Instead of closing jail in Afghanistan, U.S. going to spend $35 million to expand it
http://bit.ly/xh75oZ
By Madison Ruppert Editor of End the Lie [caption id="attachment_38561" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Detention facility in Parwan (Photo credit: U.S. Department of Defense)"] [/caption] Back in 2011, there was supposedly a plan to close the United States' main detention center in Afghanistan to the control of the Afghans themselves. Unsurprisingly, this plan was completely scrapped and instead the military is planning to actually expand the prison. I doubt any of my readers were naïve enough to believe this claim, especially given all of the indications that we will not even be leaving Afghanistan anywhere near the claimed deadline. This is evidenced by the media blackout surrounding the talks last year about the conditions for having a continued American presence in Afghanistan and the deployment of brand new, cutting edge drone technology to the region . This latest development just serves as icing on the cake proving once and for all that the ultimate goal of our so-called government is perpetual war and thus endless profit, not the safety of the people of the United States, our soldiers or those who are unfortunate enough to get caught in the Western military machine's cross hairs. The facility, about an hour outside of Kabul by car, is on the outskirts of Bagram Air Field and is called the Detention Facility at Parwan. This facility will get a stunning $35 million in funds to expand the prison enough in order to house “approximately 2,000 detainees” by expanding “detainee housing, guard towers, administrative facilit[ies] and Vehicle/Personnel Access Control Gates, security surveillance and restricted access systems,” according to an official government solicitation . Surprisingly, a Turkish company received the contract back in late January. Danger Room points out that all the way back in 2010 senior military officials who were in charge of the detention center actually boasted about their plan to close the facility by January 2012. The officials apparently saw the plan to hand the center over to the Afghans “a mark of their own success at fostering a culture of law and order within the Afghan government,” but obviously something changed along the way. Join Task Force-435, the command in charge of the massive prison complex, admitted that they would not be handing off the facility to the Afghans until combat will supposedly end in 2014. Of course, like I pointed out earlier, this date is about as reliable as the date of January 2012 for a complete handoff of the prison. An official told the Financial Times last year that this was because, “The Afghans don’t have the legal framework or the capacity to deal with violence being inflicted on the country by the insurgency.” Something tells me we will hear similar claims being made when 2014 rolls around. Danger Room rightly points out that there is deeply flawed logic inherent in this claim's obvious conflict with the plan to double the prison population at the Detention Facility at Parwan. How are they going to have the legal framework or capacity to deal with 2,000 prisoners when they couldn't even handle 1,000? Interestingly, Spencer Ackerman, Danger Room's senior reporter, said that during his visit to Fort Leavensworth, Kansas, soldiers referred to the war in Afghanistan in the past tense. This is even while there will be some 68,000 troops still present by the end of summer and there is truly no end to this war in sight. Thankfully, Danger Room isn't taking the wildly ignorant stance of so much of the mainstream media in lapping up the government's claims of actually ending the war in 2014. They correctly point to the plans for keeping troops on Afghan bases although I think the talk at the loya jirga last year of actually keeping American bases present is even more important. There is also the need to continue running incursions into Pakistan and the West will never give up the strategic position of Afghanistan in the region. The Bagram base in Afghanistan has become somewhat infamous due to allegations of a “secret jail” at the airbase which was used to torture and abuse prisoners. Indeed, a whopping nine witnesses documented the so-called “Black Hole” on the base for the BBC , and unsurprisingly the U.S. military flatly denied all of the allegations. The most troubling aspect of this story, though, is the fact that this is only a microcosmic aspect of the growth of American prisons across Afghanistan. Indeed, in July of 2011, Danger Room reported that the U.S. military was planning on spending an additional $25-100 million on more prison facilities. Of course that massive sum was complete separate from this new $35 million expenditure. This issue is incredibly important because it does not just affect the Afghans who are being detained and possibly tortured, this affects every single taxpayer in the United States. We are footing the bill to expand these prisons and hold these individuals under the sham that is the so-called “War on Terror.” We are not stopping terrorism, we are just funneling even more wealth into the coffers of the upper crust of the 1%, the war profiteers .