THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

It seems that the US military has something it is not willing to leave behind in Afghanistan, an unknown number of unidentified prisoners being held for unspecified reason.

The fate of a group of prisoners held in near-total secrecy by U.S. forces at a prison in Afghanistan is hanging in limbo, the facility's commander said, as Washington gropes for options after its legal right to hold them there expires in December.

The inmates - all foreign nationals captured on battlefields around the world - could be transferred to the U.S. court system or, as a last resort, to the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, Brigadier General Patrick J. Reinert told Reuters.

The quandary over what to do with the detainees held in a prison near Bagram airfield, north of Kabul, has rekindled the outrage over the U.S. policy of rendition in the early phases of the Afghan war.

In the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, suspected militants were abducted and held in secret prisons worldwide without charge or evidence.

The United State abandoned that policy under President Barack Obama, but the detention of those being held near Bagram is a reminder that the issue has not been concluded.

"We've got to resolve their fate by either returning them to their home country or turning them over to the Afghans for prosecution or any other number of ways that the Department of Defense has to resolve," Reinert told Reuters.

Almost nothing is known of the detainees' identities. The United States has declined to disclose their nationalities, where they were captured and how many are still in its custody.

Their status is increasingly urgent because the United States will lose the right to hold prisoners in Afghanistan after the 2014 end of mission for the U.S.-led force there.

Most of the prisoners are Pakistani, according to the human rights group Justice Project Pakistan. Some are from Yemen, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The inmates remained in U.S. custody after the prison on the outskirts of the U.S. military's Bagram base handed its Afghan detainees over to Afghan control last year.

Gotta Love It! After neither prosecuting them nor keeping them in humane conditions, we won't release them to their home countries because we can't get assurances that they will not prosecuted at home or kept in humane conditions. That would seem to be a moot point at this time.