Afghanistan detainees indefinitely confined, refusing to leave cells to shower

WASHINGTON — The prisoners at the largest U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan have refused to leave their cells to shower or exercise for the past two weeks to protest their indefinite imprisonment.

The prisonwide protest, which has been going on since at least July 1, offers a rare glimpse inside a facility that is even more closed off to the public than the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Information about the protest came to light when the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) informed the families of several detainees that scheduled video teleconferences and visits were being canceled.

Representatives of the ICRC, which monitors the treatment of detainees and arranges the calls, last visited the Bagram prison July 5, but inmates were unwilling to meet with them.

Although the prisoners are refusing to leave their cells, they are not engaging in hunger strikes or violence. Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for a Yemeni national held at Bagram, said detainees are protesting being held indefinitely without trial or legal recourse.

The U.S. military declined to comment.

Unlike Guantánamo Bay, where detainees have access to attorneys, the 620 prisoners at Bagram are not permitted to visit with their lawyers. Afghan government representatives are generally not allowed to visit or inspect the Bagram facility.

President Obama signed an executive order in January to review detention-policy options. The Justice Department is leading an interagency task force examining the issue and is set to deliver a report to the president Tuesday.

In recent years, Bagram became the destination for many terrorism suspects as Guantánamo Bay came under more legal scrutiny. The last significant group transfer from the battlefield to the prison in Cuba occurred in September 2004, when 10 detainees were moved there; in September 2006, 14 high-value detainees were transferred to Guantánamo Bay from secret CIA prisons. Since then, six detainees have been moved there.

The Bagram prison population, meanwhile, has ballooned. U.S. officials are building a bigger facility there that will hold nearly 1,000.

The Bagram facility includes prisoners from Afghanistan, as well as those arrested by U.S. authorities in other countries as part of counterterrorism operations.

In April, a D.C. district judge ruled that the Supreme Court decision that extended habeas corpus rights to detainees at Guantánamo Bay also applied to a certain set of detainees held at Bagram — those who were not arrested in Afghanistan and who are not Afghan citizens. The Justice Department has appealed the decision.

The indefinite detention of Afghan prisoners also has been a source of anger among Afghan citizens, human-rights advocates say.

The Miami Herald newspaper, meanwhile, reported yesterday that for two weeks in June, two dozen Guantánamo captives staged a sit-in at an exercise yard in a maximum-security prison camp.

Guards delivered the detainees' meals to their recreation yards rather than risk injury by forcing the 26 protesting prisoners back into their solitary cells. Captives turned trash bags into toilets and plastic water bottles into urinals in the standoff.

In an unusual window into the way captives and commanders coexists in the eighth year of the detention center, the two sides negotiated a timeout in the strike that let guards escort each captive to his single-occupancy cell for the duration of lightning strikes during a tropical storm in exchange for a promise to let them resume the sit-in once the storm passed.

Detainees said guards were strip-searching the captives in the days after the apparent suicide of a detainee, Muhammed Salih of Yemeni, and were protesting what they saw as humiliating prolonged nudity and examination of their genitals.