![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() 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.Īmerican 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.It is Time to Reassess How the US Conducts Detention Operations in the Current Fight and the Need to Incorporate our Regional Partners in the Future - Insurgents are Not Traditional Enemy Prisoners of War “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. 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. Karzai was much less concerned about the fate of foreign prisoners who had been captured in Afghanistan, often fighting alongside the Taliban. 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. He demanded control of Bagram prison, any other foreign jail and all the Afghans being held captive by foreigners in their own country. 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. 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. 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.Īlthough 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. 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.Įven 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. Within months it had earned a reputation as a brutal and dangerous place. 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. ![]() “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. ![]()
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