At Guantanamo: Hard Time and a View of What Could Have Been

The narrow windows in the 7-by-12 steel and concrete cells of Camp 6 will give detainees a view of a common room designed to bring them together as brothers in faith, language and customs.

But looking is all they will be able to do. The area will be off-limits.

When the Guantanamo prison complex’s new camp was designed two years ago, the triangular communal area was intended to let detainees mingle over meals, games and conversation.

But virtually all time at Guantanamo has become hard time, and when prisoners begin arriving at the $38-million building in the next few weeks, they will be kept mostly in isolation.

A May riot in which dozens of detainees attacked U.S. soldiers, the suicide of three prisoners in June, and changes in the camp population -- including the arrival of 14 “high value detainees” -- have transformed Guantanamo into a largely maximum security facility.

The first new arrivals in two years -- the group including the self-proclaimed Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his alleged lieutenant Ramzi Binalshibh -- were flown from secret CIA prisons abroad over Labor Day weekend. But dozens have left in recent months, too, having been cleared by annual review boards for release or transfer to their native countries. Negotiations also are underway between the State Department and foreign governments on the possible group repatriations of more than 300 Afghans, Saudis and Yemenis. Washington is trying to obtain assurances that the men will neither be tortured nor freed to potentially threaten U.S. or allied forces.

The 100 or so expected to remain after the transfers will be the detainees considered the most dangerous, those with little hope of release or reward for good behavior, according to military jailers. That population is unlikely to elicit much softening of the conditions.

Near the same time of the May and June incidents, officials discovered that prisoners with good behavior records had been dismantling their faucets to fashion weapons, officials said. That prompted jailers to reconsider whether prisoners should be allowed to interact and possibly plot resistance.

“We had to think about whether there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist,” said Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., commander of the prison and interrogation network that houses 460 war-on-terror suspects.

Col. Wade Dennis, who is effectively Guantanamo’s warden, echoed Harris’ concern that although most detainees cooperated with camp rules, the recent violence suggested some had been hiding their true nature.

“Detainees have already demonstrated they have the will and the thought processes to do self-harm and I facilitate that if I let them live in a communal-type environment,” said Dennis.

Shortly after the suicides, the prison commanders decided to scrap the medium-security comforts, and will keep inmates isolated behind steel doors for all but an hour or two of daily exercise time.

“Meals will be served in their cells,” said Naval Cmdr. Kris Winter, head of the force staffing the prisons.

Since the discovery of the vandalized faucets, Camp 1 has been emptied and its detainees moved to temporary metal-mesh cells pending repairs or relocation to Camp 6, which is expected to be fully populated by the end of the year.

Camp 4, which held about 175 prisoners before the riot, is a barracks-like compound where detainees slept 10 to a room, ate together and were free to congregate for as much as 14 hours daily. It has been cleared of all but about 30 Afghans who didn’t take part in the uprising -- the only detainees not confined to solitary cells.

Harris and Dennis say they will invoke tougher screening before any prisoners are allowed back into communal living.

Where to hold the prisoners among Guantanamo’s eight detention facilities is an exercise in risk assessment complicated by the shutdown of Camp 1 -- previously the most populous prison -- and the virtual emptying of Camp 4 to modify fans and light fixtures that the rioters used to make weapons.

Unlike Camp 5, the reigning hard-time housing, Camp 6 has no outside windows or natural light in the cells. The prefabricated units are arrayed along two sides of a triangle. Bare concrete walls, floors and metal furnishings make the common room an echo chamber.

In addition to mothballing the tables, lockers and leg-stretching spaces in the new camp, the Navy’s construction force, or SeaBees, and the prison’s Kellogg Brown and Root contractors have erected chain-link partitions to make 10-by-30-foot exercise pens in what was designed as an open sports court.

Other retrofitting has included shower doors that will prevent the detainees from communicating, said Lt. Cmdr. Eileen D’Andrea, who was in charge of the prison’s construction and 11th-hour revisions. An expanded guard force also will be needed to provide the manpower to shackle and escort each prisoner every time he needs to leave his cell, said Lt. Col. Mike Nicolucci, Dennis’ deputy.

The hardening of Guantanamo detention dispirits the detainees and their lawyers, who see it as part of U.S. political posturing in an election year.

“They’ve set this up as a showcase and they feel they can’t back down from it,” Marine Maj. Michael Mori, who represents Australian detainee David Hicks, said of the Bush administration’s Guantanamo operations. “Every day in Iraq and Afghanistan they let people go who they know are far more dangerous than these guys.”

Rank-and-file guards express little concern or curiosity about the conditions of the prisoners’ confinement, noting that they are just doing their duty.

“I don’t know exactly what they did but they must have done something wrong to be here,” said Master-at-Arms Seaman Leif Kreizenbeck, a 23-year-old Oregonian who arrived barely a month ago.

Construction chief D’Andrea said the prison’s design allows for future changes. Each of the eight clusters of 22 cells around a common area is self-contained and could be transformed to a medium-security, communal-living “pod” if that is what detention authorities decide.

That prospect seems distant.

“Once we get Camp 4 repaired -- and that is costing us a tremendous amount of money -- we will be very selective about who goes back to Camp 4,” said Harris.

carol.williams@latimes.com