Kabul, Jan.8 (ANI): The Bagram military prison in Afghanistan reportedly houses twice the number of inmates of the controversial Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba.
According to The Independent and the New York Times, the military base located 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 their 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).
Since 2005, US officials have harboured plans to hand over prisoners to Afghan authorities, who would house them at a brand new 30 million dollar facility financed by the United States on the outskirts of Kabul.
With the Afghans raising objections to US attempts to persuade them to establish a similar home-grown regime of indefinite detentions and trial by military commission already endorsed by the Bush Administration, and the Americans fearing for the security and day-to-day conditions of the proposed new facility, an agreement on how the new prison facility will be used broke down in 2006.
Afghanistan’s President Karzai has so far refused to sign a decree establishing a legal framework for the prisoners based on the discredited Guantanamo model. (ANI)