Parwan Detention Facility
The Parwan Detention Facility is Afghanistan's main military prison. Situated next to the Bagram Air Base in the Parwan Province of Afghanistan, the prison was built by the U.S. during the George W. Bush administration. The Parwan Detention Facility, which housed foreign and local combatants, was maintained by the Afghan National Army.
Once known as the Bagram Collection Point, initially it was intended to be a temporary facility. Nevertheless, it was used longer and handled more detainees than the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. As of June 2011, the Parwan detention facility held 1,700 prisoners; there had been 600 prisoners under the Bush administration. None of the prisoners received prisoner of war status.
Treatment of inmates at the facility came under scrutiny after two Afghan detainees died in the 2002 Bagram torture and prisoner abuse case. Their deaths were classified as homicides, and prisoner abuse charges were made against seven American soldiers. Concerns about lengthy detentions there prompted comparisons to U.S. detention centers in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Part of the internment facility was known as the black jail.
Physical site
was established by the U.S. in the 1950s. It was used by the Soviet Red Army during the 1980s Soviet–Afghan War. The airfield included large hangars that fell into disrepair amidst the 1990s civil war. After removal of the Taliban and formation of the Karzai administration, the U.S. took control of the base. It did not need the volume of hangar space, so it built a detention facility inside the large unused hangars. As with the first facilities later built at Guantanamo's Camp X-Ray, the cells were built of wire mesh. Only captives held in solitary confinement had individual cells. Other captives shared larger open cells.Some accounts reported that captives were provided with shared buckets to use as toilets and lacked access to running water. Although captives shared their cells with dozens of other captives, there were reports in 2006 that they were forbidden to speak with or to look at one another.
During an interview on Now on PBS, Chris Hogan, a former interrogator at Bagram, described the prisoners' cells as they were in early 2002:
According to an article by Tim Golden, published in the 7 January 2008 issue of The New York Times, captives in the Bagram facility continued to be housed in large communal pens.
The original temporary facilities of 2001 were replaced by permanent facilities completed in September 2009. According to Reuters, transfer of the 700 captives at the time to the new facilities was to begin in late November 2009, for completion by the calendar year end. Brigadier General Mark Martins, Bagram's commandant, told reporters that the facility had always met international and domestic standards.
Although the new facility was near the previous facility, DoD sources occasionally referred to it as the Parwan facility, rather than Bagram.
On December 11, 2014, U.S. Armed Forces transferred the facility to the Afghan government.
Torture and prisoner abuse
At least two deaths were verified in the last decade: captives were known to have been beaten to death by GIs staffing the facility in December 2002.Captives confined to both Bagram and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp recounted that, while in Bagram, they were warned that if they did not cooperate more fully, they would be sent to a worse site in Cuba. Captives compared the two camps said that conditions were far worse in Bagram.
In May 2010, nine Afghan former detainees reported to the International Committee of the Red Cross that they had been held in a separate facility where they had been subject to isolation in cold cells, sleep deprivation, and other forms of torture. The U.S. military denied the existence of a separate facility for detainees.
In early 2012, Afghan president Hamid Karzai ordered that control of the Parwan Detention Facility be handed over to Afghan authorities after some inmates complained of being strip-searched and put in solitary confinement.
High profile escapes
When the GIs implicated in the December 2002 homicides were about to face court martial, four prisoners escaped from Bagram. At least one of these was a prosecution witness, and was thus unable to testify.Legal status of detainees
The George W. Bush administration avoided the label "prisoner of war" when discussing the prisoners held at Bagram, preferring to immediately classify them as "unlawful enemy combatants". This way, the administration argued, it was not necessary under the Geneva Conventions to have a competent tribunal determine their classification.The administration also argued initially that the detainees could not access the U.S. legal system. However, the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush confirmed that captives in U.S. jurisdiction did indeed have the right to access U.S. courts. Rasul v. Bush determined that the Executive Branch lacked the authority, under the United States Constitution, to suspend the right for detainees to submit writs of habeas corpus.
The Supreme Court's ruling in Rasul v. Bush also resulted in establishing Combatant Status Review Tribunals to review and confirm the information that initially led each captive to be classified as an enemy combatant. The Department of Defense convened these tribunals for every captive in Guantanamo Bay, but did not apply the rule to Bagram. The most recently reported legal process governing the status of Bagram captives was the Enemy Combatant Review Board, described by Eliza Griswold in The New Republic:
On February 20, 2009, the Department of Justice under President Barack Obama announced it would continue the policy that detainees in Afghanistan could not challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
On April 2, 2009, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled that those Bagram captives who had been transferred from outside Afghanistan could use habeas corpus. Ramzi Kassem, the lawyer for one of the men, stated:
The Obama administration appealed the ruling. A former Guantanamo Bay defense attorney, Neal Katyal, led the government's case. The decision was reversed on May 21, 2010, the appeals court unanimously ruling that Bagram detainees lacked the right to habeas corpus hearings.
Captives access to video link
On January 15, 2008, the ICRC and the U.S. military set up a pilot project to let certain well-behaved prisoners not in solitary confinement in Bagram to communicate with visitors over a video link.The ICRC was to provide captives' families with a subsidy to cover their travel expenses to the video-link's studio at the ICRC office in Kabul, from where video-calls to the US military facility in Bagram could be made via a "dedicated wireless-link setup".
General Douglas Stone's report on the Bagram captives
In August 2009, a general in the United States Marine Corps Reserve filed a 700-page report on the Bagram internment facility and its captives.According to senior officials who had been briefed by Major General Douglas Stone, he reported,
up to 400 of the 600 prisoners at the U.S.-run prison at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have done nothing wrong and should be released.
According to Daphne Eviatar, writing in the Washington Independent, Stone recommended that the U.S. should try to rehabilitate any genuine enemies it holds, rather than simply imprison them.
General Stanley McChrystal's assessment
According to Chris Sands, writing in The National, General Stanley McChrystal wrote in a leaked report:Committed Islamists are indiscriminately mixed with petty criminals and sex offenders, and they are using the opportunity to radicalise and indoctrinate them... hundreds are held without charge or without a defined way ahead.
According to The Guardian, McChrystal wrote:
There are more insurgents per square foot in corrections facilities than anywhere else in Afghanistan. Unchecked, Taliban/al-Qaida leaders patiently co-ordinate and plan, unconcerned with interference from prison personnel or the military.
Detainees
According to Tim Golden of The New York Times, in 2008, the number of people held in Bagram had doubled since 2004, while the number of people held in Guantanamo had been halved.A graphic published to accompany Golden's article showed approximately 300 captives in Bagram, and approximately 600 in Guantanamo, in May 2004, and showed the reverse in December 2007.
On August 23, 2009, the United States Department of Defense reversed its policy on revealing the names of its captives in Afghanistan and Iraq, including at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility and announced that their names would be released to the ICRC. In January 2010, the names of 645 detainees were released. This list was prompted by a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in September 2009 by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers had also demanded detailed information about conditions, rules and regulations.
The number of people imprisoned sharply increased under the Obama administration, reaching 1,700 in June 2011.
Reports of new Bagram review boards
On September 12, 2009, it was widely reported that unnamed officials told Eric Schmitt of The New York Times that the Obama administration was going to introduce new procedures to allow captives held in Bagram, and elsewhere in Afghanistan, to have their detention reviewed. Tina Foster, director of the International Justice Network, and a lawyer who represents four Bagram captives, was critical of the new rules:According to Radio Free Europe, Amnesty International's Asia-Pacific director, Sam Zia Zarifi, paraphrasing Major General Douglas M. Stone's report on the US's detentions in Afghanistan: "pointed out that the lack of a legal structure for Bagram means that it is undermining the rule of law in Afghanistan and it has caused a lot of resentment among Afghans."