Yesterday, Spencer Ackerman noted that Sen. Lindsey Graham had made a rather unusual statement about Bagram during yesterday's Senate Armed Services Committee Hearing where Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Ambassador Karl Eikenberry testified. I went back and looked at the video of Graham's statement, here's a partial transcript:
When our colleagues go over to visit, I would just make a recommendation to committee members if you get a chance go over to the Bagram confinement facility, General McChrystal, y'all have done a great job, that is a, I wish we had jails like that in South Carolina, I mean it really is a very impressive facility, and I want to commend you and your staff and the embassy working together to come up with a new detainee policy I think will help the war effort.
It's true that Bagram is being renovated, and that human rights groups have praised the new Detainee Review Boards as an improvement over the Bush administration's Combatant Status Review Tribunals, while maintaining there are still numerous problems with detention policy in Afghanistan that need to be addressed. Human Rights groups used some of the recommendations McChrystal made in his strategic assessment to argue for those reforms, but Graham's praise is premature at best.
It's also true that detainees at the facility are currently housed in "cages accommodating about 20 men apiece," and that the prison itself is notorious among Afghans as a site of abuse, injustice, and arbitrary and indefinite detention. Recently, two former detainees described being tortured and abused in a "black jail" operated by Special Forces where they were denied access to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Lawyers attempting to represent the detainees there have also been denied access.
Maybe Graham thinks that American jails should be run this way, but I doubt he'd find too many corrections officials in the United States who would agree with him. I'd like to see Graham run for reelection on that platform: U.S. jails -- we'll make them just like the ones in Afghanistan!
-- A. Serwer
