NEW YORK, Feb 26: The US military has quietly expanded a less-visible prison at Bagram, near Kabul, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges, The New York Times reported on Sunday.

The news came as an international debate rages over the future of the American detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the harsh treatment meted out to detainees has been denounced by several international organizations, including the United Nations, which has recently called for its closure.

In an in-depth dispatch, the Times said that Pentagon officials describe the Bagram detention site as merely a “screening centre”. They say most of the detainees were Afghans who might eventually be released under an amnesty programme or transferred to an Afghan prison that is to be built with American aid.

But some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years, the newspaper said in a detailed dispatch. And unlike those at Guantanamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.

“Privately, some administration officials acknowledge that the situation at Bagram has increasingly come to resemble the legal void that led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June 2004 affirming the right of prisoners at Guantanamo to challenge their detention in United States courts,” the Times said.

“While Guantanamo offers carefully scripted tours for members of Congress and journalists, Bagram has operated in rigorous secrecy since it opened in 2002. It bars outside visitors except for the International Red Cross and refuses to make public the names of those held there. The prison may not be photographed, even from a distance.

“From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and bleaker than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard”.

“Bagram was never meant to be a long-term facility, and now it’s a long-term facility without the money or resources,” a Defence Department official, who has toured the detention centre, was quoted as saying. Comparing the prison with Guantanamo, the official added, “Anyone who has been to Bagram would tell you it’s worse.”

Former detainees were cited as saying that the renovations had improved conditions somewhat, and human rights groups said reports of abuse had steadily declined there since 2003. Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s chief adviser on detainee issues, Charles Stimson, declined to be interviewed on Bagram, as did senior detention officials at the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in Afghanistan, according to the Times.”—APP