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Afghan prisoner Abdul looks out from behind the bars at the Kandahar prison, Afghanistan, December 13, 2001. Dispensing with U.S. or international law as it rounded up suspects after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration routinely captured "the wrong guys" - including a number who were working for the Afghan government. With more than two-thirds of the former detainees now released without charges, it is possible to draw a first assessment of the detention process.
Tom Pennington / Fort Worth Star-Telegram / MCT
One detainee facility was at the southern Kandahar International Airport, shown here in December 2001 where members of the 26th Marine Expeditionary unit stand guard. Although the public outcry in the United States and abroad has focused mainly on detainee abuse at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, sadistic violence first appeared at Bagram and Kandahar.
Tom Pennington / Fort Worth Star-Telegram / MCT
The abandoned Bagram Air Force Base in the Shamali plains of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, in October 2001.
David P. Gilkey / Detroit Free Press / MCT
Nazar Gul says he was beaten about every five days while a prisoner at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan in 2003. He was later held at Guantanamo for 36 months.
Read the McClatchy special package "Guantanamo: Beyond the Law"
Watch the video about the eight-month investigation.
See a database of 66 detainee profiles.
Travis Heying / Wichita Eagle / MCT
According to Afghan officials and a review of his case, Nazar Gul was not a member of Al Qaida or the Taliban. His arrest and detention appeared to be a case of mistaken identity. U.S. officials mistook him for a man with a similar name who was already being held at Guantanamo.
MCT
Some detainees died in the facilities. This picture from a U.S. court martial file, drawn by military polygraph examiner George Chigi III, shows how Afghan detainee Dilawar was shackled by his wrists to the ceiling of an isolation cell at Bagram Air Base before being beaten to death in December 2002. The notation about common peroneal strikes -- a knee strike targeting a nerve near the knee, intended to cause paralyzing pain -- is a reference to the number of times that then-Private First Class Willie Brand admitted during an interview session to hitting Dilawar.
MCT
Khaled Al Asmr alledged that U.S. soldiers at Bagram Air Base abused him. He shows how his arms were bound behind his back by American soldiers, as he sits in the meeting room of his home in Irbid, Jordan, in March 2007.
Tom Lasseter / MCT
Adel Zamel said guards frequently waved sticks at him and threatened to rape him at Bagram during the spring of 2002.
MCT
During an interview in Kuwait City, in March 2007, Adel Zamel shook his head and said he remembered hearing detainees being beaten and "the cries from the interrogation room" at Bagram.
Tom Lasseter / MCT
"When they moved me to the interrogation room they covered my eyes, and took me up steep stairs. I always fell on the ground," said Afghan Akhtar Mohammed about his detention at Bagram Air Force Base in the spring of 2003. "And when I fell down, they punched and kicked me."
Travis Heying / Wichita Eagle / MCT
In May 2008, a group of men walked free in Kabul, Afghanistan. Most of them had spent several years in U.S. prisons at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan, and at the Guantanamo detention facility in Cuba.
MCT
The background of these men, along with their involvement with any terrorist organization was not known, but several of them said they had been beaten at Bagram while detained there. Twenty-nine men total were released that day after being given ten dollars at the headquarters of the Afghanistan Peace Commission.
Travis Heying / Wichita Eagle / MCT
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