Obama attempts to remedy past Bush blunders

By Sue Gloor

The Obama administration has begun to make marked changes in the United States’ approach to dealing with alleged terrorists, the New York Times reports. Especially under focus is the Bagram prison near Kabul, Afghanistan, which is known for using “heavy interrogation” methods that have so far killed two detainees.

The Pentagon has come up with several changes to current detention center operating procedures, which will hopefully be more in compliance with human rights legislation:

--Assign an official to each of the 600 detainees at Bagram, who will then be responsible for aiding the detainee in pleading his case before a military-appointed review board. The official will be able to gather documents, find witnesses and review classified information, for example, to help the detainee challenge his detention.

--Close the old Bagram prison and replace it with a new, more “modern and humane” 40-acre complex.

--The U.S. military will release the identities of detainees held in some prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan to the International Committee of the Red Cross, something it has refused to do previously.

--Pentagon officials will be more sensitive to the conditions under which detainees are held, will try to separate the extremists from the moderate militants and will determine treatment accordingly.

Some people, especially advocates from human rights groups, are unsure that the new detention standards will be enforced enough to actually affect the detainees. They believe that some of the guidelines, like acquiring enough government officials to assign each detainee his own representative, will be difficult to put into practice.

Pentagon officials are confident, though, that the proposed changes will increase the fairness and morality surrounding the detention of the suspects. Obama still wants to keep the Bagram prison open and working, since it is one of the few places that terrorism suspects captured outside of Afghanistan and Iraq can be detained.