Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Related: US, Europe Grow Frustrated With Karzai

Institute for War & Peace Reporting contributed to this report

An American military spokesperson has dismissed any suggestion that a new prison planned for Afghanistan is intended to replace or receive prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, the detention centre in Cuba that is facing increasing criticism in the United States.

“This is not going to be Guantanamo Two,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Rumi Nielson-Green, spokesperson for Combined Joint Task Force 101, based at Bagram Airfield, north of the Afghan capital Kabul. “That is absolutely false.”

Nielsen-Green also categorically rejected reports by Afghan and US human rights groups that children as young as nine years old were being held at the existing detention facility at Bagram.

“That is absolutely false,” she said. “We have no children at Bagram.”

According to Nielson-Green, the new prison is intended to receive only “unlawful enemy combatants, approximately 16 or older, apprehended by OEF [Operation Enduring Freedom] in Afghanistan”.

In mid-May, the Pentagon announced plans to build a 40-acre, 60 million US dollar detention centre to replace the deteriorating facility at Bagram airfield, a base originally built and used by the Soviet Union during its war in Afghanistan in 1979-89.

The new centre will be a big step up from the present one, according to Nielson-Green.

“There will be a great deal of improvement in the quality of life [of detainees],” she said. “There will be a lot more floor space, much more room for communal activities, which is part of their culture.”

There will also be educational and recreational facilities, as well as areas where detainees can meet their families, added Nielson-Green.

According to a New York Times report, it will be able to accommodate up to 11,000 prisoners “in a surge”, but Nielson-Green commented, “That seems a little high.”

Increased capacity may be needed to accommodate more captives from the increasingly successful war against the Taleban concentrated in the southern part of the country.

The news has made many Afghans uneasy. For many, Bagram conjures up images of arrest, torture and humiliation.

In 2002, two men died in US custody at Bagram. One of them, who went by the name Dilawar, became the subject of a widely acclaimed documentary called “Taxi to the Dark Side”.

Arrested on a tip-off from a man later proved to be a Taleban supporter, he was repeatedly beaten and died after two days in detention.

Since then, dozens, if not hundreds, of prisoners have passed through Bagram on their way to Guantanamo Bay. According to many of them, Bagram is worse than the prison in Cuba.

Nielson-Green denied that detainees at Bagram were being ill-treated.

“[They] are not being mistreated and abused,” she insisted. “We adhere to all international agreements, including the Geneva Convention.”

According to Nielson-Green, the US military go “above and beyond” what is required in their treatment of prisoners at Bagram.

“The ICRC has access,” she said, referring to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

When asked why Afghan humanitarian organisations were not allowed to visit detainees, she said she was “unaware of any requirement” that the military open its doors to anyone other than the ICRC.

One June 2, the Afghan Human Rights Organisation, AHRO, released a report alleging that ten children aged between nine and 13 were being held at Bagram.

A report by the United States government to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, the United States acknowledges, delivered in May 2008 also claimed that juveniles were being held at Bagram.

But the US military has repeatedly denied that this is the case.

“It is sometimes difficult to determine the exact age,” said Nielson-Green.

Afghans often do not know the date or even year of their birth, and appearances can be deceiving. But still, Nielson-Green insisted, there were no detainees under the age of 16 at Bagram.

News of the plan for a replacement prison created a minor storm of protest in Kabul, not least from the justice ministry, which said that it had no knowledge of the US plans.

“We know nothing about a new prison being built at Bagram,” an official at the ministry’s prisons department of told IWPR, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There has been no agreement with the ministry of justice. We cannot speak about this.”

President Hamed Karzai’s press office refused to comment on the issue.

“America has been condemned all over the world for Guantanamo,” said political analyst Mohammad Qasim Akhgar. “But now it wants to open Guantanamo Two on Afghan soil, while pretending that Afghanistan is an independent country with an independent government.”