Bagram Airbase

Originally used to process prisoners captured during Operation Enduring Freedom, Bagram has become backlogged with prisoners who are held for years without charge, trial or legal rights.

Unlike detainees at Guantánamo, prisoners at Bagram are still being held in a legal black-hole; they have no access to lawyers and thus are unable to challenge their detention, despite the fact that between 2002 and 2008 several prisoners who had undergone torture were released without having even been put on trial.

As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama unequivocally rejected the "false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus". Yet when his adminstration took office it chose to stand by Bush's legal arguments concerning Bagram detainees: as enemy combatants they had no constitutional rights.

Prisoners have been subjected to beatings, stress positions, sexual abuse and humiliation, sensory deprivation, sleep, food and water deprivation, exposure to cold temperature, dousing with cold water and blaring of loud music.

Omar Deghayes said:

“The camp looked like the Nazi camps that I saw in films… Lying on the floor of the compound, all night I would hear the screams of others in the rooms above us as they were tortured and interrogated.

"My number would be called out, and I would have to go to the gate. They chained me and put a bag over my head, dragging me off for my own turn. They would force me to my knees for questioning, and threaten me with more torture."

Tariq Dergoul, a British National, was injured by the Northern Alliance and then sold to the US for $5,000. While detained at Bagram, he suffered frostbite for which he was denied medical care. He ultimately required the amputation of the affected limb.

Dilawar was a taxi driver, known to be innocent by his interrogators, who was murdered by his captors in December 2002. He was subjected to over 100 sadistic blows to his legs by various guards, strikes performed as "a kind of running joke". As a result, his legs became "pulpified", according to the autopsy report, and the blunt trauma killed him.

Bagram prison originally consisted of crude pens fashioned from metal cages surrounded by coils of razor wire. Roughly twenty people shared a cage, sleeping on foam mats and using plastic buskets as toilets. Military personnel described it as "far more spartan" than Guantánamo.

Faced with serious overcrowding in 2004, the military began refurbishing the prison and installed flush toilets. As of 2005, the US Army claimed that Bagram had a maximum capacity of 595 prisoners. The basic infrastructure, however, remained the same. Hundreds of detainees were still held in wire-mesh pens and exercise, kitchen and bathroom space was minimal.

In August 2008 the US government awarded a $50 million contract for a new prison, one that will have the capacity to hold 1,100 prisoners. It is currently under construction.

For the BBC's reporting on allegations of abuse and neglect at Bagram please click here.