New Afghanistan prison unveiled

Bagram, Afghanistan: The US military unveiled a new $60 million (Dh220.6 million) Afghan prison on Sunday it said would provide detainees better living conditions and promote transparency, but rights groups said the changes were not enough.

International media were allowed to visit the facility at Bagram Air Base, the main US base in Afghanistan, that will replace an existing prison which has drawn widespread criticism.

The new prison, which was completed in September and is still empty, will begin housing prisoners from the old facility in the next two weeks, with transfer of the roughly 700 detainees to be completed by the end of the year.

"The new facility ... provides improved detainee living conditions ... as well as vocational, technical, and other programmes to assist with peaceful reintegration of released detainees," said US Brigadier General Mark Martins.

"This facility, and these reintegration programmes ... will promote transparency and legitimacy," Martins, interim commander for US detainee operations in Afghanistan, told reporters at the base north of Kabul.

The existing Bagram prison has become a symbol of detainee abuses for Afghans after the deaths of two detainees in 2002. In June, the BBC reported allegations of abuse and neglect at the facility after interviewing 27 former inmates.

Asked how he would describe conditions there, Martins said it had always met international and domestic standards. No media has ever been allowed to visit the notorious detention facility.

Sanctuaries

General Stanley McChrystal, US and Nato commander in Afghanistan, has said insurgents use detention facilities as sanctuaries and has criticised US facilities like Bagram, where prisoners have fewer rights than those held at Guantanamo Bay.

In September, the Pentagon announced that prisoners at Bagram prison would be able to have their detention reviewed roughly every six months and would be assigned personal representatives drawn from US military ranks.

Those detainees' representatives would not be lawyers.

The new review process, the Pentagon says, is "consistent" with the counter-insurgency strategy put in place by McChrystal, aimed at winning public support and undercutting recent gains by the Taliban.

But rights groups say the measures do not go far enough and have called on President Barack Obama to revise US detention policies in Afghanistan further.

"All detainees in Afghanistan are entitled to minimum protections, including the right to legal counsel, and to be able to challenge the legal and factual basis for the detention before an independent and impartial tribunal," three leading rights groups said in a statement.

"The US reforms still fall short of providing detainees with those rights," Amnesty International," Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch said in the statement.

The new prison, which will cost another $67 million to start up, can house up to 1,100 detainees.

It includes classrooms and vocational facilities where detainees can be taught technical skills in agriculture, masonry and tailoring.

Conditions for Karzai

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Afghan President Hamid Karzai "must do better" if he wanted US support and that included creating a major crimes tribunal and anti-corruption commission.

"We're going to be doing what we can to create an atmosphere in which the blood and treasure that the United States has committed to Afghanistan can be justified and can produce the kind of results that we're looking for," said Clinton in the interview with ABC News from Singapore.

"We've delivered that message. Now that the election is finally over, we're looking to see tangible evidence that the government, led by the president but going all the way down to the local level, will be more responsive to the needs of the people," Clinton told ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos show.