Less Bad, But Not Good

On Monday, the Obama administration announced plans to provide the more than 600 detainees at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with increased legal rights. Each detainee is to be assigned an American military official who, while not a lawyer, would be responsible for gathering evidence and witnesses on behalf of the detainee and present his case before a military review board.

This is the latest move in a series of adjustments by the current administration as it reviews the detention policies of the previous administration. Already, the administration has announced its attention to close the current prison facilities at Bagram, to have them replaced by a newer, more humane complex, and to inform the International Committee of the Red Cross of the identities of the detainees being held.

However, while we endorse these changes in policy as a step in the right direction toward providing suspected enemy combatants their legal rights as dictated by the Geneva Conventions, we see the current slate of measures as insufficient and hope that they presage more actions in the near future. Much remains to be done to see that all those detained by the United States are provided with due process of the law.

As Tina Monshipour Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, pointed out to the Inter Press Service, “The ‘new’ procedures adopted by the Obama administration are not new at all; they appear to be exactly the same as the procedures created by the [George W.] Bush administration in response to prior court challenges by Guantanamo detainees.”

Foster went on to call out the policy’s failure to provide detainees with access to lawyers. We second her concern—this omission detracts from the legitimacy of any review process that will take place. As Western State University law professor David Frakt, a former Guantanamo defense counsel, complained about the administrations’ failure to grant detainees access to valid legal representation, “It is simply unrealistic to expect non-lawyers to zealously advocate on behalf of the detainees, or to be effective in gathering witnesses and evidence to challenge the lawfulness of the detention.”

We urge President Obama and Pentagon officials to heed the complaints of Foster, Frakt, and other human-rights advocates and expand the rights of those being held at Bagram, lest this Afghan prison come to be seen by the international community as the new Guantanamo.

It is insufficient to simply label detainees “enemy combatants” and forget about issues of their legal status—in an conflict of undeterminable length such as the War on Terror, this is tantamount to renouncing all of a prisoner’s rights.

Our commitment to establishing a stable Afghan state and squelching the resurgent Taliban makes it critical for the United States to win the support of the Afghan people, and should the human rights violations at Bagram—some of whose denizens have been held there for over six years and two of whom were killed in 2002 due to beatings by American soldiers—persist, it would be counterproductive to this effort and to America’s moral status in the world.