Radio: On the BBC World Service, Andy Worthington Discusses the US’s Latest Efforts to Hold Prisoners in Bagram Forever

This morning, I was interviewed on the BBC World Service’s “World Update” programme about Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and the latest news from the facility, in the long, drawn-out process of the US handing over control of the prison to the Afghan government. The show is here, it’s available for the next six days, and the section in which I’m interviewed begins at 27 minutes in, and lasts for four minutes.

The prison at Bagram airbase — America’s main prison in Afghanistan — was established in an old Soviet factory following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, and was a place of great brutality, where a handful of prisoners were murdered in US custody.

Used to process prisoners for Guantánamo until the end of 2003, it then grew in size throughout the rest of Bush’s presidency, and into President Obama’s. During this time, a new prison was built, which was named the Parwan Detention facility, but those interested in the prison, its violent history in US hands and its unenviable role as the graveyard of the Geneva Conventions refused to accept the rebranding.

In September 2012, the US and Afghan governments reached an agreement for the US to hand over control of Bagram to the Afghans, although it took months of legal wrangling until the Afghan authorities finally took control of the prison in March 2013.

As David Loyn noted in an article for the BBC, “Around 3,000 prisoners were handed over, and since then hundreds have been released after the evidence against them was assessed by an Afghan review process.” Others were prosecuted in a court that was set up at the prison.

The US authorities, however, told the Afghan government that some of the prisoners could not  be released. 70 of the men handed over were given the status “EST,” meaning “Enduring Security Threat,” and, as the BBC put it, “There would be strong American protests if they were released.”

However, 65 others, seized since the agreement was reached in September 2012, have just been released by the Afghan government, prompting serious criticism by the US, which claimed that they were “dangerous insurgents” who should never have been released.

The US presented a dossier of detailed information about the men, including, as the BBC put it, “incriminating information from mobile phones, details of interviews with suspects including confessions, and pictures of bomb-making equipment.” As I explained to the BBC, however, the US has, from the beginning, had an extremely poor record when it comes to establishing accurate intelligence on the ground in Afghanistan — as can be readily seen from Guantánamo, and the classified military files released by WikiLeaks in 2011 — and the claims about these men are not necessarily trustworthy.

In addition, the US has no basis for criticizing Afghanistan when it comes to any aspect of the detention of prisoners, because, since the start of the “war on terror,” the US has persistently refused to hold prisoners in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and has no right to be hectoring others.

From the beginning, for instance, as well as being subjected to savage brutality (in contravention of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions), prisoners have been held without being screened to ascertain if they should have been seized or not. This screening is supposed to involve competent tribunals under Article 5 of the Geneva Conventions, held close to the time and place of capture, to tell the difference between civilians and combatants in situations in which both parties are not wearing uniforms. However, these tribunals were completely abandoned by the US after 9/11.

Moreover, once in detention, the men have had to wait, on average, for over a year for review boards to assess whether or not they should be released or whether they should continue to be held. Under President Bush, these reviews involved the prisoners having to make a statement before hearing the allegations against them, and under President Obama, although the review process was revised, it only copied the process at Guantánamo that the Supreme Court had found to be inadequate in 2008.

In addition, the US continues to hold around 60 foreign prisoners “in a corner of the facility that is still controlled by US troops,” as the BBC put it. Mostly Pakistanis, they also include men from other countries, who were seized in other countries and rendered to Bagram up to 12 years ago. Three of these men — 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 and sent to Abu Ghraib before Bagram — filed a habeas corpus petition in a US court years ago, which was granted by District Judge John D. Bates in May 2009, but was then successfully appealed by the Obama administration, when the inadequate review process mentioned above was implemented.

How this will all end is unknown at present. As the BBC noted, President Karzai “has taken a stridently anti-US line in several recent TV interviews, and refused to sign a deal to allow US troops to remain beyond the end of 2014, despite it being approved by Afghanistan’s highest representative authority — a loya jirga.”

It may be that President Karzai’s decision to release the men is part of this tussling with the US, or, perhaps, is part of the juggling required to survive politically in Afghanistan. However, as I told the BBC, it may also be that those examining the files for President Karzai genuinely concluded that the US could not back up its claims.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer and film-maker. He is the co-founder of the “Close Guantánamo” campaign, and 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. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here – or here for the US).

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