Long-Term Mission Likely at Guantanamo Bay Prison

The makeshift prison for detainees from the Afghanistan war is being readied for long-term use and will likely continue to house terrorism suspects for at least three more years, the commander of the U.S. Navy base disclosed Thursday.

Navy Capt. Bob Buehn said his budget proposals through 2005 call for funds to continue housing detainees here, and could be expanded to accommodate even more than the roughly 2,000 prisoners authorized by Congress.

And in another indication that the detainees are not leaving anytime soon, the head of the base’s medical operations noted that he too is making preparations for an upgraded health-care system for individuals kept here on an extended basis.

Although Washington has made no formal announcement of its plans, Buehn also said that if charges are filed against the detainees, Guantanamo Bay could easily handle military tribunals. “Everybody is already here,” he said.

Buehn, who also is deputy commander of the detainee task force, said “it is logical” for his facility to become the U.S. military’s central prison if the war on terrorism spreads. Captured Iraqi soldiers could also be housed here if the U.S. goes to war with that country, he said.

In his budget plans for the next three years, Buehn is calling for major projects at the 100-year-old base to accommodate the long-term operation of a prison--including new roads, building construction and other improvements to house and support guards and other staff to watch the detainees.

“We’ve already been here almost a year now,” Buehn said, “and we’re planning three years ahead. We have grand plans that go out for 20 and 25 years.”

The 598 detainees from 43 countries are housed in a sprawling prison compound known as Camp Delta. Construction of an additional 204 one-man cells is to be completed next month.

Another sign that the military is increasingly regarding Guantanamo Bay as a long-term solution is a switch in personnel here. When the first detainees arrived on Jan. 11, the guard task force was made up of regular full-time soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

But now, more than 80% of the contingent is composed of National Guard and reserve units called up after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon a year ago. This change allows full-time members of the military to be available to support the war on terrorism abroad, while the part-time units can be rotated through here for six-and eight-month tours of duty. In addition, two joint task forces set up for the detainee project--one made up of interrogators and the other comprising prison guards--are being consolidated into one unit beginning this weekend under the formal name of Joint Task Force GTMO.

A two-star general will be named soon to oversee the entire operation, with Buehn as his second-in-command.

Buehn said he often meets with his staff and talks to Washington about long-term contingencies needed to support Guantanamo Bay as this country’s chief military prison.

“We ask that question all the time,” he said. “For planning, we’re talking about years, instead of months, now.”

Navy Capt. Al Shimkus, the head of the base hospital, is looking at the long-term effects of detention. As an example, he said Thursday that detainees held for long periods in a distant land likely would require expanded psychiatric care, and noted that one detainee diagnosed as schizophrenic had been sent back to Afghanistan.

Asked whether other mental health problems will arise for detainees held here indefinitely, Shimkus said, “That likelihood is probably true.”

Already there have been four suicide attempts by hanging, in which detainees tried to use “comfort items,” such as sheets and towels, to choke themselves in their cells. Shimkus said a dozen detainees had tried to harm themselves by scratching their wrists. Another, he said, tried to swallow his tongue, “which is impossible.”

After eight months as the main detention center for individuals captured primarily in Afghanistan, the operation at Guantanamo Bay is now in a sharp state of flux as the Pentagon continues to sort through individual cases to determine whether any of the 598 detainees here should stand trial, and on what charges. The Bush administration has declared those held here to be “enemy combatants,” a murky legal and political status.

That uncertainty has raised great angst not only among the detainees, who constantly ask about their future and when they might be going home, but also among civil liberties groups, which worry that the U.S. military is exceeding the bounds of humane treatment by neither charging the detainees with offenses nor setting them free.

This month, for instance, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, a private group based in New York, sharply questioned how the U.S. could continue to hold detainees without also affording them some legal protections.

“The Defense Department has indicated that many of the detainees can expect to be kept in Guantanamo indefinitely,” the committee complained in a Sept. 4 report, “until the end of the war against terrorism, a war that shows no sign of ending any time soon.”

Army Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus, head of the guards task force, said that as the weeks and months drag on, many detainees are repeatedly asking when they can go home. Sometimes they bang on their bunks, he said, or throw water on guards, demanding answers.

“They ask the guards, they ask the chaplains, they ask the medical personnel,” he said.

Baccus and his staff insist that the detainees are being treated humanely, and that International Red Cross inspectors routinely visit the detainees and then follow up with the task force on individual complaints. The detainees do get reading material, said Army Col. John Perrone, the prison warden. Thousands of books are being flown into the prison library, including works on religion and English vocabulary, he said.

The base’s Catholic chaplain, Father Raymond A. Tetrault, said that a handful of the Muslim detainees have expressed an interest in learning more about Christianity. “They’ve asked for copies of the Old Testament that they would like to read,” he said.

But the main mission here, beyond housing and guarding the detainees, remains interrogation, as U.S. authorities continue to try to learn more from the prisoners about their backgrounds, their affiliations with terrorist groups and anything at all about terrorism plans.

Authorities are reluctant to discuss how that is going, although some sources have said the U.S. has learned little from the Guantanamo Bay detainees so far.

But Army Col. Dennis Fink, a Special Forces officer assigned to the interrogation efforts, indicated that even after eight months, all has not been a bust.

“I can’t say anyone is useless to us,” Fink said. “You can get information from anybody.”

As that crucial work continues, Buehn said he now wonders whether history eventually will remember Guantanamo Bay not as a unique U.S. military base in a communist country, but rather as something more akin to the Nuremberg stockade and trials after World War II.

“This was a quiet little spot before the detainees came,” he said of the 45-square-mile area leased from the Cuban government in 1903 on an open-ended basis. “A lot of people didn’t even know we had a base down here. Now they know we’re here for sure.”