Obama's Secret Prisons: Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the "Black Jail" and the Dogs of War

[undeterred]

Obama's Secret Prisons: Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the "Black Jail" and the Dogs of War in Afghanistan

Thursday 28 January 2010
by: Anand Gopal | TomDispatch.com

One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town's bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost's dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.

But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn't know when he would be freed.

Sometime in the last few years, Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan's rugged heartland began to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of the night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In the secretive U.S. detentions process, suspects are usually nabbed in the darkness and then sent to one of a number of detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families.

This process has become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The night raids and detentions, little known or understood outside of these Pashtun villages, are slowly turning Afghans against the very forces they greeted as liberators just a few years ago.

http://www.truthout.org/obama%E2%80%99s-secret-prisons-night-raids-hidden-detention-centers-%E2%80%9Cblack-jail%E2%80%9D-and-dogs-war-afghanistan564

[zeemike]

1. Well I stooped right with the headline.

Not because I doubt that it is all true but because of the notion that they are Obama's or even ours....in the sense that we think we control the government, and delude ourself into thinking that Obama has control of it too.

I am sure we are doing some dirty nasty things over there...and here too...but don't think that it is as easy to stop as turning off a switch or giving orders...there is some serious big money involved here and money makes the rules.

[bertman]

3. If the guy's in Bagram, then it's OUR BIG MONEY that has put him there.

[bertman]

2. My rec did not even budge this into the positive rec column. These are Gestapo tactics

that will continue to do more harm than good.

It's sad to me that we Americans cannot even imagine what it must be like to have armed bands of foreigners creeping stealthily through the night and kidnapping our fellow Americans without cause or legal basis.

More work for the warmongers is what this is.

[undeterred]

4. If its happening on Obama's watch, its his responsibility.

Look for the documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side". Its the story of an innocent man- an Afghan taxi driver- who was arrested and taken to Bagram, where he was tortured and died 5 days later.

Gitmo has not been closed and the practices of indefinite detention without being charged and prisoner abuse apparently continue.

[emilyg]

5. k/r

[undeterred]

6. kick!

http://rethinkafghanistan.com/