The Pentagon has announced plans for a 40-acre, $60 million detention center at the Bagram base.

KABUL — Human rights lawyers on Sunday, denounced US plans to build a vast detention camp in the main US base in Afghanistan as a "second Guantanamo" where laws don't apply.

"We will be attacking the use of Bagram as a legal black hole, as a second Guantanamo, as a place where no laws apply," said lawyer Barbara J. Olshansky, reported Reuters.

"I think it is very clear that the reason that the United States chose to build it inside the Air Base is that they did not like the independent decisions that would have come out of the Afghan judiciary."
The Pentagon has announced plans for a 40-acre, $60 million detention center at the Bagram base.

The new detention center is intended to accommodate up to 1100 prisoners.

The Bagram base, where 625 people are held without charges in wire mesh cages, has a notorious reputation of torture of humiliation of detainees.

In 2002, two men died in US custody at the base.

Last month, the Afghan Human Rights Organization (AHRO) said that 10 children aged between nine and 13 were being held at the notorious base.

Hundreds of prisoners have also passed through Bagram on their way to Guantanamo Bay since the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan.

"We are sure that in this new Guantanamo we will not be able to monitor the prisoners any more than we can now," AHRO chief Lal Gul told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR).

"Ninety-five percent of those who are released from Bagram have psychological problems. Some are missing body parts.

"We condemn not only this prison, but all the prisons all over Afghanistan and other places made by the Americans."

The US has been holding hundreds of detainees at its notorious Guantanamo detention center for years.

It declared them "enemy combatants" to deny them legal rights under the American legal system.

Cover-up

Rights lawyers accused Washington of targeting journalists to cover up its practices in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Many people in Afghanistan and in Iraq that have been targeted for detention are local journalists covering the conflict in their own country," said Olshansky.

"When the United States detains reporters, photographers, camera operators and holds them for long period without charge for any offence and without trials and without any evidence, we know that part of the goal is to just shut people up."

The US military is holding Jawad Ahmad, who has worked with Canadian Television (CTV), at Bagram on allegations he is an "unlawful enemy combatant."

"He has not been accused of any crime either under US law, Afghan law or international law," said Tina Monshipour Foster, executive director for International Justice Network.

Olshansky agreed, saying Ahmad's detention was mean to "make sure that the people of those countries and the United States do not know what is going on."

"The United States claims to be sowing the seeds of democracy ... and at the same time undermining those very nascent efforts by putting journalists in jail."