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Military Hopes Cache Holds Clues:
The GuantanamoBay prison camp offered media a look at the intelligence unit's 'evidence locker' -- a hodgepodge of personal items taken with captives
Carol Rosenberg
Miami Herald
May 17, 2006
May 17--GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba -- Electronic diagrams, family photos, even a U.S. military map of Cuba -- these were on display Tuesday as the U.S. military gave the media a rare glimpse at the personal belongings of suspected terrorists brought here from Afghanistan.
Visiting journalists were shown a climate-controlled "evidence locker," a bland Caribbean seafront building packed with shelves of boxes, some Army green. It's a site usually kept off-limits.
Here, military analysts sift through the contents for the prison camp's Joint Intelligence Group, a special team that gathers information for the U.S. war against terrorism.
From handwritten notebooks to documents, clothes and wristwatches, the material arrived with each 8,000-mile airlift of captives from Afghanistan, begun in January 2002.
"In a battlefield situation, you're going on a raid and everything gets scooped up," explained one analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
CONTINUING EFFORT
The items today belong to the 480 or so captives now held here and, even after four years, are part of a continuing effort "to find out who they are, what they had on them -- and what they were doing," one analyst said.
An example: A man here who described himself as a goat herder arrived with a document supposedly signed by himself as a local intelligence chief.
U.S. military officials made the display available in response to repeated requests from news reporters, who had learned that European observers earlier had been shown the site. It also comes amid the latest round of international entreaties to close the camps.
Last week, Britain's attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, condemned the Pentagon prison camps in a widely publicized speech and said President Bush's military commissions fall short of international standards of justice.
Even after about 275 captives have come and gone from this U.S. detention center in southeast Cuba with their belongings, intelligence analysts here estimate that the evidence locker has cataloged 120,000 separate items.
Each piece of paper is counted separately, even those inside notebooks.
Missing from the cache itself are the AK-47 assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and remote-control detonators that Pentagon records say Pakistani, Afghan and U.S. security forces seized with the captives. Those were cataloged, then destroyed, one analyst said.
Military escorts said the project of reexamining the old evidence began in earnest about a year ago at the initiative of the previous detention center commander, Army Maj. Gen. Jay Hood.
He asked analysts to review already-cataloged evidence to exploit any remaining intelligence that arrived with the 500 or so captives, many here since 2002.
Among the items on display: counterfeit $100 bills and passports, snapshots of small children, a global positioning system receiver, a plastic bag containing an American battle dress uniform, notebooks with diagrams of electric devices and cellphone serial cards.
MAP A MYSTERY
No one offered any explanation for the map of Cuba that was in one detainee's mini-trunk of evidence captured with him.
It plainly says it was prepared by a military defense agency in Bethesda, Md., and seems to support security doctrine here that assumes al Qaeda is studying this base for vulnerabilities -- either for an attack or escape plan.
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