The Pakistani Spectator

Bagram Air base was established by Russians during their occupation of Afghanistan in eighties. After American attack on Afghanistan this facility is used as interrogation rather torture centre. American has quietly expanded the number of “enemy combatants “in this centre and now the number of prisoners being held here are more than double of controversial Guantanamo Bay. Following are the some information about this detention centre.

Bagram has received just a fraction of the world attention paid to Guantanamo, but the two facilities have prompted very similar complaints - about prisoners held incommunicado for weeks or months, the lack of recourse to any system of legal redress, and persistent reports of prisoner mistreatment that many human rights campaigners have characterised as torture.

The New York Times, which has seen confidential documents relating to the running of the Bagram prison, reported yesterday that the military base north of Kabul now contains around 630 prisoners, a far greater number than the 275 still being held at a rapidly emptying Guantanamo.

Although conditions are generally reckoned to have improved at Bagram since December 2002, when US officials admitted that its guards beat two Afghan prisoners to death, the base’s warren of isolation cells have still prompted high-level complaints from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The brutality at Bagram peaked in December 2002, when US soldiers beat two Afghan detainees, Habibullah and Dilawar, to death as they hung by their wrists. Habibullah and Dilawar, like many Afghans, have only one name.

Dilawar died on December 10, seven days after Habibullah died.

He’d been hit in his leg so many times that the tissue was “falling apart” and had “basically been pulpified,” said then-Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Rouse, the US air force medical examiner who performed the autopsy on him.

The only American officer who’s been reprimanded for the deaths of Habibullah and Dilawar is Army Captain Christopher Beiring, who commanded the 377th military police company, a US army reserve unit from Cincinnati, Ohio, from the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2003.

Somalian refugee Mohammed Sulaymon Barre, who worked for a funds transfer company, described his Bagram interrogation as “torture.” Barre said he was picked up and thrown around the interrogation room when he wouldn’t confess to a false allegation. He was then put into an isolation chamber that was maintained at a piercingly cold temperature for several weeks. He said he was deprived of sufficient rations during his time in isolation. He said, as a result of this treatment his hands and feet swelled, causing him such excruciating pain he couldn’t stand up.

Zalmay Shah, a citizen of Afghanistan, was detained at Bagram air base and alleges mistreatment there. An article published in the May 2, 2007 issue of The New Republic contained excerpts from an intervew with Zalmay Shah. He said he had originally cooperated closely with the Americans. He had worked with an American he knew only as “Tony” in the roundup of former members of the Taliban. According to the article:
“While delivering one wanted man into U.S. custody, Shah was himself arrested, hooded, shackled, and stripped. Soldiers taped his mouth shut, refusing to let him spit out the snuff he was chewing. For three days, his jailers in Bagram denied him food. All the while, Shah pleaded his innocence and reminded the Americans of his friendship with ‘Tony.’”

Zalmay Shah was eventually released. He said that Americans continue to ask for his cooperation, but he now declines.

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