The Guantanamo Detainees
Why should I care about alleged terrorists?
Not a single detainee at Guantanamo has been "proven"to be a terrorist, since none of them have gone to trial. In fact, several hundred of the detainees at Guantanamo have been sent home after two years of imprisonment because it was determined they were NOT connected to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
What's important to remember, however, it that no matter what the detainees have done, the use of the Guantanamo Naval Base to detain terror suspects without legal proceedings has fundamentally altered both the perception and reality of the US position on both the importance of the Geneva Convention and the power of the executive branch in the constitutional balance of powers. Even if you are not concerned about the detainees currently on the base, you should be concerned about these changes, which are outlined in more detail below.
Who are the detainees? Aren't they all Afghans picked up while fighting on the battlefield?
No. Afghans are the fourth largest nationality with 80 detainees. At least 160 of the 600 plus detainees -- almost a quarter of the total -- are from Saudi Arabia, according to a UPI survey. Others are from the Islamic states of Asia and the Middle East, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. At present, several European governments, including the UK, have been pressing for release of their own citizens, with some success.
Most detainees were arrested in Afghanistan, but others were picked up in Pakistan and also in places as far away as Bosnia, Zambia, and Gambia.
What kind of a facility are the detainees housed in?
Originally, they were housed in Camp X-Ray, a series of what one reporter described as "chain-link cages" that had been used in the past to hold Haitians fleeing political unrest, Cuban boat people, even Kosovo refugees. Now, the detainees have been transferred to another facility -- Camp Delta -- built by Kellogg, Brown & Root, the construction arm of Vice President Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton. Over the past year, KBR has continued to build more cells, guard barracks, and interrogation rooms. Even though many people assumed Guantanamo is "emptying out" for good, the most recent expansion plans suggest that Delta's capacity will eventually exceed 1,000. In 2005, the Defense Department plans to ask Congress for an additional $25 million dollars for expansion.
How long have they been there?
Most of the detainees were captured in late 2001 and early 2002, though some were brought to the base later.
Aren't they providing valuable information?
The Pentagon continues to claim that interrogations at Guantanamo have been useful in conducting the "war on terror," as they have provided valuable information about Al Qaeda. However, as early as September 2002, a CIA report questioned the valued of the detainees, noting that many of the accused terrorists appeared to be low-level recruits who went to Afghanistan to support the Taliban or even innocent men swept up in the chaos of the war.
In interviews with the New York Times in June of 2004 dozens, of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East claimed that -- contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials -- none of the detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of Al Qaeda. They said that only a relative handful were sworn Al Qaeda members.
Who is guarding the detainees at Delta?
Only about one-third of the guards at Guantanamo are enlisted military personnel; the remainder are drawn from the reserves and National Guard. Most are assigned to Guantanamo for 10 months or a year.
Why are some people claiming that Camp Delta isn't in compliance with the Geneva Convention?
Under the Third Geneva Convention, signed by the United States, persons captured during wartime are granted the status of prisoners of war, and are in turn granted a certain number of rights and privileges. Thus, those captured in the conflict in Afghanistan should have been treated as POWs unless and until a competent tribunal individually determined that they were not eligible for prisoner of war (POW) status. This was the case, in fact, during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, when the U.S. government convened 1,196 such tribunals and granted POW status to 310 detainees. The 886 remaining detainees were determined to be displaced civilians and treated as refugees.
Instead of following this precedent, the Bush Administration made a blanket determination that all persons held at Guantanamo Bay are "unlawful combatants" (a status that does not otherwise exist under international law) the and thus not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. The Catch-22 here is that this designation was made prior to the tribunals -- required by the Third Geneva Convention -- that could have appropriately and accurately determined who was a combatant and who was not, who posed a grave security risk and who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the wake of the Supreme Court Decision (below), the Administration has had to revise its position.
How are the detainees being treated? Are the conditions different from other prisons?
There is no doubt that, as the administration has claimed, the detainees have been given adequate food and clothing. But, as David Rose noted in articles published in The Observer and Vanity Fair in early 2004, they have little privacy and severe restrictions on their movements:
detainees ... are confined to a metal box with mesh walls ... Each box is a little larger than a king-size bed: 56 square feet. Next to the hard steel wall-mounted bed, covered with a thin foam mattress, is a toilet, a hole in the floor, facing the open grille of the door. Depending on how co-operative they have been with their interrogators, the detainees will leave their box between two and five times a week for 30 minutes, during which they will be led in cuffs and leg irons to exercise, shower and change. If they have not started to confess, the only items they are allowed in their cell are a toothbrush, soap and shampoo, and a prayer cap, mat and a copy of the Koran.
Until recently, members of the administration have claimed that the conditions at Guantanamo are no worse than at many US maximum security prisons: journalists and lawyers who have visited the facility say that this is roughly accurate, though the prisoners have far less recourse to showers and exercise. The rationale behind the privations of Guantanamo is that preferential treatment is given to detainees who confess or inform: more showers, more exercise, even relocation to a more comfortable wing of Delta are available for informants. As time has passed, those working at Guantanamo have themselves come to question the efficacy of an intelligence-gathering system predicated on a system of bribes.
More importantly, however, evidence emerged in late 2004 that prisoners at Guantanamo were subjected to unusually harsh interrogation techniques that reflected the Administration's contention that the Geneva Conventions did not apply at the base. According to one interrogator interviewed by the New York Times, approximately one in six detainees were subjected to procedures described in a private Red Cross report as "tantamount to torture." These procedures -- further detailed in FBI memos obtained by the ACLU through the Freedom of Information Act -- included sleep deprivation, shackling prisoners in uncomfortable positions, draping prisoners in Israeli flags, administering enemas, and playing extremely loud music while prisoners were restrained.
But haven't many of the detainees already been released?
The number is changing constantly, but as of January 2005 around 200 detainees have been released from Guantanamo. It remains unclear how many detainees remain at the camp -- most news accounts claim there are "about 500" detainees remaining, but the Pentagon does not give out specific information. As recently as last August, more detainees were being transferred to the facility.
In January of 2005, the Pentagon announced that they were finally considering what they might do with some of the Guantanamo prisoners they still intend to hold indefinitely. According to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, the two proposals receiving the most support are first, the construction of a permanent medium-security facility at Guantanamo, and second, the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and Yemeni detainees from Guantanamo to US-built detention facilities that are operated by their home countries.
I hear that some of the detainees that were released have gone back to the battlefield ... isn't this an argument for holding everyone indefinitely?
According to the Pentagon, as least 12 of the roughly 200 already released detainees have taken up arms against the United States. None of these detainees were ever adjudicated: they were simply held for several years and released through negotiations with their home countries. Had there been a legal proceeding upon their arrival at Guantanamo -- or at any point during their confinement -- perhaps their actions upon their release could have been prevented.