TIME Mag: Guantánamo May Close, But in Afghanistan Another Gitmo Grows

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1869519,00.html


Guantánamo May Close, But in Afghanistan Another Gitmo Grows
By Mark Thompson / Washington Monday, Jan. 05, 2009


The incoming Obama Administration says it wants to shut down the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay. But even if Guantánamo closes, it won't end the controversial U.S. practice of jailing suspected al-Qaeda militants and other terrorists indefinitely. That's because such detentions continue on an even greater scale at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, 40 miles north of Kabul. Roughly 250 detainees are currently being held at Guantánamo; an estimated 670 are locked up under similar conditions at Bagram.

The Obama transition team has declined comment on whether detention policy for enemy combatants will change with a new Administration. Nevertheless, the U.S. military is building a new prison for what it calls "unlawful enemy combatants" at Bagram that won't be finished until Obama is well settled in the White House. "The Obama Administration is inheriting not so much a shrinking Guantánamo as an expanding Bagram," says Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, a New York-based non-profit legal group. ("Trying to Tie Obama's Hands on Gitmo.")

Foster and a consortium of other human rights lawyers will be in federal district court in Washington on January 7 to demand that those being held at Bagram get the same habeas corpus rights — the right to know the charges against them, and to be freed if a court deems those charges insufficient — that the Supreme Court gave Guantánamo detainees last summer. Their case centers on Redha al-Najar, a 43-year-old Tunisian national, who has been held without charge in U.S. military custody since May 2002. Al-Najar was arrested in Karachi, Pakistan, where he had been living with his wife and child, and, according to his attorneys, spent the next two years being shifted among various CIA "black sites" before ending up at Bagram. They argue he has been held for more than six years, virtually incommunicado and without charges or access to a fair means to challenge his imprisonment. The suit asks the court to order al-Najar's release.

What the Pentagon calls "the long war" on terror has led the U.S. military to seek a way to keep people it deems a threat behind bars so long as the war continues. While Guantánamo's unique status — far from the battlefield, yet subject to total U.S. sovereignty — led the Supreme Court to grant Gitmo detainees habeas relief, the U.S. government argues that neither circumstance applies at Bagram. "Federal courts should not thrust themselves into the extraordinary role of reviewing the military's conduct of active hostilities overseas, second-guessing the military's determination as to which captured aliens as part of such hostilities should be detained, and in practical effect, superintending the Executive's conduct in waging a war," the Justice Department said in its December 19 filing in the al-Najar case.