In Kabul, Nader Nadery, of the Human Rights Commission, told us, "Afghanistan is being transformed into an enormous US jail. What we have here is a military strategy that has spawned serious human rights abuses, a system of which Afghanistan is but one part." In the past 18 months, the commission has logged more than 800 allegations of human rights abuses committed by US troops.
The Afghan government privately shares Nadery's fears. One minister, who asked not to be named, said, "Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability."
The reporters charge that the U.S. is planning on replacing Guantanamo with a prison system in Afghanistan that like its predecessor, until the Supreme Court intervened, is beyond the reach of American and European courts.
Since September 11 2001, one of the US's chief strategies in its "war on terror" has been to imprison anyone considered a suspect on whatever grounds. To that end it commandeered foreign jails, built cellblocks at US military bases and established covert CIA facilities that can be located almost anywhere, from an apartment block to a shipping container. The network has no visible infrastructure - no prison rolls, visitor rosters, staff lists or complaints procedures. Terror suspects are being processed in Afghanistan and in dozens of facilities in Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the British island of Diego Garcia in the southern Indian Ocean. Those detained are held incommunicado, without charge or trial, and frequently shuttled between jails in covert air transports, giving rise to the recently coined US military expression "ghost detainees".
There's lots more to this important report, and I hope you'll read the whole thing. While Congress is meeting at midnight on a Sunday night to create a law to save a single life,
The floating population of "ghost detainees", according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000.
