Volatile Mix Gets 14 Stirs

The flight path into the U.S. military’s most isolated prison sweeps down over the teal waters of a placid bay graced by rare manatees and wild herons.

But the seascape’s tranquil beauty was probably veiled from 14 suspected Islamic terrorist leaders who were secretly transferred to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base nearly two weeks ago under orders from President Bush.

The arrival of militants with senior roles inside Al Qaeda and related terror groups could change the delicate dynamics of a 5-year-old facility already rife with tension.

Government and military officials have provided few details about the movement of the high-profile captives to the detention camp inside the U.S. naval base.

But inmates brought into Guantanamo over the last five years have almost always worn shackles and blindfolds when they emerged under guard from arriving planes. Until recently, they were hooded, Pentagon officials said, but under changes prompted by revisions to the military’s field manual, incoming prisoners now arrive masked by blackout goggles.

Bush’s Sept. 6 announcement that the terror suspects had been whisked from the government’s secret foreign prison system to Guantanamo’s stark expanse of concrete cellblocks and razor wire confronted military authorities with a welter of security and legal concerns. The top terror suspects have been brought into Guantanamo at a time when military officials are already struggling to reassert authority over a restive prison population of 443 detainees who erupted in recent months with hunger strikes that led to forced feedings, suicides, clashes with guards and everyday acts of defiance.

The rising tension has coincided with the government’s push to transform Guantanamo into a long-term facility, replacing its original landscape of crude metal cages with a complex of high-tech cellblocks.

Captured one after another since 2002, the 14 captives had been sequestered and interrogated for long months inside a secret system of foreign prisons.

The Islamic extremists will probably remain under some form of segregation for months and perhaps years to come, still subject to questioning by U.S. interrogators while they wait to be tried for an assortment of terrorism-related charges under a military court system still taking shape.

Several of the suspected veteran terror operatives are expected to face charges related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Among them are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind; his accomplice, Ramzi Binalshibh; and Abu Zubeida, a former close associate of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Others -- such as Indonesian terrorist leader Hambali, who is linked to the 2002 bombing of two nightclubs in Bali that killed 202 people -- could be accused in any number of other terror incidents and plots.

Bush and other government officials have acknowledged that the terror suspects endured severe treatment during their captivity. A steady stream of press accounts in recent years has described a variety of tough interrogation regimens, including sleep deprivation, extreme temperature changes and water-boarding, a stress technique in which prisoners’ heads are submerged in shallow water to simulate drowning.

Mohammed and the other Al Qaeda figures have “been milked to the bone,” according to one U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with their treatment. But the new detainees will remain available for questioning, Pentagon officials said.

“If someone new is captured in the field, you can wave photos in front of them and ask them about particular individuals,” said the counterterrorism official, who requested anonymity because of his high-security role. “But their value in terms of knowing about current plots, they are not useful anymore.”

Guantanamo’s team of 2,100 Navy and Army guards and interrogators will be hard-pressed to prevent the new arrivals from sharing information with each other. Their presence is likely to reenergize Guantanamo’s hard-core detainees, especially if they are able to stake out leadership roles.

Even in the most segregated lockups, isolated prisoners “are resourceful,” said Fred G. Robinette, a retired FBI special agent who oversaw prison investigations and counterintelligence cases. “They are going to communicate with one another.”

Added Pressure

The arrival of the accused terrorism leaders adds to the pressure on guards, who are constantly being replaced by new units and have tried to impose control through phases of detached indifference, concessions and, at times, overwhelming force.

In June, three detainees hanged themselves with knotted clothing and bedsheets in an apparently coordinated suicide pact.

A month earlier, dozens of detainees rioted in the most violent unrest since the camp opened in January 2002. The detainees ambushed guards with weapons fashioned from fan blades, broken light fixtures and pieces of metal.

The disturbance erupted at Camp 4, a more comfortable setting intended to reward detainees for compliant behavior. But guards and others have seen the greatest signs of organization at the minimum-security camp.

Freed detainees and prisoners still housed inside Guantanamo have complained of torture, forced interrogations and miserable living conditions. Abuses rampant in Guantanamo’s early days as an intake facility for terrorism prisoners in 2002 and 2003 have eased, said lawyers for several prisoners, but individual complaints are still widespread.

Detainees recognize both “good and bad guards,” but complaints still frequently single out harassment, poor diet and substandard medical treatment, said David J. Cynamon, a Washington defense lawyer who represents six Kuwaiti detainees. Two of Cynamon’s clients were released from Guantanamo on Thursday and flown back to Kuwait for trial. One of the freed men, Cynamon said, appeared clinically depressed, and other inmates have also complained about haphazard medical treatment.

“None of my detainees said they experienced torture,” Cynamon said. “But they certainly didn’t think it was proper to keep dragging them back in for questioning time and again. They felt it was a form of institutionalized harassment.”

A number of guards and military police stationed in recent years at Guantanamo respond that allegations about systematic abuse during questioning were overblown. “I’ve never heard of a detainee coming back and saying he was harmed by an interrogator,” said Navy Master at Arms 1st Class Robert McGill of New Hampshire.

Guards contend that prisoners view themselves as Al Qaeda soldiers and routinely defy prison staff, wielding insults, crude shanklike weapons and volleys of wadded excrement known as “cocktails.”

“It’s the military guys inside who are mistreated by the detainees,” said Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Robert Luna of Covina. Luna was a member of a California Guard unit that provided security in Guantanamo’s detention areas earlier this year. “They spit on you ... throw feces, urinate on you.”

Staff Sgt. Abundio Medina, 42, of Los Angeles remembers leading a 10-soldier rapid response team from the California Guard last year to quell an incident at Camp 1. He said it began after a detainee doused a guard with a urine and feces cocktail.

Inmates then began shouting profanities. Others used wet clothing to pound against the steel cells, making loud thuds that echoed through the blocks.

Medina and his crew showed up in flak vests, helmets and face masks. They had plastic ties and were poised to swarm the detainee following a procedure that assigns each team member a different part of the body to control. The lead man -- a squat 230 pounds -- peered through a slit in a 15-pound shield held in front of his body. He shouted to the men behind him that the detainee was refusing to leave his cell and lying flaccid on the floor.

“You always put the biggest guy out front to put more fear in the person inside that cage,” Medina said. It makes the detainee think, “Do I really want to fight?”

The tactic worked. The detainee quickly complied and was pulled from the cell.

While former detainees and their lawyers say these rapid response teams have been used to routinely mete out unjustified and violent discipline, Medina said no detainees were mistreated.

But such incidents, he said, quickly harden guards’ attitudes in a way that enables them to counter the aggressive posture of many detainees.

“Leave your guard down and they’ll take you,” he said. “You have to be on your toes.”

Upgrade for Camp

Meanwhile, Guantanamo is being retrofitted with state-of-the-art facilities. The U.S. military has been gradually replacing the camp’s corrugated-metal pens with an array of high-tech dormitories studded with cameras, motion sensors and listening devices.

“The decision on whether to close Guantanamo in five, seven, 10 years from now is totally irrelevant to right now,” said Col. Wade Dennis, the Army officer who serves as warden for the seven detention camps and an eighth facility that is almost finished.

Although Pentagon officials would not divulge the section of the prison camp where the high-profile terrorist suspects are confined, other officials and detainee lawyers said the most likely candidate is Camp 5, a maximum-security concrete building that is used for “administrative segregation.”

Behind steel doors, the prison building can house up to 100 prisoners inside cramped, austerely furnished cells. Equipped with multiple cameras and sensors, the cellblocks are designed to enable authorities to closely monitor their charges from remote locations, relying more on electronic surveillance and locking systems while reducing manpower.

Some inmates have been held there as punishment for assaults on guards and similar infractions. Others have been taken there for periods of lengthy interrogation. The prisoners exercise alone, adhering to a schedule devised to keep them isolated. Only one or two at a time are allowed in chain-link enclosed pens.

The concrete walls inside Camp 5 are so thin, Cynamon said, that prisoners sometimes communicate by shouting. “You can yell and be heard through the walls, but that’s their only form of contact.” Guantanamo guards often frustrate the attempts at contact between detainees by turning up the air conditioning to drown them out.

As isolated as their new setting is, said former guards, the 14 high-profile terrorism suspects will still probably begin to experience small vestiges of everyday life inside Guantanamo. Little is known about their living conditions inside the secret foreign prisons. The intelligence agents who were their primary interlocutors for months on end are being replaced by a daily procession of military guards, doctors and orderlies.

Even inside Camp 5’s segregated cells, detainees can pick up shreds of information from the conversations of passing officials. The interludes, say former guards and law enforcement officials, provide the detainees with opportunities for communicating with one another and understanding how the prison is run.

Muttered Messages

Army and Navy guards frequently transport detainees between cells or to the health clinic on motorized carts, said a military official familiar with Guantanamo’s recent workings. As the prisoners pass each others’ cells, they often mutter to each other in languages foreign to their guards.

Inside Camp 5, food, medicine and laundry are dispensed and collected through “bean hole” apertures in each cell door that open and close quickly. The apertures also open briefly five times a day for traditional Muslim prayer calls. Guards at Camp 5 say prisoners frequently use the brief openings to hurriedly converse with each other, shouting until the holes close off again.

The military official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that some detainees have become as proficient as medieval scribes, etching messages on the skin of leaves picked up in yards or blown into cells and then passing them to other prisoners. They have also used pieces of pages of the Koran provided to each Muslim prisoner to scratch out messages, the official said.

In the prison’s early days, military intelligence officers strongly suspected that Muslim translators and chaplains were aiding detainees by smuggling out information. Criminal military charges were leveled at several Guantanamo insiders, but the counts were later reduced to lesser infractions or dropped altogether.

Religious Bonds

Former Army Capt. James Yee, a Muslim chaplain who at one point faced the death penalty for espionage before his case was finally dropped, said harsh treatment inside the camp has strengthened the religious bonds of the Islamic detainees.

“When they strip you down of your humanity, all you have is your religion,” Yee said.

Religion is now the primary organizing motivation in the cellblocks, especially among detainees who have little hope of release. According to the military official, one group of prisoners tend to be more moderate “grey beards,” older, less radicalized Muslims. But as military officials have steadily released the less militant captives, the remaining population has become dominated by younger, militant firebrands, the official said.

“You’re funneling the most extreme elements to one location,” he said.

When the U.S. military court system finally reveals its terror charges against the 14 terror detainees, they will also be granted limited access to lawyers, Pentagon officials said.

But the scope of the tribunals and the severity of any future interrogations remain in doubt, tugged back and forth in a constitutional struggle underway in Washington.

Even the duration and the arrangements of the undisclosed seclusion being enforced on the newly arrived terrorism suspects have been clouded by uncertainty. Under the military’s revised field manual, “separation” is allowed only as an interrogation technique.

Pentagon official Cully Stimson said separation is not the equivalent of solitary confinement meted out in U.S. prisons to punish recalcitrant and violent inmates. Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence Lt. Gen. John Kimmons added that there are “limitations in terms of how long someone can be separated.”

steve.braun@latimes.com

This article was reported by Times staff writers Carol J. Williams in Guantanamo Bay, Rich Connell and Robert J. Lopez in Los Angeles, and Josh Meyer, Julian E. Barnes and Stephen Braun in Washington. It was written by Braun.

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Guantanamo’s detention facilities

Since 2002, terrorism suspects have been held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The original facility, Camp X-Ray, was closed in April 2002. Today, about 450 detainees from more than three dozen countries are housed at Camp Delta, which has seven detention camps and one under construction.

The main camps

Detainees brought to Camp Delta may pass through a series of camps with varying degrees of security:

Camp 3

Maximum-security facility where arriving detainees are held. Cells are 6 feet, 8 inches by 8 feet, with squat-style toilets, a metal sink and a sleeping berth attached to steel mesh walls.

Camp 2

Detainees who cooperate are moved here from Camp 3. Facilities are similar to those in Camp 3, but “comfort items” such as dandruff shampoo and plastic pens are provided.

Camp 1

Further cooperation by detainees allows them to transfer here. They receive privileges such as tan uniforms and sneakers to replace the orange jumpsuits and flip-flops worn in Camps 2 and 3.

Camp 4

Medium-security camp reserved for the most compliant detainees on their best behavior. Offers communal living and access to recreation.

Camp 5

Two-story maximum-security multiwinged concrete complex is surrounded by barbed wire. Those considered most dangerous are housed here.

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Other camps

Camp Echo: More than a dozen single-story concrete-block buildings are used mostly for detainees to meet with their lawyers, receive visits and undergo interrogation.

Camp Iguana: Lower-security facility for juvenile detainees.

Future camp

A 220-bed, $30-million facility will have communal living, increased access to exercise areas, activities, mail and foreign-language materials.

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Sources: Joint Task Force Guantanamo, Global Security, Times research, Google Earth. Graphics reporting by Julie Sheer