[...] possessing now
neither the quality
nor the quantity
of humanity

possession

Now that the sky has disappeared …

I have seen hell

And is God innocent?

New York Times

William Glaberson

In a diplomatic breakthrough that is likely to help the Obama administration close the Guantánamo detention camp, Portugal said this week that it was willing to resettle some detainees and urged other European countries to accept prisoners remaining at the camp, which has been a source of international criticism for nearly seven years.

The announcement was the first sign in the tangled history of the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that other countries might be willing to accept the Bush administration’s assertion that they should play a role in shutting it down.

“The time has come for the European Union to step forward,” Portugal’s foreign minister, Luís Amado, said in a letter to other European ministers released Thursday.

“We should send a clear signal of our willingness to help the U.S. government in that regard, namely through the resettlement of detainees,” the letter said. Mr. Amado pledged that Portugal would participate in a European Union resettlement program.

Although there is no specific agreement yet on the transfer of detainees, Bush administration officials described the announcement as a critical step toward solving the problem that has been referred to as “Guantánamo’s hard cases.” That refers to some 60 of the remaining 250 detainees whom the Pentagon has cleared for release but who cannot be sent to their home countries, often out of concern that they would be tortured or persecuted. They are from countries including Algeria, China, Libya and Tunisia.

“This is a major milestone in our efforts to secure help from the international community, and particularly from Europe, in closing Guantánamo,” said John B. Bellinger III, the State Department’s legal adviser.

Human rights groups and detainees’ lawyers welcomed the announcement, saying it could pave the way for the shuttering of Guantánamo in the early months of the new administration. “This step is an important one to usher us into a new era,” said Emi MacLean, a staff lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents detainees and has worked on the resettlement issue.

Mr. Bellinger said that Albania was the only country that had accepted detainees who were not its own former residents, when it accepted five Uighur detainees originally from western China in 2006. The State Department has been working for five years to persuade other countries to take some of the detainees who are in limbo because no country that the United States finds acceptable is willing to take them.

One obstacle has been resistance of some American officials to permitting detainees to be resettled in the United States.

Diplomats said the announcement by Portugal was partly a product of personal diplomacy by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a trip in September. But they said it also appeared that the logjam was breaking because other countries were eager to show the incoming Obama administration that they were willing to assist in the complex challenges of closing the camp.

If the 60 “hard cases” were resettled, the challenge of closing Guantánamo would be considerably diminished. About 100 of the remaining detainees are Yemenis, and American officials have long been working separately to get Yemen to promise to provide security assurances, monitoring and retraining so that many of the Yemeni detainees could be repatriated.

Resettlement programs in Europe and Yemen would leave about 100 detainees. With that smaller number, some officials say, it would be easier to close Guantánamo and transfer the remaining detainees to prisons in the United States.

President-elect Barack Obama has said he will close Guantánamo but has provided few details. He has suggested that some prisoners could be prosecuted in federal courts. Those men could be held in federal or military prisons. But the Obama transition office has not offered details of where the remainder might be held.

Mr. Bellinger said Portugal had received no promises of any assistance from American officials in exchange for its announcement.

But he described the announcement as a sign of a shift in attitudes in other capitals. “We kept telling them,” he said, “it’s fundamentally unfair to keep criticizing Guantánamo while doing nothing to help.”

In an interview, Luís Serradas Tavares, the legal adviser in the Portuguese Foreign Ministry, said his government was trying to lead the way toward a solution to what he called “a U.S. problem.”

Mr. Tavares said the details of a resettlement program would need to be worked out but might include some type of monitoring, like parole after a criminal conviction. But he said receiving governments would agree to free detainees cleared for release by the Pentagon.

He said he expected Portuguese people to be anxious about accepting men held at Guantánamo who the Bush administration said were dangerous.

But he said, “The U.S. has assured us that these people are the least dangerous people.”

New York Times

William Glaberson

A Pentagon report requested by President Obama on the conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center concluded that the prison complies with the humane-treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions. But it makes recommendations for improvements including increasing human contact for the prisoners, according to two government officials who have read parts of it.

The review, requested by Mr. Obama on his second day in office, is to be delivered to the White House next week.

The president’s request, made as part of a plan to close the prison within a year, was widely seen as an effort to defuse accusations that there were widespread abuses at Guantánamo, and that many detainees were suffering severe psychological effects after years of isolation.

The report, by Adm. Patrick M. Walsh, the vice chief of naval operations, describes steps that could be taken to allow detainees to speak to one another more often and to engage in group activities, the government officials said. For years, critics have said that many detainees spend as many as 23 hours a day within the confines of cement cells and often were allowed to exercise alone in fenced-off outdoor pens.

The report is being presented to a White House that some government officials have described as caught off-guard by the extreme emotions and political crosscurrents provoked by its plan to close the Guantánamo prison. Some critics said the report’s conclusions could intensify the debate about the prison, and put the Obama White House for the first time in the position of defending it.

The report came as officials separately said on Friday that the Obama administration had decided on the transfer of the first Guantánamo detainee since the president took office, a former British resident, Binyam Mohamed. Lawyers for Mr. Mohamed had drawn wide attention with accusations that he was tortured in Morocco on instructions from American intelligence agencies.

Mr. Mohamed, who is to be returned to Britain, was originally charged with plotting to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” inside the United States. But the Pentagon official in charge of the Bush administration’s military commission system for conducting war-crimes trials dismissed those charges in October.

Also on Friday, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced the creation of a task force to begin reviewing the cases of the remaining 245 detainees. The group, which is to include representatives of military, intelligence and other agencies, is to be led by a career federal prosecutor, Matthew G. Olsen, who has been a senior Justice Department lawyer dealing with national security issues.

The administration’s plan to close Guantánamo includes a new effort to decide whether detainees can be released, transferred to the custody of other countries or prosecuted. In the report on the conditions at Guantánamo, Admiral Walsh reviewed many accusations of abuse that critics have made about the prison, said one Pentagon official who has seen the report.

The report concluded that the Pentagon was in compliance with the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. The review included some of the most contentious issues, including the forced feeding of hunger-striking detainees and claims that many prisoners were suffering from psychosis as a result of conditions in the detention center.

According to one official, the report noted that some detainees had difficulty communicating from cell to cell, a contention that many detainees’ lawyers have also made. The Pentagon has long insisted that no detainees are held in solitary confinement. Military officials have said instead that the prisoners are held in “single-occupancy cells.”

Some Pentagon officials have continued to press the case that the Bush administration’s approach to detainee issues — and the Guantánamo Bay prison itself — should not be abandoned. The report is likely to accelerate that behind-the-scenes struggle.

The White House had no comment Friday.

One Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities involved in challenging the White House plan to close the prison, argued that the report showed that the Bush administration had created a humane detention camp. Speaking of the remaining detainees, this official said the report showed that if the men were moved, they might “go from a humane environment to a less humane environment.”

Critics of the Guantánamo Bay detention center, which is on the grounds of the American naval base at the eastern end of Cuba, have been preparing for Admiral Walsh’s report. They said they were concerned that the new administration would use it to avoid major alterations to the Guantánamo detention camp during its final year.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, a lawyer for Guantánamo detainees at the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that she and other lawyers found that conditions have remained bleak since the start of the new administration.

Ms. Gutierrez said that a report by the rights center, to be released next week, asserts that two major Guantánamo prison buildings, known as Camp 5 and Camp 6, should be closed immediately. She said prisoners there continue to be held in isolation for as long as 24 hours a day, that psychological difficulties are treated as disciplinary infractions, and that many cells are windowless.

Ms. Gutierrez said detention camp officials have recently increased detainees’ opportunities for recreation and social interaction. She said detainees’ lawyers have been concerned that some of those moves were in anticipation of visits now being made by senior members of the new administration. The attorney general is to visit Monday.

“This is really running the risk that the review is just a big whitewash,” Ms. Gutierrez added, “and we expect more of the new administration.”

New York Times

Noah Feldman

Cambridge, Mass.

Has the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism, or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?

We got a clue last week when the Justice Department filed an important document “refining” the government’s position in lawsuits over those held at Guantánamo Bay. Hailed by supporters as a leap forward, yet criticized by human rights groups as being little different from what came before, the filing reveals a distinctive approach to constitutional law. Cautious and modest where George W. Bush was ambitious and brash, Mr. Obama still claims the authority necessary to sustain almost everything his predecessor did.

Perhaps what’s most important here is what Mr. Obama’s lawyers do not say. The Bush White House long insisted that the president had inherent power as commander in chief to do whatever it took to defend the country — including overriding American and international law. The Obama filing, however, is silent on the topic of inherent executive power. Indeed, the magic words “commander in chief” never even appear.

Technically, the Obama lawyers have not abandoned the argument for broad presidential power, just implied that such authority is unnecessary to get them what they want.

Yet omitting the claim to unfettered executive authority shows respect for Congress and international standards. In effect, the Obama administration is saying to the courts that if the detainees cannot be held as a matter of federal or international law, judges should release them. This approach is brave — so brave it might even prove foolhardy if the courts, sick of nearly a decade of detention, decide to clear the decks.

The filing argues that the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress after 9/11 — the contemporary equivalent of a declaration of war — gives the president the powers any sovereign would have under the general principles of the international law of war. Relying on international law to make sense of Congress’s grant of power has deep roots in our constitutional tradition.

In the context of America’s present global military posture, however, the rediscovery of this notion is little short of astonishing. The laws of war, mostly designed for old-fashioned struggles between sovereign states, often do not fit today’s circumstances. The Bush administration saw this mismatch as an occasion to treat the Geneva conventions as “quaint” (in the words of Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel).

The Obama lawyers, however, seem to believe that the international law of war is flexible enough to serve their interests — and even to expand the president’s power to detain suspects beyond the strict language used by Congress when it gave President Bush authority to carry out his war on terrorism.

Here is where the law gets complicated: In 2001, Congress told the president he could make war on anyone who had “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration, though, went further; it claimed the power to detain any “enemy combatant,” defined to include “anyone who is part of or supporting Taliban or Al Qaeda forces or associated forces.” In an unfortunate legal overreach, one administration lawyer said the government could detain a “little old lady in Switzerland” whose donation to an Afghan orphanage ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda.

In place of the “enemy combatant” definition, the Obama administration now claims the right to detain anyone who “substantially supported” terrorists. Thankfully, the Obama standard would free the little old Swiss lady. But the words “substantial support” do not come from international law any more than Bush’s “enemy combatant” did.

The administration lawyers suggest in their brief that “substantial support” of terrorists could be defined by some unspecified analogy to the laws of detention in traditional armed conflict. Yet the details are left to the imagination; and when push comes to shove, this language might well include all the Guantánamo detainees, including those who never belonged to a terrorist group.

The upshot is that the Obama approach is potentially broad enough to continue detaining everyone whom the Bush administration put in Guantánamo in the first place. The legal theories are subtler, and the reliance on international law may prove more attractive to our allies. But President Obama is stuck with the detainees Mr. Bush left him, and some may pose a real danger. Faced with this conundrum, and pressed for answers by judges who are rightfully impatient, the administration is hurrying to reframe existing powers in new legal doctrines.

The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantánamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. If the new legal arguments actually affect who goes free and who stays in custody, then they will amount to meaningful change. Without real-world effects, though, even the most elegant new legal arguments are nothing but words.

Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing writer to The Times Magazine.

New York Times

Guantánamo Bay, After Jan. 20, 2009

To the Editor:

Re “Next President Will Face Test on Detainees” (front page, Nov. 3):

While it is likely that the Guantánamo prison camp contains some very dangerous people, the American public and the rest of world may never know the real truth. After years of torture and abuse, the confessions of anyone still held at Guantánamo Bay are highly suspect, and the unconstitutional military commissions set up to try them make achieving justice impossible in any real sense of the word.

No responsible person who is calling for Guantánamo’s closure would argue that those suspected of terrorist activities should be automatically set free if Guantánamo is closed down.

What we’re demanding is that the Guantánamo prison camp be closed, the flawed military commissions be shut down and a real system of justice, based on the Constitution, be used to determine the guilt or innocence of those held there. Such a system will not rely on torture, secret evidence and hearsay.

Only by closing Guantánamo and trying detainees in civilian courts or in military courts, governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, will justice prevail. Guantánamo can be shut down with the stroke of a president’s pen through executive order on his first day in office.

Anthony D. Romero 
Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union 
New York, Nov. 3, 2008

To the Editor:

Although the Bush administration has long misled the public about the dangerousness of many Guantánamo detainees, there is little doubt that some have committed serious crimes. The question is what to do with them.

Detaining them endlessly without trial has marred America’s reputation, providing a boon to terrorist recruiters and discouraging cooperation with international law-enforcement efforts, particularly by those most likely to learn of suspicious activity.

It has also allowed the detainees to glorify themselves as combatants rather than bear the opprobrium of being labeled convicted criminals.

The best solution is to close Guantánamo and provide suspects fair trials in regular federal courts, not the discredited military commissions that allow convictions based on coerced testimony.

Under the Classified Information Procedures Act, federal courts have long experience striking the proper balance between a suspect’s due process rights and the need to safeguard intelligence sources and methods.

Such criminal prosecutions are the best way to neutralize dangerous suspects while allowing America to regain the moral high ground so necessary for the long-term success of the fight against terrorism.

Kenneth Roth 
Executive Director
Human Rights Watch
New York, Nov. 3, 2008

To the Editor:

I almost always agree with what Nicholas D. Kristof has to say, and that includes his contention that the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should be closed (“Rejoin the World,” column, Nov. 2).

May I suggest, however, that rather than turning it into “an international center for research on tropical diseases that affect poor countries,” it would be more appropriate — and a clear repudiation of the policies of the Bush administration — to convert the base into an international center for human rights.

That kind of a Guantánamo would not only represent an affirmation by the United States against torture, it would also make Guantánamo a very different kind of thorn in the side of Cuba than it has been over most of the last 100 years, and might be what brings human rights to the Cuban people.

It could be a place for cultural exchange, academic study and conferences, and stand as a beacon for people all over the world who are or have been victims of torture and other violations of human rights. It would stand as a reminder to all governments that torture is a violation of international law and is not to be tolerated anywhere.

Bruce L. Wilder
Pittsburgh, Nov. 2, 2008

To the Editor:

I disagree with the first of Nicholas D. Kristof’s three ways for the United States to “rejoin the world.”

After the necessary closure of the Guantánamo prison, all of Guantánamo should be returned to Cuba as a gesture of friendship and reconciliation after more than 40 years of hostility. Our continued presence there is militarily unjustifiable and politically stupid.

If the place were to be turned into “an international center for research on tropical diseases,” the Cubans could do that themselves. Their expertise in tropical medicine is internationally respected, and the United States could learn much from them.

Robert Skloot 
Madison, Wis., Nov. 3, 2008

a or a schoolboy the back lighting enables one to pick out from the central tower the little captive silhouettes in the ring of cells in short the principle of the dungeon is reversed daylight and the overseer’s gaze capture the more effectively than darkness which afforded after all a sort of protection there is no need for arms physical violence material constraints just a gaze an inspecting gaze a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over and against himself a superb formula power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be minimal cost mirror with memory memory without a mirror if instead of being hanged by the neck you’re thrown inside for not giving up hope in the world your country and people like a stone at the bottom of a well four o’clock no you no six seven tomorrow the day after and maybe who knows I love my country I have swung on its plane trees I have stayed in its prisons nailed to the sky this is the price and the promise of citizenship for as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the and of the people upon which this nation relies these things are true they have been the quiet force of throughout our infernal possessing now neither the quality nor the quantity of humanity labyrinth of thoughts empty labyrinths madness as a domain of knowledge at each stage of his imprisonment he had known or seemed to know whereabouts he was in the windowless building possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure the cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground level the room where he had been interrogated by was high up near the roof this place was many metres underground as deep down as it was possible to go (con)naissance extraordinary rendition I have seen hell labyrinth of blindness and is god innocent innocuous innocent malignant malicious I never borrowed a kettle from you blind eyewitness I returned it to you intact the kettle was already broken when I got it from you under the snow and lava a swimming pool with no bottom let flowing water bring to you the king is but an earthen bowl on the potter’s shelf and victories are told on the ruined walls of the king of kings I carved your name on my watchband with my fingernail where I am you know imprison in prison inprison I don’t have a pearl-handled jackknife they won’t give us anything sharp two gentlemen meet on a train and one is struck by the extraordinary package being carried by the other he asks his companion what is in that unusual package you are carrying there prisoner a prisoner B screen memory the other man replies that is a macguffin what is a macguffin asks the first man the second says a macguffin is a device used for killing leopards in the scottish highlands naturally the first man says but there are no leopards in the scottish highlands well says the second then that’s not a macguffin is it world’s embrace blind witness omnipresent omniscient a prison where the walls are made of glass the guards are watching the inmates, the inmates are watching the guards a dark room single bright lamp in the middle a chair underneath interrogation/inter-rogation/interrelation dis-closure carrying the sky entropy what does solitude taste like pure presence is fetish in a wilderness of mirrors what do you look at subversive mirror simpl(ifi)e(d) drinking emptiness symbol of wholeness I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh because its wounds are not upon the surface and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear therefore the more I denounce it as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay art ceases to be based on ritual and begins to be based on another practice politics the worst thing in the world said varies from individual to individual it may be burial alive or death by fire or by drowning or by impalement or fifty other deaths there are cases where it is some quite trivial thing not even fatal dark moments, such as everyone has when you think you’ve achieved nothing at all when it seems that the only trials to come to a good end are those that were determined to have a good end from the start and would do so without any help while all the others are lost despite all the running to and fro, all the effort, all the little, apparent successes that gave such joy

New York Times

Tim Golden and Eric Schmitt

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

Pentagon officials have often described the detention site at Bagram, a cavernous former machine shop on an American air base 40 miles north of Kabul, as a screening center. They said most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty program or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.

Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantánamo to challenge their detention in United States courts.

While Guantánamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.

From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.

“Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it’s a long-term facility without the money or resources,” said one Defense Department official who has toured the detention center. Comparing the prison with Guantánamo, the official added, “Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it’s worse.”

Former detainees said the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles D. Stimson, declined to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan.

The military’s chief spokesman in Afghanistan, Col. James R. Yonts, also refused to discuss detainee conditions, other than to say repeatedly that his command was “committed to treating detainees humanely, and providing the best possible living conditions and medical care in accordance with the principles of the Geneva Convention.”

Other military and administration officials said the growing detainee population at Bagram, which rose from about 100 prisoners at the start of 2004 to as many as 600 at times last year, according to military figures, was in part a result of a Bush administration decision to shut off the flow of detainees into Guantánamo after the Supreme Court ruled that those prisoners had some basic due-process rights. The question of whether those same rights apply to detainees in Bagram has not been tested in court.

Until the court ruling, Bagram functioned as a central clearing house for the global fight against terror. Military and intelligence personnel there sifted through captured Afghan rebels and suspected terrorists seized in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere, sending the most valuable and dangerous to Guantánamo for extensive interrogation, and generally releasing the rest.

But according to interviews with current and former administration officials, the National Security Council effectively halted the movement of new detainees into Guantánamo at a cabinet-level meeting at the White House on Sept. 14, 2004.

Wary of further angering Guantánamo’s critics, the council authorized a final shipment of 10 detainees eight days later from Bagram, the officials said. But it also indicated that it wanted to review and approve any Defense Department proposals for further transfers. Despite repeated requests from military officials in Afghanistan and one formal recommendation by a Pentagon working group, no such proposals have been considered, officials said.

“Guantánamo was a lightning rod,” said a former senior administration official who participated in the discussions and who, like many of those interviewed, would discuss the matter in detail only on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy surrounding it. “For some reason, people did not have a problem with Bagram. It was in Afghanistan.”

Yet Bagram’s expansion, which was largely fueled by growing numbers of detainees seized on the battlefield and a bureaucratic backlog in releasing many of the Afghan prisoners, also underscores the Bush administration’s continuing inability to resolve where and how it will hold more valuable terror suspects.

Military officials with access to intelligence reporting on the subject said about 40 of Bagram’s prisoners were Pakistanis, Arabs and other foreigners; some were previously held by the C.I.A. in secret interrogation centers in Afghanistan and other countries. Officials said the intelligence agency had been reluctant to send some of those prisoners on to Guantánamo because of the possibility that their C.I.A. custody could eventually be scrutinized in court.

Defense Department officials said the C.I.A.’s effort to unload some detainees from its so-called black sites had provoked tension among some officials at the Pentagon, who have frequently objected to taking responsibility for terror suspects cast off by the intelligence agency. The Defense Department “doesn’t want to be the dumping ground,” one senior official familiar with the interagency debates said. “There just aren’t any good options.”

A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency declined to comment.

Conditions at Bagram

The rising number of detainees at Bagram has been noted periodically by the military and documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which does not make public other aspects of its findings. But because the military does not identify the prisoners or release other information on their detention, it had not previously been clear that some detainees were being held there for such long periods.

The prison rolls would be even higher, officials noted, were it not for a Pentagon decision in early 2005 to delegate the authority to release them from the deputy secretary of defense to the military’s Central Command, which oversees the 19,000 American troops in Afghanistan, and to the ground commander there.

Since January 2005, military commanders in Afghanistan have released about 350 detainees from Bagram in conjunction with an Afghan national reconciliation program, officials said. Even so, one Pentagon official said the current average stay of prisoners at Bagram was 14.5 months.

Officials said most of the current Bagram detainees were captured during American military operations in Afghanistan, primarily in the country’s restive south, beginning in the spring of 2004.

“We ran a couple of large-scale operations in the spring of 2004, during which we captured a large number of enemy combatants,” said Maj. Gen. Eric T. Olson, who was the ground commander for American troops in Afghanistan at the time. In subsequent remarks he added, “Our system for releasing detainees whose intelligence value turned out to be negligible did not keep pace with the numbers we were bringing in.”

General Olson and other military officials said the growth at Bagram had also been a consequence of the closing of a smaller detention center at Kandahar and efforts by the military around the same time to move detainees more quickly out of “forward operating bases,” in the Afghan provinces, where international human rights groups had cited widespread abuses.

At Bagram, reports of abuses have markedly declined since the violent deaths of two Afghan men held there in December 2002, Afghan and foreign human rights officials said.

After an Army investigation, the practices found to have caused those two deaths — the chaining of detainees by the arms to the ceilings of their cells and the use of knee strikes to the legs of disobedient prisoners by guards — were halted by early 2003. Other abusive methods, like the use of barking attack dogs to frighten new prisoners and the handcuffing of detainees to cell doors to punish them for talking, were phased out more gradually, military officials and former detainees said.

Human rights officials and former detainees said living conditions at the detention center had also improved.

Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military initially built some temporary prison quarters and began refurbishing the main prison building at Bagram, a former aircraft-machine shop built by Soviet troops during their occupation of the country in the 1980’s.

Corrals surrounded by stacked razor wire that had served as general-population cells gave way to less-forbidding wire pens that generally hold no more than 15 detainees, military officials said. The cut-off metal drums used as toilets were eventually replaced with flush toilets.

Last March, a nine-bed infirmary opened, and months later a new wing was built. The expansion brought improved conditions for the more than 250 prisoners who have been housed there, officials said.

Still, even the Afghan villagers released from Bagram over the past year tend to describe it as a stark, forsaken place.

“It was like a cage,” said one former detainee, Hajji Lalai Mama, a 60-year-old tribal elder from the Spinbaldak district of southern Afghanistan who was released last June after nearly two years. Referring to a zoo in Pakistan, he added, “Like the cages in Karachi where they put animals: it was like that.”

Guantánamo, which once kept detainees in wire-mesh cages, now houses them in an elaborate complex of concrete and steel buildings with a hospital, recreation yards and isolation areas. At Bagram, detainees are stripped on arrival and given orange uniforms to wear. They wash in collective showers and live under bright indoor lighting that is dimmed for only a few hours at night.

Abdul Nabi, a 24-year-old mechanic released on Dec. 15 after nine months, said some detainees frequently protested the conditions, banging on their cages and sometimes refusing to eat. He added that infractions of the rules were dealt with unsparingly: hours handcuffed in a smaller cell for minor offenses, and days in isolation for repeated transgressions.

“We were not allowed to talk very much,” he said in an interview.

The Rights of Detainees

The most basic complaint of those released was that they had been wrongly detained in the first place. In many cases, former prisoners said they had been denounced by village enemies or arrested by the local police after demanding bribes they could not pay.

Human rights lawyers generally contend that the Supreme Court decision on Guantánamo, in the case of Rasul v. Bush, could also apply to detainees at Bagram. But lawyers working on behalf of the Guantánamo detainees have been reluctant to take cases from Bagram while the reach of the Supreme Court ruling, which is now the subject of further litigation, remains uncertain.

As at Guantánamo, the military has instituted procedures at Bagram intended to ensure that the detainees are in fact enemy combatants. Yet the review boards at Bagram give fewer rights to the prisoners than those used in Cuba, which have been criticized by human rights officials as kangaroo courts.

The two sets of panels that review the status of detainees at Guantánamo assign military advocates to work with detainees in preparing cases. Detainees are allowed to hear and respond to the allegations against them, call witnesses and request evidence. Only a small fraction of the hundreds of panels have concluded that the accused should be released.

The Bagram panels, called Enemy Combatant Review Boards, offer no such guarantees. Reviews are conducted after 90 days and at least annually thereafter, but detainees are not informed of the accusations against them, have no advocate and cannot appear before the board, officials said. “The detainee is not involved at all,” one official familiar with the process said.

An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, noted that the Afghan police, prosecutors and the courts were all limited by law in how long they could hold criminal suspects.

“The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures,” Mr. Ahmadzai said in an interview in Kabul. “Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence.”

Under a diplomatic arrangement reached last year after more than a year of negotiations, Afghan officials have agreed to take over custody of the roughly 450 Afghan detainees now at Bagram and another 100 Afghans held at Guantánamo once American-financed contractors refurbish a block of a decrepit former Soviet jail near Kabul as a high-security prison.

Because of the $10 million prison- construction project and an accompanying American program to train Afghan prison guards, both of which are to be completed in about a year, military officials in the region have abandoned any thought of sending any of the Afghan detainees at Bagram to Guantánamo. Still, many details of the deal remain uncertain, including when the new prison will be completed, which Afghan ministry will run it and how the detainees may be prosecuted in Afghan courts.

Pentagon officials said some part of the Bagram prison would probably continue to operate, holding the roughly 40 non-Afghan detainees there as well as others likely to be captured by American or NATO forces in continuing operations.

Prisoner Transfers Stalled

Until now, military officials at both Bagram and Guantánamo have been frustrated in their efforts to engineer the transfer to Cuba of another group of the most dangerous and valuable non-Afghan detainees held at Bagram, Pentagon officials said.

Three officials said commanders at Bagram first proposed moving about a dozen detainees to Guantánamo in late 2004 and then reiterated the request in early 2005. In an unusual step last spring, the officials added, intelligence specialists based at Guantánamo traveled to Bagram to assess the need for the transfer.

But as Central Command officials were forwarding a formal request to the Pentagon for the transfer of about a dozen high-level detainees, at least one of them, Omar al-Faruq, a former operative of Al Qaeda in Southeast Asia, escaped from the Bagram prison with three other men. Mr. Faruq had first been taken to Bagram by C.I.A. operatives in late summer 2002, but was removed from the prison about a month later, a soldier who served there said.

Two officials familiar with intelligence reports on the escape said that last July, after Mr. Faruq had been returned to Bagram by the C.I.A., he and the other men slipped out of a poorly fenced-in cell and, in the middle of the night, piled up some boxes and climbed through an open transom over one of the doors.

In August, weeks after the escape, a Defense Department working group called the Detainee Assistance Team endorsed the Central Command’s recommendation for the transfer of nine Bagram detainees to Guantánamo, two officials familiar with the matter said.

Since then, the recommendation has languished in the Pentagon bureaucracy. Officials said it had apparently been stalled by aides who had declined to forward it to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld out of concern that any new transfers to Guantánamo would stoke international criticism.

“Out of sight, out of mind,” one of those officials said of the Bagram detainees.

Carlotta Gall, Ruhullah Khapalwak and Abdul Waheed Wafa contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.