Another Guantanamo, in Afghanistan, haunts US

As the Bush administration struggles for a way to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay...

As the Bush administration struggles for a way to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a similar effort to scale down a larger and more secretive American detention centre in Afghanistan has been beset by political, legal and security problems, officials say.

The American detention centre, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners 8212; more than twice the 275 being held at Guantanamo.

The administration has spent nearly three years and more than 30 million on a plan to transfer Afghan prisoners held by the US to a refurbished high-security detention centre run by the Afghan military outside Kabul.

But almost a year after the Afghan detention centre opened, American officials say it can accommodate only about half the prisoners they once planned to put there. The makeshift American site at Bagram will probably continue to operate with hundreds of detainees for the foreseeable future, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the treatment of some prisoners on the Bagram base has prompted a strong complaint to the Pentagon from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group allowed inside the detention centre.

In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in apparent violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The senior Pentagon official for detention policy, Sandra L Hodgkinson, would not discuss the complaint, citing the confidentiality of communications with the Red Cross. She said that the organisation had access to 8220;all Department of Defense detainees8221; in Afghanistan, after they were formally registered, and that the military 8220;makes every effort to register detainees as soon as practicable after capture, normally within two weeks.

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The obstacles American officials have faced in their plan to 8220;transition out8221; of the Bagram detention centre underscore the complexity of their challenges in dealing with prisoners overseas. Yet even as Bagram has expanded over the last three years, it has received a fraction of the attention that policymakers, Congress and human rights groups have devoted to Guantanamo.

8220;The problem at Bagram hasn8217;t gone away,8221; said Tina M Foster, a New York human rights lawyer who has filed federal lawsuits on behalf of the detainees at Bagram.