On June 26, recognizing the "International Day in Support of Victims of Torture" (designated by the U.N. 11 years ago), President Obama stated: "Torture is contrary to the founding documents of our country and the fundamental values of our people. ... That is why the United States must never engage in torture, and must stand against torture wherever it takes place."
Two days before that solemn pledge – with Obama echoing George W. Bush's repeated denunciations of torture – Agence France-Presse reported on a two-month investigation of our prison for suspected terrorists at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. One of the former "detainees" interviewed, identified as Dr. Khandan, said of his American captors: "They did things that you would not do against animals, let alone humans."
As I have previously reported, there is a long documented record of cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of these Bagram inmates in reports by international human-rights groups and the international press.
Says Amnesty International researcher Rob Freer: "The USA continues to fail to meet its international obligation (under the Convention Against Torture and its own laws) to fully investigate such allegations and bring to account all those responsible." That includes Obama.
On July 16, both the Washington Post and the Associated Press reported that hundreds of our prisoners at Bagram, located outside the capital of Kabul – a familiar stopping place for high-level American officials – had refused to leave their cells since July 1 in protest against their indefinite imprisonment for years. They also protest against U.S. refusal to allow them access to lawyers as they continue to be held as "unlawful enemy combatants," a dragnet term invented by George W. Bush. (The Obama administration says it has disdained that infamous label, but its Justice Department has told a federal judge nonetheless that Bagram prisoners have no legal rights that Obama will recognize.)
However, reminiscent of earnest assertions by Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush officials in charge of "detainees" being held indefinitely, the BBC – investigating Bagram – quoted Mark Wright, a spokesman for Defense Secretary Robert Gates (held over from the Bush administration by Obama):
(Conditions at Bagram) "meet international standards for care and custody." Oh, the spokesman for Gates added that when this policy isn't followed, "service members have been held accountable." No example of that was given, and the ongoing mass protests by hundreds of Bagram prisoners underscore Freer's charge that, as under Bush and now Obama, there remains an "absence of accountability and remedy."
While the majority of Bagram inmates now indicate their desperation by staying in their cells, refusing family visits, recreation time and videophone calls arranged by the Red Cross, what are Afghan government officials saying?
Afghan human-rights officials, reports the Associated Press, "said they could not comment on the BBC probe because they were not allowed into the prison and had no information on it."
Does Obama have any explanation for our military barring Afghan human-rights representatives from Bagram in their own country?
One of these human-rights commissioners excluded from this American "legal black hole" is Mohammad Farid Hamidi.
"The (Afghan) constitution," he told the Associated Press, "has given us the authority to monitor the condition of prisoners throughout Afghanistan, and especially the coalition detention centers, but they have refused to let us in."
In the July 16 Washington Post story on this mass nonviolent act of conscientious objection by our "detainees" in Bagram, reporters Greg Jaffe and Julie Tate quote U.S. human-rights advocates as charging that the indefinite imprisonment of the Afghan citizens at Bagram "has been a source of anger among Afghan citizens."
Adds Jonathan Horowitz, a consultant for the U.S.-based Open Society Institute who – in Afghanistan – is interviewing families of Bagram prisoners as well as former inmates: "U.S. detention policy is destroying the trust and confidence that many Afghans had in U.S. forces when they first arrived in the country." Finally, the Pentagon is worried and is reviewing conditions in our prison camps there. Who will review the reviewers?
This year, in "The Faces of Bagram: A Report by the Stanford Law School International Human Rights Clinic," edited by professor Barbara Olshansky, there is this conclusion: "As it became increasingly apparent that federal courts would exercise jurisdiction over Guantanamo, the Bush administration took steps to ensure that it maintain total and exclusive authority over other detainees.
"Central to this effort was the expansion of the internment facility at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan."
And this is precisely what Obama is doing there – with the clear purpose of keeping these prisoners (even without calling them "unlawful enemy combatants") indefinitely.
The presidency of Barack Obama is providing a new definition of the once sunlit Obama campaign promise, "Change!" And not only in Bagram, but also right here at home.
I sometimes refer to him as George W. Obama.