|
<< Back
Reward For The Obedient: World Cup
Amid World Cup 'football' and legal wrangling, media coverage has resumed in the aftermath of last month's suicides of detainees at the Guantanamo prison camps
Carol Rosenberg
The Miami Herald
July 5, 2006
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- Several dozen detainees who sat obediently on their bunks during a mid-May revolt against their guards got to watch some World Cup ''football'' last month at the detention center.
It was taped, not live. A U.S. Army officer who acts as deputy warden said prison staff sliced out commercials that might upset Muslim sensibilities from the three Saudi Arabian matches -- against Ukraine, Tunisia and Spain -- before they were screened in Camp 4.
The medium-security portion of the prison camp had held about 175 so-called cooperative captives until mid-May when, commanders said, a detainee inside a 10-bed bunkhouse feigned a suicide attempt, then the occupants attacked a guard force that charged inside.
Lawyers for the captives said there was no suicide attempt. They say the detainees fought the guards over fears that non-Muslim troops would search their Korans for contraband.
By last week there were only about 40 captives in the group barracks, considered a prerelease site -- almost all from Afghanistan. The deputy warden said those left at the most desirable compound at the camps voluntarily went inside and sat silently on their bunks during the brawl. Other captives allegedly joined in, pulling camera monitors from other units and causing disturbances. So they were moved to maximum-security cells elsewhere in the prison camps.
`TROUBLING INTRUSION'
A lawyer's affidavit suggests that investigators are searching for clues in attorney-client papers as part of a Pentagon probe into the circumstances of the simultaneous suicides of three Arab captives at CampDelta last month.
American University professor Rick Wilson, habeas corpus counsel to teen Canadian captive Omar Khadr, wrote about the ''troubling intrusion into the attorney-client relationship of counsel for the detainees'' after a June 27 visit to the base.
The Navy Criminal Investigative Service had seized the documents, including ''all attorney-client correspondence, legal pleadings and other related privileged and confidential materials in the possession of individual detainees,'' Wilson said, quoting a conversation with the senior detention center lawyer, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Pat McCarthy.
''Cmdr. McCarthy does not believe that there is any investigation of attorneys themselves as to involvement or encouragement of the deaths in question,'' Wilson wrote, with reference to the June 10 suicides. ``However, he suggested that containers holding legal papers may contain additional nonlegal materials relevant to the NCIS investigation. He believes that NCIS is aware of the obligation not to intrude in the attorney-detainee relationship.''
Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, prison spokesman, would not comment on the confiscation, saying it was part of the investigation. It is unclear when the Navy investigators would issue their report on the circumstances of the first-ever death of detainees at the prison that opened in early 2002.
MEDIA BACK AT BASE
Media operations are back in business -- and with alacrity -- just weeks after Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office ordered the media off the base in the aftermath of three days of news coverage of June's triple suicides.
Last week, ABC News reporter Terry Moran got special access for exclusive live shots from a spot overlooking the brightly lit Caribbean seafront compound for four consecutive Nightline programs.
The now-retired Nightline host, Ted Koppel, is heading down next for the Discovery Channel. And CNN is planning summer broadcasts from the base, while media escorts rethink how to host journalists. A major media turnout was expected as the Pentagon cranked up coverage of the first U.S. war-crimes tribunals since World War II, intended to try 10 of the 450 captives.
But the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the trials last week, declaring unconstitutional the formula the Pentagon had created.
On June 13, a Defense Department spokeswoman had ordered independent media to leave the base, saying she was canceling all island-based news coverage in the interest of ''fairness'' -- because other journalists wanted to report on the suicides three days earlier.
`THIS IS THEIR WAY'
Military mental-health staff continued to emphasize for reporters during a recent visit that even though to 23 percent of the 450 detainees have diagnosed mental illnesses, the suicides and attempts of late were intended as political, sane acts -- by the mentally fit portion of the population.
''The brothers here are not desperate. They interact with one another. They have good days and bad days,'' said Dr. J., a Navy lieutenant and psychologist who works on the cellblocks.
``They remain hopeful that things are moving here politically. They get news from home. They get news from their lawyers. For the brothers here, it is not an indefinite situation. You don't see that sense of desperation throughout the camp.''
Moreover, he said, the mental-health team had assessed the 131 captives who took part in hunger strikes this year and last, and concluded that none of them was mentally ill; instead they were engaged in political acts.
''This is their way to continue to fight; that's what these behaviors seems to have been,'' said the psychologist, who dismissed the proposition that anyone who kills himself is likely suffering from a mental illness. ``You're trying to put your Western style of thinking into these behaviors.''
<< Back
|
