Why no lawyers at Bagram?

The Obama Administration has announced it is to impose a military review process at Bagram, but prisoners are still denied lawyers.

The vast prison at Bagram Airbase is Guantanamo's lesser-known, more evil twin. As Guantanamo has dwindled, Bagram has grown, and this trend looks set to continue: the US is in the process of building a brand-new state-of-the-art extension that will hold over 1,000 prisoners.

Conditions in Bagram are terrible - the prison is in a crumbling, former Soviet factory where many prisoners are held basically incommunicado, with no access to lawyers. Abuse is rampant, and there is even less oversight than at Guantanamo Bay. At least two people have died in Bagram as a direct result of US abuse, and one recently released prisoner told me that whilst at Bagram, he had begged to be taken to Guantanamo Bay, because he believed it would have been an improvement.

It is certainly not a positive development that prisoners are being given access to military tribunal procedures at Bagram, because they will still not be allowed independent legal representation.  This is exactly what the Bush administration did in Guantanamo and Iraq in an attempt to avoid giving prisoners lawyers. Such 'kangaroo court' initiatives have been condemned by the international community as be woefully inadequate and manifestly unfair.

This is also one more step towards a "normalization" of Bush-era detention practices, effectively legitimising and concretising a two-tier global legal system, whereby US citizens are given a full set of rights and everyone else a lesser set of rights.

And from a policy perspective, treating Bagram prisoners in Afghanistan like this is disastrous: each Afghan prisoner in Bagram is effectively hundreds of Afghans, because each prisoner's family, village, tribe will judge the US and allied forces on the way that he is treated. We should practise the democracy and liberalism that we preach, otherwise, how can we expect to be taken seriously by the Afghan people?