Bagram: The other Guantanamo?

While the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has been the subject of legal wrangling and international controversy since the U.S. started sending terrorism suspects there in 2002, the explosive growth of the detainee population at a prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan has largely escaped international or domestic scrutiny.

Today, there are more than 3,000 detainees at Bagram, or five times the number (around 600) when President Barack Obama took office in January 2009. There are currently 18 times as many detainees at Bagram than at the U.S. military prison at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, whose prisoner population has dwindled from a peak of 780 to 170.

Watchtowers along the perimeter of the Bagram prison, north of Kabul. The facility is run by around 700 military personnel working for the Joint Task Force 435, created by former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates "to take responsibility for all U.S. detainee operations in Afghanistan."

U.S. soldiers from Joint Task Force 435 at the detention facility near Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, about an hour's drive north of Kabul.

A cell block at the detention center at the U.S. Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, November 15, 2009. The prison was built at a cost of $60 million and replaced an existing one located on the same base.

A U.S. military guard watches over detainee cells inside the detention facility near Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, March 23, 2011 photograph.

Afghan detainees are seen through mesh wire fence inside the detention facility near Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, March 23, 2011.

Daphne Eviatar, an attorney for Human Rights First, interviewed nearly 20 former detainees in Afghanistan and was permitted to observe several detainee hearings at Bagram. "It's worse than Guantanamo," Eviatar said in an interview with CBS News, "because there are fewer rights."

Eviatar's report documented stories of detainees held from seven months to seven years. "There was no evidence presented, there was no questioning of the government's evidence, whether this person had done anything wrong, whether he deserved to be in prison. So that's a real problem - you have a complete lack of due process."

Afghan detainees, seen through a mesh wire fence, prepare for noon prayers inside the detention facility near Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, March 23, 2011.

Unlike Guantanamo, the Department of Defense won't release the names of its Bagram detainees or its reasons for holding them indefinitely.

Detainees stand inside a cell block inside the U.S.-run detention facility near Bagram north of Kabul, Afghanistan on Monday, Sept. 27, 2010.

In this March 23, 2011 file photo, a prayer rug and skull cap of an Afghan detainee are seen on his bedding inside a cell in the detention facility near Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

A prisoner in an orange uniform stands in a cell in the U.S.-run Detention Facility in Bagram north of Kabul, Afghanistan on Friday, Aug 27, 2010.

A detainee stands inside a cell inside the U.S.-run detention facility near Bagram north of Kabul, Afghanistan on Monday Sept. 27, 2010.