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02/26/2006:

"A Growing Afghan Prison Rivals Bleak Guantánamo"

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.
nytimes.com


Inmates Riot at High-Security Kabul Prison
KABUL, Afghanistan - Terror convicts and hundreds of other inmates clashed with guards and took control of parts of a high-security prison in Afghanistan's capital, officials said Sunday.

Police and soldiers surrounded the Policharki Prison on Sunday as government officials attempted to negotiate with the inmates, who include al-Qaida and Taliban militants.

An Associated Press reporter heard two bursts of gunfire about two hours apart from inside the prison Sunday. A few minutes after the first gunfire, an ambulance carrying an unidentified patient drove out of the prison.

The trouble began Saturday night when prisoners forced guards out of a prison block, said Abdul Salaam Bakshi, chief of prisons in Afghanistan. He accused al-Qaida and Taliban inmates of inciting other prisoners.

The Afghan army deployed more than 100 soldiers to surround the prison and parked eight tanks and armored personnel carriers outside the gates.


A British bastion in the heart of Taliban territory
The vast camp spreads across an unforgiving landscape, the biggest British military base since the Second World War, a potent symbol of the new British presence in Afghanistan.

Camp Bastion is being built in Helmand, the most dangerous part of this highly dangerous country. It is from this desolate spot that British operations against a resurgent Taliban and al-Qa'ida will be run.

"Please don't call it our Dien Bien Phu", said a senior officer, referring to the siege of French forces that brought their occupation of Vietnam to an end in 1954. But if the isolated British base in the heart of hostile country does turn into the same sort of debacle, it won't be because the British, unlike the French, made the mistake of underestimating their enemy.

Well, they said it, not me...