http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175197/tomgram%3A_anand_gopal%2C_afraid_of_the_dark_in_afghanistan/
[Joint project of Tom Dispatch and the Nation, and appearing in the Nation's next issue.]
Obama's Secret Prisons
Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the "Black Jail," and the
Dogs of War in Afghanistan
By Anand Gopal
[The research for this story was supported by the Fund for
Investigative Journalism.]
One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of
Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply
vanished. He had last been seen in the town's bazaar with a group
of friends. Family members scoured Khost's dust-doused streets for
days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who
were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of
the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police
to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young
bazaar-goers for ransom.
But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with
no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and
village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a
neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In
it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American
prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while
he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and
he didn't know when he would be freed.
Sometime in the last few years, Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan's
rugged heartland began to lose faith in the American project. Many
of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and
it usually took place in the dead of the night, when most of the
country was fast asleep. In the secretive U.S. detentions process,
suspects are usually nabbed in the darkness and then sent to one of
a number of detention areas on military bases, often on the
slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families.
This process has become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan
than coalition airstrikes. The night raids and detentions, little
known or understood outside of these Pashtun villages, are slowly
turning Afghans against the very forces they greeted as liberators
just a few years ago.
One Dark Night in November
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Very worth reading. Full at:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175197/tomgram%3A_anand_gopal%2C_afraid_of_the_dark_in_afghanistan/
Michael