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US military vows to keep Afghan jails secret
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US military vows to keep Afghan jails secret
Accused of failing to tackle prison abuses in Afghanistan while rushing to contain the scandal in Iraq, the U.S. military in Kabul said it would review its secretive jails but vowed to keep them shut to the outside world.
The families of two Afghans who died from wounds sustained in a U.S. detention centre at Bagram, just north of Kabul, 18 months ago, are still waiting for the outcome of a U.S. investigation. In Baghdad yesterday, the first court-martial began of U.S. soldiers who abused inmates at the Abu Ghraib jail, weeks after an international outcry over mistreatment first broke. The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-General David Barno, has ordered a ?top-to-bottom? review of conditions and methods used at a network of around 20 detention centres where Islamic militant suspects are held in Afghanistan.
U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Tucker Mansager told reporters yesterday the review would be carried out by a general and completed within a month. ?The appointed general will visit every facility to ensure internationally accepted standards of handling detainees are being met,? he told a regular news briefing in Kabul.
Mansager said the U.S. military had yet to respond to a May 10 request from the Afghan Indepen-dent Human Rights Commission, which has collected more than 40 recent complaints of mistreatment, for access to the main jail at Bagram.
He also said journalists would not be allowed to see it, despite reporters being given access this month to Abu Ghraib, depicted in images of abuse of prisoners by American soldiers that sparked a backlash across the Arab world. ?It?s the coalition?s continued policy to treat persons under confinement in the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. Part of that spirit is to ensure that the persons under confinement are not subject to any kind of exploitation. It is the coalition?s position that allowing media into the facilities would compromise that protection.?
The U.S. military, which leads 20,000 troops in the hunt for al Qaeda and Taliban, has come under intense scrutiny since the prisoner abuse scandal broke in Iraq and fresh allegations of mistreatment surfaced in Afghanistan.
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