwine, Ellen Barfield, Catarina Correia, Ellen Davidson, Margaret Flowers, Tarak Kauff, Mark Mason, Devra Morice, Udi Pladott, Ward Reilly, Lisa Simeone, David Swanson, Dennis Trainor, Jr., the Rev. Dr. Bruce Wright and Kevin Zeese — also issued the following pledge, which has since been signed by many, or most of those turning up to protest:

I pledge that if any U.S. troops, contractors, or mercenaries remain in Afghanistan on Thursday, October 6, 2011, as that occupation goes into its 11th year, I will commit to being in Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., with others on that day or the days immediately following, for as long as I can, with the intention of making it our Tahrir Square, Cairo, our Madison, Wisconsin, where we will NONVIOLENTLY resist the corporate machine by occupying Freedom Plaza to demand that America’s resources be invested in human needs and environmental protection instead of war and exploitation. We can do this together. We will be the beginning.

And this is from their mission statement:

We call on people of conscience and courage — all who seek peace, economic justice, human rights and a healthy environment — to join together in Washington, D.C., beginning on Oct. 6, 2011, in nonviolent resistance similar to the Arab Spring and the Midwest awakening. [...]

Forty-seven years ago, Mario Savio, an activist student at Berkeley, said, “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

Those words have an even greater urgency today. We face ongoing wars and massive socio-economic and environmental destruction perpetrated by a corporate empire which is oppressing, occupying and exploiting the world. We are on a fast track to making the planet unlivable while the middle class and poor people of our country are undergoing the most wrenching and profound economic crisis in 80 years.

“Stop the Machine! Create a New World!” is a clarion call for all who are deeply concerned with injustice, militarism and environmental destruction to join in ending concentrated corporate power and taking direct control of a real participatory democracy. We will encourage a culture of resistance — using music, art, theater and direct nonviolent action — to take control of our country and our lives. It is about courageously resisting and stopping the corporate state from destroying not only our inherent rights and freedoms, but also our children’s chance to live, breathe clean air, drink pure water, grow edible natural food and live in peace.

Since June’s announcement, of course, another movement, “Occupy Wall Street,” has sprung up on a similar basis, recognizing that only a permanent occupation, rather than turning up for the day, patting ourselves on the back, and going home can bring about change. Although prompted primarily by opposition to the war, and its ruinous cost, the organizers of the Freedom Plaza occupation were also clearly motivated by the bigger picture — the revolutionary movements in the Middle East, the inspirational actions in Madison, Wisconsin in February and March, and the mass movements in Greece and Spain — which all fed into “Occupy Wall Street” and the hundreds of other occupations that are now taking place all over the United States.

With the additional focus on seeing “our corporations and billionaires taxed,” and “our money invested in jobs and green energy,” the aims of the Freedom Plaza occupation are, of course, dovetailing with those of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, which began its own mobilization in Washington D.C., “Occupy D.C.,” on Saturday, and which continues to draw new supporters.

The timing could hardly have been more fortuitous. As “Occupy Wall Street” continues to grow, finally attracting some serious mainstream attention, it seems as if a revolutionary call for change is gaining momentum in the US — driven not just by the long-term activists behind October2011.org, but also by the young people of the “Occupy” movement, educated but without work, who are ideally placed to take to the streets as permanent protestors, and not to leave until a solution is found.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in June 2011, “The Complete Guantánamo Files,” a 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011, and details about the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and available on DVD here — or here for the US). Also see my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

This is the sixth article in “Bagram Week” here at Andy Worthington (although I freely acknowedge that the original seven-day schedule has slipped), with seven articles in total exploring what is happening at the main US prison in Afghanistan through reports, analyses of review boards, and the voices of the prisoners themselves, and ongoing updates to

This is the second of three articles telling, for the first time, stories — in the prisoners’ own words, albeit in a heavily redacted format — from the US prison at Bagram airbase (now replaced by a new building, called the Detention Facility at Parwan). The stories come from the Detainee Review Boards at Bagram, established by President Obama in 2009, and are taken from documents obtained by the ACLU through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, in which the Pentagon not only released documents providing summaries of the review boards’ conclusions (which I began analyzing here), but also released 58 documents relating to specific prisoners.

These 58 documents contain more information than the brief summaries — the Commander’s Final Decision Memo, a Memo from the DRB President to the Commander or the Deputy Commander, a DRB Report of Findings and Recommendations, and, most importantly, a Summary of the DRB Hearing, which, between redactions, usually contains some of the allegations against the prisoners, which are otherwise unknown, and some of the prisoners’ own statements and their responses to questions from the panel.

Below, following the first part of this three-part series, are 20 more stories from these documents — of prisoners recommended for release, for transfer to the Afghan authorities for prosecution, or for release under a rehabilitation program, or for continued detention at Bagram/Parwan — these various choices being a refined version of the unilateral reworking of the Geneva Conventions under President Bush that has not been adequately addressed under President Obama (see my articles The Black Hole of Bagram, What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part One): Torture and the “Black Prison” and What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part Two): Executive Detention, Rendition, Review Boards, Released Prisoners and Trials.

The last 20 stories will be covered in an article to follow. Individually, the stories these documents are not always revealing — although in some cases they clearly are — but cumulatively they help to provide an overview of the entire process, and, unfortunately, echo the problems with the tribunals at Guantánamo on which they were modelled.

20 Stories from Bagram

ISN 3782: Nek Marjan

At a Detainee Review Board on June 5, 2010, it was explained that 2 out of 3 board members found that internment was necessary to mitigate the threat posed by Nek Marjan (also identified as Shah Wazir), who was assessed to be “a part of or a substantial supporter of insurgent forces opposing Coalition Forces,” even though, alarmingly, it was also noted, “Notwithstanding the majority vote, the evidence was so weak that one board member found no internment criteria.”

In a statement at his hearing, he said:

My name is Nek Marjan, son of [redacted]. I lived in Sukart. Sukart is in … Khost province. There is no Taliban in my village … I do not know any Taliban at all. I don’t know of any Taliban in my village. I have not ever done anything to help Taliban because I barely can take care of my family. I don’t have time to help the Taliban … I’ve never had anyone in my village come to my house that has attacked CF [Coalition Forces].

He also said:

I am accused of being Taliban and a Taliban commander and none of this is true. [I do] not store anything for the Taliban in my house. My house is for my wife and children only. I’m not against coalition forces or government. I’m a poor person making a living driving a cab. You can verify this by anybody in my village. Someone paid money to the police to detain me … Before I started driving taxi I had a retail shop and I was living there. You can ask anybody about me. Anything they say will be the truth about me. The US is improving our country, making roads, schools and hospitals. Why would I do anything to the US? I like the coalition forces. I have never been involved with attacks against coalition forces. There might be two reasons I’m here, if someone paid money to keep me here, or somebody has animosities toward me.

And:

Of course I have enemies; my father was killed by our enemies. The three enemies I speak of specifically are [redacted], they are my enemies who killed my father. They killed my cousin for marrying a woman they did not approve of.

ISN 3799: Nawar Khan

At a Detainee Review Board on June 7, 2010, the board members found that Nawar Khan did not meet the criteria for internment, because there was “a lack of credible evidence” against him, and a more senior figure then ordered his release.

In the analysis of the supposed reasons for his detention, it was stated, “The following items were found in the detainee’s compound: laptop computer, bolt-action rifle, seven rounds of ammunition, SIM card. The following items were found at the place of capture: ID card, cell phone, calling cards, bold-action rifle, small pocket litter.”

Clearly, however, this had nothing to do with Nawar Khan, as he explained:

I am a poor person. All the stuff you accuse me of I wasn’t involved … I don’t know anything about anything that was found. I am a farmer … I don’t know whose items that were captured belong to. I am tired of the dispute. I’m just a farmer and land is an important thing for me. It’s up to the board for your decision to make.

He also said:

I have had a brother killed by Coalition Forces. There was fighting going on between two tribes because they were arguing about who owned the mountain. They had people bring them drinking water up to the mountains because they were fighting with each other. My brother went by himself to provide water for a nomad tribe because they paid [him] money. When [he] was coming back, the Coalition Forces shot him. I don’t know if he ran from them or somebody told something against him, but they shot him. My brother went to the fight without saying anything to our parents. He did something wrong and God punished him for that. I don’t blame anybody, and I don’t have any bad feelings towards anyone. My brother died maybe two or three years before my capture.

And, perhaps demonstrating how difficult his life was in general, he also said, “Since I have been here, I have been treated very good. I am happy. I learned some Pashtu training. I am in farming class too.”

ISN 3820: Bismullah

At a Detainee Review Board on September 24, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. The exact circumstances of his capture were not spelled out, but it was clear that he was seized in connection with explosives held in a compound, as, in response to questions that were not included in the transcript, he said:

• No, I was not in the compound with the explosives.
• I did not know that the Taliban kept or held weapons there.
• The compound is about a 30-minute walk.
• The Taliban never approached my brother.

In a statement, he also said:

Four people were detained when I was captured with my family. I am innocent. I am a farmer. We have no hostility. We are a peaceful people. I have no one to support my family. We have not done anything violent. My father was there but they released him because he was not able to walk. We would live in the city away from violence but we do not have the money. We need your help … I am innocent. Detain and arrest people only involved in violent acts.

ISN 3822: Abdul Janan

At a Detainee Review Board on September 24, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. According to the US authorities, “He supports the Taliban and associated forces” and “was observed fleeing from an IED factory with eight other individuals,” but in a statement, Abdul Janan said, “I teach children and I am innocent.” He added, “My name is ‘Janan’, ‘Mullah Janan.’”

In response to specific questions about the circumstances of his capture, which were not included in the transcript, he said:

• I do not know whose motorcycle that was. I was not riding one. I was at my house all day long.
• I do not know whose phone was recovered the night I was captured. I do not know how explosives ended up on the clothes that I was wearing. The clothes I originally had on got dirty and the family that I was staying with gave me fresh clothes to put on so that I could pray and [so] that they could be washed.
• I have a wife and children. I learned my lesson from this; and if I am released, I will live a peaceful and free life … If I get released, I will live my life as a mullah.
• A water pump accident caused me to lose my fingers.

In a final statement to the board, he said, “I have nothing else to say other than I am worried about my family.”

ISN 3823: Sadullah

At a Detainee Review Board on September 24, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution, although it was unclear why, as all the allegations were redacted, and all that remained were his assertions that he was seized at his home, and that US forces found nothing incriminating:

• We are a very poor people. If you have any proof, then don’t release me. I am a farmer. You can ask anyone and they will say that I am not involved in this. There is an old saying, “If you are not a thief, then you are not scared of the king.” I was brought here as an innocent person.
• Yes, I do have a brother named [redacted]. We were captured together at my home. I do not know anyone by name of [redacted].
• I do not know a man by the name [redacted]. My father was there with me when I was captured, but they did not take him.

In a final statement, he said, “I am an innocent man. You found nothing at my house when it was searched. [Showing feet to members] I have calluses on my feet from farming. I am from a big village.”

ISN 3824: Idris

At a Detainee Review Board on September 24, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. In hand-written notes on a rare “Unclassified Summary” included with the documentation, it was claimed that he “AttenDeD [sic] a jihad tRaNiNg [sic] camp,” filmed an attack on a vehicle, and participated in an attack.

In his defense, he made the following statement, which, I must admit, I cannot entirely understand:

All of my friends received a job and I was left in my village without one. The Taliban told me I was smart and gave me money to fight. When I was captured, I wasn’t beaten or mistreated so I knew that the Taliban deceived me. I never fought or trained with the Taliban.

He also said:

• If I get out, I will try to find a job with a friend.
• I am 20 years old. I am going to look for a job to generate money and income. If I was going to go back to the Taliban, why would I tell you I was with the Taliban? I was very scared during the bombing.
• I did not attend a training camp.

ISN 3825: Khalilullah

At a Detainee Review Board on September 24, 2009, the board concluded that he did “not meet the criteria for internment,” and a senior officer approved his release without conditions. The basis of his capture was not officially explained, but in a statement Khalilullah was able to explain, “I am innocent. I have not done anything. I am only a teacher. I have no connections to those groups whatsoever.”

He also said:

• I am in prison, so I don’t know of the current government. I am a teacher of the Qu’ran.
• I have no connection with jihadists. I am not familiar with the jihadists in the Khowst Province. I think that proper planning by the Afghanistan government would get jihad out of this country.

ISN 3829: Bakhtyar

At a Detainee Review Board on September 24, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. Although the allegations against him were not spelled out, it was clear that they involved claims that he was involved in some sort of insurgent movement because he had transported weapons, as the following passage shows:

Those weapons in the photo are not mine. I just transported the weapons from the village to the mosque. I hand carried the weapons. I transported them for money but I did not get paid. If I get released, I will be a farmer on my father’s land and raise my brothers. I will not carry weapons for them again nor walk with them.

Who “they” were was not explained, although elsewhere he said, perhaps confusingly, “There is no Taliban or jihad movement in my area.” It was perhaps more significant when he said, “I do not know who is supporting the Taliban in my area.” What was also clear, however, as Bakhtyar himself pointed out, is that he was a poor, uneducated man who needed money:

• I don’t have an education. If you can read the charges, then I can explain them one by one.
• I am the oldest son of my family and I need to raise my brothers because my father is dead.

ISN 3839: Mohammad Azim

At a Detainee Review Board on October 1, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. In an “Unclassified Summary,” it was stated that he “was in possession of approximately 2050 voter cards, with his fingerprints on 442 of them,” although another charge was redacted.

In a statement, and in response to questions, Azim said:

• I graduated from school and then I was working for the government of Afghanistan. How could I be a Taliban member? The reporting that you have on me was from one of my enemies.
• I am from the Ebad village. [Redacted ] is one of the vllagers and he works for the Taliban.
• I was working on the election for Afghanistan. I made cards so that women could vote. This task was given to me by the district. I previously had been working to improve the country.
• I do have a car and it is a gray station wagon. I was asked to go to NDS [the Afghan National Directorate of Security] and they said that I was not guilty of anything. I was detained for 4 days. I have a cousin that reported to NDS because I burned his hay and that is why I was arrested. The person that accused me is working for NDS and that is why I was arrested.

In a final statement, he said, “I am innocent. You can ask the mayor of our district or the school about me.”

ISN 3845: Sher Agha (Dil Awar)

At a Detainee Review Board on June 5, 2010, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for participation in a reconciliation or reintegration program, but a more senior figure then ordered his release instead.

The allegations against him were that “he was found with an SD card, which contained propaganda videos and images,” and also that a computer was found at the compound where he was captured, However, in response he not only said that his name was “Dil Awar,” and not Sher Agha, but also explained that he had worked at a motorcycle dealership for 19 years before he was detained, that he had been invited to the compound where he was captured, and that the computer was not his. He also stated:

I got the SD card/memory chip from a bizarre [sic]. I put these pictures on the SD card. I don’t know where the propaganda videos of exploding coalition forces vehicles on my SD card came from. I bought the memory card used and didn’t know what was on the card before when I bought it.

In the detailed account of his review board hearing, he also said:

• I have never supported the Taliban with anything.
• I don’t make that much money to help anybody, only enough to help my family.
• I have not planned or executed any attacks against the coalition forces.
• I do not have enemies, but some people may be trying to make money.
• I don’t know who would say I was taking part in Taliban activities.
• I am well liked in my village. I don’t know of anyone who dislikes me.

He also provided the explanation of why he had a photo of himself with a weapon:

I took the pictures because I wanted a picture of me with the weapon. People take pictures with lots of different things, so what is so wrong with me taking a picture with a weapon?

He also said, “I am happy with coalition forces; they are all right. The Taliban are not so good. I don’t know if there are Taliban in the area I’m from.”

In his review board hearing, an Afghan civilian witness was also called, who corroborated his account, stating the following:

• I am from Ghazni province, Khalati village, it’s my hometown.
• I am the lead elder of the village and I farm.
• I know the detainee, he is my neighbor. I’ve never heard of him being called another name but Dil Awar. I’ve known him since he was a little baby.
• He worked at the motorcycle dealer.
• He was visiting some relatives for Laundy [?] and then coalition forces arrested him. I don’t know why he was arrested.
• I’ve never seen or heard of him being involved in anti-coalition activities.
• He is not a member of any terrorist group that I’ve heard of.
• If he was part of any of those terrorist groups I would never have come to testify on his behalf.
• If you release him, then I will make sure he doesn’t do anything wrong and I will keep an eye on him.
• If you release Dil Awar, please don’t release him to the Afghan government because his father is poor and doesn’t have enough money to bribe to get him released from the Afghan government.

Dil Awar’s father also made a statement:

[He] has been here for about 19 montns. I am very old, and I sold my property because I wasn’t able to keep it up. Now I don’t have any money and I am really old and will probably be dying soon. Please release my son because I want to be buried with his hands. My son’s kids were crying for their father before I came here and want their father back. The Mullah here came here because he’s going to vouch for Dil Awar. I’m not saying you guys are guilty for holding him here. I know someone must have said something about him and that’s why he’s being detained here. Please let me stay in place of my son here so he can go back and take care of his family. I can’t support his family because I am poor and have no money. Thank you for letting me make a statement.

ISN 3877: Shamsuddin Ul-Rahman

At a Detainee Review Board on September 24, 2009, the board recommended that Ul-Rahman, a lumber driver, should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. What he was alleged to have done was not made clear, although it seemed to involve a claim that he was involved in distributing threatening “night letters” from the Taliban to people in his village, and also that his name was mentioned on a Taliban radio transmission.

As he said:

I have not seen “night letters” in all of my life. Everyone in my village hates the Taliban. Every Taliban is my enemy because they killed my uncle. I do not know why my name was mentioned on a Taliban radio when I was captured. If I was released, I would bring my whole family to Kabul so that I can work and they can go to good schools.

He also said:

I am a poor man and my children have no one to take care of them. I am not Taliban and these are wrong accusations against me. I just want to go and take care of my kids. I am glad that America is here in Afghanistan because the overall pay has gone up. When I was captured, they searched my home and nothing was found. I will always prefer to have my family over Taliban. My uncle was with the government and, when the Taliban found out, they killed him. I hate the Taliban because of this. I.am happy with the Americans and I just want to be with my family.

ISN 3932: Bahram Jan

At a Detainee Review Board on October 1, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. Although the allegations against him were not made clear, it was apparent that they involved a claim that he was involved in handling materials to be used in an IED attack, although he refuted the claim:

I have a mental problem and I forget things. The IED materials are not mine. The explosive materials were given to me to take care of. The explosives were in a box and I did not know what was inside the box. The reporting on me was false.

He also said:

• I have always been cooperative.
• I buy and sell flowers. If I am released I would sell goods. I was threatened by the Taliban to cooperate.
• I’m a poor person, you should capture the Taliban. US is always very nice and I will help and cooperate if I am paid.

ISN 3938: Abdullah

At a Detainee Review Board on October 1, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. The allegations against him were not spelled out, but involved a claim that he had been involved with explosives, although he denied it:

I am a mullah of two families. The book was an address book to family members. I have never touched explosives and I am a poor person. [Redacted] is a mullah.

He also said:

• If this is an accusation, then that is different than proof. If you have proof, then you can hang me.
• If you are keeping me for being a mullah, then that is not a crime. You can keep me for 100 years, but I have never touched explosives.

ISN 3939: Noor Alam

At a Detainee Review Board on October 1, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. As usual, the allegations were not spelled out, although a heavily redacted “Unclassified Summary” included the words, “cell member.” In his defense, he stated:

I am a land owner and a carpenter. I know nothing of politics. I was caught by Taliban and they said that the infidels were coming and then they left me in the car and I was caught by US forces.

He also said, “[Redacted], a Taliban member, is my sister-in-law’s son. [Redacted] is my brother-in-law. [Redacted] was kicked out of the village by the elders.” He added, “I did not provide water for Taliban forces.”

ISN 3952: Jai Gul

At a Detainee Review Board on October 15, 2009, the board concluded that he did “not meet the criteria for internment,” and a senior officer approved his release without conditions. Unfortunately, the redactions in the document mean that there is no clue as to what he was alleged to have done, just the following statements by Gul himself:

• I am a poor man. I was happy when America and the Coalition Forces came to Afghanistan. I am a small farmer and I was waiting on Spring to come.
• My village is called Wurzana Kalay. I know nothing of Taliban there because I have not seen them. I am busy with my own work and I am poor. My younger brother is a very bad and hated person in my village.
• If I were released, I would go to my garden and plant seedlings and take care of it. I would be enough to feed and provide for my family.

In the saddest passage, he spoke about how well he had been treated, which, I think, showed up the desperation of his life before imprisonment:

Everything is good here but the detainees. The food, guards, and everything is good but the detainees are loud and bang on the cages because some of them are on strike. I get treated better here than I ever did at home. I have never received good treatment like this in my whole life. I try to be nice.

He also spoke about the abuse he received on capture, saying, “When I was detained, the American Army hit me,” which prompted a US Captain, perhaps acting as his representative, to ask “that the board inquire deeper into the abuse of the detainee at the time of capture,” and Jai Gul made the following statements to questions that were then asked:

• The army guard at capture hit me when I told him that I did not do anything wrong. He slapped the right side of my face and it caused my head to hit the wall. [The detainee lifted his right hand and placed it on his right cheek and simulated a motion that looked like his head was hitting a wall].
• I do not remember what the guard looked like because I was dizzy and bleeding after I got hit.

At the end of the hearing, he said, “Please help me because there is no one to feed my family and they have no source of income.”

ISN 3990: Abdul Samad

At a Detainee Review Board on June 9, 2010, the board concluded that he should continue to be held at Parwan. From the information presented, it was obvious that he was seized in a compound in which there was a large amount of material that US forces thought significant, including “spools or copper wiring, car batteries and battery chargers, remote controls, electrical tape and clips with trip wires, ammunition, two frag-grenades, and multiple blasting caps with some caps found in the Detainee’s pocket, three cell phones-one cell phone found [redacted], three walkie-talkies, 14 SIM cards, inventories of nefarious materials, ledgers, and Jihad poetry.” Also found were an “RPK machine gun, with used ammunition,” plus “part of ‘Stars and Stripes’ newspaper, a DVD, and a used bandolier.”

However, Abdul Samad claimed that he had no knowledge of any of it, except his school books. “There were four of us detained, my two uncles and one cousin,” he said, adding, “I am an honest person. These things that you have read to me I do not have. The only things that are mine are my store [school?] books. I am a student and I am not involved with IEDs at all. I do not have anything else to say, feel free to ask me questions.”

ISN 3995: Hajji Agha Jan

At a Detainee Review Board on June 7, 2010, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for participation in a reconciliation or reintegration program. In the documentation, it was stated that on capture, the following items were seized: “six hard drives, one laptop computer, nine SIM cards, loose papers, business cards, telephone directories, 1630 Afghani, 1690 Pakistani Rupees, 20 US dollars, camcorder with tape, still camera and case, Polaroid camera with scope, four ID books, five ID cards, three Afghanistan passports indicating numerous trips to Pakistan, airline ticket. receipt book, photo album, phone book, and audio cassette.” It was also noted, “Detainee’s computer and hard drives contained anti-coalition propaganda. Detainee claimed in his last Detainee Review Board hearing that his son was responsible for these materials.”

In a detailed statement, in which he protested his innocence, and also seemed to suggest that he had been robbed at the time of his capture, he said:

The allegation[s] that I’ve heard here are entirely false. If there is any proof, then, of course, I am guilt[y]. But there is no truth to these allegations. While I am making my statements my witnesses hear me and listen to me. I am a businessman. I don’t need to be involved in these activities. Of course, I have telephones. That doesn’t mean that I am part of the Taliban. I don’t know how to operate a computer. I bought it for my sons, for their education. There is nothing on the computer against the government or against the coalition forces. If you have any proof from outside my house, if someone in the village said something, I will take responsibility for that. You will not find anyone in the village who will accuse me of these things. While I have been detained in the facility, I have not cause[d] any problems or been involved in any detainee reports (DR’s). At the time of the search, I left $28,500 US dollars with my passports and some other business cards. How come they only mentioned 20 US dollars? Any witnesses that will testify against me, or any documents against me, I have a right to know about them. I am a businessman. I don’t hide anything from the board. Anyone who knows me knows that I am an innocent man, I [am] not involved in any activities against the government, nor do I have any ties to the Taliban.

During questions from board members, he not only dealt with questions about people regarded with suspicion by US forces, whom he admitting knowing but not being close to, but also answered questions about his computer as follows:

I can’t tell if that is my computer. I don’t know how to run a computer. I know that it is a computer, but I can’t identify it … It’s common in Afghanistan now to find videos of beheadings and IED explosions in the bazaar. Maybe my kids bought them just for fun. I myself am not involved. I didn’t buy them. I have never been against the government or the coalition forces. I’m a well-liked businessman, and I have nothing to do with those kinds of videos.

Speaking further of his sons and his work, he said:

I have ten sons, all of which live with me. They all use the same laptop. I don’t know how to work the computer, so I don’t know how to keep track of what they are doing on it. My sons are not dangerous people. They are my kids. In the area where I live, there is no Taliban. I live in the middle of the city for the last sixteen years. I live in Sahino, and there is not Taliban influence. If I were released, I would just continue with my businesses. I have some house[s], shops and lands. I own about 2,500 acres of land. I am not in favor of those who want to destroy the country. I am in favor of those who build the country. I am in favor of the government, the Coalition Forces, and American Forces. I have farmers and supervisors who take care of my land. I lease my lands to other people, and they grow grain and wheat on it. I do not personally work on the land. I am not a farmer. I have a brother-in-law in [redacted], who takes care of leasing the lands to people.

Speaking of Pakistan, he said:

I have made some trips to Pakistan because I have a cooking oil factory there. I go there to take care of business. Also, sometimes when someone in my family gets sick, I take them to Pakistan for treatment. I do business in Dubai involving cooking oil, dry milk and sugar.

In a final statement, after witnesses had also spoken on his behalf, he said:

I have been detained here for almost a year. What is the reason for my detainment here? I have no ties with the Taliban. I have never been in favor of the Taliban. I have never lied in the previous interrogation and I will never lie in any future interrogation.

ISN 3997: Ajmal Shamsher

At a Detainee Review Board on June 9, 2010, the board concluded that he did “not meet the criteria for internment,” and a senior officer approved his release without conditions. In the documentation, it was stated that he had been seized on April 22, 2009, but the exact allegations against him were not spelled out. However, he told the board, “I have a land dispute with a guy and he is the one who made the false report,” explained that “My brother, his son, his five daughters, my two wives, and seven children live with me,” and made the following statement:

My name is Ajmal. My dad’s name is [redacted]. I was a member of the local security team … I was driving for the Government of Afghanistan and I worked all my life to reconcile the differences between people in different parts. When I was driving for the Government I had the Taliban actually threaten to kill me. With all these threats why do you guys think that I am a member of the Taliban? If they are trying to kill me why would I try to be a part of them and support them? This is a proven fact that I have never been part of the Taliban. The Taliban burned my truck trying to kill me. Whoever reported to you that I am a bad person is against peace and reconciliation … They are my enemies and have made false reports about me. As I told you before, if the oil, diesel and spare parts for my truck are considered explosives than these are the only ones I have. The Taliban is out to kill me.

Witnesses also spoke on his behalf.

ISN 4112: Rahmat Wali

At a Detainee Review Board on September 17, 2009, the board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution. In a rare “Unclassified Summary” included with the documentation, it was stated that he “was captured [redacted] weapons network and its commander,” but there were no further clues as to what he was accused of. He reportedly “stated that he is glad that the Americans came because now we have good schools for his children,” adding that “he had never been involved with the Taliban coming from Pakistan to Afghanistan,” and “that he was afraid of the Taliban and Haqqani Network [an independent insurgent group, under veteran warlord and former mujahideen commander Maulvi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which is closely aligned with the Taliban].” There is no further information, however, as no one on the board asked him any questions.

ISN 4122: Abdul Ghani

At a Detainee Review Board on October 8, 2009, the board concluded that he did “not meet the criteria for internment,” and a senior officer approved his release without conditions. He was evidently a teacher, as the following statement reveals:

I’m not a Taliban member and have no association with them. My nephew was with me going to a wedding. I stayed the night in Deh Chopan [redacted]. I don’t understand why I’m here. I’m from a sub district in Zabol. I have lived there for 10 years. I’m a teacher and after my students pass five grades I teach them religion as well.

After explaining that the “Taliban are not in the district itself but in the mountains,” and that, “If released, I would go back to teaching,” he also explained that he was captured with two others, who had both been released. As he said, “[Redacted] is my friend and was released as well as my brother.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

This is the fifth article in “Bagram Week” here at Andy Worthington, with seven articles in total exploring what is happening at the main US prison in Afghanistan through reports, analyses of review boards, and the voices of the prisoners themselves, and ongoing updates to the definitive annotated Bagram prisoner list

With perfect timing, as “Bagram Week,” my series looking at US detention policies in Afghanistan, continues, the Associated Press has published an exclusive report about secret US prisons in Afghanistan, including the notorious Tor Jail at Bagram, which I discussed in my recent article, The “Dark Side” of Bagram: An Ex-Prisoner’s Account of Two Years of Abuse. In that article, a former prisoner, seized in a house raid with eight others (including a 12-year old boy), and held for two and a half years, even though the raid was based on lamentably poor inteligence, explained how he was held in the Tor Jail for 33 days before being transferred to the main prison facility at Bagram:

After our arrest we were first taken to Tor Jail, or the Black Jail. It was terrible. They didn’t treat us like humans at all. They didn’t allow us to sleep. There was nothing to cover ourselves with. They insulted the Quran. Whenever we were taken to the bathroom, they left the door open. We never knew when it was time to pray or which direction we should face. We never saw sunlight. We were treated rudely during interrogation.

Although the original US prison at Bagram airbase, housed in a gloomy Soviet-era factory building, has recently been replaced with a brand-new, state-of-the-art facility, and renamed — or rebranded — as the Detention Facility at Parwan (even though this is a transparent attempt to banish the brutal reputation that clung to Bagram throughout its long existence), the US authorities have found it impossible to suppress reports about abuse in the Tor Jail (as I explained in an article last year, entitled, What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part One): Torture and the “Black Prison”). The authorities have also found it impossible to suppress reports about abuse in other short-term detention facilities, housed in forward operating bases throughout Afghanistan, which I reported in another article last year, Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions, and which were also discussed in an important article by Anand Gopal.

The persistent stories about the Tor Jail and these other shadowy facilities have gnawed away at President Obama’s otherwise decent record when it comes to banishing the bleak ghosts of the network of CIA “black sites” that was established under the Bush administration. Obama ordered the “black sites” to be closed in an executive order issued on his second day in office (along with another promising the closure of Guantánamo, which has been spectacularly unsuccessful), but to be honest, it is unlikely that any “black sites” were still in operation by 2009, and Obama’s fine words are further undermined by the realization that, although the “black sites” may have been banished, he has failed to hold anyone accountable for torture, and has, in many ways, merely replaced the Bush administration’s contentious detention policies with drone attacks instead — a policy of “kill rather than capture,” if you are looking for a description.

For the AP’s exclusive report, unidentified US officials explained, as the agency described it, that “suspected terrorists are still being held under hazy circumstances with uncertain rights in secret, military-run jails across Afghanistan, where they can be interrogated for weeks without charge.”

The Pentagon has previously acknowedged holding prisoners in temporary detention sites, but officials have stated that the maximum time permitted for their detention was 14 days — although they have also conceded that the 14-day limit could be extended “under extraordinary circumstances.”

Now, however, officials have told the AP that prisoners are being held in a number of shadowy, frontline jails “for up to nine weeks, depending on the value of information they produce.” According to the AP, there are “roughly 20″ of these sites, which accords with a report I received over a year ago, when a reliable Afghan source informed a US lawyer friend of mine that:

there were, at the time, about two dozen secret facilities in Afghanistan, including three or four in Herat, four or five in northern Afghanistan, and three or four in Kabul. According to this source, the majority were US facilities, although a few were run by the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the Afghan government’s domestic intelligence agency, and a few others were run by the Afghan Army.

According to the AP, the “most secretive” site, run by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), a suitably shadowy counter-terrorism unit , is at Bagram — the long-mentioned Tor Jail, or Black Jail, which, as described to the AP, is “responsible for questioning high-value targets … suspected of top roles in the Taliban, al-Qaida or other militant groups.”

JSOC’s role has been disputed, as, for example, in an article in the Atlantic last year by Marc Ambinder, which I discussed in my own analysis of the secret prison last June:

[According to Ambinder,] “JSOC, a component command made up of highly secret special mission units and task forces, does not operate the facility. Instead, it is manned by intelligence operatives and interrogators who work for the … Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC),” a branch of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon’s main military intelligence department.

Complicating matters further, Ambinder also explained that DCHC “perform interrogations for a sub-unit of Task Force 714, an elite counter-terrorism brigade,” which, last year, was described to Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent by a National Security Council staffer as “‘small groups of Rangers going wherever the hell they want to go’ in Afghanistan and operating under legal authority granted at the end of the Bush Administration that President Obama has not revoked.”

Explaining how the nine-week detention period can come about, US officials told the AP that, when prisoners are first seized and interrogated in the field, the intention is to discover, fairly swiftly, what their status is, and what intelligence they might therefore possess. Generally, after 14 days maximum, they are then moved to Parwan (Bagram) or released.

Vice Adm. Robert Harward, who is in charge of detention operations in Afghanistan, has explained that Taliban foot soldiers “often provide useful information about how insurgent networks work, who runs them and who pays the bills,” but that, “if detainees can provide unusually valuable information on the location of a bomb-building factory or are willing to identify the local Taliban commander, their interrogators can ask to keep them longer,” as the AP described it.

There is, at first, a three-week extension, for reasons including “producing good tactical intel” or being “too sick to move,” and then a month’s extension, leading to nine weeks in total. After that, officials would have to appeal to the defense secretary Robert Gates, or even President Obama, although apparently that has never happened. If the prisoners produce useful information after this period, they are then moved to Parwan, to await a decision to transfer them to Afghan custody to face prosecution.

No one knows how many prisoners are held in this manner. A military spokeswoman, Capt. Pamela Kunze, said it was not more than “a small fraction of the total number of detainees,” and the AP noted that 1,900 prisoners are currently held at Parwan, but that, last year, only 1,300 out of a total of 6,600 suspects arrested across Afghanistan ended up at Parwan, according to Vice Adm. Harward.

Despite the best explanations of the military, this report only confirms that the United States, in Afghanistan, continues to behave in a manner that demonstrates the government’s disdain for international law, and senior officials’ belief that they are a law unto themselves.

Beyond the obvious fact that the sleep deprivation and isolation used in the Tor Jail, and, by extension, in the other secret prisons, is clearly abusive, and that the entire set-up reveals how the US military remains in the post-9/11 world shaped by Bush’s first defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who presided over the terrible departure from the Geneva Conventions, and the torrent of torture, abuse and murder that followed, the current snapshot of US activities, as revealed by the Associated Press, also relies on readers’ trust that US operatives in Afghanistan know what they are doing.

And on this point, unfortunately, the US also fails. As I have been discovering through my analyses of the limited number of stories that have emerged from the Detainee Review Boards at Bagram — or Parwan — in which panels of military officers have decided whether to release prisoners, whether to continue holding them, or whether to transfer them to Afghan custody, what passes for intelligence has often been revealsed as woefully lacking in substance.

The most shocking example in the first article I published on ths topic, Voices from Bagram: Prisoners Speak in Their Detainee Review Boards (Part One of Three), was in the case of Fazel Rahman, a shopkeeper, whose review board thought long and hard about whether to conclude that he could be detained as a supporter of the Taliban because he “allowed” them to rob him at his shop. In the end, common sense prevailed, and the board recommended his release, but it could have gone either way.

In Part 2 of “Voices from Bagram” (forthcoming), I have just been examining the case of Nek Marjan, a cab driver from a village in Khost province, whose continued detention was approved by two out of three board members, even though the dissent of the third official was based on the fact that there was absolutely no evidence that he had done anything wrong. As the official report stated, “Notwithstanding the majority vote, the evidence was so weak that one board member found no internment criteria.”

With reports like these — and the recollections of the young man detained in the Tor Jail for no reason — it is impossible to have any faith that America’s ongoing refusal to obey the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan serves any purpose, other than to continue to allow the military to abuse individuals who were never even a threat to them in he first place.

It’s a grim scenario, to be honest — a project called “Losing Hearts and Minds,” which has been going on for nearly ten years in Afghanistan. The wonder is that it can continue with such impudence, and apparently still with no end in sight …

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

This is the fourth article in “Bagram Week” here at Andy Worthington, with seven articles in total exploring what is happening at the main US prison in Afghanistan through reports, analyses of review boards, and the voices of the prisoners themselves, and ongoing updates to the definitive annotated Bagram prisoner list.

As part of “Bagram Week” here at Andy Worthington, I’m cross-posting a rather harrowing story, originally published on the Afghanistan Analysts Network, that I came across recently, and then lost again. I retrieved it via my colleague Mathias Vermeulen, who, on his blog The Lift, picked out a key passage in this bleak account by a former Bagram prisoner of the time he spent in the Tor jail — Bagram’s secret torture prison — before his transfer to the main facility. This is the passage:

After our arrest we were first taken to Tor Jail, or the Black Jail. It was terrible. They didn’t treat us like humans at all. They didn’t allow us to sleep. There was nothing to cover ourselves with. They insulted the Quran. Whenever we were taken to the bathroom, they left the door open. We never knew when it was time to pray or which direction we should face. We never saw sunlight. We were treated rudely during interrogation.

This entire article is a damning revelation — an insider’s account not only of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used in the Tor Jail, but more generally of the cruelty and incompetence that fuels Bagram as surely as it fueled Guantánamo, with random arrests, threats, psychological abuse, poor intelligence, incompetent translators, ”segregation” — in isolation cells — used as persistently as it was in Guantánamo on perceived troublemakers, and, worse than Guantánamo (but as Bagram was in its early days) the death of a prisoner that was, it seems, effortlessly covered up and not reported. The account is also revealing about the dysfunctional relationship between the Afghan and American detention facilities, where there is supposed to be cooperation regarding trials, but where in fact chaos reigns, and prisoners are being lost between the two systems, abandoned unless they can pay a substantial bribe.

Overall, this article should, I think, be widely circulated as an antidote to all the claims that the move from Bagram to the new Detention Facility in Parwan has suddenly done away with abusive patterns of behavior that, it seems, are engrained in the operations, and in the casual racism and dehumanization of war, and that have nothing to do with the buildings themselves. Of all the accounts I have read, this one rings the truest, not just becasue it accords with other insider reports I have heard over the last few years about the ongoing physical and psychological abuse of prisoners, but also because it so clearly echoes what we know about detention operations throughout the “War on Terror,” which will not fundamentally change until someone draws a line under it all, and actually starts all over again, with respect for the geneva Conventions that were shredded by the Bush administration, and that have not been thoroughly reintroduced under President Obama.

Stories people tell: Bagram prison; not a single good day
By Martine van Bijlert, Afghanistan Analysts Network, March 9, 2011

There are so many stories of people who get caught up in the nightly operations by American and Afghan forces. In the search for ‘kill & capture’ targets the net is cast wide: once a door is kicked in all males in a household are usually taken for interrogation. And it is then anyone’s guess when they will be released again. One story — out of many — of how an unlucky sleep-over resulted in years of detention, and what those years were like.

I was arrested by American and Afghan Special Forces about two and a half years ago. It was night and I was staying as a guest in a house when the forces came. I had saved money to open a small medicine shop and that night I had gone to see this man to buy medicine. Maybe someone reported him to the Americans; in Afghanistan there are so many enmities. Maybe they thought there was some kind of meeting or program going on, because there were other guests as well. I don’t know why they arrested us, but they took all the men in the house: nine in total, including a 12-year old boy.

When they came we were sleeping. None of us was wearing shoes or proper clothes. One of us was only wearing his underwear. They took us with them just like that. We had to walk through the mud. After our arrest, one of the men was handed to the NDS (National Directorate for Security); he was a friend of the owner of the house. The four sons and a nephew were released after about two weeks. Then two other guests were released. They had come that night to get a tahwiz (religious amulet). They were released a few months before me. The owner of the house and I were released last, now a few weeks ago.

After our arrest we were first taken to Tor Jail, or the Black Jail. It was terrible. They didn’t treat us like humans at all. They didn’t allow us to sleep. There was nothing to cover ourselves with. They insulted the Quran. Whenever we were taken to the bathroom, they left the door open. We never knew when it was time to pray or which direction we should face. We never saw sunlight. We were treated rudely during interrogation. Some people were also beaten, but that didn’t happen to me.

After 33 days in the Black Jail I was transferred to the big jail. Here we were visited by ICRC [the International Committee of the Red Cross], which was good even though they had no authority. They brought letters, but they didn’t tell the press about us or about the circumstances we were in. The Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) didn’t come to the prison; maybe they were not allowed in. About a month before my release they came, but they were so young. What could they do?

Many things were really bad. For instance, I was locked up in ‘segregation’ sixteen times, sometimes for 10 or 20 days at a time. I did nothing special to provoke this. I didn’t do anything serious like hit them or attack them. It happened when I asked for my rights.That was reason enough to call me shureshi (trouble maker, revolter). I just asked for food, for instance, or I complained that they were interfering with our prayers. The food in segregation was especially bad; they called it ‘low-grade food’. It smelled and tasted horrible and made you sick. They even put an old man of 75 years in segregation, with bare feet and a bare head. The guards also used gas on the prisoners, it was like teargas and it made it very difficult to breathe.

There was one group of [American] guards who were called badmashi (thugs). They behaved very badly and rudely with the prisoners. One of them once told me he would kill me. When that group left things got a little better. But we did not see one good day in that place. The Black Jail of course was worse. At least in the big prison I was registered with ICRC. I knew they could not just execute me. Other prisoners said that from Tor Jail many people had disappeared.

There was a man from Uruzgan; he was about 30 years old. He became very agitated, but the doctor said he was alright. When the doctor finally came, he had died. Those kinds of things happen. But they don’t appear in the press, nobody pays attention.

There was also a young boy, he was mute and had psychological problems. When he was put in our cell, he was climbing the walls and trying to hurt himself. We tried to calm him down and to stop him. I told those in charge that it was not our job to look after him and that he should receive proper treatment. They said he was a suicide bomber. In the end they put him in segregation. When I was released he was still there. By that time he had been there for three months. He didn’t receive any medication. He was very loud and kept all the prisoners in that section awake.

There were also no facilities for handicapped or wounded people. Many prisoners had no legs or had other handicaps. It was difficult for them to go to the bathroom. There was one person in my cell who had fallen off the roof when he was arrested. His 10-year old son was shot during the raid. He arrived in prison with two broken legs. For two months we carried him to the bathroom.

About one year ago things in the prison became a bit better. A mullah was appointed. He belonged to the Americans and he helped improve the situation. Then the ANA [Afghan National Army] took over and we were transferred to a new jail. The new jail was better, there were bigger cells. But the Americans were still in charge. The Afghan soldiers had no right to talk to the prisoners. In every block there was a station, one at the north and one at the south, where there were Americans. They had to be informed about any request the prisoners had. The Afghan soldiers complained that they were just like waiters or sweepers in a hotel and that they weren’t allowed to do anything. Even the officers felt like that.

I was interrogated so many times. They asked me, “Do you know this person? Have you done that?” Once they showed me some pictures of what looked like explosives. I don’t know what it was, but they kept saying that it belonged to me. I was tied to a chair until nine o’clock at night. The Americans say that they don’t do zulm (oppression, cruelty), but they do. They bothered prisoners in a psychological way. They threatened them.

Once they told me that they would bring my father to the prison. I said that I would be very happy, because my father had died several years ago and I would like to see him again. But they did the same to other prisoners, who really became worried. Especially those who were not educated, who didn’t know whether the Americans might really do this or not. Sometimes the Americans even told the prisoners they would bring their wives or sisters to the prison. There was one man from Zabul. When they arrested him they took pictures of all the women in his family. During the interrogation they showed him the pictures and said they were going to make copies and distribute them in the whole of Zabul. They also took pictures of prisoners while they were having a shower and threatened to distribute them in their home areas. These kinds of things can give you psychological problems.

There were also problems with the translators. Some of them didn’t understand Afghan vocabulary at all. Once when I was being interrogated I told them that I had done two namaz (prayers) and that there were two left. He translated that I had shot two rockets and that there were two left. I didn’t know it at the time, but they confronted me with this during an interrogation much later. The whole thing was like a stupid joke.

There was a commander who was also detained. After six and a half years they told him, “We still have doubts that you are a Hezb-e Islami commander”. He said, “You have doubts? There is no doubt! I am a Hezb-e Islami commander, for sure. But what is my crime?” He was a commaner and a malek, a person who tried to build up the government, but they kept him detained for such a long time for no reason. There was another man called Abu Baqer. The Americans thought he was Commander Abu Baqer, because his name was the same, so they kept him detained for seven years. In the meantime the real Commander Abu Baqer was still moving around and everybody knew it.

Some prisoners did not see their relatives for a year or more. There was a man from Khost. When his relatives asked about him, the Americans told them that he was not there — but he was. After a year and a half he was finally given a meeting. After that he was released.

I was released a few weeks ago. At my release an American colonel apologized to me. He said that they had concluded that I was innocent and that I had worked for the good of Afghanistan. He said that after two and a half years! They gave me a bottle of perfume, but they did not return my possessions. When I was arrested I had $6000 on me, as an advance for the medicines, and also my mobile phone and some afghanis. They did not give them back. At the time I didn’t say anything; I just wanted to leave. But they should give it back.

Now I am in a bad situation. I feel like half my life is gone. My economic situation is bad, my savings are gone. My health is not well. My legs hurt, I don’t know why, maybe because of the lack of exercise. On the day of arrest I also hit my leg, when they pushed me into the car while I was blindfolded. For the first few months I couldn’t walk properly. My back also hurts. We went on strike for a while in the prison, because of the bad conditions and because we were upset that our fate was not clear. After four and a half months they came in with force to break up the strike. One man broke a leg and an old man broke a rib. Two guards fell on top of me with their heavy jackets. My back still aches from that.

One prisoner wrote a book. He actually wrote two books. While he was in prison he gathered toilet paper and wrote on it with a pen. We were not allowed pens, but he had received one from an ANA guard. The books are called ‘Gift from Bagram’ and ‘From Karez Mir to Bagram’. I don’t know if they have been published yet.

According to Afghan and international law you can detain a person for three months, but they hold people for years and years without any decision. Since the demonstrations there are now reviews every six months, but there are so many people who have already been kept for years and who are still in the prison. Their detention just gets extended every time. Once when I was getting ready for the DRB (Detention Review Board), the representative gave me a piece of paper and said that if I read that at the meeting I would be released. The paper said that I had killed people. I said I cannot read that, but he said if you do you will be handed over to the Afghan government. I went to the court but I did not read the paper. My detention was extended for six months.

In the end I was sent to two Afghan courts. They decided to release me. Two months after that the Americans released me. They don’t care about the Afghan courts, and the Afghan courts are not processing the cases. There are more than 300 prisoners that are in between the two systems. Their files have been sent to the Afghans, but they are still in the American prison. They are lost. If they don’t give money, their file will never be found again.

I wasted two and a half years of my life. I don’t feel well at all. I am afraid that, because this happened once for no reason, it may happen again. Who can guarantee me that I will not be unlucky again? When I was arrested I was engaged. I still am, but I have no money or income. So much happened in those years, I cannot remember it all. I have only told you what I remembered. I think it might be good if my story is published. The world should know what it was like. There was not one good day in all those years. We were not treated like humans. Even though we had done nothing wrong and they had no information against us.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Since the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan opened in December 2001, the voices of the prisoners held there have never been made available to the outside world by the US authorities. When they have become known, it is either after the prisoners’ release, or, for those sent to Guantánamo from Bagram between 2002 and 2004, through the transcripts of their tribunals and review boards at Guantánamo, when some spoke about what happened to them in Bagram.

The prison has changed over the years. It was a place of mayhem and murder in the early years, when horrendous brutality accompanied its role as the prison used for processing prisoners for Guantánamo. After the transfer of ordinary prisoners ceased (in November 2003), and most of the additional prisoners who had passed through a variety of secret prisons were also disposed of (by September 2004, when some were sent to Guantánamo and others were forcibly repatriated), Bagram became Guantánamo’s dark mirror, untouched by the lawyers who, at Guantánamo, fought for and secured habeas corpus rights for the men held there.

Under Obama, attempts have been made to pry Bagram open. Three foreign nationals, seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram, where they have been held for many years (since 2002, in two of the cases), had their habeas corpus petitions granted in a court in Washington D.C. in March 2009, when Judge John D. Bates ruled that their circumstances were essentially the same as the Guantánamo prisoners and that therefore the habeas rights that the Supreme Court granted the Guantánamo prisoners in June 2008 extended to foreigners rendered to Bagram as well. This was undoubtedly true, but the ruling was overturned on appeal last May, hurling the men back into a legal black hole.

In an attempt to hide this blatant unfairness, the Obama administration introduced a new review process at Bagram, replacing the disgraceful set-up under President Bush, whereby prisoners had to make a statement before they were even told what the allegations against them were. Obama’s solution was to introduce a process almost identical to the Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantánamo — which the Supreme Court found to be “inadequate” — in which the prisoners are assigned personal representatives, instead of lawyers, and are not allowed to see or hear any evidence that the government regards as classified.

The Detainee Review Boards, which began in September 2009, are therefore as “inadequate” as the tribunals at Guantánamo, in particular because they maintain the Bush administration’s unchallenged fiction that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to current US wars, and that prisoners seized by the US since 9/11 are therefore not prisoners of war.

The Review Boards also reveal the chaotic nature of detention policies in Afghanistan, where there are prisons run by the Americans and prisons run by the Afghans, and the Boards, as a result, are given a smorgasbord of options for dealing with the prisoners: releasing them, continuing to hold them, or transferring them to Afghan custody, either to face criminal prosecutions, or to be put through a process of reconciliation and rehabilitation.

Although the Review Boards have led to the release of hundreds of prisoners, it would be difficult to regard them as a success, not only because they continue the unacceptable sidelining of the Geneva Conventions, but also because the entire process of holding hearings for prisoners who are not allowed to have lawyers and are not able to see or hear classified evidence against them is fundamentally unfair, as was demonstrated at Guantánamo, and as has also been demonstrated in reports from Bagram over the last year, as discussed in my articles, What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part Two): Executive Detention, Rendition, Review Boards, Released Prisoners and Trials and Broken Justice at Bagram — for Afghans, and for Foreign Prisoners Held by the US.

Nevertheless, the Detainee Review Boards have produced the first documents that reveal the words of the prisoners themselves, albeit in a heavily redacted form. In documents obtained by the ACLU through FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests, the Pentagon not only released documents providing summaries of the review boards’ conclusions (which I began analyzing here), but also released 58 documents relating to specific prisoners, which contain more information than those brief summaries — the Commander’s Final Decision Memo, a Memo from the DRB President to the Commander or the Deputy Commander, a DRB Report of Findings and Recommendations, and, most importantly, a Summary of the DRB Hearing, which, between redactions, usually contains some of the allegations against the prisoners, which are otherwise unknown, and some of the prisoners’ own statements and their responses to questions from the panel.

Below, I’m posting synopses of the first 18 of these documents, and will cover the other 40 in two articles to follow. Individually, they are not always revealing — although in some cases they clearly are — but cumulatively they help to provide an overview of the entire process, and, unfortunately, echo the problems with the tribunals at Guantánamo on which they were modelled.

18 Stories from Bagram

ISN 1433: Salah Mohammed Ali

Ali is — or was — a Pakistani prisoner, who was just 20 years old when he was seized. His Detainee Review Board took place on June 5, 2010, when he had, by his own reckoning, been held for six and a half years. The board recommended that he should be released in Pakistan, having concluded that he was “not an Enduring Security Threat.” During his DRB, he made the following statement:

I never belonged to any of the organizatIons that were mentioned. I came to study at a madrassa in Lahore. A group came to the madrassa school based on Islamic teaching. They brainwashed me against Americans. They talked a lot about Americans and that they are very bad people. They said Americans did bad things in Iraq, killing innocent kids and raping women. They said Americans came for the oil. I. am not associated with any organization like LET [Lashkar-e-Tayyiba] or Al-Qaeda. No one told me to join them. The other people who came to the madrassa might belong to them [redacted]. I accept that I went there for Jihad. That was a serious mistake in my life and I was too young to understand the consequences of that.

ISN 2619: Shafiq

On October 8, 2009, a Detainee Review Board concluded that Shafiq, assessed as “an insurgent member” who had “been involved in coalition attacks,” should be transferred to the Afghan authorities “for participation in a reconciliation program.” The board found that, although he was “not an Enduring Security Threat,” “internment is necessary to mitigate the threat [he] poses.”

In his hearing, Shafiq “sat on the floor and refused to make any statements.”

ISN 2638: Mullah Abdullah

On October 8, 2009, a Detainee Review Board concluded that Mullah Abdullah, assessed as “a low-level Taliban member and informant,” should be transferred to the Afghan authorities “for criminal prosecution.” The board found that, although he was “not an Enduring Security Threat,” “internment is necessary to mitigate the threat [he] poses.”

In his hearing, Mullah Abdullah asked a number of questions indicating that he did not believe the allegations against him:

• If I am Taliban, then who told you this?
• If weapons were found in the village, then it is not my fault. If I had weapons, then they should have taken a picture.
• The weapons were not 10 feet away. The weapons were 200 feet away. I was in my home at the time of the capture.
• I am mad because no one asked me anything for 4 years.

ISN 3151: Abdul Rahman Jan

On June 7, 2010, a Detainee Review Board concluded that Jan, a recently seized prisoner who was not included in the list of prisoners held in September 2009, should be released. The board “found no support for [his] internment.”

In statements, he explained that he was seized after taking his son to Pakistan, because he was sick, and then returning to meet a friend who had just returned from the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). The exact circumstances of his arrest were redacted, but it was clearly something to do with allegations about a cousin of his, which he said were mistaken, as US forces had a different name to that of his cousin. Specifically, he said, “I don’t know anything about any weapons or radios found in the area I was captured. It was not my house, or my village. I didn’t see anyone carrying any weapons that day.”

He also explained that he had been captured before, and sent to Bagram, but that he did not bear a grudge against US forces:

I was captured in my own house in 2007. There were four of us captured … I don’t have any hard feeiings about the coalition forces, even though they’ve captured me twice. They didn’t disrespect me. They didn’t beat me. I am satisfied with and have confidence in the government. The government brings prosperity and security. I just want to explain to the board that I am a poor person and I’m not involved in any of the activities I’m accused of.

ISN 3154: Qari Mohamand (aka Mohmand)

On October 8, 2009, a Detainee Review Board concluded that Qari Mohamand, captured on February 6, 2007 and “assessed to be an insurgent facilitator,” should be transferred to the Afghan authorities “for criminal prosecution.” The board found that, although he was “not an Enduring Security Threat,” “internment is necessary to mitigate the threat [he] poses.”

In his hearing, Qari Mohamand said, “I have never fought with anyone. I am innocent. It is common for Afghans to make up stories. Nobody found any evidence.” He added, “I went to school at the Madrassa when I was 8 years old. I am only a farmer and I do not know anyone with explosives.”

ISN 3273: Said Wali Jan

On June 7, 2010, a Detainee Review Board concluded that Said Wali Jan was “an Enduring Security Threat,” and should “continue to be detained at the Detention Facility in Parwan.”

In his hearing, Jan, who evidently worked as a baker, said:

There is no proof of the allegation against me. it you have proof, I am willing to take whatever punishment you give me. If you can prove that I was involved in any suicide mission against the coalition forces, either by training or supplying materials, then bring the proof to me and I will accept it. There is not any proof that I was involved in [redacted]. If I had ties to these types of attacks or operations, I would not have been captured in my bakery. I see Coalition Forces, ANP, and ANA every day while running my bakery. These people come and buy bread from me. If I was that type of person they could have captured me anytime they wanted.

ISN 3314: Maulawi Ahmad Jan

On September 24, 2009, in his Detainee Review Board, it was decided that Jan did not meet the criteria for internment, and that he should be released without conditions. It was stated that he was captured on September 10, 2007 and that “He was but no longer is assessed to be a Taliban commander.”

Most of the case against him was not clear from the documents (as is the case with most of these hearings), but it was stated at the time of his capture that he was regarded as the Taliban district commander of Andar, in Ghazni province, and that he was “known to be extensively involved in the coordination of insurgent activities in Ghazni Province” and had “directed IED and ambush attacks against ANSF and Coalition forces throughout the region.”

Although Army Maj. Chris Belcher, a Combined Joint Task Force-82 spokesperson, said at the time of his capture, “With Ahmad Jan now detained, Ghazni will be a less dangerous place,” it may be that this was not the case, and that he was released because he was not who the US thought he was, or had far less influence than was thought.

Whatever the exact story, Maulawi Ahmed Jan’s dissatisfaction was clear from the following comments he made in response to various allegations:

• I am not part of the Taliban. I was brought here by force.
• I was not captured at home.
• My feet and wrists are injured from fighting with the guards.
• I am frustrated today because people hit me.
• I want to go home so that I can be a farmer.
• I have a wife and children. I have communicated with my family since I have been here.
• I was captured by the Taliban.

ISN 3451: Amanullah

At a Detainee Review Board on September 24, 2009, it was decided that Amanullah was “part of, or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities aginst the United States or its coalition partners,” and the Board recommended that he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for prosecution.

It was not made clear what he was supposed to have done, but it evidently involved his alleged knowledge of another individual in his village. In statements, he said, “I am a poor farmer and not Taliban. If I was guilty, then I would have run away from the scene. I have always been calm and cooperated with you.”

ISN 3483: Mak Mali Jan

At a Detainee Review Board on October 1, 2009, Mak Mali Jan’s release without conditions was recommended, even though a box was ticked which indicated that he was “part of, or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities aginst the United States or its coalition partners.”

What Jan, a schools inspector, was supposed to have done was unclear, although it may have involved him allowing — or being prevailed upon to allow — someone to stay at his home who subsequently brought trouble on him. In statements from his hearing, he said:

• I am an innocent man.
• I work for the government so we have the same goal.
• I am an anti-coalition enemy.
• I do not know [redacted]. I do not want them to stay at my home.
• I check the curriculum for schools for the government. I like GIRoA [the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan]. They are a good government. If I get released, I will do my previous job.

ISN 3485: Qari Abdul Wali

At a Detainee Review Board on October 8, 2009, Qari Abdul Wali’s release without conditions was recommended, even though, as with Mak Mali Jan (above), a box was ticked which indicated that he was “part of, or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners.”

Although it was stated that he was “reported as a Taliban facilitator,” this was clearly not the case. As he stated at his hearing:

• I have always been cooperative and I will continue to be. When I was captured, they asked me my name and where I was coming from. It is outrageous to call me a Taliban member.
• I never said I was a Taliban member. I am not a driver for the Taliban.
• If I say that I know Taliban, then you will say that I am a bad person. If I say that I do not know any Taliban, then it does me no good because I am already in jail.

ISN 3665: Yakoub

At a Detainee Review Board on September 17, 2009, it was stated that Yakoub was “part of, or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” and the Board recommended that he be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution.

Whether this was fair or not was impossible to ascertain, as all Yakoub’s statements were redacted, although the inference that he was involved with the insurgency can be easily reached from the the recorder, Specialist [redacted], who “presented the board with the unclassified information and internment criteria” and “further stated that a vehicle with five RPGs, six RPG propellants, one tank mine, a link of 7.62-mm rounds, one pressure plate, and two fragmentation grenades were found with the detainee.”

ISN 3670: Sadik

At a Detainee Review Board on October 15, 2009, it was recommended that Sadik be released without conditions, because he did not meet the criteria for internment. Although he was assessed to be “part of or supporting Taliban engaged in hostilities against the US and Coalition forces,” it was clear that he had been falsely regarded as harbouring an insurgent who attacked US forces. As he said, “The guy did not come from my vehicle. I have seen the soldier by my own eyes. I am innocent.”

He also said:

• I deny any part of any forces against the US. My little brother is 15 years old. I am poor. I transport things in my truck. I am innocently in jail. My truck is now ruined because it was shot up. I am innocent. Are you going to pay for my truck and pay me for the time I’ve been here innocently? Once I’m out, I expect someone to pay for my truck.
• I am innocent. If I stay, it is unfair to hold an innocent person for another 6 months.

ISN 3686: Ghulam Yaya

At a Detainee Review Board on October 15, 2009, it was recommended that Ghulam Yaya, described as “part of, or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for participation in a reconciliation program.

The exact cause of his detention was unclear, although it obviously involved his uncle, whose purported connections with the insurgency he claimed to know nothing about, and a white car. As he explained:

• I haven’t seen the white car. I am a working man, What. have I been brought here for? I haven’t done anything. Look at my file and ask about me. What is my fault? Why am I here?
• I am a peasant. That morning I was sleeping. I heard gunfire so I went outside to see what was going on. They put my wife, and children in a corner and asked me questions.
• For God’s sake, I have not done anything. I have a wife. It is cruelty that I am here. Please, don’t be cruel to me.

ISN 3687: Mohammad Nazar

At a Detainee Review Board on November 15, 2009, it was recommended that, even though Nazar was “part of, or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” he should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for participation in a reconciliation program.

In a statement at his hearing, it was claimed that “pressure plate IEDs, six pressure cooker IEDs, two propane tank IEDs, one PKM, three AK-47s, five chest rigs, two hand grenades, and multiple amounts of ammo” were found near his point of capture, and that, according to a sworn statement by a US soldier, Nazar “was seen fleeing the raid.”

Whether Nazar had any connection to this cache of weapons and a firefight that is mentioned in the documents is unknown, but from his testimony he appeared to be a nobody, seized only because he was around and had run away. He said:

• I am new to this village, and I am just a farmer. All accusations are wrong. I am a poor farmer just trying to feed my family. I have done nothing wrong. I have nothing to feed my family, and it is not good for my family that I am in here. I moved to Baqua to work for [redacted]. I have three daughters, two sons, and a wife. I have no idea on why you are holding me here.
• I live at someone else’s home. The house does not have a door. I was inside, with my family. I will do labor job to feed my kids.

He also complained about being the victim of violence after his capture:

After I was cuffed I was hit. I did not resist arrest. It was too dark to tell who hit me … They hit me on the head and many other.places. I was bleeding after being hit in the head. I was hit with a gun, and I was kicked. I talked to the investigators about it, many times.

It was clear that he was an extremely unsophisticated man, nothing more than the laborer he said he was, because, in the words of a US Army sergeant who was called as a witness, “The detainee is not good with seeing himself in pictures because he is not used to it.”

ISN 3691: Noor Ahmad

At a Detainee Review Board on November 15, 2009, it was recommended that Ahmed, designated as someone who was “part of, or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution.

Ahmad was evidently seized in the same raid as Mohammad Nazar, above, as it was stated that his arrest involved “a white vehicle containing four pressure plate IEDs, one PKM, three AK-47s, five chest rigs, two hand grenades, and various amounts of ammo.”

Ahmed also spoke less than Mohammad Nazar, and all that was unredacted in the report of his hearing were the following statements, which make it impossible to know whether he played any role in the events that led to his capture:

• These things are not true, Everything you are saying is not true. I am a poor person. I have told everything to the 10 or 15 investigators, make your decision off of them.
• Everything is in my file. Please don’t beg me to speak.

ISN 3748: Shahbodin

At a Detainee Review Board on October 8, 2009, it was recommended that Shahbodin, designated as someone who was “part of, or substantially supported Taliban or al-Qaeda forces, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners,” should be transferred to the Afghan authorities for criminal prosecution.

In an “Unclassified Summary” included with the documents — not made available in any other cases — it was stated that Shahbodin had “confessed to IED activitiy” and had led his Afghan captors to “a site where he had hidden IED material.” He was then transferred to other Afghan forces, who discovered that he had been abused by his previous captors. Nevertheless, he then “confessed to placing IEDs wth intent to target CF [Coalition Forces]” during an interview after he was handed over to US forces a few days later.

In statements, Shahbodin explained that he had been involved in a planned IED attack, but had not been in charge, and had handed himself in because he was not happy with his involvement:

I have been here for 30 months, I am an Afghan and I would not destroy my country. I was present when the IEDs/mines were placed. I turned myself in because I realized it was wrong. I took the authorities to show them where they were placed.

After explaining that he used to “ship bread to Pakistan” from Ghazni, he spoke about meeting two men, whose names were redacted, who, he claimed, were in charge of the operation and recruited him. One of the men, he said, “gave me a speech about the Americans being bad and how he wanted to kill them,” and while these two men “placed the mines,” Shahbodin said, “I was the watch man.”

ISN 3771: Fazel Rahman

At a Detainee Review Board on June 5, 2010, “the board members found that [he] did not meet the criteria for internment,” and a more senior military figure then ordered his release. It was disclosed that Fazel Rahman, also identified as Hajji Nazar Gul, was a shopkeeper, and the following extraordinary passage explained why his “support” for the Taliban was no basis for his detention — because it consisted of him standing by while they robbed him:

Overall the DRB assessed that if Fazel Rahman provided any support at all to the Taliban it was most !ikely in the form of him standing by while they took items without payment from the store. The DRB considered this kind of support to be unwilling and under implied threat of violence.

The Review Board also noted:

• Notably, there is some evidence that Fazel Rahman smokes hashish and supplements his income in the off season by working in opium fields. The DRB considered these habits inconsistent with the tenets of some of the puritanical types of Taliban.
• Lacking any substantial support of or membership of an insurgent group, the DRB voted that Fazel Rahman, ISN 3771, does not meet internment criteria.

The Board also explained that Fazel Rahman’s small shop sold “chai, candies, sugar, chewing gums, candy, and groceries,” and that he understood that he was “accused of having a nefarious relationship” with someone whose name was redacted, but the mention of whose name prompted him to say that he “knows three of them, a shopkeeper, a barber, and a mullah,” who “is a suspected Taliban member.” The Board considered that he “was forthcoming when admitting ‘borderline’ nefarious conduct, lending a sense of credibility to his testimony generally,” and mentioned that he “discussed his travel to Iran for work. including the use of smugglers to cross the border.”

He also said that his brother and others would vouch for him: “They can tell the DRB what kind of person he is. When released he will try to help Americans. He likes the Americans because they build clinics, madrassas, and roads.”

In statements, Fazel Rahman said:

• I appreciate the respect I have received while here. I want to help Americans but I cannot because I’m a detainee. I have a shop and almost all the people know me and my brother and they all would have good things to say about me.
• I am receiving excellent medical treatment here. I have received two [doctors' visits] since being here. I was trying to tell the guard I needed to go to the Dr. and they would not take me so I spit on the guard. Yes, I threw my feces at the guard. I did it because I’m a sick person.

ISN 3776: Gul Haider

At a Detainee Review Board on June 9, 2010, the board members found that Gul Haider met detention criteria, but recommended that internment was not necessary to mitigate the threat that he posed, and that he should be released without conditions.

In his hearing it was stated that Gul Haider had admitted that his brother was a “known Taliban member,” and that he also “expresse[d] personal knowledge of numerous Taliban personalities and details regarding Taliban activities.”

In a statement, Gul Haider said:

• Thank you very much for giving me the time to speak, here. I was never a Taliban. When my father was sick I went to Kabul and stayed at the hospital for 19 days. If I was a Taliban I would have never gone to the hospital ran by the government. I am very happy with my government and happy for the Coalition Forces. If I was a Taliban I could not have stayed in Kabul for so long. When I was captured by the Americans I knew that I would be safe but I have been captured too long. If I am released I will still say that I like the Americans. I am very happy with the education classes here. I have signed up for English and farming. This is really nice for people here but I should not be here because I have done nothing wrong. My behavior has been good here.
• The government is not bad; with your help we can build our country. I like the Coalition Forces; they are building schools and roads. They are good for this country.

He also said:

• I have never been a part of the Taliban. I have never wanted to become a part of the Taliban. I said before that the Taliban came to my house and I gave them food, but only one time.
• How can I admire my brother? Because of him I have been put in jail. He has caused me a lot of suffering so how can I like him? We are brothers and we have the same family but we each have our own five fingers. I have my own mentality and can think for myself. Each person has their own mentality so people living together don’t always do the same things.
• If your enemy comes in your home you have to be hospitable and when he leaves then you can say what you want.

Note: For more information about the prisoners at Bagram, see: Bagram: The First Ever Prisoner List (The Annotated Version).

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

As published exclusively on Cageprisoners.

So what’s happening at Bagram, the main US prison in Afghanistan, which has been wracked by scandals, including a number of murders, and allegations of torture and abuse since it opened in December 2001?

Unrecognizable since those early days, the prison at Bagram — once housed in a Soviet-era machine shop — is now in an entirely new building, known as the Detention Facility in Parwan. This, according to the Pentagon, is part of a larger Afghan Justice Center in Parwan, which “will become Afghanistan’s central location for the pre-trial detention, prosecution and post-trial incarceration of national security suspects.”

Bagram only occasionally attracts media attention, but in February the prison — in its new location — was officially relaunched as part of America’s revised approach to detention in the Afghan warzone, with more focus on rehabiitation, and less on punishment and isolation. At the time, I was too busy to write about or to cross-post reports by journalists who visited the facility for this relaunch — whose reports were published in the Huffington Post, Stars and Stripes and McClatchy Newspapers — so I thought I’d gather them together here, for anyone else who missed them, as part of my special coverage of Bagram this week. This coverage includes an update to the definitive Bagram prisoner list (the updated prisoner list is here), and “Voices from Bagram,” a three-part series drawing on the Detainee Review Boards at Bagram, and featuring rare examples of the testimony of prisoners.

I was planning to do a clever edit of these three articles, but instead I’m going to content myself with cross-posting them in their entirety, as they all have something to offer. First up is an article in the Huffington Post on February 13 by Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First, looking primarily at the problems with clearing foreign prisoners for release, but then continuing to hold them (something that also has echoes at Guantánamo). This is based on a useful analysis of the work of the Detainee Review Boards,  introduced by President Obama in September 2009, which are used to formalize detention at Parwan/Bagram, in a form that is an improvement on the Bush years, but is still problematical, not only because they are not leading to the release of foreign prisoners, thereby undermining their credibility,  as Daphne explains, but also because they still bear no resemblance to the Geneva Conventions, which were throughly sidelined by the Bush administration, and are stlll, it seems, missing in action under President Obama.

This article is followed by a McClatchy Newspapers article from February 25, looking primarily at the success of the new, more humane regime at Parwan, but also touching on problems with abuse at the point of capture, and the prisoners’ difficulties when it comes to mounting meaningful challenges to the evidence against them in their Detainee Review Boards, where they do not have access to lawyers, or, in any adequate sense, to the outside world as a whole, where witnesses might be located who would be able to help them.

The concluding article, published in Stars and Stripes on February 21, examines the difficulties of establishing the guilt or innocence of prisoners, again revisiting important questions that need to be raised about the Detainee Review Boards, and about the type of screening that needs to take place in wartime, by focusing on one particular story — that of former Bagram prisoner Ghullam Sarwar Jamili. This is an excellent case study, juggling the many different elements of detention in Afghanistan — in particular, how the Afghans’ hopes of “build[ing] a law-based state, where due process in a courtroom is the basis for incarceration,” clashes with the US approach.

Defending their use of open-ended detention and review boards — despite the fact that they constitute a unilateral abrogation from the Geneva Conventions — US officials appear to be unconcerned that Afghan prosecutors are complaining that they receive nothng more than “vague case files” from intelligence officials at Bagram, provoking doubts that “the right people are landing behind bars” because “the detentions are based more on confidential intelligence than on releasable evidence.”

US officials also appear unconcerned by complaints from “human rights groups, along with the Bagram detainees themselves,” who say that “their inability to adequately refute the claims against them breeds bitter contempt against the Americans.”

As the articles reveal, the physical conditions at Bagram may have improved for the majority of the prisoners held, but complaints remain that America is still operating under an assumption that it can make up rules as it goes along, and that no one is listening when critics — either Afghan officials, or the priosners, or human rights groups — complain that these innovations have not led to fairness, and to success in the crucial arena of winning Afghan hearts and minds, but have, instead, often led to more confusion, resentment and bitterness, and a belief that Bagram and justice are incompatible.

Justice Remains Elusive for Many at U.S. Prison in Afghanistan
By Daphne Eviatar, Huffington Post, February 13, 2011

In the summer of 2008, the United States military captured a 16-year-old Pakistani boy and imprisoned him at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. According to his lawyers, for over a year his family had no idea where he was. When he was finally allowed to speak to relatives nearly two years later due to intervention by the Red Cross, Hamidullah Khan told his brother that he had had a hearing in the U.S. prison. The U.S. military judges had admitted lacking any evidence against him and recommended he be returned home to his family in Pakistan. Months later, he remains imprisoned at the U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan.

Hamidullah Khan is not alone. Of the 41 men who come from outside Afghanistan and remain locked in the U.S.-run prison at Bagram, more than a dozen have been recommended for release by U.S. military tribunals. Yet only one is currently scheduled to be sent home.

I arrived in Afghanistan last week to research U.S. detention here. According to the recently-released detainees I interviewed, prison conditions and treatment have significantly improved in recent years and prisoners now at least have a chance to plead their case in a hearing — a big step up from the policies of the Bush administration. But I was shocked to learn that for some reason no one seems to know, prisoners from outside Afghanistan who are imprisoned here aren’t being sent home even after they’ve won their case and been recommended for release.

Known as Detainee Review Boards, the hearings take place at the United States’ recently-built Parwan Justice Center on the Bagram air base. Detainees are supposed to get a hearing about every six months, but they’re not represented by lawyers and don’t get to see much of the evidence against them. (I’ll be writing more about this later). But it’s still the only opportunity prisoners at Bagram have to make their case, ask relatives or village elders to speak on their behalf, and plead for release. Last year about 350 U.S. prisoners were released this way. But in some cases, even though a panel of military judges has ruled that the prisoner does not pose a security threat and the military has no evidence that he’s done anything wrong, these men — who come from Pakistan, Tunisia, Kuwait, Yemen and even Germany — are still locked up in prison. At least one has been at Bagram since 2002. [Actually, two men, Mohammed Amin al-Bakri, a Yemeni seized in Thailand, and Ridha Ahmad Najjar, aka Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian seized in Karachi, were seized in 2002. They, and another Bagram prisoner, Fadi al-Maqaleh, won a habeas corpus petition in a US court in March 2009, but this was overturned by an appeals court in May 2010. However, just two days after this article was published, Judge Bates gave them an opportunity to present new evidence in support of their habeas petitions, as discussed here].

Since arriving in Kabul a week ago, I’ve asked about a half dozen U.S. military and State Department officials in Afghanistan why that is. Nobody seems to know.

The reluctance to release these men may have something to do with the parallel holdup at Guantánamo Bay, where almost 90 prisoners have been approved for transfer or release but remain stuck in the U.S. prison there. Most of those detainees come from unstable countries such as Yemen, where the U.S. government categorically refuses to return Gitmo prisoners ever since one Yemeni over a year ago [actually a Nigerian, allegedly recruited in Yemen] tried to blow up a plane bound for Detroit. Others, such as the Chinese Muslim Uighurs, don’t want to return to home because they legitimately fear being tortured upon their return. Finding a place for these detainees to go is a challenge — particularly since the United States has refused to accept a single one of them. [For more on these stories, see my articles, Does Obama Really Know or Care About Who Is at Guantánamo?, Guantánamo and Yemen: Obama Capitulates to Critics and Suspends Prisoner Transfers and No Escape from Guantánamo: Uighurs Lose Again in US Court].

Congress just made returning Guantánamo prisoners even more difficult by blocking their transfer unless the Defense secretary and secretary of State will certify that the receiving country will prevent the detainee from getting involved in any future anti-U.S. activities. [See my article, With Indefinite Detention and Transfer Bans, Obama and the Senate Plumb New Depths on Guantánamo].

But there’s no legal bar on returning home innocent men, like Hamidullah Khan, who’ve been recommended for release from Bagram. Yet for some reason, the U.S. government isn’t doing it.

Officials in both the Defense and State Departments I spoke to say they’re aware of the problem but it’s out of their hands. When I was at the Parwan Justice Center at Bagram earlier this week watching Detainee Review Board hearings, one soldier complained about how frustrating it is to be unable to tell innocent prisoners when they’ll be going home, or what’s causing the holdup. The problem, according to the U.S. officials I spoke to in Afghanistan, is somewhere in Washington.

Why should Washington start paying more attention to the problems of a dozen or so men? One military commander at Bagram I spoke to insisted this group makes up just a tiny percentage of the more than 1500 prisoners at Bagram — not something to be too worried about, given the number of detainees. But it’s still a big concern to the family of Hamidullah Khan. And outraging extended families in the region isn’t going to help the United States.

What’s more, the belief that the United States is imprisoning people without cause is widespread in Afghanistan. For a long time, that was because the U.S. didn’t give detainees at Bagram any opportunity to defend themselves at all. They could be locked up for years without even knowing the charges against them. There are now almost three times as many prisoners at Bagram as there were during the Bush Administration. Although now they get hearings, they’re not allowed to have lawyers and much of the evidence against them remains secret. The detainees never get to see or challenge it. Still, some detainees manage to win recommendations for release. But the United States’ refusal to release the non-Afghans among them tells the entire prison population that this new so-called “justice” system — and with it, U.S. respect for the rule of law — is meaningless.

That’s not going to help the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan.

What happened earlier this week in Jalalabad is illustrative. On Monday, hundreds of Taliban sympathizers rallied in an anti-U.S. protest at the funeral of a Guantánamo detainee who was returned home in a coffin after he died last week [actually on February 1] in the U.S. prison. Although the United States insists he was a known Taliban commander, 48-year-old Awal Gul was never charged or put on trial, so the government never proved its case. The Taliban and their sympathizers eagerly capitalized on that at home in Afghanistan. “Death to America!” was the rallying cry at the funeral. [For more on this story, see my articles, Guantánamo Prisoner Dies After Being Held for Nine Years Without Charge or Trial and In Afghanistan, 5,000 Attend Funeral of Prisoner Who Died in Guantánamo, as Afghan Peace Council Calls for Release of Former Taliban Official].

As the war in Afghanistan drags into its tenth year, the United States doesn’t need more martyrs. It does need to do a much better job of winning regional support for its mission. Sending innocent prisoners home would be a good start.

With new Bagram prison, U.S. looks to put bad press of years past to rest
By Saeed Shah, McClatchy Newspapers, February 25, 2010

BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan — The bearded Taliban prisoners at Bagram broke off from a spirited game of soccer in the yard to greet a McClatchy Newspapers reporter, the first journalist allowed into the notorious U.S. jail in Afghanistan since detainees there were moved into a new multimillion-dollar facility.

“Nice to see you guys!” one of the prisoners said with unexpected cheerfulness, in English with an American accent, rushing over and showing off some prayer beads made in the prison workshop. “These should be in retail somewhere.”

The prisoners were running around in bright orange Afghan-style baggy shirts and trousers, a slight variation on the orange jumpsuits made infamous at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba. The detainees, all young men allegedly associated with the Taliban or al-Qaida, wore prayer caps and the long, unkempt beards that fundamentalist Muslims favor.

“Colonel Garrity has brought us a lot of good things,” the prisoner volunteered. He spoke through a metal fence and didn’t identify himself, and McClatchy’s reporter wasn’t allowed to ask any questions.

Col. John Garrity runs the new Bagram jail, formerly known as the Detention Facility in Parwan, and he aims to bury years of bad press. Garrity, brought in last year from Fort Bragg, N.C., to take over the jail, admitted that not all his charges feel so warmly toward him.

“I know most of them, and I know all of their stories,” Garrity said as he conducted a lengthy tour. “This is COIN” — counterinsurgency — “inside the wire, turning an insurgent into a productive citizen.”

Journalists weren’t allowed to visit the old Bagram prison, in another part of the vast air base 30 miles outside Kabul, where prisoners were kept in cages in a converted aircraft hangar and widespread abuse has been documented, including two homicides in 2002.

While the Obama administration plans to close Guantánamo, Bagram not only has been retained, it’s also been expanded in its new location, leading some critics to dub it “Guantánamo Two.”

Bagram is the test of President Barack Obama’s ambition to improve the treatment of detainees the U.S. military captures in its anti-terrorism fight. The new American approach to the Afghan conflict also rests partly on the conditions for detainees, in order to win over an outraged population that for years has dined on stories of torture and religious abuse.

Jonathan Horowitz, a consultant with the Open Society Institute, an independent group based in the U.S. that promotes democracy, said that there were “very few, if any” indications that the institutionalized physical abuse reported at Bagram from 2003 to 2005 was continuing. However, he said that many detainees at Bagram remained there because of mistaken identity or on the basis of false information provided against them.

Reports of prisoner abuse began to decline in 2006 and now are rare.

Horowitz said two big problems remained: physical abuse at the point of capture and the inability of detainees at Bagram to “meaningfully” challenge the allegations against them, despite procedural reforms that were instituted in September.

The average detainee spends 24 months at Bagram — some spend many years there — and no one sees a lawyer once during that time.

“There has to be a credible and fair process that can get these detainees out of the fog of war, to be able to make an accurate assessment of who should stay in detention and who should get to go home to their families,” said Horowitz, who’s worked extensively with former Bagram detainees.

The new $60 million facility, to which the detainees were transferred in recent weeks, is a spotless, modern prison. Human rights groups, who were allowed to visit before the prisoners arrived, say the new building is a vast improvement.

Inside the cells, the guards — 1,200 American military personnel are deployed there — were using the prisoners’ recreation time to search through their few possessions — mattresses, blankets and clothing — for banned items. Their Qurans, provided for each prisoner and stacked in a corner, also would be checked, but by a Muslim employee.

At 10:30 a.m. one recent day, those prisoners who were still in their spartan cells mostly were napping or lying on their mattresses staring into space, while a few were bent over in prayer. Although officials had warned that the prisoners might spit at visitors or even throw feces, there was no hostility.

Each cell was crammed with about 20 prisoners, a rubber mat on the floor marking the spots where each would place a thin mattress. Food is passed into the cells. Piles of Afghan flatbread were stacked outside the cells, waiting for lunchtime. The Bagram authorities boasted that the average prisoner gains 36 pounds during his detention.

In one section of the jail, detainees were speaking by video link to friends or relatives — bearded, turbaned men were on the screens at the other end — an experience they appeared to relish. According to Garrity, better facilities, including space to hold classes and separate “negative detainees,” mean that Bagram can attempt to rehabilitate some detainees.

“If we treat him with dignity and respect, he’s less of a threat to you. He’s not angry at the guard force,” Garrity said. “We change Taliban, one detainee at a time.”

Under a legal revamp last September [actually, September 2009], a new detention-review procedure means that detainees are present for their hearings and get “personal representatives” or military officers to argue for them and, in theory, to call witnesses. This, however, is technically “internment,” so no charges are ever brought, nor is anyone found guilty or innocent.

The U.S. plans to hand over the new Bagram to the Afghan military next January, a demanding target that some think it will be unable or unwilling to meet. Afghan guards are due to start arriving this spring to be trained. This appears to be the reason, officially at least, for expanding the capacity so dramatically, from 600 prisoners at the old site to 1,000 currently and up to 2,300 when the new building is completed.

“This will be the enduring detention facility for the next 50, 60 years. It’s world class,” said Navy Vice Adm. Robert Harward, who’s in charge of U.S. detention programs in Afghanistan and who was visiting Bagram. “For the Afghans, this means that they will immediately be able to separate the insurgents from the criminal population.”

One obstacle is funding, though. It costs $5 million a year to maintain the new facility, plus an additional cost per detainee, Garrity said. That’s way beyond the budget of the Afghan authorities for a single jail, so it remains unclear how the new prison will be financed.

Parwan detention center reviews suspects’ cases, but finds neither guilt nor innocence in a war zone
By Dianna Cahn, Stars and Stripes, February 21, 2011

KABUL — It would be easy to take Ghullam Sarwar Jamili at his word — that this smiling and dedicated family man has survived a hard life swept up in his country’s endless travails.

Behind his glasses, one lid is closed over a missing eye. Jamili’s leg, hidden beneath his traditional Afghan cloak, bears battle scars from almost 20 years ago, during the civil war. His scarred and ruined arm does not fully extend.

Jamili’s family sits around the soft-spoken man with the salt and pepper beard and jokes easily, quick to defend this 59-year-old patriarch who raised nine children as a refugee outside his native Afghanistan, educating them through college and beyond.

But there is another, more menacing portrait of Gullam Sarwar Jamili — that of an Islamic revolutionary committed to violent struggle for Afghanistan and accused of recruiting young militants to fight against U.S. and Afghan forces. That is the man whom U.S. soldiers say they imprisoned in 2007 and held behind the concrete and razor wire walls of Afghanistan’s most secretive prison, the U.S. detention center at Bagram Air Field in Parwan province, for three and half years.

Throughout his detention, Jamili held fast to his declarations of innocence, while American officials and some observers familiar with the case insisted the suspicions against him were warranted.

But even after he was released last September, the truth remained hidden. Jamili, like most of the thousands of detainees held in Bagram since 2002, or the new Parwan facility nearby, found himself consigned to a legal purgatory, never found guilty of any crime, but never quite cleared, either.

U.S. officials say they have no choice but to hold suspected Afghan militants like Jamili without formal charges. In a time of war, they say, it’s the only way to keep dangerous enemy fighters off the battlefield.

But Afghan government officials looking to the Americans to help them build a law-based state, where due process in a courtroom is the basis for incarceration, are instead being presented with a very different, extra-judicial example based on the laws of armed conflict.

For Afghan prosecutors, who receive vague case files from U.S. officials at Bagram, there is skepticism that the right people are landing behind bars because the detentions are based more on confidential intelligence than on releasable evidence.

Meanwhile, human rights groups, along with the Bagram detainees themselves, say their inability to adequately refute the claims against them breeds bitter contempt against the Americans.

“Once you are in Bagram, it doesn’t matter what country you came from or how you got there,” said Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network that represents dozens of Bagram detainees, though it has never had access to them. “You are in a black hole. You have no legal recourse anywhere in the world.”

Human rights groups complained for years that detainees at Bagram languished with little or no knowledge of the accusations against them, no rights to challenge their detentions and no legal representation. In the early years of the war, two detainees were killed in Bagram and several U.S. soldiers were convicted of or pleaded guilty to abusing inmates.

More recently, conditions have improved. In the past year, the U.S. replaced the old facility with a pristine new complex dubbed the Detention Facility in Parwan and moved the detainees there. It has roomier housing, space for family visitations and, most importantly, new detainee review boards that allow detainees to receive some information regarding the suspicions against them. Suspects can also rebut those accusations and call witnesses to appear on their behalf.

The facility, which many still refer to as Bagram prison, also opened its gates to visits by human rights groups and journalists, who are permitted to attend hearings.

“Part of the goal of our command was to increase transparency,” said Michael Gottlieb, a State Department attorney who advises the year-old Task Force 435 that runs the complex. “Stories of people disappearing and families not knowing where there their relatives were, especially in the 2004 to 2007 period, were a common gripe.”

Nevertheless, rights groups say that the system remains fundamentally flawed. Detainees still don’t have lawyers, and there is no threshhold of proof to keep them indefinitely behind bars. Information gathered through intelligence remains secret. And a determination that a detainee poses a threat is enough to extend his detention.

“They might have improved buildings, they might have made it prettier, they might have improved their own internal proceedings,” Foster said. “But nothing has changed regarding the rights of these people.”

A history of violence

Jamili’s story is the story of Afghanistan, a chronicle of strife and displacement that began more than 30 years ago.

It was 1979 and Soviet forces were assisting their client government in Kabul to fight U.S.-backed mujahadeen rebels.

Jamili, then an educated 27-year-old, said he spent a year in prison for his anti-communist views. In 1982, he said, he fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, with his wife and three young children, and ultimately settled at the Shamshatu refugee camp run by the Islamist Hezbi-e-Islami movement of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, or HiG.

Jamili said he spent the next 10 years working for HiG political agencies, first in the refugee section in Shamshatu and later as a party communications officer in Tehran. He taught his children to speak and teach English, and the family was well known in the camp.

Jamili said he followed the mujahadeen briefly to Kabul in 1994, and that he was wounded when his car got caught in the crossfire of warring parties. He was shot in the arm and in the head, a life-threatening wound that cost him an eye.

After recuperating in Pakistan, Jamili said, he spent four more years as a principal of a madrassa, or religious school, in Iran, and returned to Shamshatu in 2000.

By then, the Taliban was in control in Kabul, and HiG had aligned itself with the Taliban and al-Qaida in Pakistan. When al-Qaida terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, Jamili said, he was no longer involved.

Jamili’s eldest sons supported the family. Javid, the oldest, was a journalist. Anwar, who went to medical school, brought home extra money by playing a part on a popular BBC radio soap opera. Both later moved to Kabul, where Anwar worked with USAID and then an affiliate charity where he ultimately became country director.

In July 2007, the Jamili clan gathered in Kabul for a niece’s wedding. Anwar was about to set his parents and youngest siblings up in Kabul permanently. Life was good.

Then, on July 11, Jamili said he was walking down the street with his son and son-in-law when an unmarked car pulled up alongside them. An undercover officer declared that Jamili needed to come with them.

At the police station, Jamili recalled, two Americans took his photograph. The hours passed, and he said two U.S. soldiers blindfolded him and cuffed his arms and legs. They took him somewhere where he could hear helicopter rotors.

And then he found himself in a cell in Bagram.

‘A pretty robust process’

The Americans in charge like to describe the detainee review boards as the real change. Detainees get to appear and answer questions regarding the accusations against them. Each is assigned a uniformed U.S. soldier familiar with the case who is tasked with helping to defend the detainee. Witnesses also may be called on a detainee’s behalf.

“It’s a pretty robust process,” said Gottlieb. “We’ve had over 1,300 Afghan witnesses testify before the board this year.”

Across Afghanistan in 2010, U.S. forces detained more than 5,000 suspected combatants, Gottlieb said. Of those, 1,000 were sent to Parwan, where each came before a detainee review board.

Review boards last year ruled that 60 percent of those being held met the minimum criteria for detention and should remain in custody, Gottlieb said. Eleven percent did not meet the criteria and were released. An additional 10 percent were found suitable for reintegration; that is, they met the criteria for being held but the board decided to release them. And 10 percent were handed over to the Afghans for prosecution. Gottlieb did not account for the remaining detainees, but said some were foreigners who were found eligible for extradition to other countries.

A detainee review board is not a criminal trial, the military says, and it is not intended to prove guilt or innocence. Instead, its purpose, based on evidence and intelligence, is to determine whether a detainee continues to pose a threat.

“The purpose is to remove an insurgent from the battlefield during a time of hostility,” Gottlieb said, “not to … prove an individual’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Military officials say that the process is the only way to protect intelligence they gather on suspected insurgents or terrorists. But that’s a sticking point for rights groups.

“There may have been devastating intel for these detainees — we just don’t know,” said Rachel Reid, an Afghanistan analyst with Human Rights Watch. “As a counterinsurgency strategy, the U.S. wants to be seen as a fair actor. As long as they keep this process secret, it is very difficult to show Afghans that they are getting a fair process.”

‘Not even No. 100’

At first, Jamili believed he would be released quickly. But when days turned to weeks, then months, Jamili resigned himself to his detention.

Physically, he said, he was treated well.

“It’s enough if you are in a cage with no link to the outside world,” Jamili said, “and no certainty about your future and no connection to your family.”

In the old facility, he said, detainees were shackled together in a chain gang to go outside and exercise. But that stopped once they moved to the new facility, he said. If prisoners misbehaved or protested, Jamili said, guards took away everyone’s blankets and mats.

Occasionally, Jamili said, if a prisoner taunted a guard, there were beatings, but they were rare.

Jamili’s description matched those provided by other detainees who spoke during a recent release ceremony at the facility.

“No one is mistreated, but if one detainee makes a problem, all the detainees are punished,” said Mullah Abdul Rauf, a madrassa teacher from Paktiya province who said he was held in Bagram for two years.

Throughout his more than three years in detention, Jamili steadfastly denied that he’d played any role in the insurgency.

But an officer with one independent international organization that monitors detentions, who spoke on condition that neither he nor his agency be identified, said that Jamili was “a dangerous man,” a recruiter who solicited young Afghan refugees to fight against the Afghan government and U.S. soldiers.

U.S. officials won’t comment on reasons for holding or releasing individual detainees. But one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Jamili’s detention was not an accident. He’d been reviewed repeatedly and review boards continued to find reason to hold him, the official said.

Others backed Jamili’s claim of innocence. Ghairat Baheer, Hekmatyar’s son-in-law and a spokesman for HiG, was in Bagram at the same time. He recounted how his jailers questioned him about Jamili.

“When he was captured, they told me that they had captured a senior person in HiG,” said Baheer, who has since been released and was reached by telephone in Pakistan. “I said he’s not No. 2, No. 3, No. 10, not even No. 100.”

Outside the prison walls, Anwar, Jamili’s son, reached out to everyone he could. He hired an Afghan lawyer and contacted Foster at the International Justice Network. He called the U.S. Embassy repeatedly. Meanwhile, Javid, who had moved to Paris, contacted rights groups there.

When the brothers appeared before a review board for their father last summer, Anwar said he confronted the Americans.

“We told them, ‘How could we be al-Qaida when we are working with the government, the educated?’ ” Anwar recounted.

When Jamili was released from U.S. detention in September, it was not to be set free. The U.S. military handed him over to Afghan prosecutors, who were asked to determine whether to put him on trial.

Problematic handover

The U.S. military has been negotiating with the Afghan government to eventually transfer the prison at Parwan to Afghan control.

But that process is fraught with problems. Afghanistan’s judicial system is steeped in corruption and its jails are known for torture, creating a dilemma for international armies wishing to hand over suspected insurgents or terrorists.

Hoping to create a model for a new justice system, the U.S. military is building an entire judicial complex near the prison, training judges, defense lawyers and prosecutors and setting up a crime lab that includes equipment for forensics and DNA analysis.

“One of the reasons we built the judicial complex in Parwan is because we know corruption is endemic in the Afghan justice system,” said the State Department’s Gottlieb.

When Jamili was finally handed over to Afghan custody in September, his case file was incomplete. Afghan prosecutors said they found no indication of insurgent activity, and they allowed a reporter to go through the file.

Though Jamili was held until September 2010, his file ends in July 2008, making reference to just three interrogations and three polygraph tests.

Jamili stuck to his account throughout, stating that “he hated the Taliban,” and that he knew the camp in Pakistan was run by HiG, but “… when you do not have a place to stay or eat from, you would do anything for your family,” according to the file.

After each recorded interview, the American representative would make an assessment.

“The detainee did not show indication of deception and was willing to cooperate,” wrote one, noting that Jamili might have more information to reveal if asked the right questions.

“The detainee, in my opinion, remains a moderate threat to U.S./coalition forces and would not continue to be a part of the HiG group,” the representative concluded. Still, he recommended that Jamili remain in detention.

Afghan prosecutor Maulavi Saddiqi said he believed that someone likely framed Jamili.

“The main problem is with our own people — they give bad reports to the U.S. Army because of personal conflicts,” Saddiqi said. Saddiqi’s team decided there was no case against Jamili and six weeks later, they released him.

The stigma remains

At the time of his father’s arrest, Anwar Jamili was at first relieved when he heard that his father was in American hands.

“I said at the time that if we went to the coalition, he will be back in 10 days. If it were Afghan forces, it could be longer, but these were the Americans.”

But as time went on, the family grew angry. Anwar went to the American Embassy and asked them what he should do.

“I told them we can’t go back to Pakistan because I work with a U.S. NGO. You think we are al-Qaida. What should we do?”

Foster, from the International Justice Network, said Jamili was one of the lucky ones. He and his family were educated and able to navigate the complex system.

“The thing that was most helpful at his [Detainee Review Board hearing] was his ability to present witnesses who were sympathetic to folks who detained them,” she said. “They spoke English, were modern, had Western attitudes.”

Still, the stigma of detention remains, she added.

“It’s impossible to clear your name after having been captured by the U.S. government.”

Jamili might very well have been a terrorist recruiter who used his intellect and education to fight Americans. Or he could have been an educated Afghan refugee swept up in the turmoil of a conflict that has taken a terrible toll on his country.

In mid-November, Jamili’s family members gathered for their first Eid holiday together since the patriarch’s release. Jamili sat surrounded by his eight sons and his daughter, who is in law school, and shook his head.

“This is the reason that after 10 years the American people cannot win against the Taliban and al-Qaida,” Jamili said. “They are always preaching about human rights and respect for religious cultures. But in reality, they are not doing this, and it just increases the hatred of the people.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

My apologies. I have been so busy with other projects that I have let my attention wander from Bagram in recent months, which is unwise when this particular prison — America’s largest prison in Afghanistan — is not only a legal black hole that makes Guantánamo look like a facility that is transparent and fair (it’s not, by the way, although civlian lawyers are allowed to visit, and prisoners nominally have habeas relief), but also the place where the Bush administration’s disregard for the Geneva Conventions has been most consistently apparent, and has not been reversed by President Obama.

Bagram occasionally attracts media attention because of the persistent stories about the “Tor prison,” a secret facility associated with the prison, where, according to those held there, “enhanced interrgation techniques” supposedly banned by President Obama — primarily involving isolation and sleep deprivation — are still used. This is bad, although it may be largely out of Obama’s control, in the hands of one of the shady organizations in America’s bloated security apparatus that effectively runs itself. This ought to be worrying in and of itself, but even if there are areas over which Obama has little control, he ought to be able to keep control of the main facility at Bagram — or, as it has been rebranded, Parwan, where up to 1,500 prisoners are held, and where the government recently made a point of showing off its new facility, boasting about ts transparency and the humane manner in which the prisoners are treated.

It certainly appears to be the case that, in general, America has belatedly worked out from Iraq that running prisons in a war zone humanely is more successful than treating everyone with brutality, especially given how random and chaotic the rounding up of prisoners has been throughout the “War on Terror.”

Despite this, Bagram — or Parwan — remains a showcase for what happened to the US military under Donald Rumsfeld in the “War on Terror,” when the Geneva Conventions were discarded, and prisoners were held for as long as the authorities saw fit, and, in addition, tortured when it was felt that they were not providing adequate “intelligence.”

Nominally, all this came to an end when Rumsfeld was replaced, under George W. Bush, with Robert Gates (who was then taken on by Obama, in the absense, presumably, of anyone in his team with a foot in the Pentagon’s door). In reality, however, although the Supreme Court insisted in June 2006, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that everyone in US custody must be treated humanely, and, most crucially, that everyone is protected by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions (which prevents “cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”), this successful overturning of one of the most despicable decisions undertaken by Bush (the executive order announcing that the Geneva Conventions did not apply in the “War on Terror,” which was issued on February 7, 2002) did not actually restore the Geneva Conventions to how the military operates.

At Bagram, for example, instead of holding prisoners unmolested until the end of hostilites (and holding Article 5 competent tribunals, close to the time and place of capture, to ascertain whether those not captured in uniform were combatants or civilians seized by mistake), the US authorities have been holding everyone for an unspecified amount of time before subjecting them to Detainee Review Boards, modeled on the Combatant Status Review Tribunals — used at Guantánamo to ascertain whether the prisoners had been correctly labeled as “enemy combatants” on capture, and  found  to be “inadequate” by the Supreme Court in Boumediene v. Bush, the 2008 case in which the prisoners were granted constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights.

These habeas rights should have extended to foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, as was decided by District Court Judge John D. Bates in March 2009, when he ruled on a number of habeas cases brought by foreign nationals seized in other counries and rendered to Bagram from 2002 onwards. Judge Bates correctly ruled that their circumstances — though not the circumstances of any of the Afghan prisoners, even those who were also seized in other countries — were comparable to the Guantánamo prisoners, and that therefore they should have the same rights, but his ruling was overturned by the D.C. Circuit Court last May, as I explained in an article entitled, The Black Hole of Bagram.

This was a great shame — and it remains one of many black marks against the Obama administration, indicative of the general manner in which, when decisive action has been needed to overturn and thoroughly repudiate the novel exceesses of the Bush administration, President Obama has shown himself to be sadly lacking in fulfilling the promise of change that he spoke about so eloquently as a Senator and on the campaign trail.

In a separate article, I’ll be pulling together three reports filed from Bagram in February, which, in particular, examine how the Detainee Review Boards — which are, admittedly, an improvement on the scandalously poor review process that existed at Bagram under Bush — have been progressing, but in the meantime I thought that readers might also be interested to know about what I did yesterday.

Alerted by a friend to the existence of FOIA documents about Bagram obtained by the ACLU, which I had not yet examined, I spent yesterday updating the first definitive Bagram prisoner list that the ACLU obtained last January. When that list was issued it was the first time that the US government had released any information about who was held at Bagram, and I examined its significance in two articles entitled, Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List and Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions.

At the time, there was no information about who the 645 prisoners listed were, or what had happened to them since the list was compiled in September 2009, so as a result I researched the names of the 645, creating what I described as Bagram: The Annotated Prisoner List (A Cooperative Project), and yesterday I cross-referenced this list with the documents obtained by the ACLU, adding the results of around 100 Detainee Review Boards, and also adding around 100 new cases — with internment numbers, but not with names, sadly — of prisoners seized since the master list was compiled in September 2009.

These are fascinating, in that they help to shed light on what has happened to the prisoners, and how long it has taken for them to receive something resembling justice, although it remains a disturbing process, as the information confirms America’s flight from the Geneva Conventions, and also explains how chaotic detention policies are when there is not only an American system that has evolved based on the presumed need for intelligence, rather than the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, but also when another detaining authority is involved — in this case, of course, the Afghan government, which has been installed since November 2004, but still shares power uneasily with its American occupier.

All of these complications are laid out clearly in the documents, as the US review boards ascertain whether to release prisoners, whether to continue holding them, or whether to transfer them to Afghan custody for criminal prosecution or to be included in a process of reconciliation and rehabilitation. In the documents, these are often referred to as being proposed for the consideration of the Aloko Commission, named after Afghan Attorney General Mohammad Ishaq Aloko, and the Americans’ perceived problems with the Commission were revealed in one of the US diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks, which was made available last December.

There’s much more to be done in adding information to the master list from the documents obtained by the ACLU, as I have only, to date, analyzed and transferred information from Set 1 of the 7 Sets listed under “10/11/2010 – Commander’s Final Decision Memos” and have not yet added imformation from other important documents at “10/29/2010 – More complete documents relating to an illustrative sample of 60 DRB hearings,” which I’m currently writing about in a series of three articles for Cageprisoners, and together with some cross-posted articles from elsewhere, shedding more light on the prison, the treatment of prisoners, the detention policies, and the review process, I have, I think, enough to declare that this week is “Bagram Week” at Andy Worthington.

If anyone wants to help with this project by undertaking an analysis of Sets 2 to 7 of the Final Decision Memos, then please let me know, and we can work out how to proceed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.