1115.org

So we don’t have secret CIA prisons any more (we don’t, right?), and we are going to close down Guantanamo within a year.

But those who know that the U.S. can be kept safe only by holding detainees beyond the reach of U.S. laws — holding them indefinitely, without bringing charges, and without access to lawyers — are not necessarily losing any sleep. Because we still have Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan, where we practice all of the above.

Here’s how the NYT compared Bagram and Guantanamo in January 2008:

Despite some expansion and renovation, the detention center (at Bagram) remains a crude place where most prisoners are fenced into large metal pens, military officers and former detainees have said.

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, on an American-controlled military base 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers. Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said.

Hey, come on, you’re probably thinking, President Obama will get around to cleaning up Bagram too, it’s just not that high up on his list of priorities, and God knows he has enough on his plate right now. After all, the man who recoiled from the travesty of justice that is the Guantánamo military tribunal system must find the legal black hole that Bagram represents equally troubling.

If so, you just got fooled again (and, for the record, even George “Fool Me Once” Bush knows better than that):

The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.

In a two-sentence filing late Friday, the Justice Department said that the new administration had reviewed its position in a case brought by prisoners at the United States Air Force base at Bagram, just north of the Afghan capital. The Obama team determined that the Bush policy was correct: such prisoners cannot sue for their release.
[...]
The closely watched case is a habeas corpus lawsuit on behalf of several prisoners who have been indefinitely detained for years without trial. The detainees argue that they are not enemy combatants, and they want a judge to review the evidence against them and order the military to release them.

The Bush administration had argued that federal courts have no jurisdiction to hear such a case because the prisoners are noncitizens being held in the course of military operations outside the United States. The Obama team was required to take a stand on whether those arguments were correct because a federal district judge, John D. Bates, asked the new government whether it wanted to alter that position.

And the new government thought it over carefully, and responded: “No sir, no sir, three bags full!”

For the record, everyone who is detained at Bagram was not captured at or near a battlefield in Afghanistan. These people are not necessarily quasi-prisoners-of-war. Some of them were imported from other jurisdictions under that quaint Bushworld business practice known as extraordinary rendition.

The four prisoners who are the plaintiffs in the Bagram habeas case tell a familiar story:

Though most of Bagram’s prisoners were collared in battle, the four petitioners say they were captured like their counterparts at Guantánamo (abroad), detained like them (without charges) and allegedly treated like them (tortured). Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 20 Bagram detainees are in that situation.

Take Amin Al Bakri, for instance:

Amin Al Bakri, one of the Bagram detainees who sued for his day in court, never chose to visit the battlefield, say his lawyers, who were hired by his family and have never actually met or spoken directly to him because detainees are allowed few outside correspondences.

Al Bakri, a gem merchant, was seized during a short business trip to Bangkok in late 2002, sometime after checking out of his hotel and before his scheduled flight home to Yemen, one of Al Bakri’s lawyers told us. After cycling through a series of CIA “black sites” he turned up at Bagram, a former detainee who knew Al Bakri told his lawyers.

So the Bush administration’s policy of arbitrarily labeling someone an enemy combatant, and then detaining them indefinitely without even bringing charges, let alone affording them a trial, is alive and well under Obama.

It’s really amazing how much change looks just like what we had before.

Which has me sometimes wondering:
— Are we really going to close down Guantanamo within a year?
— Do we not have secret CIA prisons any more, or do we just not know what they’re calling them now?