Xray is 5-star compared to Bagram

This week Tim Golden of the New York Times detailed the growth of Bagram's detainee population, describing the harsh conditions of the prison compared to Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners are kept in cages similar, according to one tribal elder held there two years, to the cages for animals in the Karachi zoo in Pakistan.

Only the International Red Cross is allowed to visit Bagram, and visits must be planned well in advance. There are no lists of prisoners in the facility. Military documents suggest the number of detainees to be around 600 people, up from only 100 in 2004. These detainees have little hope of ever seeing legal council, although the legality of their detention has yet to be tested in US courts.

From what Golden writes, it appears that many people picked up by the CIA are prisoner at Bagram, and if they were taken to Guantanamo, it would be possible that details of their arrest (or kidnapping) would be heard in a US court.

There is also a connection between the kind of abuses described in Southern Afghanistan in Taliban Country and the large detainee population at Bagram.

Officials said most of the current Bagram detainees were captured during American military operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country's restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004.

"We ran a couple of large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during which we captured a large number of enemy combatants," said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, "Our system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the numbers we were bringing in."

General Olson and other military officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same time to move detainees more quickly out of "forward operating bases," in the Afghan provinces, where international human rights groups had cited widespread abuses.