Though the Department of Defense has made a big deal about the major changes being made in the detention procedures at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, and the notion that for the first time detainees will have something resembling rights while in US custody, the Obama Administration has made it clear today that those “rights” don’t extend very far.
Today the administration made a filing with the US Court of Appeals in Washington challenging a previous determination by a judge that some Bagram detainees actually had legal rights to challenge their detention.
Though the judge said some of the detainees actually had no legal rights, he determined that foreigners being held there were materially the same as those at Guantanamo Bay, and should be afforded the same rights. The administration is now arguing that they’re not the same, and that giving the detainees actual legal rights could be a threat to the ongoing war effort in Afghanistan.
The “rights” they’ll actually get, rather, are that the Pentagon will actually assign a non-lawyer soldier to them to help them gather evidence in an attempt to prove that they’re not guilty of whatever they’re being accused of. The military will then decide if they want to let them go or not.
Bagram detainees SHOULD have the right to challenge their detention. That decision is supported by a top US general in the area, Major General Douglas Stone, who calls for up to 400 of the 600 inmates to be released because they pose NO THREAT TO THE US.
Of course, this decision comes too late for DILAWAR, a 22 year-old Afghan, arrested and tortured to death in 2002, the cause of death, blunt force to lower extremeties equivalent to legs being run over by a truck, ruled homicide by the autopsy conducted by Marine Corps pathologists in Germany, official autopsy available at http://action.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/10240… . Subsequent testimony by Dilawar's guards and interrogators indicated he was "probably innocent."
While Dilawar's torture and death at Bagram occurred shortly after then Vice-President Dick Cheney said we were going to have to "take the gloves off…" and "operate on the dark side…" (his words), only low level guards and interrogators were tried and convicted for Dilawar's torture and death. No military officers or political architects were charged with any crime.