Uncertainties Vex Detainees, U.S.

In addition to banana rats, tarantulas and scorpions, this outpost is home to 3-foot-long iguanas, a protected species. It is also home to 300 increasingly angry prisoners of the war in Afghanistan whose status is far less defined, and that, admit U.S. military officials who are in charge of this makeshift prison, is becoming a problem.

In unprecedented legal limbo as the U.S. government figures out what to do with them, they fully expect to be tortured or worse and have no idea whether they will be tried and executed--or simply sent home.

Prison officials say those tensions underlie the hunger strike that erupted this week after a guard stripped a prisoner of the turban he had fashioned from a bedsheet, in violation of camp rules.

The protest lost steam after camp officials agreed to change their rules to permit detainees to wear turbans and to let them have more books. By Friday, the hunger strike had dwindled to about 75 prisoners who continued to refuse to eat.

But meals or not, nobody here or in Washington yet knows whether the detainees from 32 countries will be going home or to trial. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last week that interrogators are only now beginning to weigh which prisoners might face military tribunals and where.

The uncertainty promises to keep “Camp X-Ray” a very taut place for the foreseeable future.

Work Starts on Prisoner Housing

As if to underscore how open-ended their stay here is, soldiers this week began clearing scrubland for construction of more permanent special wire-mesh modules to house the detainees in what officials said will hold up to 408 prisoners.

But those units are two months from being ready, and Brig. Gen. Michael R. Lehnert, the task force commander, said the new construction does not include courtrooms. He added that, “I haven’t been told anything about tribunals.”

Meanwhile, this narrow slit of land and water, 45 acres that the United States rents from Cuba, has been transformed into a growing, sprawling, self-inventing prison. The first 20 prisoners arrived Jan. 11; today there is room for just 20 more in the temporary wire cages. More than 200 prisoners are still being held in Afghanistan.

The prison camp is nestled in a far-back portion of the military base, surrounded by barbed wire and hills and eight wooden guard towers. The new housing will come with an ocean view.

The prisoners’ “job” is to be interrogated. Often they are escorted to an interview room inside the compound, where military and Justice Department investigators seek answers of their own. They want to determine the true identities of these men--mostly former soldiers in their 20s and 30s--and what they can tell them about war crimes and possible plans for further terrorist attacks.

It is not always easy; many of them have been interviewed three and four times, giving a different name each time.

“Sometimes the information we get does not seem to be of initial value,” Lehnert said. “But when it is matched with what we are hearing all over the world, it can increase in value.”

But, he added, “some of the detainees have not told us the truth yet, and they don’t intend to.”

They speak to one another through the wire separating their cages, and guards can make out that there are leaders emerging among the detainees.

But, said Army Col. Terry L. Carrico, the warden, “they can plan just about anything they want. I have no fear of escape.”

They Spend Their Days Praying and Waiting

Other than the interrogations or, this week, the hunger protest, the prisoners’ lives are largely mundane. They wear bright orange jumpsuits and white prayer caps--all easily seen by the heavily armed guards around the prison.

They sit and squat and stand in their 8-by-8-foot cells; for hours on end they simply wait. Guards here say that the prisoners arrive fearing they will be tortured.

They read their Korans. Most of them pray five times a day when a Muslim religious service is conducted over loudspeakers by a Navy Muslim chaplain, Lt. Abuhena Mohammad Saiful-Silam of Camp Pendleton, Calif.

When each day is over, they sleep on thin mattresses rolled out on the concrete slab that is their jail cell floor. They cover themselves with two white blankets.

Officials in Washington have dubbed them “the baddest of the bad,” but those who guard them have so far found them relatively harmless--or at least powerless under the heavy security. One threw a shampoo bottle at a guard, another tried to bite a military policemen--nothing outrageous, the guards say.

The detainees are allowed two white buckets in their cells, one for drinking, the other a latrine. Their every movement is visible, hence the name Camp X-Ray.

Even the sniper guards manning the towers follow them from above, whenever a pair of guards escorts each inmate to a portable toilet or a shower.

For occasional recreation they are moved to an open space, also confined by see-through wire. There they can stretch their legs or try to jog a little, perhaps, but that is not easy with their hands cuffed to chains around their waist and their feet in rubber flip-flops.

Thirty-five prisoners have needed treatment at the camp hospital, most for war wounds or infections from wounds. One suffered tuberculosis, another had a lesion removed from his lower back, one required thoracic surgery, another neurosurgery. Two legs have been amputated and one eye removed.

Another detainee was told he should have his eye removed too. But Navy Cmdr. James Gallagher, an eye specialist, said the prisoner refused.

“He was shot through the forehead with shrapnel and it ruptured the back of his eye. He has a totally retarded retina, and he is blind in that eye.”

Like other troops assigned to this hard duty, Marine Capt. Robert Patterson, from St. Helena, Calif., who oversees the tower guards, does his job by trying to balance his outrage at what the terrorists did Sept. 11:

“I view them and what they have allegedly done to our country and realize there are some bad people in here. Some are truly evil people. But they are human beings too.”

The American guards at first slept on the ground like their charges but now have built a dozen tents on a rise near Camp X-Ray. They call it Freedom Heights. They have TV and radio, and now they sleep on cots.

Saiful-Silam, the chaplain, ministers to those who practice Islam.

“They want to know when something is going to happen to them,” he said. “The main thing they want to know is how soon their cases will be resolved.”

He said they have no concept of what is happening in the outside world, no radio or newspaper, and they are hungry for news from home. They often send mail out. But rarely do any letters arrive for them.