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Afghan Taliban deny new talks with US
AFP via Yahoo! News - Apr 29 04:53am
Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents on Sunday denied that they had resumed talks with the United States, while the Afghan government insisted that the peace process was "on track".
The Taliban, who last month broke off contacts with the US in Qatar, said they would not resume talks "until the Americans take constructive steps and fulfil promises which were agreed upon for confidence building".
Among the confidence building measures proposed is the release of five Taliban leaders held at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
The statement, posted on the Taliban website, came just days after the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed at a meeting in Islamabad to look at ways to provide safe passage to Taliban who are willing to join the peace process.
That move was also rejected by the hardline Islamists, who said it was aimed at facilitating militants "kowtowing to US demands in the name of supposed reconciliation talks".
"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, hereby, strongly denounce such foul and horrendous rift-creating attempts," the Taliban said in a separate statement by spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
But in Kabul on Sunday, the Afghan government said progress was being made in efforts to negotiate an end to the decade-long war.
"The peace process is still on track with the Taliban and also efforts are underway by the Afghan government for setting up a Taliban address in the Gulf state of Qatar," foreign ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai told a news conference.
The Taliban, however, have always dismissed the idea of talks with the Afghan government, describing it as a puppet of the Americans.
For its part, Washington has consistently said that any talks with the Taliban to end the war could only take place with the agreement of the Afghan government, which eventually should lead the process.
Mosazai said the idea of safe passage aimed to provide "a guarantee to Taliban leaders and officials to safely approach the Afghan government or to travel from one country to another country to engage in direct negotiations with the Afghan government".
Senior Taliban leaders operate from bases within neighbouring Pakistan, which the Afghan government accuses of supporting the militants.
Al Qaeda now incapable of 9/11-scale attack: U.S. officials
By Mark Hosenball | Reuters – Sat, Apr 28, 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's core organization is likely incapable of carrying out another mass-casualty attack on the scale of September 11, 2001, U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials said on Friday.
U.S. government experts also believe that the likelihood of an attack using chemical, biological, atomic or radiological weapons over the next year was not high, said Robert Cardillo, deputy director of U.S. National Intelligence.
Cardillo and other U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described these assessments on a conference call with journalists billed as an opportunity for government experts to voice their assessments of al Qaeda's potency a year after the killing of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. commando raid.
Cardillo said the al Qaeda "core" organization that bin Laden created has suffered strategic setbacks due to the outbreak of "Arab Spring" protests and rebellions in Islamic countries, which have not spread great sympathy for al Qaeda's hardline and violent brand of Islam.
More worrying to U.S. counterterrorism officials and their allies abroad is the possibility of home-grown extremists, or "lone wolves," who are radicalized over the Internet or in small cells, but who also now are being given encouragement by media outlets connected to al Qaeda and its affiliates.
While they were unwilling to declare that al Qaeda was on the brink of "strategic defeat," the U.S. officials did say they believed the central organization founded by bin Laden simply was not capable today of marshalling the kind of resources and planning that went into the deadly suicide airplane hijackings of September 11, 2001.
The officials said that the United States regards four al Qaeda spinoffs or affiliates as still posing threats of greater or lesser degree to U.S. interests.
Most deadly, the officials said, was Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which U.S. officials believe was behind unsuccessful but imaginative attempts to attack continental U.S. targets over the last 18 months using airplane-borne bombs stashed in a passenger's underwear and in photocopier ink cartridges.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, which arose in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, remains a potentially lethal presence in that country and may be expanding its activities into neighboring Syria, though officials did not indicate they believe it poses much of a threat to U.S. interests outside that region.
U.S. officials said they regarded al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an affiliate based in North Africa, as largely a criminal organization engaged in kidnapping Westerners for ransom. But they said they were concerned such tactics could evolve into more spectacular kidnappings intended to win publicity for militant causes.
U.S. officials said that after a period in which their struggle became a magnet for disillusioned Islamic youths in both the United States and Europe, al Qaeda's Somali affiliate, al Shabaab, has seen a measurable falloff in Western recruiting and support.
On balance, a counterterrorism official said, it was "clear we've made progress towards defeating al Qaeda the organization," though elements of both the ideology and the organization certainly remain, including "a number of active networks in the United Kingdom."
(Editing by Eric Beech)
Kabul's nameless streets top challenge for police
KABUL, April 29 | Sun Apr 29, 2012 10:33am EDT
(Reuters) - The maze of nameless streets and numberless houses in Afghanistan's capital is making it difficult to catch insurgents and thwart attacks, prompting Kabul's police chief to ask on Sunday that a system be installed.
Most of the city's dishevelled, dust-filled streets have no names, and of those that do, few are marked. For the majority of Kabul's four million inhabitants, navigating is a trick of good memory and a stream of questions to locals and passers-by.
"I have repeatedly asked the Mayor of Kabul to create a system," Ayoub Salangi told Reuters. "But it is a vast project and requires a lot of money."
Eleven years into the NATO-led war against Taliban insurgents, Kabul still has no official street map.
"From a security point of view, not having street names is devastating. There is no way to know where anyone is," said the 47-year-old lieutenant-general, who oversees Kabul's 14,000-strong police force.
Though Kabul was one of the first areas in Afghanistan to have security responsibilities transferred from NATO in 2008, confidence in the local force is eroding as most foreign troops look to leave the country by the end of 2014.
Kabul's security forces were praised by NATO mentors and local authorities earlier this month for repelling a coordinated attack by insurgents who took aim at foreign embassies and the parliament, suffering relatively low losses.
Salangi blamed weak Afghan intelligence for allowing the insurgents to slip under the watch of security forces and into the capital. (Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman and Hamid Shalizi Editing by Maria Golovnina)
Afghan interior ministry says five Taliban killed, 21 detained in last 24 hours
New Kerala
Kabul, April 29 : Five Taliban militants have been killed and 21 others detained during operations during the past 24 hours, the Afghan Interior Ministry said Sunday morning.
"Afghan police, Army and NATO-led Coalition Forces launched 10 joint cleanup operations in Nangarhar, Kunar, Kapisa, Kandahar, Helmand, Khost, Ghazni, Logar, Zabul and Farah provinces over the last 24 hours, killing five armed Taliban insurgents and detaining 21 other suspects," the ministry said in a statement.
They also found and seized weapons besides defusing 14 anti- vehicle mines, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
Taliban militants have yet to make comments.
Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against Taliban and other militant groups across the country recently. Over 530 insurgents have been killed and more than 1,170 others detained in the country so far this year, according to the Afghan Interior Ministry. (ANI)
A Rodney King moment, as US tries to restart talks with the Afghan Taliban
Marc Grossman, US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, met with senior Afghan and Pakistani officials this week. 'The shared goal is to open the door for Afghans to sit down with other Afghans to talk about the future of their country,' Mr. Grossman said.
By Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer / April 28, 2012 The Christian Science Monitor
Marc Grossman, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, had a Rodney King moment this week as he tried to find a path for restarting talks with the Afghan Taliban.
“The shared goal is to open the door for Afghans to sit down with other Afghans to talk about the future of their country,” said Mr. Grossman Friday in Islamabad, Pakistan, after a meeting with senior Afghan and Pakistani officials.
Maybe it was only because this week marks the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of police officers who were caught on tape savagely beating Mr. King. Whatever the reason, Grossman’s kumbaya-esque comment conjured up the famous plea that King issued after the verdict: “Can we all get along?”
Just as the poetry of that simple question seemed to innocently disregard layers of racial tensions and ingrained divisions, the American diplomat’s description of a dialogue where bitterly opposed Afghan factions could huddle together and plan a common future seemed to gloss over daunting complexities.
It remains to be seen whether the Afghan Taliban and representatives of the Afghan government can sit down together and negotiate anything. Afghan President Hamid Karzai does occasionally refer to the Taliban as “Afghan brothers,” but Taliban leaders prefer terms like “lackeys” to describe the Afghans running the Kabul government.
Grossman and other American officials insist that the hoped-for talks are about Afghans talking with Afghans. But the Taliban view the negotiations primarily as a way to deal with the Americans – on issues like the fate of their fighters in American custody.
Then there is the matter of the conditions that the United States has put on any deals that the Afghans, once together, might reach. The Taliban must renounce any connection to Al Qaeda, give up violence, and respect the Afghan Constitution – including its recognition of the rights of all Afghan citizens, including women.
Some Afghan officials and regional experts say that the Afghan Taliban, its ties to Al Qaeda already weakened, might be willing to sever connections to the terrorist organization, which it harbored when it was in power in Afghanistan. Getting the Taliban to give up their arms will be harder.
But getting the Taliban to accept a constitution that it considers to have been imposed by infidel foreigners will be the hardest of the conditions, experts say. The ferocity with which the Taliban continue to thwart the education of Afghan girls – closing down girls’ schools that are practically under the noses of US and NATO soldiers – does not suggest a softening on core ideological principles.
All this tells some that the US needs to remain very cautious of the Taliban’s motives in eventually returning to talks. They worry that the US, eager to arrive at NATO’s May summit in Chicago with hope for a political settlement in Afghanistan, will unwittingly open the way to a Taliban return to power.
As Lisa Curtis, a South Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington says: “Rather than long-shot talks with the Taliban leadership, Washington should focus on strengthening anti-Taliban elements that share the US interest in preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a safe haven for international terrorists.”
That position might be criticized as only prolonging a war that has already gone on for more than a decade. One thing it doesn’t do, on the other hand, is echo an idealistic “Can we all get along?”
Fighting season - for animals - peaks in Afghanistan
By Emal Haidary AFP via Yahoo! News - Apr 29 01:03am
Spring marks the start of the "fighting season" for humans involved in Afghanistan's decade-long war -- but for birds, dogs, camels and even kites it reaches its peak.
At dawn on Friday mornings in Kabul's central park, hundreds of people converge with decorated cages full of fighting birds, including quail and roosters, as well as dogs, for a day of bloody combat by proxy.
"I was born and grew up in war, I love to see fighting, it is a good pastime," says Najibullah, 30, while fondling his bird and preparing it for a big fight.
"Last Friday, my quail beat two others, it is a hero," he says.
In other corners of the park big roosters with bloody beaks fight and dogs rip into each other as crowds of excited men roar around them.
Outside of the capital, particularly in northern areas of the country, people also make camels, rams and bulls fight, for the "fun" of watching them -- and for gambling on the outcome.
Animal fighting was banned as un-Islamic under the Taliban's 1996-2001 regime, but is once again a violent feature of daily life in Afghanistan -- as is the war between Taliban insurgents and 130,000 NATO troops.
The hardline Islamist Taliban were overthrown by a US-led invasion in 2001 for harbouring Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington -- and have since waged an increasingly bloody insurgency.
Spring, when the snows melt, is traditionally the start of intensified fighting -- this year signalled by a major attack by Taliban suicide squads on Kabul on April 15.
"No doubt the continuous fighting in the country has added to the violent character of the people," says Dr Temorshah Mosamim, head of a mental health hospital in Kabul, referring to more than 30 years of war since a Soviet invasion in 1979.
"War is a main cause of mental health problems in Afghanistan too.
"Poverty, stress, fear, trauma -- all this presses people to lose their temper. Up to 80 percent of around 100 patients we see every day have violent characters due to war," he adds.
Taliban militants have targeted animal fighting gatherings several times in the past. In February 2008, around 80 people were killed when a suicide bomber attacked the crowd at a dog fight in Kandahar.
But Afghans, who live with war every day, are not deterred. Even when families and friends gather on windy hilltops to fly their kites, they do it to fight each other.
At the top of Maranjan hill in the centre of Kabul hundreds of people gather every Friday for kite fighting.
"There is no fun only in flying kites, you have to fight with them", says Ahmad Shah, controlling his colourful kite in aerial combat with a competitor, each trying to slice through the other's glass-coated string and bring the kite down.
People who don't like forced and vicious animal fighting, love kite fighting, he says.
"As long as I remember, the people of Afghanistan have always been fighting for different causes, we cannot love anything else but fighting", Shah says.
Government Has No Political Commitment to Fight Terrorism: National Front
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 28 April 2012
Leader of the Afghan opposition party National Front claimed Saturday that the Afghan government had no political commitment in fighting against terrorism, evidenced by discussion of forming a coalition with the Taliban.
Speaking in at the 20th anniversary of the Mujahideen's victory day, head of the National Front Ahmad Zia Massoud said that the Afghan government is evidently considering a coalition government with the Taliban, evidence that it is not committed to ending terrorism.
"The government has no commitment to fighting terrorism. The recent comments of the government leaders show they want to establish a coalition with Taliban. We don't want to make a government with those who kill thousands of innocent people," Massoud said in Kabul.
Meanwhile, leader of the National Coalition of Afghanistan Abdullah Abdullah said that several prominent public figures were killed last year by the Taliban, so we should not make peace with those people.
"Several public figures were killed [by the Taliban] last year. We don't want peace with those who killed innocent people and changed the country into a hideout for terrorists," he said in his speech.
The newly-appointed chief of the Afghan High Peace Council Salahuddin Rabbani also spoke on the occasion, saying that it is impossible to bring peace if Afghans are not united.
He also emphasised that the presidential election and security transfer needs peace to happen.
"It's impossible to bring peace in the country without the people being united. We have a lot to do to bring peace," Rabbani said.
"To hold the presidential election and security transfer we need peace and stability."
This comes as senior Taliban leaders told British Channel 4 that talks between the group and the US have been resumed in Qatar.
The Taliban had suspended the talks last month after accusing the US of not having a clear vision or sticking to its promises.
Parliament Calls for Investigation Into Minister for Energy and Water
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 28 April 2012
Afghanistan's House of Representatives called for an investigation Saturday into the corruption-accused Minister of Energy and Water Mohammad Ismail Khan.
The head of the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption Azizullah Lodin named the Minister last week while speaking at Kabul University as the minister suspected of corrupt practices.
The Parliament have also summoned Lodin to give more information about the case after he accused the Parliament of knowing about the corruption when it gave Ismail Khan the vote of confidence to be made Minister.
"Ismail Khan is accused of $70 million embezzlement - the court must decide about this," Kabul parliamentary representative Allah Gul Mujahid said Saturday. "Lodin should prove his claims."
"Some corrupt ministers have been named, along with commanders and provincial governors who were also accused of corruption," Khost province representative Mir Bat Khan said. "If it's so, Mr Lodin should prove it."
Kabul MP Obaidullah Kalimzai said that such issues taint the reputation of other parliamentary members if they are not followed up.
"It really defames the MPs when such accusations are not cleared," he said.
Lawyer in Afghan murder case hopes to put the war on trial
John Henry Browne is defending Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, charged with murdering 17 civilians. The lawyer, whose clients have included Ted Bundy, says he is driven to get the system to work for Bales.
Los Angeles Times By Kim Murphy April 28, 2012
SEATTLE - John Henry Browne's first brush with the U.S. military was during the Vietnam War. The lanky attorney, then a student who drove a purple hippie van, was rejected for the draft because he was too tall.
"I had done research, and I knew if you were over 6 foot 6 you were not qualified to go kill short people," said Browne, who has a 1969 photo of himself in an Uncle Sam hat towering above a sea of fellow antiwar protesters. "So I'd done a bunch of yoga and stretched myself — and I got some help from some Quaker doctors — and I went in with a letter saying I was close to 6-7, which I was at the time."
These days, Browne is preparing for another kind of encounter with the military, taking on the defense of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, charged with murdering 17 Afghan civilians during a late-night shooting rampage in southern Afghanistan.
It surprised almost no one when Browne announced that he would put the Afghanistan war itself on trial. He flew to Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., to listen to Bales' stories about the war and broke down weeping.
"It was quite emotional for all of us," Browne said in a recent interview. "Bob Bales describing some of the things he's witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of the things he's had to do: Picking up body parts from friends and putting them in bags," he said. "You saw the movie 'The Hurt Locker?' It's really a Disney movie compared to what Sgt. Bales told me."
Browne, 65, has long since traded his 1960s-era long locks and droopy mustache for expensive, lawyerly overcoats, a trademark white scarf flung over the shoulder and carefully trimmed hair. He is also now one of the Northwest's most prominent members of the defense bar, whose clients have included serial killer Ted Bundy and "Barefoot Bandit" Colton Harris-Moore.
He has won 17 not-guilty verdicts for murder defendants out of roughly 50 murder cases that have gone to trial. Only two clients in 30 years, he said, were convicted of first-degree murder — one of them, painfully, after he and his client proceeded to trial after rejecting a plea deal.
"Somebody asked me why I do this. I said, it's because it's my [flipping] path. It's not romantic. This is one of the hardest jobs in the world to do well," he said. "It sounds grandiose, and I don't mean it that way, but I'm trying to get the system to work for Sgt. Bales."
But the new case presents challenges even Browne has rarely had to face — countering forensic evidence gathered by military investigators from a nearly inaccessible village half a globe away; eliciting sympathy for Bales' stressful combat deployments and previous brain injury from a panel of Army jurors; and playing the "put the war on trial" strategy to a U.S. Army tribunal.
"I do not think that will be a very productive theory to pitch to a panel of military officers and enlisted folks who have been over there three or four times," said military defense attorney Phillip Stackhouse. "Because then, aren't you almost putting them on trial?"
***
Browne has often won leniency for his clients by arguing that they were brain damaged, had troubled childhoods or were beaten by their husbands. He has a reputation for exhaustive trial preparation, combative pursuit of evidentiary motions, and careful strategizing that also leans heavily on the media.
In the Harris-Moore case, Browne's team negotiated a nearly unprecedented agreement to consolidate roughly two dozen claims for prosecution across the country into a single set of charges, plus a federal case. Propelled by staff counsel Emma Scanlan, the defense prepared a heartbreaking "mitigation package" detailing Harris-Moore's childhood ordeals.
Browne leaked it to the media two days before the sentencing hearing, creating a rash of sympathetic stories and preparing the public to accept the relatively lenient 71/2-year sentence handed down by the judge.
In a 2011 case, Browne sought to get a mistrial declared for a client charged with selling drugs at a casino by insisting that Kitsap County Superior Court Judge Theodore Spearman — who had made a series of unfavorable rulings — had "cognitive defects."
"This trial has turned into a farce. F-A-R-C-E," Browne declared in court. Browne refused to continue if Spearman didn't get a mental evaluation, the judge threatened fines and incarceration, and the prosecutor protested that Browne was simply trying to get out of a trial he was about to lose.
"Call the jailers!" Browne declared.
It ended when a juror approached the bailiff and asked: "Will I get in trouble if I punch the defense attorney?"
"Mistrial," sighed Spearman.
The judge died of a brain aneurysm a few months later — a fact that Browne now says proves he was right, and ethically bound, to challenge the judge's mental functioning. "It had turned into a debacle," he said. Kitsap County Prosecutor Russell Hauge, who insists the popular judge seemed fine, says it proves nothing. The defendant will be retried on the charges later this year.
Browne takes no responsibility for Bundy's death sentence. The charismatic killer, executed in 1989 after confessing to 30 killings, rejected the plea deal Browne had negotiated for him and moved on to another attorney.
A memoir Browne is writing — tentatively titled "Music, Metaphysics and Murderers" (the music part will detail Browne's days as a bass player for a band that opened for Jimi Hendrix and the Doors) — will include details of some 100 slayings the killer reportedly told him about.
"Ted Bundy's going to be the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the world. What he told me he did, and gave me permission to talk about, is horrendous," he said.
Browne went through his own form of post-traumatic stress as he was writing, he said, when he unearthed a note Bundy had left with a box of cookies. "'Save one for me, Bunny,' it said. That's what he called me: Bunny. Talk about creepy."
***
With Bales, Browne is powering forward with what looks to be a two-part strategy: One, he is challenging the Army to come up with a provable case, which so far, he says, it hasn't, and may not be able to. And two, he's planting seeds about the 38-year-old's nightmares, foggy memory and traumatic war record in front of the public in case he needs to fall back on mental incompetence or, if it comes to that, a lenient sentence.
"Certainly for the prosecution this is not a slam dunk, in the sense that they have a body and an identified crime scene where the police showed up and secured the crime scene, they had the CSI people arrive and they collected forensic evidence. Browne is absolutely correct in that sense," said Philip Cave, a retired Navy judge advocate who is now in civilian military practice.
On the other hand, he said, prosecutors probably have a video of Bales returning to the base, and they will have seized not only his weapon, but bullet fragments and cartridges collected at the shooting scenes.
"Let's assume they got a reasonably decent chain of custody on the weapon and reasonably decent recovery on the cartridge cases, and identifiable bullet fragments. Then they match that to the weapon. Bingo," he said.
And that may be where the old antiwar activist strides to the podium.
"There was a poll that came out two weeks after Sgt. Bales was arrested the number of people opposed to the war rose 20 percentage points since this alleged incident. I think it's up to 77-78% of the American people say, 'What are we doing there? Let's get the hell out,'" Browne told KIRO radio during a studio visit this month.
"I've met a lot of soldiers who are fighting a war that a lot of them don't know why they're there," he said. "They don't see the mission."
kim.murphy@latimes.com
Bagram Prison Inmates Deserve Clear Answers About Their Fates
The U.S. will turn over the political prisoners in Bagram prison to Afghanistan sometime in the next six months, but so far there are no clear answers about what happens to those prisoners, especially citizens of Pakistan.
The Daily Beast By Sarah Bilal Apr 29, 2012
Almost four years ago, near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, United States troops took into custody a 14-year-old Pakistani citizen named Hamidullah, who has been held ever since in a cell at the U.S.-controlled Bagram prison near Kabul. According to Hamidullah, in 2011, U.S. authorities cleared him for release.
Last month, when the governments of the United States and Afghanistan announced that the prison will be handed over to Afghan control in the next six months, there was an ominous silence about what would become of Hamidullah and 50 or so other detainees at the prison who are not citizens of Afghanistan.
The transfer of the Bagram prison to Afghan control may finally result in a trial for the Afghan citizens who have been detained there, many of them for years, without knowing if or when they would ever have their day in court. But Bagram prisoners who are nationals of Pakistan and other countries are at risk of sliding deeper into a legal limbo or being transferred into torture.
Justice Project Pakistan is a Lahore-based legal-action charity that provides legal support to prisoners facing the death penalty, as well as Pakistani citizens detained in the war on terror. The organization is representing nine Pakistani detainees at Bagram. It is working with these prisoners’ families, pressing for information about their status and conditions of confinement, for the establishment of normal communication channels, and for a resolution of their detention, either by trial or release. So far, U.S. authorities have completely denied Justice Project Pakistan lawyers access to their clients, preventing them from making even the simplest inquiries necessary to assist them and their families.
The U.S. authorities at Bagram have also not provided Hamidullah and the other detainees or their families with clear grounds for their detention. They have never been told what circumstances must arise for them to be able to challenge their detention in a court of law or even when such circumstances might arise. The only legal process afforded them—a military review board—has fallen well short of basic fair-trial standards.
Now is the time to set out a proper legal framework for detention, including guarantees of due process and a fair trial.
After examining the cases of some Bagram detainees,, a U.S. review board has recommended their release—Hamidullah says he is among them—either because they should not have been detained in the first place or because they no longer pose a threat. Yet high-level political stalemate, particularly between the United States and Pakistan, has prevented the release of even these individuals to their homes and their families.
The agreement between the United States and Afghanistan on the transfer of detention authority is an opportunity to finally clean up this legal mess and put an end to a disgraceful, unjust situation. Now is the time to set out a proper legal framework for detention, including guarantees of due process and a fair trial. The United States must also meet its legal obligation not to transfer any detainee in its custody to detention in a country where there will be a real risk of torture. This is a serious concern when it comes to transferring detainees to the custody of Afghan authorities, who have a record of torture. Just last month, a report by the Open Society Foundations and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission detailed widespread torture of persons held in detention by the Afghan authorities.
The governments of the United States and Afghanistan should agree either to the transfer of non-Afghan detainees, including Hamidullah and others represented by Justice Project Pakistan, to the Afghan authorities for final prosecution or for repatriation to their home countries. If the U.S. government moves forward with repatriation of detainees, it must transfer them in a manner that ensures such individuals are not put at risk of abuse. The United States should also clearly and expeditiously communicate to other states what specific measures it believes they should adopt to secure the repatriation of non-Afghan detainees.
The Pakistani government also has a responsibility to its citizens held by the U.S. Pakistan’s own courts have said as much, and ordered the government to do more to secure the release of its citizens and ensure that no agreement to transfer Pakistani citizens to Afghan authorities puts them at risk of torture. Should the United States and Pakistan move forward with repatriation, the Pakistani government must also spell out what will happen to these individuals, and if not immediately released, how their cases will be adjudicated and their rights protected.
After so many years of waiting, Hamidullah and other non-Afghan detainees in Afghanistan deserve to have access to their lawyers, and their cases resolved. If the authorities have no evidence against them, they should be released immediately. If there is evidence of wrongdoing against them, they should be tried. Holding them indefinitely or transferring them to torture are not options.
Sarah Belal is the founder and director of Justice Project Pakistan.
Christopher Rogers is a human rights lawyer with the Open Society Foundations.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com
www.afghanistannewscenter.com
AFP via Yahoo! News - Apr 29 04:53am
Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents on Sunday denied that they had resumed talks with the United States, while the Afghan government insisted that the peace process was "on track".
The Taliban, who last month broke off contacts with the US in Qatar, said they would not resume talks "until the Americans take constructive steps and fulfil promises which were agreed upon for confidence building".
Among the confidence building measures proposed is the release of five Taliban leaders held at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay.
The statement, posted on the Taliban website, came just days after the US, Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed at a meeting in Islamabad to look at ways to provide safe passage to Taliban who are willing to join the peace process.
That move was also rejected by the hardline Islamists, who said it was aimed at facilitating militants "kowtowing to US demands in the name of supposed reconciliation talks".
"The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, hereby, strongly denounce such foul and horrendous rift-creating attempts," the Taliban said in a separate statement by spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.
But in Kabul on Sunday, the Afghan government said progress was being made in efforts to negotiate an end to the decade-long war.
"The peace process is still on track with the Taliban and also efforts are underway by the Afghan government for setting up a Taliban address in the Gulf state of Qatar," foreign ministry spokesman Janan Mosazai told a news conference.
The Taliban, however, have always dismissed the idea of talks with the Afghan government, describing it as a puppet of the Americans.
For its part, Washington has consistently said that any talks with the Taliban to end the war could only take place with the agreement of the Afghan government, which eventually should lead the process.
Mosazai said the idea of safe passage aimed to provide "a guarantee to Taliban leaders and officials to safely approach the Afghan government or to travel from one country to another country to engage in direct negotiations with the Afghan government".
Senior Taliban leaders operate from bases within neighbouring Pakistan, which the Afghan government accuses of supporting the militants.
Al Qaeda now incapable of 9/11-scale attack: U.S. officials
By Mark Hosenball | Reuters – Sat, Apr 28, 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's core organization is likely incapable of carrying out another mass-casualty attack on the scale of September 11, 2001, U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials said on Friday.
U.S. government experts also believe that the likelihood of an attack using chemical, biological, atomic or radiological weapons over the next year was not high, said Robert Cardillo, deputy director of U.S. National Intelligence.
Cardillo and other U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described these assessments on a conference call with journalists billed as an opportunity for government experts to voice their assessments of al Qaeda's potency a year after the killing of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. commando raid.
Cardillo said the al Qaeda "core" organization that bin Laden created has suffered strategic setbacks due to the outbreak of "Arab Spring" protests and rebellions in Islamic countries, which have not spread great sympathy for al Qaeda's hardline and violent brand of Islam.
More worrying to U.S. counterterrorism officials and their allies abroad is the possibility of home-grown extremists, or "lone wolves," who are radicalized over the Internet or in small cells, but who also now are being given encouragement by media outlets connected to al Qaeda and its affiliates.
While they were unwilling to declare that al Qaeda was on the brink of "strategic defeat," the U.S. officials did say they believed the central organization founded by bin Laden simply was not capable today of marshalling the kind of resources and planning that went into the deadly suicide airplane hijackings of September 11, 2001.
The officials said that the United States regards four al Qaeda spinoffs or affiliates as still posing threats of greater or lesser degree to U.S. interests.
Most deadly, the officials said, was Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which U.S. officials believe was behind unsuccessful but imaginative attempts to attack continental U.S. targets over the last 18 months using airplane-borne bombs stashed in a passenger's underwear and in photocopier ink cartridges.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, which arose in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, remains a potentially lethal presence in that country and may be expanding its activities into neighboring Syria, though officials did not indicate they believe it poses much of a threat to U.S. interests outside that region.
U.S. officials said they regarded al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), an affiliate based in North Africa, as largely a criminal organization engaged in kidnapping Westerners for ransom. But they said they were concerned such tactics could evolve into more spectacular kidnappings intended to win publicity for militant causes.
U.S. officials said that after a period in which their struggle became a magnet for disillusioned Islamic youths in both the United States and Europe, al Qaeda's Somali affiliate, al Shabaab, has seen a measurable falloff in Western recruiting and support.
On balance, a counterterrorism official said, it was "clear we've made progress towards defeating al Qaeda the organization," though elements of both the ideology and the organization certainly remain, including "a number of active networks in the United Kingdom."
(Editing by Eric Beech)
Kabul's nameless streets top challenge for police
KABUL, April 29 | Sun Apr 29, 2012 10:33am EDT
(Reuters) - The maze of nameless streets and numberless houses in Afghanistan's capital is making it difficult to catch insurgents and thwart attacks, prompting Kabul's police chief to ask on Sunday that a system be installed.
Most of the city's dishevelled, dust-filled streets have no names, and of those that do, few are marked. For the majority of Kabul's four million inhabitants, navigating is a trick of good memory and a stream of questions to locals and passers-by.
"I have repeatedly asked the Mayor of Kabul to create a system," Ayoub Salangi told Reuters. "But it is a vast project and requires a lot of money."
Eleven years into the NATO-led war against Taliban insurgents, Kabul still has no official street map.
"From a security point of view, not having street names is devastating. There is no way to know where anyone is," said the 47-year-old lieutenant-general, who oversees Kabul's 14,000-strong police force.
Though Kabul was one of the first areas in Afghanistan to have security responsibilities transferred from NATO in 2008, confidence in the local force is eroding as most foreign troops look to leave the country by the end of 2014.
Kabul's security forces were praised by NATO mentors and local authorities earlier this month for repelling a coordinated attack by insurgents who took aim at foreign embassies and the parliament, suffering relatively low losses.
Salangi blamed weak Afghan intelligence for allowing the insurgents to slip under the watch of security forces and into the capital. (Reporting by Amie Ferris-Rotman and Hamid Shalizi Editing by Maria Golovnina)
Afghan interior ministry says five Taliban killed, 21 detained in last 24 hours
New Kerala
Kabul, April 29 : Five Taliban militants have been killed and 21 others detained during operations during the past 24 hours, the Afghan Interior Ministry said Sunday morning.
"Afghan police, Army and NATO-led Coalition Forces launched 10 joint cleanup operations in Nangarhar, Kunar, Kapisa, Kandahar, Helmand, Khost, Ghazni, Logar, Zabul and Farah provinces over the last 24 hours, killing five armed Taliban insurgents and detaining 21 other suspects," the ministry said in a statement.
They also found and seized weapons besides defusing 14 anti- vehicle mines, the statement said, without saying if there were any casualties on the side of security forces.
Taliban militants have yet to make comments.
Afghan forces and some 130,000 NATO-led coalition troops have intensified cleanup operations against Taliban and other militant groups across the country recently. Over 530 insurgents have been killed and more than 1,170 others detained in the country so far this year, according to the Afghan Interior Ministry. (ANI)
A Rodney King moment, as US tries to restart talks with the Afghan Taliban
Marc Grossman, US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, met with senior Afghan and Pakistani officials this week. 'The shared goal is to open the door for Afghans to sit down with other Afghans to talk about the future of their country,' Mr. Grossman said.
By Howard LaFranchi, Staff writer / April 28, 2012 The Christian Science Monitor
Marc Grossman, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, had a Rodney King moment this week as he tried to find a path for restarting talks with the Afghan Taliban.
“The shared goal is to open the door for Afghans to sit down with other Afghans to talk about the future of their country,” said Mr. Grossman Friday in Islamabad, Pakistan, after a meeting with senior Afghan and Pakistani officials.
Maybe it was only because this week marks the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots that followed the acquittal of police officers who were caught on tape savagely beating Mr. King. Whatever the reason, Grossman’s kumbaya-esque comment conjured up the famous plea that King issued after the verdict: “Can we all get along?”
Just as the poetry of that simple question seemed to innocently disregard layers of racial tensions and ingrained divisions, the American diplomat’s description of a dialogue where bitterly opposed Afghan factions could huddle together and plan a common future seemed to gloss over daunting complexities.
It remains to be seen whether the Afghan Taliban and representatives of the Afghan government can sit down together and negotiate anything. Afghan President Hamid Karzai does occasionally refer to the Taliban as “Afghan brothers,” but Taliban leaders prefer terms like “lackeys” to describe the Afghans running the Kabul government.
Grossman and other American officials insist that the hoped-for talks are about Afghans talking with Afghans. But the Taliban view the negotiations primarily as a way to deal with the Americans – on issues like the fate of their fighters in American custody.
Then there is the matter of the conditions that the United States has put on any deals that the Afghans, once together, might reach. The Taliban must renounce any connection to Al Qaeda, give up violence, and respect the Afghan Constitution – including its recognition of the rights of all Afghan citizens, including women.
Some Afghan officials and regional experts say that the Afghan Taliban, its ties to Al Qaeda already weakened, might be willing to sever connections to the terrorist organization, which it harbored when it was in power in Afghanistan. Getting the Taliban to give up their arms will be harder.
But getting the Taliban to accept a constitution that it considers to have been imposed by infidel foreigners will be the hardest of the conditions, experts say. The ferocity with which the Taliban continue to thwart the education of Afghan girls – closing down girls’ schools that are practically under the noses of US and NATO soldiers – does not suggest a softening on core ideological principles.
All this tells some that the US needs to remain very cautious of the Taliban’s motives in eventually returning to talks. They worry that the US, eager to arrive at NATO’s May summit in Chicago with hope for a political settlement in Afghanistan, will unwittingly open the way to a Taliban return to power.
As Lisa Curtis, a South Asia expert at the Heritage Foundation in Washington says: “Rather than long-shot talks with the Taliban leadership, Washington should focus on strengthening anti-Taliban elements that share the US interest in preventing Afghanistan from again serving as a safe haven for international terrorists.”
That position might be criticized as only prolonging a war that has already gone on for more than a decade. One thing it doesn’t do, on the other hand, is echo an idealistic “Can we all get along?”
Fighting season - for animals - peaks in Afghanistan
By Emal Haidary AFP via Yahoo! News - Apr 29 01:03am
Spring marks the start of the "fighting season" for humans involved in Afghanistan's decade-long war -- but for birds, dogs, camels and even kites it reaches its peak.
At dawn on Friday mornings in Kabul's central park, hundreds of people converge with decorated cages full of fighting birds, including quail and roosters, as well as dogs, for a day of bloody combat by proxy.
"I was born and grew up in war, I love to see fighting, it is a good pastime," says Najibullah, 30, while fondling his bird and preparing it for a big fight.
"Last Friday, my quail beat two others, it is a hero," he says.
In other corners of the park big roosters with bloody beaks fight and dogs rip into each other as crowds of excited men roar around them.
Outside of the capital, particularly in northern areas of the country, people also make camels, rams and bulls fight, for the "fun" of watching them -- and for gambling on the outcome.
Animal fighting was banned as un-Islamic under the Taliban's 1996-2001 regime, but is once again a violent feature of daily life in Afghanistan -- as is the war between Taliban insurgents and 130,000 NATO troops.
The hardline Islamist Taliban were overthrown by a US-led invasion in 2001 for harbouring Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington -- and have since waged an increasingly bloody insurgency.
Spring, when the snows melt, is traditionally the start of intensified fighting -- this year signalled by a major attack by Taliban suicide squads on Kabul on April 15.
"No doubt the continuous fighting in the country has added to the violent character of the people," says Dr Temorshah Mosamim, head of a mental health hospital in Kabul, referring to more than 30 years of war since a Soviet invasion in 1979.
"War is a main cause of mental health problems in Afghanistan too.
"Poverty, stress, fear, trauma -- all this presses people to lose their temper. Up to 80 percent of around 100 patients we see every day have violent characters due to war," he adds.
Taliban militants have targeted animal fighting gatherings several times in the past. In February 2008, around 80 people were killed when a suicide bomber attacked the crowd at a dog fight in Kandahar.
But Afghans, who live with war every day, are not deterred. Even when families and friends gather on windy hilltops to fly their kites, they do it to fight each other.
At the top of Maranjan hill in the centre of Kabul hundreds of people gather every Friday for kite fighting.
"There is no fun only in flying kites, you have to fight with them", says Ahmad Shah, controlling his colourful kite in aerial combat with a competitor, each trying to slice through the other's glass-coated string and bring the kite down.
People who don't like forced and vicious animal fighting, love kite fighting, he says.
"As long as I remember, the people of Afghanistan have always been fighting for different causes, we cannot love anything else but fighting", Shah says.
Government Has No Political Commitment to Fight Terrorism: National Front
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 28 April 2012
Leader of the Afghan opposition party National Front claimed Saturday that the Afghan government had no political commitment in fighting against terrorism, evidenced by discussion of forming a coalition with the Taliban.
Speaking in at the 20th anniversary of the Mujahideen's victory day, head of the National Front Ahmad Zia Massoud said that the Afghan government is evidently considering a coalition government with the Taliban, evidence that it is not committed to ending terrorism.
"The government has no commitment to fighting terrorism. The recent comments of the government leaders show they want to establish a coalition with Taliban. We don't want to make a government with those who kill thousands of innocent people," Massoud said in Kabul.
Meanwhile, leader of the National Coalition of Afghanistan Abdullah Abdullah said that several prominent public figures were killed last year by the Taliban, so we should not make peace with those people.
"Several public figures were killed [by the Taliban] last year. We don't want peace with those who killed innocent people and changed the country into a hideout for terrorists," he said in his speech.
The newly-appointed chief of the Afghan High Peace Council Salahuddin Rabbani also spoke on the occasion, saying that it is impossible to bring peace if Afghans are not united.
He also emphasised that the presidential election and security transfer needs peace to happen.
"It's impossible to bring peace in the country without the people being united. We have a lot to do to bring peace," Rabbani said.
"To hold the presidential election and security transfer we need peace and stability."
This comes as senior Taliban leaders told British Channel 4 that talks between the group and the US have been resumed in Qatar.
The Taliban had suspended the talks last month after accusing the US of not having a clear vision or sticking to its promises.
Parliament Calls for Investigation Into Minister for Energy and Water
TOLOnews.com Saturday, 28 April 2012
Afghanistan's House of Representatives called for an investigation Saturday into the corruption-accused Minister of Energy and Water Mohammad Ismail Khan.
The head of the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption Azizullah Lodin named the Minister last week while speaking at Kabul University as the minister suspected of corrupt practices.
The Parliament have also summoned Lodin to give more information about the case after he accused the Parliament of knowing about the corruption when it gave Ismail Khan the vote of confidence to be made Minister.
"Ismail Khan is accused of $70 million embezzlement - the court must decide about this," Kabul parliamentary representative Allah Gul Mujahid said Saturday. "Lodin should prove his claims."
"Some corrupt ministers have been named, along with commanders and provincial governors who were also accused of corruption," Khost province representative Mir Bat Khan said. "If it's so, Mr Lodin should prove it."
Kabul MP Obaidullah Kalimzai said that such issues taint the reputation of other parliamentary members if they are not followed up.
"It really defames the MPs when such accusations are not cleared," he said.
Lawyer in Afghan murder case hopes to put the war on trial
John Henry Browne is defending Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, charged with murdering 17 civilians. The lawyer, whose clients have included Ted Bundy, says he is driven to get the system to work for Bales.
Los Angeles Times By Kim Murphy April 28, 2012
SEATTLE - John Henry Browne's first brush with the U.S. military was during the Vietnam War. The lanky attorney, then a student who drove a purple hippie van, was rejected for the draft because he was too tall.
"I had done research, and I knew if you were over 6 foot 6 you were not qualified to go kill short people," said Browne, who has a 1969 photo of himself in an Uncle Sam hat towering above a sea of fellow antiwar protesters. "So I'd done a bunch of yoga and stretched myself — and I got some help from some Quaker doctors — and I went in with a letter saying I was close to 6-7, which I was at the time."
These days, Browne is preparing for another kind of encounter with the military, taking on the defense of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, charged with murdering 17 Afghan civilians during a late-night shooting rampage in southern Afghanistan.
It surprised almost no one when Browne announced that he would put the Afghanistan war itself on trial. He flew to Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., to listen to Bales' stories about the war and broke down weeping.
"It was quite emotional for all of us," Browne said in a recent interview. "Bob Bales describing some of the things he's witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of the things he's had to do: Picking up body parts from friends and putting them in bags," he said. "You saw the movie 'The Hurt Locker?' It's really a Disney movie compared to what Sgt. Bales told me."
Browne, 65, has long since traded his 1960s-era long locks and droopy mustache for expensive, lawyerly overcoats, a trademark white scarf flung over the shoulder and carefully trimmed hair. He is also now one of the Northwest's most prominent members of the defense bar, whose clients have included serial killer Ted Bundy and "Barefoot Bandit" Colton Harris-Moore.
He has won 17 not-guilty verdicts for murder defendants out of roughly 50 murder cases that have gone to trial. Only two clients in 30 years, he said, were convicted of first-degree murder — one of them, painfully, after he and his client proceeded to trial after rejecting a plea deal.
"Somebody asked me why I do this. I said, it's because it's my [flipping] path. It's not romantic. This is one of the hardest jobs in the world to do well," he said. "It sounds grandiose, and I don't mean it that way, but I'm trying to get the system to work for Sgt. Bales."
But the new case presents challenges even Browne has rarely had to face — countering forensic evidence gathered by military investigators from a nearly inaccessible village half a globe away; eliciting sympathy for Bales' stressful combat deployments and previous brain injury from a panel of Army jurors; and playing the "put the war on trial" strategy to a U.S. Army tribunal.
"I do not think that will be a very productive theory to pitch to a panel of military officers and enlisted folks who have been over there three or four times," said military defense attorney Phillip Stackhouse. "Because then, aren't you almost putting them on trial?"
***
Browne has often won leniency for his clients by arguing that they were brain damaged, had troubled childhoods or were beaten by their husbands. He has a reputation for exhaustive trial preparation, combative pursuit of evidentiary motions, and careful strategizing that also leans heavily on the media.
In the Harris-Moore case, Browne's team negotiated a nearly unprecedented agreement to consolidate roughly two dozen claims for prosecution across the country into a single set of charges, plus a federal case. Propelled by staff counsel Emma Scanlan, the defense prepared a heartbreaking "mitigation package" detailing Harris-Moore's childhood ordeals.
Browne leaked it to the media two days before the sentencing hearing, creating a rash of sympathetic stories and preparing the public to accept the relatively lenient 71/2-year sentence handed down by the judge.
In a 2011 case, Browne sought to get a mistrial declared for a client charged with selling drugs at a casino by insisting that Kitsap County Superior Court Judge Theodore Spearman — who had made a series of unfavorable rulings — had "cognitive defects."
"This trial has turned into a farce. F-A-R-C-E," Browne declared in court. Browne refused to continue if Spearman didn't get a mental evaluation, the judge threatened fines and incarceration, and the prosecutor protested that Browne was simply trying to get out of a trial he was about to lose.
"Call the jailers!" Browne declared.
It ended when a juror approached the bailiff and asked: "Will I get in trouble if I punch the defense attorney?"
"Mistrial," sighed Spearman.
The judge died of a brain aneurysm a few months later — a fact that Browne now says proves he was right, and ethically bound, to challenge the judge's mental functioning. "It had turned into a debacle," he said. Kitsap County Prosecutor Russell Hauge, who insists the popular judge seemed fine, says it proves nothing. The defendant will be retried on the charges later this year.
Browne takes no responsibility for Bundy's death sentence. The charismatic killer, executed in 1989 after confessing to 30 killings, rejected the plea deal Browne had negotiated for him and moved on to another attorney.
A memoir Browne is writing — tentatively titled "Music, Metaphysics and Murderers" (the music part will detail Browne's days as a bass player for a band that opened for Jimi Hendrix and the Doors) — will include details of some 100 slayings the killer reportedly told him about.
"Ted Bundy's going to be the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the world. What he told me he did, and gave me permission to talk about, is horrendous," he said.
Browne went through his own form of post-traumatic stress as he was writing, he said, when he unearthed a note Bundy had left with a box of cookies. "'Save one for me, Bunny,' it said. That's what he called me: Bunny. Talk about creepy."
***
With Bales, Browne is powering forward with what looks to be a two-part strategy: One, he is challenging the Army to come up with a provable case, which so far, he says, it hasn't, and may not be able to. And two, he's planting seeds about the 38-year-old's nightmares, foggy memory and traumatic war record in front of the public in case he needs to fall back on mental incompetence or, if it comes to that, a lenient sentence.
"Certainly for the prosecution this is not a slam dunk, in the sense that they have a body and an identified crime scene where the police showed up and secured the crime scene, they had the CSI people arrive and they collected forensic evidence. Browne is absolutely correct in that sense," said Philip Cave, a retired Navy judge advocate who is now in civilian military practice.
On the other hand, he said, prosecutors probably have a video of Bales returning to the base, and they will have seized not only his weapon, but bullet fragments and cartridges collected at the shooting scenes.
"Let's assume they got a reasonably decent chain of custody on the weapon and reasonably decent recovery on the cartridge cases, and identifiable bullet fragments. Then they match that to the weapon. Bingo," he said.
And that may be where the old antiwar activist strides to the podium.
"There was a poll that came out two weeks after Sgt. Bales was arrested the number of people opposed to the war rose 20 percentage points since this alleged incident. I think it's up to 77-78% of the American people say, 'What are we doing there? Let's get the hell out,'" Browne told KIRO radio during a studio visit this month.
"I've met a lot of soldiers who are fighting a war that a lot of them don't know why they're there," he said. "They don't see the mission."
kim.murphy@latimes.com
Bagram Prison Inmates Deserve Clear Answers About Their Fates
The U.S. will turn over the political prisoners in Bagram prison to Afghanistan sometime in the next six months, but so far there are no clear answers about what happens to those prisoners, especially citizens of Pakistan.
The Daily Beast By Sarah Bilal Apr 29, 2012
Almost four years ago, near the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, United States troops took into custody a 14-year-old Pakistani citizen named Hamidullah, who has been held ever since in a cell at the U.S.-controlled Bagram prison near Kabul. According to Hamidullah, in 2011, U.S. authorities cleared him for release.
Last month, when the governments of the United States and Afghanistan announced that the prison will be handed over to Afghan control in the next six months, there was an ominous silence about what would become of Hamidullah and 50 or so other detainees at the prison who are not citizens of Afghanistan.
The transfer of the Bagram prison to Afghan control may finally result in a trial for the Afghan citizens who have been detained there, many of them for years, without knowing if or when they would ever have their day in court. But Bagram prisoners who are nationals of Pakistan and other countries are at risk of sliding deeper into a legal limbo or being transferred into torture.
Justice Project Pakistan is a Lahore-based legal-action charity that provides legal support to prisoners facing the death penalty, as well as Pakistani citizens detained in the war on terror. The organization is representing nine Pakistani detainees at Bagram. It is working with these prisoners’ families, pressing for information about their status and conditions of confinement, for the establishment of normal communication channels, and for a resolution of their detention, either by trial or release. So far, U.S. authorities have completely denied Justice Project Pakistan lawyers access to their clients, preventing them from making even the simplest inquiries necessary to assist them and their families.
The U.S. authorities at Bagram have also not provided Hamidullah and the other detainees or their families with clear grounds for their detention. They have never been told what circumstances must arise for them to be able to challenge their detention in a court of law or even when such circumstances might arise. The only legal process afforded them—a military review board—has fallen well short of basic fair-trial standards.
Now is the time to set out a proper legal framework for detention, including guarantees of due process and a fair trial.
After examining the cases of some Bagram detainees,, a U.S. review board has recommended their release—Hamidullah says he is among them—either because they should not have been detained in the first place or because they no longer pose a threat. Yet high-level political stalemate, particularly between the United States and Pakistan, has prevented the release of even these individuals to their homes and their families.
The agreement between the United States and Afghanistan on the transfer of detention authority is an opportunity to finally clean up this legal mess and put an end to a disgraceful, unjust situation. Now is the time to set out a proper legal framework for detention, including guarantees of due process and a fair trial. The United States must also meet its legal obligation not to transfer any detainee in its custody to detention in a country where there will be a real risk of torture. This is a serious concern when it comes to transferring detainees to the custody of Afghan authorities, who have a record of torture. Just last month, a report by the Open Society Foundations and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission detailed widespread torture of persons held in detention by the Afghan authorities.
The governments of the United States and Afghanistan should agree either to the transfer of non-Afghan detainees, including Hamidullah and others represented by Justice Project Pakistan, to the Afghan authorities for final prosecution or for repatriation to their home countries. If the U.S. government moves forward with repatriation of detainees, it must transfer them in a manner that ensures such individuals are not put at risk of abuse. The United States should also clearly and expeditiously communicate to other states what specific measures it believes they should adopt to secure the repatriation of non-Afghan detainees.
The Pakistani government also has a responsibility to its citizens held by the U.S. Pakistan’s own courts have said as much, and ordered the government to do more to secure the release of its citizens and ensure that no agreement to transfer Pakistani citizens to Afghan authorities puts them at risk of torture. Should the United States and Pakistan move forward with repatriation, the Pakistani government must also spell out what will happen to these individuals, and if not immediately released, how their cases will be adjudicated and their rights protected.
After so many years of waiting, Hamidullah and other non-Afghan detainees in Afghanistan deserve to have access to their lawyers, and their cases resolved. If the authorities have no evidence against them, they should be released immediately. If there is evidence of wrongdoing against them, they should be tried. Holding them indefinitely or transferring them to torture are not options.
Sarah Belal is the founder and director of Justice Project Pakistan.
Christopher Rogers is a human rights lawyer with the Open Society Foundations.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com
www.afghanistannewscenter.com