Bagram Prison Exposed

intangible child · 11-25-2009, 03:32 PM

Dear Defending the Truth Members,

As the President prepares to announce a decision on escalation in Afghanistan, Brave New Foundation brings you this rare and important testimony of two former prisoners at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. Their experiences serve as an important reminder of what this war looks like to the Afghan civilian population.
Bagram Prison Exposed – Rethink Afghanistan War Blog

Gathering footage like this is a tricky and sometimes dangerous endeavor. To talk to these two former prisoners, we tracked down Tina Foster from the International Justice Network, who provided us with the habeus corpus petition her organization had filed on behalf of Abdul Raqeeb, who at that time was imprisoned at Bagram. Next we got in touch with the Afghanistan Human Rights Organization about interviewing Raqeeb's brother, Noor.

Eventually Abdul was released and we arranged for both brothers to travel to Kabul, because it was too risky for our camera crew to travel outside of the city. There they met with our field producer on the ground in Afghanistan.

Even after shooting the interviews, it took our field producer a month to get the footage back to our office in California, because the courier companies cannot send out footage without a letter from the Ministry of Information and Culture. In the end, in fact, she had to fly to Dubai to dispatch the footage from there.
Bagram Prison Exposed – Rethink Afghanistan War Blog

This kind of planning and improvising is necessary when you're dealing with an undeveloped and war-torn country like Afghanistan. That's why so few stories like these come out of the mainstream media. And that's why it's critical for Brave New Foundation to continue to be able to carry on this work, to show the public what's really happening in Afghanistan.
Bagram Prison Exposed – Rethink Afghanistan War Blog