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Today there are many prisoners who have been victims of kidnapping and imprisonment, the practice known as extraordinary rendition, they have been unlawful arrested and detained by the British and American governments.

Accused by their captors of having links with terrorism, these two men have been held in secret prisons for many years, held incommunicado without any access to the outside world.

Reprieve has recently released conclusive results that their investigations have revealed the identity of two such men, one man, Amanatullah Ali, and the other man is known by the name Salahuddin.

Reprieve is a UK based Human Rights organisation which investigates the cases of prisoners who have been imprisoned without recourse to due legal processes

Reprieve have produced evidence which shows that the the British government has consistently misled parliament and the public about their involvement in any extraordinary rendition operations. (more…)

President Obama has failed to meet his own deadline to close Guantanamo by January 2010, the detention and torture facility remains operative, he now says it will probably close later in 2010, but he does not set a specific deadline.

The adminstration has yet to identify an alternative maximum security detention centre on the US mainland to which they will transfer the remaining detainees, the sites still being considered include U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas and the Standish Maximum Correctional Facility in Standish, Michigan.

Although 40 prisoners are now to be tried in the US, some including alleged 9/11 instigator Khalid Sheikh Mohamed will be tried by Civil Courts and the remainder will be tried by military tribunal.

The remaining detainees are global pariahs, although 90 of them have been cleared for release they are still imprisoned because they are considered to dangerous to be allowed into the US and there is no where else in the world that will accept them.

Dubbed by the Bush adminstration “the worst of the worst,” the twisted logic of the US military deems that even if they weren’t terrorists before their incarceration they may have been so radicalised by their exerience in Guantanamo that if they were released they would take up arms against the US, therefore they must continue stay in detention without recourse to judicial process.

The remainder of the detainees are in a legal limbo, neither charged or cleared, either because there is insufficient evidence to charge them, or, because they have been to badly tortured and mistreated to be able to stand trial.

One possibility is that the US will seek to create more guantanamos in new locations around the globe beyond the jurisdiction of US Justice, one such location is Bagram prison located at Bagram airbase in the ancient city of Bagram near Charikar in Parvan, Afghanistan. (more…)

How the US Funds the Taliban

By Aram Roston

This article appeared in the November 30, 2009 edition of The Nation.

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts–hundreds of millions of dollars–consists of payments to insurgents. (more…)