Only the third lingers, happy for the opportunity to speak. No one has come to pick him up. Hadji Gul Raman relates the worst with a smile. His teeth broken by punches the day of his arrest. The air conditioning that froze his bones in midwinter. The fire extinguishers that sprayed ice water on the twenty prisoners piled up in chain-linked cells. The lack of privacy, the daily fights to use the sole toilet … These humiliations and tortures, formerly used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, are still standard operating procedure at Bagram, in spite of Barack Obama’s declaration. In spite of the horror he seemed to profess for these aberrations of the “war against terrorists” begun by his predecessor. And yet, Raman did not experience the “techniques” in use during the first years of Bagram prison, built eight years ago. He did not live through what Omar Kadr – 15 years old at the time of his arrest – suffered; Kadr, whom the screws transformed into a living mop, wiping him across the floor after having coated it with floor wax. Or those that Dilawar – dead in 2002 after having been hung by the hands for four days, although there was no evidence against him – endured. According to the autopsy report, Dilawar’s legs had doubled in volume.

So Hadji Gul Raman spent three years in this dungeon of America-at-war because, like almost all Afghans, he possessed a Kalashnikov … One day in December 2006, Raman left with his uncles to find his cousin, Hadji Ahmed Sharkan, a district governor in Helmand province, kidnapped by traffickers – a national sport in Afghanistan. At a checkpoint, American soldiers searched them. They arrested the one holding the weapon; they ended up releasing the others. Raman never saw either lawyer or judge; it is consequently impossible to verify his version of events … “They crossed me off the list of the living,” he says. “I knew neither how long I would remain imprisoned nor where I was.” How to locate a place that does not exist?

On No Map

For the Bagram detention center, located on an American military base in northwestern Kabul, does not figure on any map. The site of the biggest American military prison outside the United States is classified a defense secret. Unlike Guantanamo, no journalist has been able to visit the two sand-colored hangars surrounded by concrete. No outside observer, no Red Cross inspector, has had access to the detention center’s “special” quarter where “very high-value” prisoners are interrogated. In this “black jail,” as the detainees call it, the individual concrete cells have no window; the lights remain on 24/7. Last August, the American government limited time spent in these interrogation sites to … two weeks.

Bagram, the prison which, in the words of an American military prosecutor, would make Guantanamo look like “a five-star hotel.” Bagram, the dread of Afghans who all know a family member or a neighbor who disappeared one day without a trace, swallowed up by that black hole. Bagram, which American human rights activists have dubbed “Obama’s Guantanamo.” For after the new president’s election, the American attorney general decreed that those imprisoned there – unlike those in Guantanamo – could not contest their detention before a civilian judge, nor even see a lawyer … A decision so contrary to the principles asserted by Obama that he is today suspected of wanting to replace the Cuban penal colony with the Afghan prison. While the number of detainees at Guantanamo has continued to decline (there are now less than 200), it has rapidly increased at Bagram, particularly over the last few months. According to American Army spokesman Stephen Clutter, there are 750 today, including 30 non-Afghans and five minors. It is as though the United States, enmeshed in its struggle against terrorism and al-Qaeda, had finally determined that it couldn’t, in time of war, make do without a lawless prison where every means is legitimate for “harvesting” intelligence. Initially a triage center for prisoners arrested in the Afghan theater of operations, Bagram became the final destination for suspects arrested in the framework of the war against terror.

In the early morning hours of a glacial December day, squatting men wait in the Kabul prosecutor’s rose garden. They have come to enquire about their disappeared. Families from every region of Afghanistan have sent their old people: those who can no longer work in the fields sometimes camp for whole months in the capital in hope of having news about their prisoners. The prosecutor receives notables only, those who can produce a letter of recommendation signed by their tribal chieftain. The others are tossed from offices to little cubicles, directed to subalterns who chase them away with the back of a hand or rush to lose their files in the stacks of paperwork.

In the batch, there are guilty persons to be sure, authors of attacks animated by hatred of the occupier. But the majority of stories these men tell describe the extraordinary misunderstanding that has settled in between Afghans and the occupying troops. Fear and incomprehension. Culture shock, skillfully exploited by warlords or simple peasants: to get rid of a troublesome rival, all one has to do is denounce him as a dangerous Taliban to Western soldiers who understand nothing about all these quarrels. This war conducted by strikes of blind raids sends people to prison for years who are often guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Abdul Razak, a Kandahar bazaar merchant, was detained for five years at Guantanamo, then Bagram, because he had … the same name as the Taliban minister of the interior. Abdul Rahman, also jailed in the Afghan prison, was accused of having killed a policeman who was not yet dead the day of his arrest … The affair that brought Alam Khan, a young peasant, to Bagram is just as absurd. His father, an old man whose face is crisscrossed by deep wrinkles, railing against the Americans’ lack of discernment, relates: “One day, in Zabul province, our neighbor Nasrallah shot my son, whose land he coveted, twice. During his convalescence, my son swore to take revenge. But before he could do so, Nasrallah had denounced him to the Americans to protect himself. He claimed that my son was a Taliban commandant, a certain Salim. Yet everybody knows that this Salim is not even from our district!”

“Zoo Smell”

Outraged by these arbitrary arrests, the committee for peace and reconciliation (charged with rallying the “moderate” Taliban to the Afghan government) and President Karzai have asked the Americans to allow the Afghan legal system to reexamine the cases of prisoners for whom their tribal chieftains vouch. The Americans – as in Iraq – finally agreed to communicate certain files to the local authorities. At this time, the committee has received over 2,300 letters from tribal chieftains which have led to hundreds of liberations. Committee member and law professor Hachimi, former adviser to the Afghan justice minister, acknowledges that these discharges have frequently been as arbitrary as the arrests: “It’s too dangerous to go to the provinces to hear the protagonists. So we settle for having the detainees repeat their version of the facts. If there’s no discrepancy, we propose their release. And the Americans decide …”

Sayed Sharif Sharif, the Afghan judge charged with preparing the cases that the Americans agree to communicate to him, receives visitors in a tiny office, the cupboards of which overflow with paper. He will never forget the first time he visited the prison at Bagram: “The dogs, the zoo smell that emanated from the cages …” Of the 600 cases he has been able to examine, 200 prisoners were immediately cleared – “judicial errors.” The others were tried on minor charges and released after two years of prison. “As for the hundred or so Bagram prisoners arrested before 2007, we’ve never been able to obtain access to their files,” says Judge Sharif.

“We Even Have to Pay the Judges”

Barack Obama, who has not given up on closing the prison at Guantanamo, has never mentioned Bagram in his speeches. Yet, after his election, he signed a decree ordering the closure of all secret sites under CIA control. That decree, however, was not applied to Bagram, because it comes under the responsibility of the Army’s special forces section … Such mystery surrounds this detention center situated in the combat zone that a good many Americans do not even know of its existence. Human rights activists’ actions have lifted a corner of the veil. The American Civil Liberties Union, a New York-based NGO whose mission is “defending and preserving the individual rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States,” brought a legal action and obtained a ruling obliging the American military penitentiary administration to reveal the names of most Bagram detainees. But those who figure on that list remain “enemy combatants” and still do not have the right to representation by a lawyer.

Tina Foster, a lawyer for the legal NGO headquartered in New York, the Center for Constitutional Rights, was defending Guantanamo prisoners when she realized that the worst physical maltreatment undergone by her clients had taken place at Bagram. Since she has been looking into the case of the “Afghan gulag,” the young woman receives Obama’s promises with skepticism. The American government has just announced that it was considering confiding the administration of the prison to the Afghan government as soon as it had trained the necessary personnel. But Tina Foster doesn’t believe it. She points out that no date has been fixed for this transfer of power that is all the more hypothetical in that President Karzai, who for months has been trying – in vain – to form a government, has never been weaker. “They’re not preparing to close the prison at all,” states the lawyer. “On the contrary, they’re enlarging it. The United States needs Bagram to be able to replace Guantanamo. With respect to the methods of the war against terror, nothing but the language has changed from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.” Meanwhile, for the last few months, the Bagram prisoners against whom there is the least evidence are being progressively transferred to the Afghan Pul-e Charkhi prison – which is also being enlarged. There, they recover an identity and receive a verdict, a prelude to their exit from prison: a manner of providing a legal framework to their liberation, in the absence of any for their incarceration. But this step towards freedom is not without pitfalls, since, in the Afghan legal system, other ambushes lie in wait for “releasables.” As the father of Hayatullah, a 20-year-old prisoner who has hoped for months to get out of the Pul-e Charkhi limbo, explains: “If my son is innocent, why not liberate him directly? Since he’s been at Pul-e-Charkhi, we have to pay all the time, even the judges. But we don’t have the means … The rich Taliban commandants, they have comfortable cells; they’ve even got cell phones!”

In a confidential 700-page report on the prison system in Afghanistan ordered by Gen. David Petraeus, marine officer Douglas Stone has demonstrated the system’s perversity. Of 600 prisoners incarcerated at Bagram in June 2009, at least 400 were innocent! But the detention conditions and prison overpopulation result from the multiplication of military operations, notably in the south of the country, frequently leading to the transformation of innocents into fanatics. In other words: arbitrary detentions and abuse manufacture terrorists on an assembly line; a vicious circle that the dispatch of 30,000 additional soldiers risks reinforcing. And which seriously undermines the cause for which America fights in Afghanistan. Such is the paradox of Barack Obama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who is conducting wars on two fronts. A sincere humanist who maintains secret prisons in violation of the principles of that America which elected him.

Since Obama has been the United States president, the number of prisoners at Bagram prison has continued to rise. To answer human rights activists’ criticisms, the American administration has just built a new building (cost: $67 million) as yet unoccupied. It will be able to shelter only 300 prisoners of the 750 still held in the dilapidated cages of the old prison.

Tina Foster

Since 2005, Tina Foster, a 35-year-old New York lawyer, has gone to bat for Bagram prisoners. In their name, she submits habeas corpus petitions (in principle, it is illegal in the United States to imprison anyone without a trial) but up until now, in vain. Tina Foster campaigned for Obama, thinking that he would put an end to the illegal methods implemented in the name of the “war against terror.” Today, she is cruelly disappointed.

For barely two years, and thanks to the International Committee of the Red Cross, Bagram prisoners have been able to communicate with their family members through videoconferencing. The ICRC also obtained permission, in September 2008, to organize family visits within the confines of the prison. However, recently, detainees have refused to participate to protest against their conditions of imprisonment.

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the September 11 attacks, was Bagram prison’s most famous detainee. He stayed there before being sent to a secret jail in Poland, then to Guantanamo. At Bagram, he was tortured: “They stuck a tube in my anus into which water was poured,” he confided to Red Cross representatives.

At the London Conference on Afghanistan, the question of national reconciliation with the Taliban was discussed … According to the UN’s Kabul representative, Norwegian Kai Eide, a first subject of discussion with the Taliban faction could bear on the “list of detainees at Bagram prison.”

Sara Daniel, for Le Nouvel Observateur (c) 2010

Translation: Truthout French Language Editor, Leslie Thatcher.

Pierre-Jean Luizard: Five years after the American intervention, there is still no Iraqi state. Reconstruction of institutions under the occupation regime has proved a failure. That means the triumph of private interests – communitarian interests first of all, then, to an ever greater extent, local ones. All Iraqi political actors, without exception, have been caught up in an infernal mechanism that ends up emptying their actions and their speech of any political meaning. With no state to protect them, the Iraqis have, in fact, reverted to the lowest common denominator: the tribe, the clan, the neighborhood. It’s a vicious circle: the foreign occupation bars any stabilization of a state and the absence of a state prevents consideration of an end to the occupation.

LNO: It seems that the agreements the American Army has made with yesterday’s enemies, with the Sunni guerilla, to fight against al-Qaeda have resulted in a decrease in violence. What do you think of this American strategy? Is it the end of al-Qaeda in Iraq?

Luizard: Al-Qaeda never planned to take power in Baghdad. The international jihadists’ sole objective is to trap the Americans on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates by perpetuating chaos as long as possible. In their eyes, Iraq is a choice battlefield against the Americans for stakes that far exceed the Iraq framework. Now the present situation offers them infinite possibilities for maintaining chaos. Up until now, al-Qaeda was curbed by its posture as defender of the Sunni community in Iraq. Today, the Americans have freed them from that “mission.” In desperation, the Americans armed and financed their enemies of yesterday, with the immediate result of dividing the Sunni into a thousand rival allegiances, for the nature of any tribal policy is that it cannot satisfy everyone. When you make an alliance with one tribe, when you pay them, you alienate another. For every fire you put out, you fan ten others. Al-Qaeda prospers in this hotbed of rivalries, enjoying an inexhaustible pool of kamikazes who now act – not in the name of the Sunni – but in application of the lex talionis after a husband, brother or son is killed by the new American-armed militia. The consequence is that the Americans have precipitated the atomization of the Sunni community, the ranks of which are now as divided as the Shia.

LNO: So Bush’s decision to send an additional 30,000 men to Iraq, “the surge,” is a bogus success?

Luizard: In despair over the Iraqi situation in 2007, the Americans played their last card with “the surge.” They bet enormous resources on “the surge.” But the reversion to tribalism in Iraq cannot serve them the same way it served the British during the years 1920-1930. The Americans cannot continue to give 300 euros a month – almost twice a teacher’s salary – to every militia auxiliary whom they arm. The temporary reduction in violence is due solely to this windfall. Wouldn’t it have been better to have had a relatively homogeneous enemy to negotiate with on a political basis than these thousand allegiances that fight one another, mortgaging any political solution?

LNO: Is the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq that the Democratic candidates for president call for a realistic perspective?

Luizard: Today in Iraq, there can only be a pretence of withdrawal. Look at what’s happening in Basra, where thousands of people demonstrated to demand that the British return to the center city! They can’t leave their homes any more without risking death…. So we’ll witness a bogus withdrawal, just as the surge was a bogus victory intended for the consumption of American public opinion. The Americans are betting heavily on private security companies. These mercenaries who come from all over the world are called to play a growing role in this conflict, with the dangers and unintended consequences we’ve already seen. But this privatization has its limits. Without the massive presence of a foreign army, it’s the whole laboriously constructed system that risks collapse.

Mercenaries are not a new phenomenon. But after September 11, there was an explosion of private militias because the American Army found itself stretched too lean: by intervening in several theaters around the world, it found itself in difficulty to assure troop rotations and was unable to obtain enough new recruits.

The result is that private militias count over 100,000 men in Iraq, which constitutes the second-largest contingent after the American Army, and perhaps even the largest… These private guards assure the security of convoys, diplomats, etc. and sometimes go so far as to take the place of the regular American Army. That’s what happened in 2004 during the Mahdi Army offensive in Nadjaf: men from Blackwater, which is the most powerful and controversial of the private companies operating in Iraq, found themselves on the front line and fired on the order of the regular American Army command!

Moreover, there is ever more rancor from the Army. These mercenaries are better equipped; they have armored cars; they’re better paid: from $600 to $1000 a day when regular Army soldiers are paid a pittance. Suddenly, soldiers are tempted to quit the regular army to join the militias. And more generally, the Army feels that the American government trusts these militias better than its own military forces. But the militias’ actions on the ground are problematic: they have contributed, for example, to damaging relations between Americans and Iraqis. It was following the murder of four Blackwater mercenaries in 2004 that the Battle of Fallujah – a key moment in the Iraq conflict – took place…

The private company Blackwater is being sued in an American court for war crimes by a human rights association in the name of one survivor and the families of three Iraqi victims of the shooting that took place September 16 in Baghdad that involves Blackwater men. Will this inaugurate the end of the impunity that has reigned up until now for these militias?

In Iraq, these militias act, in fact, with total impunity. They don’t fall under Iraqi law, but under extra-territorial jurisdiction only. While the regular Army – US soldiers – must answer for their actions, if only before their own hierarchy. The result is that, although there have already been numerous unbelievable incidents involving these cowboy mercenaries with their shaved heads, sun glasses etc., of the over 100,000 militia men present in Iraq, not a single one has been prosecuted up until now!

Yet, these Blackwater men are particularly violent: the army has already reported numerous war crimes committed by them; they fire “preventively” etc. They seem to be allowed to do anything. They are tough guys and what’s very worrying is that people know Blackwater is not only a militia, but also an ideological group: its founder belongs to the fundamentalist ultra-Christian right that thinks Bush isn’t tough enough…

They operate in complete opacity, refusing to account to the legal system or to Congress. Although, since the election that gave the majority to the Democrats, members of Congress are asking them to answer for themselves more and more. And if the Bush administration appeals to this shadow army more and more, that is also to circumvent Congress… Recourse to these militias poses serious problems for democracy since they specifically offer the means to circumvent democratic and also diplomatic rules. On the legal level, this is not the first controversy concerning them. Moreover, Blackwater has already begun to respond by attacking victims’ families… And by hiring very powerful lawyers, like Kenneth Star, world-famous since the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair…

How is it that these companies, beginning with Blackwater, are so powerful?

Blackwater is not only ultra-powerful in Iraq, but is also building itself up in the United States: thus, the company sent its men to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. These terrifying mercenaries who are formed for wars had the mission of preventing looting with the order to fire on looters! The company has also intervened in southern Sudan and now wants to send its mercenaries to Darfur.

What does this company do to bag so many contracts? If it gets away with building itself up this way, it’s surely because it has powerful support and connections within the Bush administration. Thus, surprisingly, the company’s vice president is a former CIA mainstay. We know that Blackwater is financed to a large extent by the American State Department; that’s its biggest client. But there’s also the Pentagon, USAID etc. From which one may predict – and the signs are beginning to be numerous – a scandal of the same sort as with Halliburton…

Translation: Leslie Thatcher .

Sara Daniel

The problem for the White House is that the generals it consulted have admitted that there is no longer any Plan B. According to them, securing Baghdad was the keystone for the new tactic the Pentagon defined several months ago. But the campaign to stop the violence in the Iraqi capital that was launched August 7 with the arrival of 12,000 additional troops has proved to be a punishing defeat. The number of attacks increased 22% during the first weeks of Ramadan, and 73 soldiers were killed, making October before it was over one of the deadliest months in three years. While Vice Prime Minister Barham Saleh demands that the United States and Great Britain “not give in to panic,” ever more clear-cut dissensions are appearing between the American government and the Iraqi administration on points as important as amnesty for Sunni rebels, disarmament of the Shiite militia, and the possible partition of the country.

Sara Daniel