Bagram Airbase

Originally used to process prisoners captured during Operation Enduring Freedom, Bagram has become backlogged with prisoners who are held for years without charge, trial or legal rights.

Hamidullah Khan, for example, was picked up while travelling from Karachi to his father's village in Waziristan to salvage the family's possesions during the ongoing military operation. He was just fourteen. He is currently being held at Bagram and his family are desperate for his return.

Unlike detainees at Guantánamo, prisoners at Bagram are still being held in a legal black-hole; they have no access to lawyers and thus are unable to challenge their detention, despite the fact that between 2002 and 2008 several prisoners who had undergone torture were released without having even been put on trial.

As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama unequivocally rejected the "false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus". Yet when his adminstration took office it chose to stand by Bush's legal arguments concerning Bagram detainees: as enemy combatants they had no constitutional rights.

Prisoners have been subjected to beatings, stress positions, sexual abuse and humiliation, sensory deprivation, sleep, food and water deprivation, exposure to cold temperature, dousing with cold water and blaring of loud music.

Omar Deghayes said:

“The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films… Lying on the floor of the compound, all night I would hear the screams of others in the rooms above us as they were tortured and interrogated.

"My number would be called out, and I would have to go to the gate. They chained me and put a bag over my head, dragging me off for my own turn. They would force me to my knees for questioning, and threaten me with more torture."

Tariq Dergoul, a British National, was injured by the Northern Alliance and then sold to the US for $5,000. While detained at Bagram, he suffered frostbite for which he was denied medical care. He ultimately required the amputation of the affected limb.

Dilawar was a taxi driver, known to be innocent by his interrogators, who was murdered by his captors in December 2002. He was subjected to over 100 sadistic blows to his legs by various guards, strikes performed as "a kind of running joke". As a result, his legs became "pulpified", according to the autopsy report, and the blunt trauma killed him.

Reprieve's local partner Justice Project Pakistan (JPP) is fighting a ground-breaking case filed on behalf of seven Pakistanis imprisoned in Bagram Air Base, which challenges the Pakistan Government over their role in renditions. Awwal Khan, Hamidullah Khan, Abdul Haleem Saifullah, Fazal Karim, Amal Khan, Iftikhar Ahmad and Yunus Rahmatullah were abducted from Pakistan and taken to Bagram, where they have been kept without charge or trial since 2003. One prisoner is merely 16 years of age and was seized two years ago at the age of 14. Another was not permitted to speak to his family for six years, and is believed to be in a grievous physical and psychological condition.  

For the BBC's reporting on allegations of abuse and neglect at Bagram please click here.

Infrastructure:

Bagram prison originally consisted of crude pens fashioned from metal cages surrounded by coils of razor wire. Roughly twenty people shared a cage, sleeping on foam mats and using plastic buskets as toilets. Military personnel described it as "far more spartan" than Guantánamo.

Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military began refurbishing the prison and installed flush toilets. As of 2005, the US Army claimed that Bagram had a maximum capacity of 595 prisoners. The basic infrastructure, however, remained the same. Hundreds of detainees were still held in wire-mesh pens and exercise, kitchen and bathroom space was minimal. 

In August 2008 the US government awarded a $50 million contract for a new prison. This is now completed, but in the wake of the redevelopment reports still circulate of an undisclosed part of the site (sometimes referred to as a "Temporary Screening Facility") where abusive practices continue.