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Gitmo Captive Facilities Adequate, Says Admiral

By Carol Rosenberg
McClatchy Newspapers
October 29, 2006
 
MIAMI
 
Just days into the job, the Pentagon's new Southern Command chief made an overnight weekend visit to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay -- and declared captive conditions compatible with the Geneva Conventions.
 
Navy Adm. James Stavridis said Saturday he met with about 300 U.S. military personnel and saw about 50 of the 435 captives held at the base, including the so-called high-value terrorist suspects who had recently been moved there from secret CIA custody.
 
"I went and saw their facility," the admiral told The Miami Herald in a telephone interview after a 24-hour visit to the remote Navy base in southeast Cuba.
 
He declined to give specifics on where the latest arrivals are being kept, and under what circumstances. But he declared them "in appropriate conditions commensurate with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. I laid eyes on it; they're in good shape in that regard."
 
After being stung by a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this year, the Bush administration reversed course and declared that -- although enemy combatants, not prisoners of war -- the alleged al-Qaida and Taliban captives were entitled to the protections.
 
They were just this month granted their first visits with the International Committee of the Red Cross, after up to four years in secret U.S. captivity and so-called CIA "black sites."
 
In the course of the site inspection, the admiral said, he saw detainees in a range of locations -- being interrogated, playing soccer and exercising individually -- and found them "a hearty bunch."
 
Interrogations, he said, struck him as "amicable conversations between two people."
 
Referring to the 14 high-value detainees in particular, he said they were in "very good shape."
 
President Bush ordered the men sent to the detention camps for possible trial around Labor Day, including suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed -- who published reports allege was subjected to a rough interrogation technique called water-boarding, and at one point purportedly confessed to wielding the knife that beheaded Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl, in January 2002 in Pakistan.
 
In parallel, the first Navy admiral to oversee military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean also met with about 300 sailors and soldiers at the base -- from senior commanders to camp guards -- and declared himself impressed with their professionalism.
 
U.S. forces at Guantanamo, he said, are "interacting daily with very, very dangerous terrorists" in typical one-year tours he described as "hardship duty" that separate them from their families.
 
His Miami-based staff, he said, would propose improvements in housing and other activities for them.

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