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Date: Thu, 09 Dec 2004 07:22:33 -0500
Subject: [osint] Permanent jail set for Guantánamo
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[Excerpt: The Pentagon has plans to build a $25 million prison and
establish a permanent guard force in its detention center at Guantánamo
Bay, The Herald has learned.]
{Note: This is almost certainly going to be used to incarcerate U.S.
citizens as well. Helps to isolate them from troublesome lawyers, ACLU,
etc.}
Posted on Thu, Dec. 09, 2004
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/10372662.htm?1c
DETENTION CENTER
Permanent jail set for Guantánamo
The Pentagon has plans to build a $25 million prison and establish a
permanent guard force in its detention center at Guantánamo Bay, The
Herald has learned.
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Even as federal judges weigh whether the U.S. has the authority to
detain and try suspects in the war on terror, the Pentagon is quietly
planning for permanency at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay,
The Herald has learned.
Pentagon planners are now seeking $25 million to build a
state-of-the-art 200-cell concrete building meant to eventually replace
the rows of rugged cells fashioned from shipping containers at Camp Delta.
At the same time, the Army is creating a full-time, professional guard
force -- a 324-member Military Police Internment and Resettlement
Battalion that will replace a temporary, mostly reserve force at Guantánamo.
A Department of Army memorandum to Congress obtained by The Herald
envisions the new military police force being included in the 2005 and
2006 budgets. ''This action is part of a systematic process to enhance
Army's capabilities required to defend the Nation's interests at home
and abroad,'' says the undated memo from the Army's legislative liaison
office.
It gave two key dates: Oct. 16, 2004, to activate the battalion
headquarters and its first company, and Oct. 16, 2005, to activate
another company.
Not all 20 officers and 304 enlisted soldiers have been activated, said
Army Col. David McWilliams of the Southern Command. But an advance team
is already at the base preparing to take up guard duties in the spring,
he said.
A second Army memo to answer congressional queries about the new unit
says it ''doctrinally supports a sensitive operational requirement'' and
``helps to mitigate the high operational tempo of the military police
force.''
Aside from the Marine force that set up the prison nearly three years
ago, many troops who guarded captives in Guantánamo have been Army
reservists mobilized from civilian law enforcement duties in the Midwest.
550 CAPTIVES
The prison today has about 550 captives from 42 nations who have been
brought to Cuba from Afghanistan, the first front in the war against
terrorism. Only four have been charged with crimes, a trial process now
stalled in federal courts.
On Nov. 8, U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington, D.C.,
ruled unconstitutional a Military Commission's war crimes trial for
Osama bin Laden driver Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 34, of Yemen. The Pentagon
then suspended all war crimes trials while the Justice Department
appealed his decision.
Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green is deciding on habeas
corpus petitions brought by civilian lawyers for 53 prisoners alleging
they are illegally detained.
''They're betting that the courts are going to, in the end, find for the
government, that they can keep these enemy combatants, as they label
them, indefinitely, as long as they have some kind of an annual review
process,'' said retired Army Col. Dan Smith, a Vietnam veteran who is
now a senior military affairs fellow at the Friends Committee on
National Legislation, a Quaker lobby.
''So Guantánamo becomes an extra-territorial -- I don't want to say
gulag -- a prison for anyone we want to put down there and label an
unlawful enemy combatant,'' Smith said.
Bush administration officials describe any possible judicial proceedings
there as secondary to the prison's main purpose of holding and
interrogating suspects for intelligence on how al Qaeda works.
Commanders describe the guards' work there as at times humiliating and
testing soldiers' patience because some captives have spewed insults and
spit on guards.
CAMP DELTA
That kind of contact would be reduced under the Pentagon plan to replace
Camp Delta, which was projected to last five years when it opened in May
2002.
Built by KBR, a subsidiary of Pentagon contractor Halliburton, Delta's
cells were welded from steel shipping containers by laborers brought in
from South Asia.
''Camp Delta is comprised of temporary facilities that are rapidly
reaching the end of their design life, and therefore a more permanent
facility is needed,'' said Army spokesman Lt. Col. Leon Sumpter. The new
mortar-and-steel prison, called Camp 6, should cost $25 million.
Commanders hope to consolidate most Camp Delta prisoners into ''these
hardened facilities,'' he said.
Pentagon officials are still crunching the prison project's overall cost
in response to a 2-month-old Herald request. A Senate tally, as of April
2003, estimated building costs only at $104 million. Virtually all
expenditures have come from post-Sept. 11 emergency funding rather than
line-item appropriations by Congress.
A Pentagon spokesman said it was still unclear how the military would
pay for Camp 6. ''There's a lot of unknowns about the project,'' said
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Alvin Plexico.
Begun as a short-term detention and interrogation solution to relieve
overwhelmed troops in Afghanistan, the prison on the Navy base in
southeastern Cuba has had a nearly nonstop three-year building boom.
CAMP 5
Besides the 1,000-cell Camp Delta, the Pentagon has also built Camp 5, a
100-cell version of the new prison being proposed; a new command center,
a laundry, fitness center, movie theater, and extensive dining and
recreation facilities -- all sprawled across an area called Radio Range,
that overlooks the Caribbean. Reporters got a glimpse of the future in
November in a brief tour of Camp 5, which commanders called efficient,
effective and humane despite repeated allegations that U.S.-approved
interrogation techniques are tantamount to torture.
The designs for Camp 5 and 6 copy a medium-security prison in Indiana,
the Miami Correctional Facility at Bunker Hill.
enditem
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