The Secret Jails in Afghanistan

US admits to secret jails in Afghanistan

Bagram airbase in Afghanistan has been identified as a site for a secret US detention facility by various human rights groups.

Apr 9, 2011 - The United States has eventually admitted to holding terror suspects in a network of around 20 secret prisons spread across Afghanistan known as “black sites.”

Under the Obama administration, the CIA is prohibited from holding terrorism detainees in secret jails and the Pentagon has, for a long time, denied the existence of such detention facilities.

Suspected terrorists are still being held under hazy circumstances with uncertain rights in secret, military-run jails across Afghanistan, where they can be interrogated for weeks without charge, according to U.S. officials who revealed details of the top-secret network to The Associated Press. AP

Human rights groups have been sounding the alarm about these detention centers since 2009. Detainees who claim to have gone through the sites have told them about abuses inside the so-called “black jails” ranging from sleep deprivation to punching. The Wired

Human Rights First's Daphne Eviatar tells Dozier (from the Associated Press) that inmates at the JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) sites are “forced to strip naked, then kept in solitary confinement in windowless, often cold cells with lights on 24 hours a day”. All of that is supposed to be banned under Obama's January 2009 executive order on interrogations. The Wired {continued}