AP Confirms Secret Camp Inside Gitmo

[Joanne98]

Wednesday February 6, 2008 10:01 PM


By ANDREW O. SELSKY

Associated Press Writer

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) - Somewhere amid the cactus-studded hills on this sprawling Navy base, separate from the cells where hundreds of men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban have been locked up for years, is a place even more closely guarded - a jailhouse so protected that its very location is top secret.

For the first time, the top commander of detention operations at Guantanamo has confirmed the existence of the mysterious Camp 7. In an interview with The Associated Press, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby also provided a few details about the maximum-security lockup.

Guantanamo commanders said Camp 7 is for key alleged al-Qaida members, who must be kept apart from other prisoners to prevent them from retaliating against long-term detainees who have talked to interrogators. They also want the location kept secret for fear of terrorist attack.

Many operations have been classified since the detention center opened in January 2002 in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. More than four years passed before the military released even the names of detainees held on this 45-square-mile base in southeast Cuba - and it did so only after the AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

Detainees have been held in Camp Echo and Camps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Journalists cleared by the military have been allowed to tour some of these lockups, where 260 men are held, but aren't allowed to speak to detainees. Some lawmakers and other VIPs have passed through, and the International Red Cross has access, but doesn't divulge details of visits with prisoners.

Camp 7, where 15 ``high-value detainees'' are held, is so secret that its very existence was not publicly known until it was mentioned in December by attorneys for Majid Khan, a former Baltimore resident who allegedly plotted to bomb gas stations in the United States. Previously, many observers believed the 15 were being held in Camps 5 or 6, which are maximum-security facilities.

``Under the gag order ... we are prohibited from saying anything more about their camp,'' lawyer Gitanjali Gutierrez, who met with Khan in October, said Tuesday. Most of the lawyers' notes and memos have been stamped ``top secret'' by the government.

Buzby told the AP he is sharply limiting to a ``very few'' the number of people who know Camp 7's whereabouts.

He described it as a maximum security facility that was already built when President Bush announced in September 2006 that 14 high-value terrorism suspects had been transferred from CIA secret detention facilities to Guantanamo. An additional detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, arrived last April.

``They went straight into that facility,'' Buzby said.

Buzby, who heads all military detention operations on Guantanamo, said he controls Camp 7, but would not discuss whether the CIA might still be talking with the high-value detainees.

Paul Rester, the military's chief interrogator at Guantanamo, told AP he has been interviewing one of the Camp 7 detainees and that others may be interrogated, depending on intelligence needs.

But other key military commanders on the base have been told to leave Camp 7 to others.

``Not everybody, even within the Joint Task Force, has access or even knowledge of where Camp 7 is,'' said Army Col. Bruce Vargo. As commander of the military's Joint Detention Group at Guantanamo, Vargo is responsible for the camps holding 260 detainees. But not for Camp 7.

Red Cross representatives have visited Camp 7 and all the other detention facilities at Guantanamo, confirmed Geoff Loane, head of the humanitarian organization's delegation in Washington. He declined to give details.

Buzby said the 15 are kept isolated in part to protect other prisoners. ``Detainees have told us a lot of things about this group of people, and if there were potential for retribution it would
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-7288144,00.html

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE.......

While the policies attempted to excise collectivism from the culture, inside the prisons torture tried to excise it from the mind and spirit. As an Argentine junta editorial noted in 1976, "minds too must be cleansed, for that is where the error was born."

Many tortures adopted the posture a doctor or a surgeon. Like the Chicago economists with their painful but necessary shock treatments, these interrogators imagined that their electroshocks and othe torments were therapeutic-that they were administering a kind of medicine to their prisoners, who were often referred to inside camps as apestosos, the dirty or diseased ones. they would heal them of the sickness that is socialism, of the impulse toward collective action. Their "treatments were agonizing, certainly: they might even be lethal-but it was for the patients own good. "If you have gangrene in an arm, you have to cut it off, right?" Pinochet demanded, in impatient response to criticisms of his human rights record.

In testimony from truth commission reports across the region, prisoners tell of a system designed to force them to betray the principle most integral to their sense of self. For most Latin American leftists, that most cherished principle was what Argentina's radical historian Osvaldo Bayer called "the only transcendental theology; solidarity." The torturers understood the importance of solidarity well, and they set out to shock that impulse of social interconnectedness out of their prisoners. Of course all interrogation is purportedly about gaining valuable information and therefore forcing betrayal, but many prisoners report that their torturers were far less interested in the information, which they usually already possessed, than in achieving the act of betrayal itself. The point of the excercise was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of themselves that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation.

The ultimate acts of rebellion in this context were small gestures of kindness between prisoners, such as tending to each others wounds or sharing scare food. When such loving acts were discovered, they were met with harsh punishment. Prisoners were goaded into being individualistic as possible, constantly offered Faustian bargins, like choosing between more unbearable torture for themselves or more torture for a fellow prisoner. In some cases, prisoners were so successfully broken that they agreed to hold the picana on their fellow inmates or go on television and renounce their former beliefs. These prisoners represented the ultimate triumph for their torturers: not only had the prisoners abandoned solitarity but in order to survive they had succumbed to the cutthroat ethos at the heart of laissex-faire capitalism-"looking out for number one," in the words of the ITT executive.

[gateley]

1. A secret camp inside a secret camp.

[Joanne98]

2. YES!