What Are They Hiding? Obama Administration Defending Black Site Prison at Bagram Airbase

[unhappycamper]

What Are They Hiding? Obama Administration Defending Black Site Prison at Bagram Airbase
by Dave Lindorff
Published on Thursday, October 28, 2010 by This Can't Be Happening

A victory for the government in a federal court in New York City Monday marks another slide deeper into Dick Cheney’s “dark side” for the Obama Administration.

In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information about all captives it is holding at its huge prison facility at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul in Afghanistan, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York has issued a summary judgement saying that the government may keep that information secret.

The lingering question is: Why does the US government so adamantly want to hide information about where captives were first taken into military custody, their citizenship, the length of their captivity, and the circumstances under which they were captured?

Says Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, “The military says that they can’t release the information because it would be a threat to national security, but they provided that information for the prisoners at Guantanamo.”

And of course, as our leaders informed us repeatedly, those captives at Guantanamo, who hailed from all over the globe, including Afghanistan, were allegedly “the worst of the worst” -- at least until it turned out that many of them were wholly innocent of anything. had been framed and turned in for a bounty, or were mere children when picked up, like Omar Khadr, the 24-year old Canadian man who just copped a guilty plea to avoid a sham tribunal before 7 officers and potential life imprisonment, after being captured at 15, tortured at Bagram, and held for nine years at Guantanamo (on a charge of killing an American soldier in battle).

[MadHound]

1. They're hiding the same thing that Bush hid at Gitmo

Torture, human rights abuses, the works. That's why I always thought that Obama's promise to close Gitmo was a hollow one. While he promised to close Gitmo (funny how he hasn't done that yet) he didn't promise to end the type of abuse that happens at Gitmo. All that closing Gitmo would accomplish is moving the site of such abuse from a much publicized prison to a much less known location. The abuse wouldn't stop, just where that abuse occurs.

[Gravel Democrat]

2. kr

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