US finally closes detention facility at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/afghanistan-us-bagram-torture-prison

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The US has shut the last jail it ran on Afghan soil, ending a programme that has been a source of controversy at home and of strife in Kabul for more than a decade.

American soldiers flew the last foreign prisoners out of the country earlier this month, possibly three Pakistanis transferred to their own government on 6 December. US forces had already handed all Afghan prisoners over to their own government last year.

“Effective 10 December 2014, the Defense Department no longer operates detention facilities in Afghanistan nor maintains custody of any detainees,” said Col Brian Tribus, a spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan.

The first American detention centre at Bagram airbase was set up soon after US troops arrived in the country in late 2001 to help topple the Taliban government. Within months it had earned a reputation as a brutal and dangerous place.

Guards tortured detainees so badly that two died from abuse in 2002, one of them a taxi driver who even interrogators later admitted was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even after the US government stopped the most brutal torture techniques, the military continued to run a secret “black jail” on the site, where prisoners were subjected to sleep deprivation, cold, forced nudity and other mistreatment, with detainees cut off from their families and lawyers.

The closure of the last Bagram jail was announced the day after the release of a report on CIA use of torture, which highlighted gruesome abuse at four jails in Afghanistan.

Although all the sites in the report were given code names, one is believed to have been on Bagram airbase, in a separate location from the military prison where abuses also occurred.

Officials said the timing of the shutdown was coincidental, and had been planned months before the report release, to meet legal obligations to the Afghan government.

Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s former president, was furious about conditions at the jail and saw its very existence as a gross violation of Afghan sovereignty. He demanded control of Bagram prison, any other foreign jail and all the Afghans being held captive by foreigners in their own country.

That handover was finally completed last year, and many of the prisoners released, including dozens who the US said were a serious risk to foreign soldiers and their own government, further inflaming already difficult ties between Kabul and Washington.

Karzai was much less concerned about the fate of foreign prisoners who had been captured in Afghanistan, often fighting alongside the Taliban. Several dozen remained in American hands, as the military puzzled over what to do with them ahead of a 1 January 2015 deadline for shutting all US jails on Afghan soil.

“The closure of our detention facilities was an explicit provision of the Bilateral Security Agreement, which states the United States shall not maintain or operate detention facilities in Afghanistan,” Tribus stated.

Some were sent back to their own countries for prosecution or a monitored release, but there was a small group the US military considered hardened extremists whose countries would not take them or could not prosecute or monitor them.

American officials did not say when the last prisoners were removed or where they were sent, but officials in the past have ruled out transferring any Bagram prisoners to Guantánamo Bay.