Via Andrew Sullivan, a Christian Science Monitor report on Bagram airbase:
An estimated 242 prisoners remain at Guantánamo. In contrast, more than 600 are held at Bagram, and efforts are under way to expand facilities to potentially hold as many as 1,100 terror suspects.
With the US about to escalate the war in Afghanistan, the Bagram prison is likely to play a more visible and important role in that conflict.
In the meantime, US-based lawyers are mobilizing. Some of the same lawyers and human rights activists who fought successfully to bring judicial oversight to Guantánamo are now pushing for similar oversight at Bagram.
It's a development accurately predicted by some US Supreme Court justices. They made the predictions in a string of high court decisions since 2004 establishing for the first time that Guantánamo detainees are entitled to challenge the legality of their military detention.
Prosecuting prisoners at Bagram in civilian courts or military courts-martial would be an important first step. But it's not ideal. Ideal would be the prosecution of insurgents in Afghan courts, by Afghan authorities, and this has been the fate of some "low-level" detainees at Bagram. On the one hand, Afghan civil institutions are incapable of handling the insurgency as it currently exists. On the other, as Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said, it's necessary to put "an Afghan face" on the war. As long as we're imprisoning hundreds of people at Bagram Air Force base, it will be hard to do that. How many people we're locking up at Bagram can probably be seen as a sign of how well we're doing at strengthening Afghan civil institutions.
As the Army COIN manual points out, "When insurgents are seen as criminals, they lose public support," and "[e]fforts to build a legitimate government though illegitimate actions are self-defeating." An increased population of prisoners at a facility controlled by a foreign military certainly perpetuates the identity of insurgents as insurgents rather than criminals, especially since detainees at Bagram exist in an even deeper legal black hole than those at Guantanamo.
-- A. Serwer
