Bagram/Guantanamo

Karen Greenberg writes on Bagram, the US prison in Afghanistan which is in many respects worse than Guantanamo, but won't be closed by Obama--he is expanding it at the cost of millions of dollars. Bagram was where some detainees were first incarcerated before being shipped to Guantanamo: "many of those eventually transported to Guantanamo were originally held under even worse conditions at Bagram and, from early on, they had reported beatings, abuse and a startlingly wide range of other forms of mistreatment there." Moreover, she writes that "two Afghans, Dilawar and Jullah Habibullah, had been beaten to death by US Army interrogators" at Bagram in December 2002 and that "beatings, as well as various other forms of torture, had been normalized at Bagram at the very beginning of the Bush administration's long march of pain that led to Guantanamo and then on to Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq as well as foreign torture chambers."