Negotiations in Afghanistan on a long-term military agreement are breaking down because of resistance to night raids by US forces and US-run prisons. There’s also the fact that Afghans and Pakistanis, like most people I assume, don’t particularly like it when you kill their citizens and desecrate their most sacred rituals. Just recently, t he US and NATO apologized for inadvertently burning Korans at one of their air bases

The focus on Guantanamo over the past couple years has hidden the fact that the number of detainees there has been dissipating somewhat. The number of detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan has exploded, with detainees captured throughout the world moved over to Bagram and shielded from any habeas proceedings. Bagram has become the black hole. So it’s good news, on its face, that the Administration wants to repatriate non-Afghan detainees out of Bagram.

Walter Pincus was the guy at the Washington Post known for writing skeptical stories about the Iraq debacle that wound up on page A17. He still gets that level of respect today, even when he’s got better information than anyone else. In this case, Pincus advances the story of permanent bases in Afghanistan (I’m calling them permanent bases, even if they end up being “joint bases” in the end), by taking a look at the construction contracts.

The voices of the tortured keep speaking to me. They will not be quieted. They will continuing speaking long after I am old and gone. Will they be heard, or buried again in a spiritual dungeon built out of human indifference, ignorance, and fear?

When the votes were tallied on the night of November 2, 2008, I was at a bar in Moab, Utah – the one rabid Democratic stronghold in a rabidly Republican state – to enjoy the hysteria as Barack Obama was summoned to lead the country out of the disaster of eight years of George W. Bush. People shook hands, hooted, clinked glasses, got drunk, raised fists, wept. The good liberals had elected a visionary Democrat to the presidency, who, blessed with a Democratic majority in Congress, would fashion “hope” and “change” into a palpable policy. I was told that in parts of Brooklyn, my hometown, voters ran through the streets banging pots and pans. The feeling was of religious jubilee – the new dispensation was upon us, and 2009 would mark the emancipation from the old rottenness. Corruption and fraud and deceit and war and oligarchy would be washed from the body politic. It was the beginning of the restoration of the republic.

On Friday, Russia joined the growing list of country telling us to investigate our torture chambers. And on the subject of investigating torture, as we’ve been noting, the statute of limitations on the torture tape destruction expires today. Have we indicted anyone yet?

A new report by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations corroborates earlier news stories on torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners by the U.S. forces at a secret prison within the Bagram complex near Kabul, Afghanistan. While the vast majority of the press have ignored it, one of the report’s “main findings” was that the abuse of prisoners is linked to use of the Army Field Manual’s Appendix M.

War is not politics, it is violence – murder – on an enormous scale. It does not lead to democracy, security, or good governance, it leads to anger, humiliation, and above all else, more violence.

Andy Worthington is posting portions of the United Nations’ “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, 186-page report issued last February. The UN report was hardly reported by either the U.S. press or the blogosphere, and deserves wide dissemination.

BBC reports that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has confirmed the existence of a second prison site at Bagram. The presence of a second site has long been suspected, a prison the Afghans call Tor Prison, or the “Black” Prison.