Oh, swell... Just what we've been waiting for - Gitmo east...

yesirree, just what the world needs - another prison, especially one to hold detainees who haven't been charged with anything and have no legal recourse... and, while we're at it, let's put it in someplace that's even more remote and harder to get to than gitmo... and, by the way, let's be sure to point out that we'll be returning the detainees to their HOME COUNTRY... (cue applause...)

The US government has plans to build a high-security prison in Afghanistan to hold terror suspects, including some who would be transferred from the controversial US naval base at Guantánamo Bay.

The site selected for the jail is Pol-e-Charki, a rundown prison near Kabul dating from the Soviet era. Some of the base’s prison facilities have recently been refurbished as part of a European Union-financed criminal justice reform programme backed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

The transfer of prisoners of Afghan origin from Guantánamo to Afghanistan is intended to take pressure off the US administration, which continues to face strong international criticism for holding detainees without trial or other legal recourse.

The administration is eager to return as many detainees as possible to their home countries, while bringing what it considers the most dangerous ones to trial before US military tribunals.

According to estimates by Amnesty International, the human rights group, about 750 people have been detained in Guantánamo since January 2002, many of them of Afghan origin.

jeralyn at talk left has this to say...

So they can be tortured in an Afghan-run, U.S. jail and Bush can still say, "We don't torture." As if we should close our eyes because it's not happening on our soil.

The U.S. is currently holding around 500 prisoners at Bagram and Kandahar. This does not include the terror suspects who are in secret jails in Afghanistan.

[...]

Bagram is a torture facility. Why should we expect the new U.S. prison there to be any different? It will just be further out of view.

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