Leaving Bagram

Redha al-Najar, a Tunisian who was suspected of having been one of Osama bin Laden's bodyguards, had been in U.S. custody since May 2002. A defense official said al-Najar and a second Tunisian, Lutfi al-Arbai al-Gharisi, were turned over to Afghan authorities Wednesday, just a day after the Senate report detailed what it characterized as widespread abuses of U.S. detainees since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A Jordanian detainee was also released for repatriation, the officials said.

The Pentagon told NBC News that it "no longer operates detention facilities in Afghanistan nor maintains custody of any detainees" after the final handover. Under Washington's agreement with Kabul, the handoff to Afghanistan wasn't due to go into effect until Jan. 1. Defense officials said they couldn't explain why the U.S. was getting out three weeks early.

  NBC

Oh, really?

The spokesperson told NBC News that the transfers were due to the Jan. 1 deadline and were "not linked to the release of the Senate committee report on detention and interrogation." But, Tina Foster, al-Najar's attorney, said her client — one of the first detainees to have been subjected to the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" — and other detainees were shuttled among various detention centers for years "to avoid scrutiny by U.S. courts." She said al-Najar was turned over less than a week before the U.S. government was to have filed a response to the Supreme Court about his treatment.

The US Defense Department announced it has closed the Bagram detention center and now has zero detainees in its custody in Afghanistan, Reuters reported.

Although the United States transferred control over Bagram to the Afghans back in 2013, the detention center became infamous due the harsh treatment some of the detainees received while in American custody. At one point, it was double the size of the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison complex in Cuba.

The facility's closure comes just one day after the Senate released its long-awaited torture report.

[...]

Two of the most infamous cases involved prisoners named Habibullah and Dilawar, whose abuse was chronicled by The New York Times in 2005. Dilawar – who was chained to the top of his cell for days by the time he died – was brutally beaten and passed away in 2002.

  RT

He “passed away.”

"At the interrogators' behest, a guard tried to force the young man to his knees. But his legs, which had been pummeled by guards for several days, could no longer bend," wrote Tim Golden in the Times.

"An interrogator told Mr. Dilawar that he could see a doctor after they finished with him. When he was finally sent back to his cell, though, the guards were instructed only to chain the prisoner back to the ceiling."

[...]

Habibullah, who died just a few days before Dilawar, was also chained to the ceiling and beaten.