U.S.
President Barack Obama has presided over a threefold increase in the number of
detainees being held at the controversial military detention center at Bagram
Air Base, the Afghan cousin of the notorious prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval
Base in Cuba.
There
are currently more than 1,700 detainees at Bagram, up from over 600 at the end
of the Bush administration.
The
situation at Bagram, especially the legal process that determines whether
detainees are released, is the subject of a new report by Human Rights
First.
It
finds that the current system of hearings for detainees “falls short of the
requirements of international law” because they are not given “an adequate
opportunity to defend themselves against charges that they are collaborating
with insurgents and
present a threat to U.S. forces”.
Human
Rights First also argues that cases of unjustified imprisonment are damaging the
broader war effort by undermining Afghans' trust in the military. Salon
Justin
Elliott, a Salon reporter, spoke to the author of the report, Daphne Eviatar, a
senior associate in the law and security program at Human Rights First who
traveled to Bagram to observe the situation first-hand.
The
following is some of the highlights of their conversation:
So
to start with the basics, what is Bagram and what is its purpose?
It's
a U.S. military detention center in Afghanistan that, like the Guantanamo
detention center in Cuba, is on a military base. People who are sent there now
are being picked up in Afghanistan. When it was first opened in 2001, there were
some detainees brought in from other countries as well. The military has said
that stopped in recent years. By the end of the Bush administration, there were
about 600 or 650 detainees being held there. There are now more than 1,700.
What
do we know about who the detainees are and why they were sent to Bagram?
We
know that these are people who have been captured by the U.S. military during
the war in Afghanistan or during the broader war on terror. The people who have
been sent there recently were largely picked up during so-called night raids.
The military will
go into villages where they believe there are Taliban and raid a house. They
take all the men out, and put the women and children in a separate area. If the
soldiers find weapons when they search the house, the men are likely to be
detained, and they
may end up being sent from the village to Bagram. Some of those people
end up being held at Bagram for years.
What
legal status do the detainees at Bagram have? Are they prisoners of war?
The
U.S. doesn't call any of the prisoners we keep in the context of the war on
terror -- including Afghanistan -- "prisoners of war." They're called
"unprivileged belligerents" which means that they don't have POW status. That's
because we're at war
with organizations like the Taliban or al-Qaeda rather than a country or
official government. But these detainees are supposedly being held under the
rules of armed conflict.
What
does this mean in practice about what sort of legal process they face and what
rights these detainees have?
It
depends who you ask. There are no laws under the rules of war governing how you
treat detainees in this kind of armed conflict. So the position of most other
civilized nations, most European commissions and human rights bodies is that
international
human rights laws should apply. The U.S. government says that those laws
don't apply beyond its own borders, and therefore no laws apply.
You
went to Afghanistan and attended some of the hearings for Bagram detainees. How
does this all work and what did you find?
They
are supposed to get a hearing on their detention after 60 days and then at six
months and every six months after. The hearings sound good on paper but then
when you actually attend them -- I hate to use the cliché --
it's Kafkaesque.
They're
not allowed to see much of the evidence against them because it's classified.
And the military won't produce it because it's classified. The accused does not
get a lawyer; they get what's called a personal representative. That's a
field-grade
soldier who is assigned to represent a detainee -- but they have no legal
training beyond a 35-hour course.
So
what are the biggest problems at Bagram in your view?
The
biggest is that it's not at all clear the military is getting the right people.
They often depend on tips from unnamed informants who are unreliable or have a
personal ax to grind.
Are
there specific changes you'd like to see at Bagram?
The
two biggest are to improve the representation for detainees and to reduce the
reliance on classified evidence. Because really those things amount to detainees
not being able to defend themselves. Even if the personal representative has
access to the classified evidence, he can't tell his client what it is. So you
really need someone with legal training who understands how to work within those
limitations and to fight to declassify evidence.
And
there are two reasons to do this. One is fairness and due process. The other is
that eventually these detainees will be released and go back to their villages.
You don't want these men going back and saying, "I was imprisoned by the U.S.
military for
three years for no reason." That's a good way to breed animosity among the local
population.
HJ/KA/DB
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