132
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE — When the help of Allah comes and the Victory/ And thou seest men entering the religion of Allah in crowds / Glorify thy Lord with His praise and seek His forgiveness./ Surely He is oft-returning with mercy.
The men sway back and forth, trance-like, as they recite these words in Arabic. Cross-legged on the floor, eyes cast downward past their greying beards to the Korans in their laps. We watch them through the diamond cutouts of a chain-link fence, topped with endless curls of barbed wire. In the periphery, armed soldiers keep watch from the guard towers. A military welcome sign down the road proclaims that the "value of the week" is "Pride." It is daytime, and the Cuban sun beats down on the prison camp, but daytime can last well beyond sunset here — there are floodlights everywhere.
This is Camp 4, the most pleasant of the notorious detention camps at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and home to the most co-operative of the 275 prisoners here, including the last Western citizen in Guantanamo, 21-year-old Canadian Omar Khadr.
In the 110-year history of the base, the six-year duration of the "war on terror" detention camps is a blip. And yet it is images from this time period — of bound Muslim men in orange jumpsuits, on their knees before their U.S. captors — that will probably come to define a base that was once known for little more than processing migrants and upsetting the Cuban government.
Canada's no-longer-teenaged terror suspect, Omar Khadr, is housed in Guantanamo Bay's Camp 4.
Related Articles
Internet Links
Since opening in 2002, the Guantanamo facilities have become the target of angry criticism around the world. Every remaining candidate for U.S. president, including Republican John McCain, has said they should be shut down.
However, no one has a satisfying answer to what would become of its prisoners after that.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush's administration is preparing to launch the most important trials ever to take place here, trying to prove its case against the men accused of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But that effort could be complicated by an imminent Supreme Court decision on whether Guantanamo inmates can challenge the grounds for their detention in a U.S. court.
None of that is mentioned as the reporters tour Camp 4. We view the inside of a communal cell, and soldiers note that every room in the camp has an arrow pointing in the direction of Mecca. We walk past copies of the Geneva Conventions, posted on billboards for detainees to read in multiple languages.
And as the Camp 4 tour nears an end, we watch the detainees chanting under the shade of an awning, but we are not allowed to speak to them.
"Okay, let's go, guys," a soldier tells us. "We don't want to bother them while they're praying."
The men are actually just reading the Koran, but the intention is clear: The last thing the U.S. military wants on this tightly controlled tour is to shatter the calm. We are shuffled into waiting vans to proceed to Camp 5 and Camp 6, maximum-security detention camps where prisoners are held in isolation for upward of 22 hours a day, subject to visual checks by guards every three minutes.
(The earlier facilities, Camps 1, 2 and 3, were shut down in January of this year. In June of 2006, three prisoners hanged themselves in Camp 1, the most lenient of the set.)
We will not be visiting Camp 7, reserved for the "highest value" detainees, including the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed. The very existence of Camp 7 was, until recently, a secret; its location and procedures still are.
So far, only one person has been convicted of a crime in a Guantanamo court — an Australian man who pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism, served a nine-month sentence in his homeland and is now free. The rest of the cases have been plagued by everything from inconsistent translators to accidental disclosure of classified documents. With increasing consistency, the men charged have chosen to boycott their own trials.
Of the 280 prisoners here, the U.S. plans to charge about 80. An additional 70 have been deemed "no longer a threat," a term that dodges the possibility that an innocent person was ever imprisoned here.
