The fate of a group of prisoners held in near-total secrecy by US forces at a prison in Afghanistan is hanging in limbo, the facility’s commander said, as Washington gropes for options after its legal right to hold them there expires in December.
The inmates - all foreign nationals captured on battlefields around the world - could be transferred to the US court system or, as a last resort, to the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Brigadier General Patrick J. Reinert told Reuters.
The quandary over what to do with the detainees held in a prison near Bagram airfield, north of Kabul, has rekindled the outrage over the US policy of rendition in the early phases of the Afghan war.
In the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, suspected militants were abducted and held in secret prisons worldwide without charge or evidence.
The United State abandoned that policy under President Barack Obama, but the detention of those being held near Bagram is a reminder that the issue has not been concluded.
“We’ve got to resolve their fate by either returning them to their home country or turning them over to the Afghans for prosecution or any other number of ways that the Department of Defense has to resolve,” Reinert told Reuters.
Almost nothing is known of the detainees’ identities. The United States has declined to disclose their nationalities, where they were captured and how many are still in its custody.
