Bagram, the new Guant�mo

By Steve Hynd

Clive Stafford Smith at the Guardian responds to the BBC report of abuse and torture at Bagram prison in Afghanistan that I mentioned earlier.

President Obama told us that this sort of thing has stopped. Well, it hasn't.

Sadly, the Obama administration is up to the former administration's familiar tricks, attempting to block the world from the truth. In April, a federal judge in Washington DC ordered that prisoners in Bagram should be allowed counsel, and the right to be heard in court; the Obama administration refused to comply, and appealed the judgment. People being beaten up in Bagram should, apparently, grin and bear it.

The US is spending $50m on a new prison for Bagram, housing more than 1,000 people � to add to the 600 who are already there. Of these, many (including all those in the recent Washington case) were not originally captured in Afghanistan at all, but in other countries. The US then rendered them into Afghanistan.

The British government should have a sense of familiarity with this story: in February, Defence Minister John Hutton admitted that British personnel had taken two Pakistani men prisoner in Iraq in 2004, and had subsequently handed them to the Americans. The men were rendered to Afghanistan, where they have now been held � and, if the latest BBC report is anything to go by, presumably beaten � for five years. They have never been charged. The US argues that it is too dangerous to allow them lawyers � and yet, like so many others, the first time they went to Afghanistan was when the US took them there.

...Bagram is the evil twin of Guant�mo Bay, if rather more cut off from the world, and all things we consider civilised.

And, make no mistake, the Obama administration bears ultimate responsibility for what is happening there now. Back in March, Amnesty International issued a plea to Obama:

Amnesty International has urged the new administration not to repeat its predecessor's use of secrecy to conceal from the public its response to the judge. Transparency, essential to accountability and detainee protection, must be central to US detention policy. As President Obama has himself instructed his administration, "transparency promotes accountability".

The need for transparency was illustrated late last month when the UK government revealed that two individuals it handed over to the USA in Iraq in 2004 had subsequently been transferred to US custody in Afghanistan, where they remain five years later.

Amnesty International has asked the US government to confirm whether the two are held in Bagram and to provide further information on their cases. The organization has raised the possibility that the USA's transfer of these individuals to Afghanistan constituted a war crime.

Amnesty International continues to call for the Bagram detainees to be granted access to an independent court to challenge the lawfulness of their detentions, to effective remedies in relation to their treatment and conditions of detention, and to meaningful access to legal counsel for such purposes. At present, the detainees have no access to lawyers or courts.

Obama has shown no sign of listening: even as he continues to hold his administrations actions on Gitmo up as a premier policy change, his administation continues following the same criminal course in another, more secret, location.