[Pnews] Secret Guantanamo camp forced into the spotlight

[Prisoner News]

  Secret Guantanamo camp forced into the spotlight


Ben Fox, The Associated Press
*http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/secret-guantanamo-camp-forced-into-the-spotlight-1.1773928*

Published Sunday, April 13, 2014 11:41AM EDT
Last Updated Sunday, April 13, 2014 5:25PM EDT

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- Attorney James Connell has visited his client 
inside the secret Guantanamo prison complex known as Camp 7 only once, 
taken in a van with covered windows on a circuitous trek to disguise the 
route on the scrub brush-and-cactus covered military base.

Connell is allowed to say virtually nothing about what he saw in the 
secret camp where the most notorious terror suspects in U.S. custody are 
held except that it is unlike any detention facility he's encountered.

"It's much more isolating than any other facility that I have known," 
the lawyer says. "I've done cases from the Virginia death row and Texas 
death row and these pretrial conditions are much more isolating."

The Camp 7 prison unit is so shrouded in secrecy that its location on 
the U.S. base in Cuba is classified and officials refuse to discuss it. 
Now, two separate but related events are forcing it into the limelight.

In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted on April 3 to 
declassify a portion of a review of the U.S. detention and interrogation 
program in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attack. The 
report, the release of which is opposed by the CIA, is expected to be 
sharply critical of the treatment of prisoners, including some now held 
in Camp 7.

And on Monday, a judge in Guantanamo will open a hearing into the sanity 
of one of those prisoners, Ramzi Binalshibh, whose courtroom outbursts 
about alleged mistreatment in Camp 7 have halted the already bogged-down 
effort to try five men in the Sept. 11 attacks, all of whom are held there.

Both issues are deeply intertwined. Binalshibh has accused the 
government of making noises and vibrations inside Camp 7 to deliberately 
keep him awake, reminiscent of the intentional sleep deprivation, along 
with other forms of abuse, that his lawyers say he endured at the hands 
of the CIA from the time he was captured in Pakistan in September 2002 
to when he was brought to Guantanamo four years later.

Military officials deny doing anything intentional to disrupt his sleep. 
Prosecutors say his accusations are delusions, though they still believe 
he is mentally competent to stand trial. His lawyers say he is 
competent, but are not convinced officials have adequately investigated 
his complaints.

His mental state is somewhat murky. Court records show Binalshibh has 
been treated while in Guantanamo with medications that are used for 
bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, but he did not participate in a 
court-ordered mental evaluation in January.

The judge, Army Col. James Pohl, could decide to sever Binalshibh from 
the case against his co-defendants, all of whom are being tried by 
military commission on charges that include terrorism and murder and 
face the death penalty if convicted.

Another possibility is that his inability to sleep and his fevered 
outbursts in court, which prompted the judge to order him removed from 
the courtroom in December, are a result of post-traumatic stress from 
his treatment at secret CIA interrogation centres known as black sites, 
said Anne Fitzgerald, director of the research and crisis response 
program for Amnesty International.

"The problem is that because everything is done in secret and there is 
so little opportunity for even the lawyers to have access to their 
clients it's difficult for anybody to figure out what is actually 
happening," said Fitzgerald, who is at the base to observe the sanity 
board proceedings.

Camp 7 has never been part of the scripted tours of Guantanamo offered 
to journalists and there are no published photos. It's not even 
mentioned on a military media handout about the detention centre, which 
otherwise notes that the military "conducts safe, humane, legal and 
transparent care and custody of detainees."

Military officials, while insisting that they adhere to international 
human rights standards, refuse to describe Camp 7. "I'm not even 
functionally allowed to discuss the place," said Army Lt. Col. Todd 
Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman.

A few facts have come out through government reports and court 
testimony. It apparently holds 15 of the 154 prisoners at Guantanamo. 
Those held in Camp 7 include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has portrayed 
himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack and is on trial with 
Binalshibh. Also held there is a Saudi prisoner charged with 
orchestrating the deadly bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

The men are apparently held in solid-walled cells -- as opposed to the 
cage-like structures used soon after the U.S. began using Guantanamo as 
a prison in 2002 -- that are intended to limit their ability to 
communicate with each other, and are allowed up to four hours per day of 
exercise, according to a Government Accountability Office report.

The secret camp also is apparently falling apart.

Marine Gen. John F. Kelly, commander of Miami-based Southern Command, 
told Congress that Camp 7 has become "increasingly unsustainable due to 
drainage and foundation issues" and needs to be replaced. But officials 
balked at the proposed $49 million price tag and the military scrapped 
the idea for a replacement and is making repairs out of existing funds, 
said Army Col. Greg Julian, a spokesman for Southern Command, which 
oversees Guantanamo.

James Harrington, a lawyer for Binalshibh, said he does not believe 
problems with the foundation -- which Julian described as "heaving and 
shifting" -- are responsible for the vibrations and sounds that his 
client says keep him awake.

The judge granted all five defence teams a request to visit Camp 7 one 
time for up to 12 hours to inspect conditions. Because of an ongoing 
dispute over the rules for handling classified evidence however, only 
Connell, who represents defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, has been inside. He 
went in August, riding in the van with windows covered in heavy-duty 
paper and a makeshift interior barrier so he could not see the driver.

It is not clear whether one visit closely monitored by prison 
authorities would reveal the cause of Binalshibh's distress. His 
previous military lawyers, Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier and Lt. Richard 
Federico, were allowed inside Camp 7 in November 2008 for about two 
hours. With Connell, they are the only other defence lawyers known to 
have ever been inside the facility. They could not determine a cause for 
his complaints.

The secrecy and security, Lachelier recalls, seemed excessive then and 
she remains skeptical. "There's no way to explain the security measures 
that they use from the perspective of the safety of the guards or the 
safety of the detainees, beyond that they must be hiding something."


Read more: 
http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/secret-guantanamo-camp-forced-into-the-spotlight-1.1773928#ixzz2yry8zMPG
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