P U L S E

A few days ago a group of journalists were allowed to go on a restricted access tour of Bagram Theater Internment Facility, which is located north of Kabul in Afghanistan.  Commonly referred to as just “Bagram,” the recently renovated prison (60 million US tax dollars were used to build an additional wing which has been given a new name) is one of the United States’s lesser known “war on terror” inspired “detention facilities.”  Ironically, it was widely believed that Bagram actually had more detainees than the now infamous Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, and although US officials had previously ignored all requests made by a number of human rights focused organizations to release information about the prisoners, this was confirmed when an official admitted to currently holding 700 prisoners, 5 of which are juveniles. This was the first time in its history that unofficial outside observers were allowed into the prison, although attending Al Jazeera correspondent James Bays noted that all of this was part of a concentrated effort to fend off slowly but surely increasing negative press that the institution has been getting and generating for the Obama Administration, due at least in part to the previous refusals to release any information about it:

It soon became clear this was part of a concerted drive to show Bagram’s new face. In fact, the new prison block, built at a cost of $60 million has been renamed Parwan Detention Facility. (Parwan is the province, north of Kabul, where Bagram is located.)

Bays also stated that no one would ever be allowed to film the old prison block (where prisoners currently are), even after its closed.

We were consistently told the new jail was bigger and better than the existing prison, which is reportedly based in a converted, former aircraft repair shop on Bagram Airfield. The official line, though, is that there was nothing wrong with the old prison, officially called the “Bagram Theatre Internment Facility”. However, I was also told there was no chance of ever filming there, even when it is soon deactivated. The building has apparently been “designated classified.”

There are many reasons to believe that Bagram prisoners have endured brutal torture at the hands of US officials, and some have even died.  The story of an innocent taxi driver being tortured to death by interrogators was made into a documentary (it was received with extremely low viewership) by Alex Gibney in 2007 (you can find my review of Taxi to the Dark Side here).  That Bagram has slipped past or been intentionally ignored by the mainstream news media for all these years, coupled with its almost absolute closure to the outside world, can’t mean good things for those who have been invisibly rotting away inside it.  Remember, the majority of the inmates have yet to be tried.

President Obama had promised to close Gitmo while campaigning for the presidency, but made no such assertion with regards to Bagram.  Is this going to be another case of “out with the old, in with the new” US government style?

Below is Bays’s report on his tour of the new prison wing.