David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Raw Story
Monday, May 25, 2009
Although President Barack Obama has promised to close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, his administration has no intention of closing the much larger center at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, which currently holds more than 600 prisoners and is about to double in size as part of a $60 million expansion of the base.
According to an article which originally appeared in the Independent, “Human rights groups and journalists have been barred from Bagram, where former prisoners say they were tortured by being shackled to the ceiling of isolation cells and deprived of sleep. … The Red Cross issued a formal complaint to the U.S. government in 2007 about harsh treatment of some prisoners held in isolation for months.”
CNN’s Stan Grant spoke recently with a former senior Taliban member, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was held at Bagram as an “unlawful energy combatant.”
Zaeef, who had been the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan at the time of 9/11, told Grant, “I didn’t see a worse situation in my life than Bagram. They were beating me. They put me in the snow, in the cold, until I was unconscious.”
Zaeef, who also spent more than three years at Guantanamo before his release in 2006, says the Bagram detention center should be closed because “it was a bad stain on American history.”
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
“This is not the justice way,” he told Grant. “They are closing Guantanamo Bay for justice. They have to bring the people — what they were doing with the detainees, they were torturing the people, they were abusing the people — to bring them to the justice.”
Zaeef says he is no longer a Taliban member, but that he sees it as natural for detainees who are released after being deprived of their human rights to become angry and want to get revenge. He added that former detainees often find that they “are losing everything … house, money, and property. They have nothing after that.”
Zaeef believes “there is no choice” for the Taliban now but to keep fighting and that US troops “are not able to win the war.”
CNN has more details here.
This video is from CNN.com, broadcast May 24, 2009.
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