![\"000_was444195.si\"](\"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/000_was444195.si_-e1375715673168.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The Washington Post<\/em> reported<\/a> last week that hundreds of Afghan detainees held at Bagram airbase were transferred to Kabul’s control, as per earlier agreements, and hundreds were simply released. At Lawfare<\/em>, Robert Chesney was none too happy<\/a> about this, arguing they should have continued their detention without due process.<\/p>\n Chesney’s Lawfare<\/em> colleague John Bellinger saw that as a good opportunity to remind people<\/a> of what President Obama did with regard to detention policy in Afghanistan. What he did was create “his own Guantanamo in Afghanistan that was more than ten times the size of the Guantanamo he inherited…”<\/p>\n When the Administration came into office, there were roughly 600 detainees at Bagram (and roughly 240 at Guantanamo). By the fall of 2012, when the initial agreement to transfer control of Bagram to the Afghan Government was reached, the number of detainees had quintupled, to more than 3000, including approximately 50 non-Afghan detainees. The Administration has held all of these detainees\u00a0under the laws of war, but\u00a0not as POWs under the Third Geneva Convention or Protected Persons under the Fourth Convention; the\u00a0Administration instead has called them\u00a0\u201dunprivileged enemy belligerents\u201d (to be distinguished from the Bush Administration\u2019s much maligned label of \u201cunlawful enemy combatants\u201d).\u00a0\u00a0 Moreover,\u00a0unlike the detainees at Guantanamo,\u00a0none of the detainees at Bagram have enjoyed the right of habeas corpus to challenge their detention in US courts. Despite the opprobrium they heaped on the Bush Administration, European governments and the press have been strangely silent about the Bagram detention facility; Human Rights First did release a report in 2011 entitled \u201cDetained and Denied in Afghanistan<\/a>,\u201d but it received little attention.<\/p>\n In his NDU speech earlier this year, President Obama\u00a0asserted<\/a>\u00a0that Guantanamo is a \u201cfacility that should never have been opened.\u201d When his speechwriters wrote these lines, however,\u00a0they may not have realized that President Obama has presided over the creation of his own Guantanamo in Afghanistan that was more than ten times the size of the Guantanamo he inherited and where detainees have had substantially fewer legal rights to challenge their detention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s old news that Obama didn’t close Gitmo, and old news that the Bush administration’s concept of indefinite detention was therefore embraced. That Obama expanded Bagram to 3,000 detainees and held them under the same logic as Bush did Gitmo detainees is also \u00a0old news, except that it’s old news that almost nobody knows (I’ve been writing about it since Obama began his surge).<\/p>\n It’s worth thinking about how the Bagram population grew so large and the likelihood that thousands of them are guilty of nothing that would stand up in court (if court were a privilege they were afforded). At \u00a0the height of Obama’s surge in Afghanistan, according to a 2011 report<\/a> by the Open Society Institute,\u00a0\u201cAn estimated 12 to 20 night raids [occurred] per night, resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.\u201d This at a time when senior commanders in the Joint Special Operations Command were telling the Washington Post<\/em><\/a> that night raids\u00a0get the wrong guy about 50 percent of the time.<\/p>\n Even with his “unprivileged enemy belligerents” doctrine,\u00a0Obama has managed to wiggle out of the public backlash Bush received for his “unlawful enemy combatants” doctrine. Somehow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Washington Post reported last week that hundreds of Afghan detainees held at Bagram airbase were transferred to Kabul’s control, as per earlier agreements, and hundreds were simply released. At Lawfare, Robert Chesney was none too happy about this, arguing they should have continued their detention without due process. Chesney’s Lawfare colleague John Bellinger saw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-22336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22336"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22338,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22336\/revisions\/22338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22336"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}