Base Awaits ‘the Worst of the Worst’

The cells are boxes of chain-link fence with concrete floors and thick-planked wood roofs. The beds are mats on the floor.

The jailers are gun-toting infantrymen, military police with attack-trained German shepherds and artillerymen in Humvees.

And the inmates are “the worst of the worst,” said the prison’s commander--the toughest of the Al Qaeda and Taliban members currently held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan.

“Our job here is to take these terrorists out of the fight by locking them up,” Marine Brig. Gen. Michael Lehnert said Wednesday, two days before prisoners are expected to begin arriving at this remote U.S. naval outpost on the southeast corner of Cuba.

In two weeks, the military has transformed this somnolent naval base, established at the beginning of the last century, into a ferocious hub of activity, with more than a dozen giant cargo planes landing each day, disgorging military construction workers, police, jailers and scores of others.

Lehnert himself arrived just five days ago from his command at Camp Lejeune, N.C., to oversee the mammoth effort to detain Al Qaeda and Taliban supporters far from where they can do harm.

Eventually, more than 2,000 detainees from Afghanistan will be imprisoned here, guarded by an equal number of American troops.

The task at Guantanamo is fraught with obstacles. Soldiers trained to police and jail the occasional U.S. military man or woman who breaks the law are being asked to guard inmates whose compatriots have proved themselves willing to die to destroy their jailers and the country they represent.

The soldiers must learn to work at a makeshift, open-air facility unlike any they have ever seen. And they have to control their own anger at prisoners suspected of supporting the Sept. 11 attacks on America as they create a prison environment that is tough but beyond reproach.

“We have no intention of making it comfortable,” Lehnert said of the prison camp, dubbed Camp X-Ray, that has been erected in two weeks and of more lasting facilities still to be built.

“It will be humane,” Lehnert added. “But I assure you that when you see Camp X-Ray, you will not wish to be an occupant.”

On Wednesday, the Pentagon permitted a small group of journalists to see what the drive to create a secure jail for Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees has wrought at Guantanamo Bay.

It is a place that seems suited to serve as a jail.

Forty-five square miles of land, water and faded pink buildings, Guantanamo Bay is cut off from the rest of Cuba by 17.4 miles of double fence, land mines, mangrove swamps and salt flats, and from the rest of the world by steep cliffs that crash into the ocean and bay on three sides.

Deep within those natural barriers, the Pentagon is constructing barriers of its own.

First to materialize is Camp X-Ray, an open-air prison in a valley amid forbidding hills, with an American flag already flying high. Lehnert said it is ready for about 100 prisoners. Eventually it will have space for about 220 inmates in isolated, 6-foot-square cells. Its perimeter--two chain-link fences looped with razor and concertina wire--is already guarded day and night by U.S. infantry and artillery troops, busy training for their mission as jailers.

Prisoners, garbed in jumpsuits, will use portable toilets. They will sleep at night under halogen security lighting turned to full strength. They might get rained on in winter storms, said Marine Col. Terry Carrico, who is managing the prison camp.

In 40 to 60 days, the Pentagon hopes to have a more permanent jail of corrugated tin, Quonset-style.

The U.S. military has embarked on rapid construction projects before, but officials said they could recall nothing resembling this one. It provided tent cities at Guantanamo for more than 40,000 Haitians and Cubans in 1994, and old U.S. military barracks for 125,000 Cubans from the Mariel boat lift in 1980. But those were for people seeking political asylum in the United States, not for terrorists like those who rioted at a prison in Afghanistan in late November, killing a CIA officer.

This is not the first time that Guantanamo has housed prisoners. While the Haitian and Cuban refugees were housed in tents on an airport runway, a small number with criminal records or a record of violence were kept in a small camp at what is now Camp X-Ray.

Recent years have been much quieter at Guantanamo, which serves primarily as a refueling station for the Navy and a place for its ships--particularly those involved in narcotics and immigration enforcement--to dock and resupply. Its sole airport runway had been shut down several days a week.

Now the skies are humming with flights 24 hours a day. More than 50 planes are landing each week, said the base commander, Navy Capt. Robert Buehn.

Until two weeks ago, the base housed only about 700 active-duty personnel. For leisure dining, there is one McDonald’s; for shopping, the Navy outfitter; for entertainment, movies on a giant open-air screen.

Since Dec. 24, 600 troops have poured in, with more arriving every day.

They come to an important place in the history of U.S.-Latin American relations. Marines fighting in the Spanish-American War landed here in 1898. Five years later, President Theodore Roosevelt signed an agreement to lease the base from Cuba for use as a coaling station, making Guantanamo the oldest U.S. military installation abroad.

Since Cuban President Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, his regime has seen the base as an unwelcome symbol of American incursion. The United States has rights to the base indefinitely and pays rent of about $4,000 monthly to the Castro government--checks that have gone uncashed.

In 1964, Castro cut off the base’s utilities and other supplies. But instead of closing it, the Pentagon chose to make Guantanamo self-sufficient. Today “Gitmo,” as it is known to those who serve here, treats its own water, generates its own electricity and imports everything else.

These days the base bristles with activity and mission. Dogs sniff arriving visitors for bombs. Soldiers practice techniques to handcuff and sedate prisoners. And young men like Marine Staff Sgt. Scott Bolman of Portland, Ore., do their best to figure out their place in it all.

“It is a little more difficult for us to keep the anger in the back of our mind with these prisoners,” Bolman said. “When you start to think about these guys, you start to think about what actually has taken place since Sept. 11. This is real life.”