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Guantanamo's Unhappy Campers
ADVANCE COPY from the February 11, 2002 issue: Some strange things
are happening at Gitmo.
by Matt Labash
02/01/2002 6:00:00 PM
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA
It's 5 A.M. at the Roosevelt Roads Naval station in Puerto Rico, and
20 journalists straggle to the gate in sleep- deprived silence to
catch a plane to Guantanamo Bay. Many of us haven't been up this
early in years. But after flying thousands of miles, then pub-
crawling through the streets of Old San Juan last night, we are here
because our military escorts insist we show up at this time, though
the flight actually leaves four hours later. "The military operates
on one principle," explains a savvy veteran: "Hurry up and wait."
If we're not happy, that goes double for our public affairs
babysitters. "I'm up to my ears in Vieques," says Navy Lt. Corey
Barker, of the nearby bombing range/public relations fiasco that has
been protested by everyone
from Al Sharpton to obscure Kennedys. Now, Barker is stuck minding us as we light out
for Guantanamo, the American naval station on the southeastern tip of Cuba. It is
there that 158 al Qaeda/Taliban prisoners are being d
etained because, depending on who you ask, it is an ideal, sunny clime, it's not
subject to the get-out-of-jail escape hatches of U.S. federal law, or because, as one
senior Pentagon official says, "The lawyers didn't wan
t to go on 14-hour flights to some guano rock in the Pacific."
Inside the air terminal, our baggage handlers check us in with the efficiency of
Bulgarian DMV workers. A sign on the wall says "Air Terminal of the Year 2000." "I'd
hate to see who got second place," whispers one reporte
r. As we wait for our flight on a creaky Pan Am jet, we are shunted off to the "VIP"
room, so named because it has a coffee pot and seascape paintings that look pilfered
from a south Florida retirement village. Here, we a
re given our media "indoctrination" packages, never an encouraging word if you aspire
to reportorial autonomy. As we sit watching CNN, an unfounded rumor gains currency.
Though it's Saturday, and we're supposed to be in C
uba until Monday, the military has changed plans and is going to make us leave
Guantanamo Sunday morning. "One thing's for sure," says a wire reporter, "you won't
have to sort through all your notes to decide what to lead
with."
Fearing an abbreviated schedule, I commence valuable newsgathering. Knowing that in
some Taliban-held provinces, pederasty rivaled headless-goat polo (buzkashi) as the
favorite pastime, I ask a Naval officer if there are
any reports of Guantanamo prisoners turning to man-love. "Oh God no," he says. "Though
there are some Air Force personnel over there, so who knows what's going on?"
Another officer relays something we'll hear repeated often: that because of
international political pressure, the prisoners are getting coddled. The latest report
has Army guards directing detainees on which way to pray t
o Mecca. "They're actually going to paint arrows on the floors of the cells so they'll
know to face north," he says. "You mean east," I say. "North, east, whatever," he
replies, "I'm Lutheran--I don't know where the hell
it is."
A FEW hours later, we touch down at the Guantanamo landing strip on the isolated
leeward side of the base (Gitmo, as it is nicknamed, is actually bisected by
Guantanamo Bay). After getting sniffed by a German shepherd who
's more interested in bombs than my colleague's Percocet, we're escorted to the media
center, an ugly wood- paneled affair that sits next to a pink hangar. After another
hour or two of waiting, a mouthy reporter loudly ca
lls his editor so we can all hear him report the latest: "Same shit, different day.
Though they're really cleaning up the media center. Curtains, an air conditioner, even
a freakin' bulletin board!"
The hospitality ends there. A stern sign on the bulletin board admonishes us to clean
up after ourselves. The goodies set out on a table (grape beverage powder and apple
jelly from meals-ready-to-eat packs) practically sc
ream, "Can't wait till you leave." Many of us had secretly harbored the fantasy that
we could talk our overseers into letting us go right up to the prisoners' cells, the
terrorist equivalent of a field trip to the ASPCA.
But as a gaggle of public affairs officers enter, they lay down two immutable laws:
There will be no access to detainees (the Geneva Convention forbids making them a
"public curiosity"). And we can go only where the offic
ers take us. Running the public affairs show is Army Lt. Col. William Costello, a
bearish soldier who looks like the kind of guy who enjoys breaking things on his face.
His hard, dark orbs dart to and fro while he deliver
s a good news/bad news proposition. The good news is Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld will be visiting the detainees' Camp X-Ray the next morning. The bad news is
that the unfounded rumor is founded--the Pentagon pres
s corps is coming with him, and we'll be forced to leave a day early.
Immediately, an angry media throng closes in on Costello, the air now containing an
Altamont-like level of violence. "My editors are going to crush my nuts," says one
reporter, probably female. "This is crazy," I say, "Ho
w am I supposed to get enough material for a piece?" "Not my problem," replies
Costello. "This is bullshit," thunders another print reporter. "You're making us leave
as the biggest story gets here." "You're not allowed to
stay," says Costello. "Why not?" snaps the reporter. Costello's blood rises as his
high-and-tight haircut stands up like an angry-dog scruff: "BECAUSE . . . YOU'RE . . .
NOT . . . STAYING!" "Welcome to the Pearl of the A
ntilles," deadpans Lt. Commander Brendan McPherson, in a limp cruise-director chirp.
It's understandable if public affairs types are a little testy. There's an obvious
culture clash (military personnel don't get paid to ask why; journalists don't get
paid otherwise). Besides that, ever since the detainees
started arriving on January 11, Gitmo and the joint forces being run under Southern
Command have experienced the PR equivalent of what my ever-subtle
colleagues--borrowing from Special Forces terminology for disastrous m
issions--call a "goat f--." In the richest irony of the war on terrorism, the
Department of Defense, which normally goes out of its way not to make news, caused an
international outcry by releasing still shots of detainee
s being brought to Camp X-Ray.
As they were transported and in-processed, al Qaeda members were photographed
kneeling, wearing earmuffs, shackles, and blackout goggles. Though these seemed
perfectly reasonable precautions to take when transporting by C
-141 members of an organization already responsible for one prison uprising
(Mazar-i-Sharif, which resulted in a CIA operative's death) and several suicide plane
crashes, human rights groups and international media, led b
y a chorus of Euro-whiners, immediately lapsed into hysterics.
The British press, with typical understatement, claimed prisoners were being
"brutalized, tortured, and humiliated," and that the whole operation was nothing more
than "a sick attempt to appeal to the worst red-neck preju
dices." Tony Blair pointed out that the three British al Qaeda members being held at
Gitmo have had no complaints. But that didn't stop the Mirror's Stephen Moyes from
method reporting by donning an al Qaeda rig. "Wrapped
in the suffocating orange boiler suit," he wrote, "I lost any sense of dignity"--a
loss he could have just as easily sustained by rereading his own copy.
Sillier still were protestations from such humanitarians as Saddam Hussein and the
government of Malaysia (Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has made some of the loudest
noise, though Amnesty International dings him for arr
esting the speechwriter of a political rival, who was then blindfolded, stripped
naked, punched, verbally abused, and forced to simulate homosexual acts--none of which
is alleged at Camp X-Ray). About the only foreign lea
der who has supported the American detainee camp, ironically, is Fidel Castro, who is
either angling to end the embargo or inching ever closer to dementia. (He declared
January "Americans' Month" and invited Jimmy Carter
for a visit.)
All of this has made Camp X-Ray personnel a sensitive lot. On the ferry crossing over
to the windward side where the camp is located, I sit next to a now mellow Lt. Col.
Costello, who has decided to patch things up with t
he reporter he snapped at, and who, after getting the sign-off from Southern Command,
has cleared us to stay through Rumsfeld's visit. Costello, like many Gitmo types, is
baffled at the uproar over the prisoners' treatmen
t. "Soldiers and Marines that are guarding the detainees at Camp X-Ray have worse
conditions than the detainees," he says. Much has been made over their being kept in
outdoor cells, invariably called "cages," which are to
pped with corrugated tin-covered wooden roofs that keep what little rain Gitmo gets
(six inches a year) off the prisoners. Costello says their eight-by-eight cells
contain about twice as much space as soldiers have in the
ir crowded, unventilated tents a few hundred yards away.
"They're getting warm showers, clean laundry, hot chow," Costello says of the
prisoners. "They're getting 2,600 calories a day. I'm not getting 2,600 calories a
day. I'm running my ass off chasing you guys around." (One o
f the medics treating detainees claims that a full quarter of them were suffering from
malnutrition when they were captured.)
But we don't have to take Costello's word for it. We can see for ourselves, sort of.
After a quick stop at McDonald's (the only one in Cuba), our white school bus
transports us past beautiful seaside vistas and brownish c
actus- infested scrub, past ramshackle housing and up a hill, which features an
abandoned auto yard that the locals used to call Sears. It's where they'd strip old
junkers for parts then used on jerry-rigged jalopies call
ed "Gitmo specials."
Across from Sears is Camp X-Ray, a teeming hive of concertina wire, canvas tents,
guard towers, and newly constructed plywood interrogation shacks with window-unit air
conditioners. The chain-link cells themselves don't n
eed air conditioning, since a comfortable Caribbean breeze (temperatures range from
the low 70s at night to the low 80s during the day) continuously circulates through
the encampment.
Restricted to an area about 150 yards away from the open-air cellblocks, we observe
the camp from a slight elevation that CNN's John Zarrella calls "Heartbreak Ridge," so
named "because if you're a journalist, it breaks y
our heart that you can't get closer." Gitmo has actually been the site of a lot of
heartbreak over the years.
It broke Christopher Columbus's, when he stopped here on his second New World voyage.
He left after failing to find gold, threatening to cut off the tongues of his crew if
they didn't agree to pretend they'd reached Asia.
It also rankles Castro, who has wanted to throw us off the island for four decades,
but can't because of a pre-Revolution lease agreement. Likewise, when thousands of
Cuban rafters were detained here for months in the mi
d-'90s, many grew so unhappy with Gitmo's ghostly desolation that they'd do anything
to leave, including inject diesel fuel into their veins, drive tent stakes into their
limbs, even swim back to Castro's Cuba.
By comparison, the al Qaedans look pretty fat, if not happy. They laze away in the
shade of their cells. They sleep on inch-and-a-half-thick isomats, the same ones that
are issued to our military. With the assistance of a
Muslim Navy chaplain, they pray five times daily. (Quick studies, the al Qaedans
didn't need arrows painted on their cell floors. A single signpost next to an American
flag points the way to Mecca.) And while American pr
isoners in the Hanoi Hilton often spent years in solitary confinement and received no
medical care (John McCain to this day can't comb his own hair), X-Ray detainees get
daily sick calls from all manner of doctors, from o
ptometrists to podiatrists. The prisoners (who represent about 25 different
nationalities but mostly are Saudis) can also freely chat with each other about God
knows what: prison uprisings, the demise of Talk magazine, tr
ades of Froot Loops for garlic bagel chips.
Their restroom arrangements are pretty spartan. They get a white bucket for emergency
squirts, while they are instructed to hold two fingers up for the alternative. At that
time, a guard shackles them and takes them to th
e port- o-loo. While the military has spared no expense in construction costs (in
three weeks, they built a completely operational field hospital staffed by 160 medical
personnel--two more than there are prisoners), they'
ve saved a fortune in toilet paper. It's the detainees' cultural preference not to use
any. "We don't shake their hands," says one camp guard.
In addition to the aforementioned amenities, detainees also receive two towels, a
Koran, a shortened toothbrush (still long enough to file into a shiv), a canteen, a
bucket of water, fluoride toothpaste, and shampoo. Not
just any shampoo, but "Lively" salon anti-dandruff shampoo--a "luxurious shampoo in a
gentle formula that restores moisture, shine, and body to your beautifully clean
hair." Those who think the prisoners are getting coddl
ed (Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican, visited the camp and said it's "too good for
the bastards") will be happy to know that the shampoo is not jojoba-enriched.
WHILE public affairs officers these days are going to great lengths to talk about how
docile the prisoners are, detainees have been reported biting a guard, spitting, and
threatening to kill Americans. When I skirt away f
rom my minders and visit the Marine snipers' tent, I learn it went well beyond that.
The snipers, of course, are the camp's deadliest sharpshooters, ropy young bucks
(21-23 years of age) who seem largely culled from the western or southern United
States, where firearms are often regarded as extra appendag
es. Their tent looks like a Marines-issued college dorm room: Skoal-juice bottles,
laundry hanging everywhere, and a spade-like sniper insignia banner tacked to a tent
wall. If there is a prison uprising, it is these gent
leman who will man the guard towers and introduce the rioters to their 72 black-eyed
virgins.
At some point, that might become necessary, they tell me, as plotting is obviously
afoot. Sgt. Matt Lampert of Montana says the other day one of the prisoners was caught
"with a piece of cloth stuffed with rocks that was
tied off at the end." Sgt. Rodney Davis says that during chowtime, he sees them
through his scope "making terrain models out of their food." And unlike say, Afghan
prisons, where starving detainees are reportedly begging
to be sent to Gitmo, there's plenty of food to play with. "They get fed better than
us, sir," says Lampert. When I ask the Marines if they've seen anything weird, they
laugh sheepishly, looking at each other. Finally, Sgt
. Josh Westbrook, who sports a forearm tattoo of flaming baby heads, steps up. "They
know they're being watched," he explains, "so they'll stare at you, and while they
stare at you, they'll, uh, masturbate."
According to these Marines, they don't just pleasure themselves to freak out the
snipers, but also to embarrass the female Army guards in the camp's interior. The
weirdness doesn't end there. They've also eaten their toil
etries and urinated on equipment. "The other day," says Westbrook, "one of the guys
tried to do a naked cartwheel." In the most bizarre twist, Lance Corporal Devin
Klebaur says a few have also been known to "put toothpast
e in their ass." "What's the purpose?" I ask. "I'm not sure," he says, puzzled.
After leaving the snipers, I collar other grunts who say they believe the prisoners
are more apt to act out whenever they see one of the regular visitors from the
International Committee of the Red Cross enter the camp. "
They're looking to be disciplined," says one, so that any aggressive guard behavior
will make it look as if they're being brutalized by the American military in front of
international witnesses. ICRC visits, says another
soldier, are the highlight of a prisoner's day, since they've been spotted "giving the
unshackled prisoners cookies and milk, cigarettes, shaking their hands." Many
organizations who haven't been to Gitmo, like Human Righ
ts Watch, have been extremely critical of the prisoners' treatment, while the ICRC has
aired no complaints. Still, says another soldier, "They're a pain in the ass. We see
them offering them cookies, hugging them like the
y're best buddies. They're undermining everything we're trying to do."
What we're trying to do isn't exactly clear at this point. We are certainly
interrogating the prisoners, though base sources won't divulge any information that's
been gleaned. The prisoners will likely be formally charged
and tried, though when I called a senior Pentagon source to find out by whom and
when, the source said, "If you find out, will you please tell me?"
ON SUNDAY, Rumsfeld visits, and we hope for illumination. Sitting on a bus on the
tarmac, waiting for the secretary to emerge from his plane, we pass the time as
journalists do, discussing the AP-style spelling of "bin La
den," speculating whether the prisoners will get an Internet cafe (one of them has
asked for video games), and making fun of the fresh-meat Pentagon press corps, who are
overdressed in heavy wools instead of our much cool
er island linens.
One of Rumsfeld's security agents mounts our bus, telling us the ground rules: no
photos on the tarmac, no fighting, no hitting Rumsfeld in the head with a boom mike.
After Rumsfeld tours Camp X-Ray with four senators and
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers (who is so overshadowed by
the secretary's rock star aura that one reporter has to ask who he is), Rumsfeld meets
the press on Heartbreak Ridge. He gives the sort
of hooah performance that has endeared him to both the troops and the press. While he
remains as firm as ever that the detainees are "illegal combatants," not "prisoners of
war," which would afford them more rights under
the Geneva Convention, he nicely avoids plucking the only hair worth
splitting--whether the captives' status is his call. (Human rights hawks say the
matter should be decided by a "competent tribunal," whatever that is.)
Even if it isn't up to Rumsfeld, the argument seems rather academic. It's hard to
imagine anyone who has actually read the Geneva Convention wanting to confer POW
status on alleged al Qaeda members. Doing so would not onl
y make the terrorists eligible for repatriation to their home countries, but also
would forbid their being punished for trying to escape, allow them to receive
"scientific equipment" from home, and even confer upon them t
he right to dentures--in case they lost their teeth while, say, biting a guard. Most
ludicrous, they would be afforded "advances of pay" in an amount "never . . .
inferior" to that which we pay our own armed forces. If yo
u're a terrorist from Central Asia, it's not a bad deal: Kill Americans, get arrested,
then get a pay raise from America.
With all the global bellyaching about the detainees' right to humane treatment, it's
hard to imagine them getting better treatment than they're already receiving. On my
last day at Gitmo, all I have time to eat is a stale
Ding Dong and a greasy plate of onion rings. My public affairs keepers couldn't care
less. By contrast, for breakfast and lunch alone, the prisoners are served oatmeal, an
orange, peanut butter, margarine, a "culturally
appropriate" halal meal, and a giant snack pack containing Froot Loops, raisins, a
Nature Valley granola bar, baked garlic bagel chips, and Bullseye barbecue-seasoned
sunflower kernels. Still, the overseers of the prison
are concerned that detainees aren't getting enough pita bread with their meals, and
they're planning to make the food spicier, just the way the prisoners like it back
home.
While we wait, we journalists have to stand in the hot sun most of the day. After
hours, we are confined to our Consolidated Bachelor Quarters, sleeping four to a
duplex room on cots, some without pillows or blankets. We
aren't even allowed to go the beach, a few hundred yards away from our building
(though, emboldened by the rum we imported from Puerto Rico, a colleague and I make a
mad dash under a guard searchlight for the bathwater Ca
ribbean anyway). Besides drinking, our only entertainment is a pool table--one cue is
cracked, the other is missing its tip. The prisoners, by contrast, get to read their
Korans, while novels and more "religious books" ar
e on the way.
At the end of their day, they get a good night's sleep in a single cell. At the end of
our day, we are told that a C-141 (the same plane that transported the detainees) just
became available, and we are prematurely hustle
d off so the military can dump us in Nowheresville, New Jersey, on a Sunday night
after every rental car place in the state has closed.
Perhaps the international community is right. The treatment being meted out at
Guantanamo is inhumane. To see for yourself, don't bother canvassing Camp X-Ray
prisoners. Just get a Gitmo press pass.
Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
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