Afghan President Hamid Karzai (click here) and his top justice officials on Thursday ordered the release of 72 imprisoned terrorism suspects for lack of evidence to prosecute them, defying U.S. objections to freeing men still considered a security risk.
The prisoners at the Parwan detention facility at Bagram air base, north of Kabul, were captured by U.S. and NATO forces over the course of the 12-year-old U.S.-led war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda-backed militants.
But a case review by Afghan officials of 88 prisoners deemed by the United States to be too dangerous to set free found enough evidence to prosecute only 16 of them, Karzai spokesman Aimal Faizi told reporters after the president met Thursday with the Afghan attorney general and justice minister.
"We cannot allow innocent Afghan citizens to be kept in detention for months and years without a trial for no reason at all," Faizi told foreign journalists in Kabul, the capital, the BBC reported....
The US needs to shut up and remove their soldiers from Afghanistan.
September 17, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL and DAVID ROHDE
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 16 - Sgt. James P. Boland, (click here) a reserve military police soldier from Cincinnati, watched as a subordinate beat an Afghan prisoner, Mullah Habibullah, 30, the brother of a former Taliban commander, according to a military charge sheet released recently.
The report also said that Sergeant Boland shackled an Afghan named Dilawar, chaining his hands above his shoulders, and denied medical care to the man, a 22-year-old taxi driver, whose family said he had never spent a night away from his mother and father before being taken to the American air base at Bagram, 40 miles north of Kabul. The two detainees died there within a week of each other in December 2002.
Now, 21 months later, the Army has charged Sergeant Boland with assault and other crimes and investigators are recommending that two dozen other American soldiers face criminal charges, including negligent homicide, or other punishments for abuses that occurred more than a year before the scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Far from settling the cases, the charges raise new questions about who authorized the harsh interrogation methods used in Afghanistan and about the contradictory statements made by American military officials who, when questioned shortly after the men's deaths, said they had died of natural causes....
More drone mischief? What are we doing there?
And then the USA wonders why "The Taliban" seems a better alternative to these people.
(To the right) A sketch showing how Dilawar was chained to the ceiling of his cell by Thomas V. Curtis, a former sergeant in the Reserve United States Army Military Police Corps
How quickly we forget.
UPDATE: This list was extensively updated on the weekend of April 2-3, 2011, when the results of around 100 Detainee Review Boards were added from documents secured by the ACLU through FOIA requests, and around 100 new cases were added, of prisoners seized since this list was compiled in September 2009.
...On Friday January 15, 2010, the Pentagon responded (click here) to a FOIA request submitted by the ACLU last April, and released the first ever list of 645 prisoners held, as of September 22, 2009, in the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan (the Bagram Theater Internment Facility).
In the hope of making the list more readily accessible — and searchable — than it is through a poorly photocopied Pentagon document, I reproduce it below, with commentary on some the prisoners I have been able to identify. This is very much a work-in-progress, of course, as the state of knowledge regarding Bagram is akin to that regarding Guantánamo back in 2005, before the prisoner lists and 8,000 pages of documents were released that allowed me to research and write my book The Guantánamo Files, and to begin a new career as a full-time journalist on Guantánamo and related issues.
In an article accompanying the publication of this list, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined what the list — which contains only the prisoners’ names, and not their nationalities or the date and place of their capture — reveals about the small number of foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, three of whom are currently waiting to see if the Court of Appeals will overturn the right to habeas corpus that was granted to them by Judge John D. Bates last March, and raise questions about the whereabouts of other known “ghost prisoners” who do not appear to have been included on the list....
