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With all due (great) respect to Amnesty International, in the document cited by Glenn (and all due great respect for Glenn's column today) the document is too gentle. In particular, it talks about,
Hundreds of people remain detained without charge, trial or judicial review of their detentions at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan.
That's very bad. It's more prisoners than at Guantanamo. All accounts are that the conditions are worse than Guantanamo too. Just to get some perspective: In its January report, the ICRC noted 10,171 prisoners in Afghanistan registered with the Red Cross. Since some other observers put the total as high as 15,000, that meant many, in fact thousands, of prisoners held incommunicado without registration. It's hard to say what has changed to the present. But the ICRC in its October 2008 report documents, "95 places of detention holding nearly 12,300 people". One would have sincerely hoped that this meant the newly registered prisoners were a diminution of the number kept off the books. But since it also documents visiting or following up on "2,941 people arrested in connection with the conflict or the security situation" this year, it is probably not the case.
Conditions at the 95 prisons are not equal. Not all are permanent structures like Kandahar and Bagram. Cages are very harsh in a country which has very cold winters and very hot summers. Even in some permanent structures, conditions are bad, as Amnesty rightly points out about Bagram. The same could be said of Pol-e-Charki, Kandahar and many other locations. They are resort hotels to only the same people who believe that Guantanamo is Club Med.
As a baseline figure, the infamous Taliban, who famously ruled with a lot of fear, especially against women, and arbitrary summary punishment, had 600 prisoners, total, in jails across the country when the U.S. invaded in 2001.
Even accepting, which, like Glenn, I don't, that punishments are undeserved and people were just following orders, and that they kept the country safe: These guys are 12 days from leaving office in an 8 year term. From what I have cited above, we aren't just talking about crimes from back in the John Yoo days, we're talking about right now in the present. We don't know whether the current crimes are "just following orders" because we've been so focused on the past and on Guantanamo (all the landmark decisions have been about Guantanamo, and some of them are so specific to it that nobody knows if they apply in, say, Pol-e-Charki), that we don't know what the current orders are, or whether there is anyone still giving them.
[ ICRC figures are from: 10-11-2008 Operational update Afghanistan: ICRC activities from January to September 2008 located here: http://icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/htmlall/afghanistan-update-101108?opendocument ]
