May 18, 2008	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 12, 1429

UNITED NATIONS, May 17: In a clear signal that United States plans to hold prisoners overseas for years to come, the Pentagon plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, the New York Times reported on Saturday.

The proposed detention centre would replace the “cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.“

The Times said that until now, the Bush administration had signalled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The newspaper said “the Pentagon is planning to use $60 million in emergency construction funds this fiscal year to build a complex of 6 to 10 semi-permanent structures resembling Quonset huts, each the size of a football field,’’ a Defence Department official said.

The military plans to request $24 million in fiscal year 2009 and $7.4 million in fiscal year 2010 to pay for educational programmes, job training and other parts of what American officials call a reintegration plan. After that, the Pentagon plans to pay about $7 million a year in training and operational costs.

“Our existing theatre internment facility is deteriorating,” Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the senior Pentagon official for detention policy, told the Times. “It was renovated to do a temporary mission. There is a sense that this is the right time to build a new facility.”