Three weeks ago, the U.S. government finally complied with a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to find out who was being held at the prison in Afghanistan. The Department of Justice released to the ACLU a first-ever list of 645 names of detainees. The heavily redacted list only provided names, and omitted information such as prisoners’ citizenship, length of detention, and where they were captured.

 

According to journalist Andy Worthington, who has written extensively on detainees, all but approximately a hundred of the Bagram prisoners were seized in the last two years. But based on the numbering system used by the U.S. government, as many as 3,000 individuals may have been held at the detention facility since the 2001 invasion of Afhganistan. Worthington says that while many of the former Bagram detainees are probably free, others could have been transferred to prisons run by the Afghan government.

 

Furthermore, some of the men still held at Bagram are former detainees of Guantánamo who were recaptured after being released. These include Gul Zaman, freed from Guantánamo in April 2005, Khadan Kadir, freed from Guantánamo in October 2006, and Hafizullah Shabaz Khail, freed from Guantánamo in December 2007.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions (Andy Worthington)

Bagram: The First Ever Prisoner List (The Annotated Version) (Andy Worthington)

ACLU Obtains List of Bagram Detainees (American Civil Liberties Union)

Bagram Detainees Named by U.S. (by Alissa J. Rubin and Sangar Rahimi, New York Times)

Obama Administration Continues To Withhold Vital Information About Bagram Detainees (by William Fisher, Public Record)