Guantanamo's Unhappy Campers

[Ziroc]

Guantanamo's Unhappy Campers
ADVANCE COPY from the February 11, 2002 issue: Some strange things are happening at Gitmo.
by Matt Labash
02/01/2002 6:00:00 PM


GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA

It's 5 A.M. at the Roosevelt Roads Naval station in Puerto Rico, and 20 journalists straggle to the gate in sleep-deprived silence to catch a plane to Guantanamo Bay. Many of us haven't been up this early in years. But after flying thousands of miles, then pub-crawling through the streets of Old San Juan last night, we are here because our military escorts insist we show up at this time, though the flight actually leaves four hours later. "The military operates on one principle," explains a savvy veteran: "Hurry up and wait."

If we're not happy, that goes double for our public affairs babysitters. "I'm up to my ears in Vieques," says Navy Lt. Corey Barker, of the nearby bombing range/public relations fiasco that has been protested by everyone from Al Sharpton to obscure Kennedys. Now, Barker is stuck minding us as we light out for Guantanamo, the American naval station on the southeastern tip of Cuba. It is there that 158 al Qaeda/Taliban prisoners are being detained because, depending on who you ask, it is an ideal, sunny clime, it's not subject to the get-out-of-jail escape hatches of U.S. federal law, or because, as one senior Pentagon official says, "The lawyers didn't want to go on 14-hour flights to some guano rock in the Pacific."

Inside the air terminal, our baggage handlers check us in with the efficiency of Bulgarian DMV workers. A sign on the wall says "Air Terminal of the Year 2000." "I'd hate to see who got second place," whispers one reporter. As we wait for our flight on a creaky Pan Am jet, we are shunted off to the "VIP" room, so named because it has a coffee pot and seascape paintings that look pilfered from a south Florida retirement village. Here, we are given our media "indoctrination" packages, never an encouraging word if you aspire to reportorial autonomy. As we sit watching CNN, an unfounded rumor gains currency. Though it's Saturday, and we're supposed to be in Cuba until Monday, the military has changed plans and is going to make us leave Guantanamo Sunday morning. "One thing's for sure," says a wire reporter, "you won't have to sort through all your notes to decide what to lead with."

Fearing an abbreviated schedule, I commence valuable newsgathering. Knowing that in some Taliban-held provinces, pederasty rivaled headless-goat polo (buzkashi) as the favorite pastime, I ask a Naval officer if there are any reports of Guantanamo prisoners turning to man-love. "Oh God no," he says. "Though there are some Air Force personnel over there, so who knows what's going on?"

Another officer relays something we'll hear repeated often: that because of international political pressure, the prisoners are getting coddled. The latest report has Army guards directing detainees on which way to pray to Mecca. "They're actually going to paint arrows on the floors of the cells so they'll know to face north," he says. "You mean east," I say. "North, east, whatever," he replies, "I'm Lutheran--I don't know where the hell it is."

A FEW hours later, we touch down at the Guantanamo landing strip on the isolated leeward side of the base (Gitmo, as it is nicknamed, is actually bisected by Guantanamo Bay). After getting sniffed by a German shepherd who's more interested in bombs than my colleague's Percocet, we're escorted to the media center, an ugly wood-paneled affair that sits next to a pink hangar. After another hour or two of waiting, a mouthy reporter loudly calls his editor so we can all hear him report the latest: "Same shit, different day. Though they're really cleaning up the media center. Curtains, an air conditioner, even a freakin' bulletin board!"

The hospitality ends there. A stern sign on the bulletin board admonishes us to clean up after ourselves. The goodies set out on a table (grape beverage powder and apple jelly from meals-ready-to-eat packs) practically scream, "Can't wait till you leave." Many of us had secretly harbored the fantasy that we could talk our overseers into letting us go right up to the prisoners' cells, the terrorist equivalent of a field trip to the ASPCA.

But as a gaggle of public affairs officers enter, they lay down two immutable laws: There will be no access to detainees (the Geneva Convention forbids making them a "public curiosity"). And we can go only where the officers take us. Running the public affairs show is Army Lt. Col. William Costello, a bearish soldier who looks like the kind of guy who enjoys breaking things on his face. His hard, dark orbs dart to and fro while he delivers a good news/bad news proposition. The good news is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will be visiting the detainees' Camp X-Ray the next morning. The bad news is that the unfounded rumor is founded--the Pentagon press corps is coming with him, and we'll be forced to leave a day early.

Immediately, an angry media throng closes in on Costello, the air now containing an Altamont-like level of violence. "My editors are going to crush my nuts," says one reporter, probably female. "This is crazy," I say, "How am I supposed to get enough material for a piece?" "Not my problem," replies Costello. "This is bullshit," thunders another print reporter. "You're making us leave as the biggest story gets here." "You're not allowed to stay," says Costello. "Why not?" snaps the reporter. Costello's blood rises as his high-and-tight haircut stands up like an angry-dog scruff: "BECAUSE . . . YOU'RE . . . NOT . . . STAYING!" "Welcome to the Pearl of the Antilles," deadpans Lt. Commander Brendan McPherson, in a limp cruise-director chirp.

It's understandable if public affairs types are a little testy. There's an obvious culture clash (military personnel don't get paid to ask why; journalists don't get paid otherwise). Besides that, ever since the detainees started arriving on January 11, Gitmo and the joint forces being run under Southern Command have experienced the PR equivalent of what my ever-subtle colleagues--borrowing from Special Forces terminology for disastrous missions--call a "goat f--." In the richest irony of the war on terrorism, the Department of Defense, which normally goes out of its way not to make news, caused an international outcry by releasing still shots of detainees being brought to Camp X-Ray.

As they were transported and in-processed, al Qaeda members were photographed kneeling, wearing earmuffs, shackles, and blackout goggles. Though these seemed perfectly reasonable precautions to take when transporting by C-141 members of an organization already responsible for one prison uprising (Mazar-i-Sharif, which resulted in a CIA operative's death) and several suicide plane crashes, human rights groups and international media, led by a chorus of Euro-whiners, immediately lapsed into hysterics.

The British press, with typical understatement, claimed prisoners were being "brutalized, tortured, and humiliated," and that the whole operation was nothing more than "a sick attempt to appeal to the worst red-neck prejudices." Tony Blair pointed out that the three British al Qaeda members being held at Gitmo have had no complaints. But that didn't stop the Mirror's Stephen Moyes from method reporting by donning an al Qaeda rig. "Wrapped in the suffocating orange boiler suit," he wrote, "I lost any sense of dignity"--a loss he could have just as easily sustained by rereading his own copy.

Sillier still were protestations from such humanitarians as Saddam Hussein and the government of Malaysia (Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has made some of the loudest noise, though Amnesty International dings him for arresting the speechwriter of a political rival, who was then blindfolded, stripped naked, punched, verbally abused, and forced to simulate homosexual acts--none of which is alleged at Camp X-Ray). About the only foreign leader who has supported the American detainee camp, ironically, is Fidel Castro, who is either angling to end the embargo or inching ever closer to dementia. (He declared January "Americans' Month" and invited Jimmy Carter for a visit.)

All of this has made Camp X-Ray personnel a sensitive lot. On the ferry crossing over to the windward side where the camp is located, I sit next to a now mellow Lt. Col. Costello, who has decided to patch things up with the reporter he snapped at, and who, after getting the sign-off from Southern Command, has cleared us to stay through Rumsfeld's visit. Costello, like many Gitmo types, is baffled at the uproar over the prisoners' treatment. "Soldiers and Marines that are guarding the detainees at Camp X-Ray have worse conditions than the detainees," he says. Much has been made over their being kept in outdoor cells, invariably called "cages," which are topped with corrugated tin-covered wooden roofs that keep what little rain Gitmo gets (six inches a year) off the prisoners. Costello says their eight-by-eight cells contain about twice as much space as soldiers have in their crowded, unventilated tents a few hundred yards away.

"They're getting warm showers, clean laundry, hot chow," Costello says of the prisoners. "They're getting 2,600 calories a day. I'm not getting 2,600 calories a day. I'm running my ass off chasing you guys around." (One of the medics treating detainees claims that a full quarter of them were suffering from malnutrition when they were captured.)

But we don't have to take Costello's word for it. We can see for ourselves, sort of. After a quick stop at McDonald's (the only one in Cuba), our white school bus transports us past beautiful seaside vistas and brownish cactus-infested scrub, past ramshackle housing and up a hill, which features an abandoned auto yard that the locals used to call Sears. It's where they'd strip old junkers for parts then used on jerry-rigged jalopies called "Gitmo specials."

Across from Sears is Camp X-Ray, a teeming hive of concertina wire, canvas tents, guard towers, and newly constructed plywood interrogation shacks with window-unit air conditioners. The chain-link cells themselves don't need air conditioning, since a comfortable Caribbean breeze (temperatures range from the low 70s at night to the low 80s during the day) continuously circulates through the encampment.

Restricted to an area about 150 yards away from the open-air cellblocks, we observe the camp from a slight elevation that CNN's John Zarrella calls "Heartbreak Ridge," so named "because if you're a journalist, it breaks your heart that you can't get closer." Gitmo has actually been the site of a lot of heartbreak over the years.

It broke Christopher Columbus's, when he stopped here on his second New World voyage. He left after failing to find gold, threatening to cut off the tongues of his crew if they didn't agree to pretend they'd reached Asia. It also rankles Castro, who has wanted to throw us off the island for four decades, but can't because of a pre-Revolution lease agreement. Likewise, when thousands of Cuban rafters were detained here for months in the mid-'90s, many grew so unhappy with Gitmo's ghostly desolation that they'd do anything to leave, including inject diesel fuel into their veins, drive tent stakes into their limbs, even swim back to Castro's Cuba.

By comparison, the al Qaedans look pretty fat, if not happy. They laze away in the shade of their cells. They sleep on inch-and-a-half-thick isomats, the same ones that are issued to our military. With the assistance of a Muslim Navy chaplain, they pray five times daily. (Quick studies, the al Qaedans didn't need arrows painted on their cell floors. A single signpost next to an American flag points the way to Mecca.) And while American prisoners in the Hanoi Hilton often spent years in solitary confinement and received no medical care (John McCain to this day can't comb his own hair), X-Ray detainees get daily sick calls from all manner of doctors, from optometrists to podiatrists. The prisoners (who represent about 25 different nationalities but mostly are Saudis) can also freely chat with each other about God knows what: prison uprisings, the demise of Talk magazine, trades of Froot Loops for garlic bagel chips.

Their restroom arrangements are pretty spartan. They get a white bucket for emergency squirts, while they are instructed to hold two fingers up for the alternative. At that time, a guard shackles them and takes them to the port-o-loo. While the military has spared no expense in construction costs (in three weeks, they built a completely operational field hospital staffed by 160 medical personnel--two more than there are prisoners), they've saved a fortune in toilet paper. It's the detainees' cultural preference not to use any. "We don't shake their hands," says one camp guard.

In addition to the aforementioned amenities, detainees also receive two towels, a Koran, a shortened toothbrush (still long enough to file into a shiv), a canteen, a bucket of water, fluoride toothpaste, and shampoo. Not just any shampoo, but "Lively" salon anti-dandruff shampoo--a "luxurious shampoo in a gentle formula that restores moisture, shine, and body to your beautifully clean hair." Those who think the prisoners are getting coddled (Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican, visited the camp and said it's "too good for the bastards") will be happy to know that the shampoo is not jojoba-enriched.

WHILE public affairs officers these days are going to great lengths to talk about how docile the prisoners are, detainees have been reported biting a guard, spitting, and threatening to kill Americans. When I skirt away from my minders and visit the Marine snipers' tent, I learn it went well beyond that.

The snipers, of course, are the camp's deadliest sharpshooters, ropy young bucks (21-23 years of age) who seem largely culled from the western or southern United States, where firearms are often regarded as extra appendages. Their tent looks like a Marines-issued college dorm room: Skoal-juice bottles, laundry hanging everywhere, and a spade-like sniper insignia banner tacked to a tent wall. If there is a prison uprising, it is these gentleman who will man the guard towers and introduce the rioters to their 72 black-eyed virgins.

At some point, that might become necessary, they tell me, as plotting is obviously afoot. Sgt. Matt Lampert of Montana says the other day one of the prisoners was caught "with a piece of cloth stuffed with rocks that was tied off at the end." Sgt. Rodney Davis says that during chowtime, he sees them through his scope "making terrain models out of their food." And unlike say, Afghan prisons, where starving detainees are reportedly begging to be sent to Gitmo, there's plenty of food to play with. "They get fed better than us, sir," says Lampert. When I ask the Marines if they've seen anything weird, they laugh sheepishly, looking at each other. Finally, Sgt. Josh Westbrook, who sports a forearm tattoo of flaming baby heads, steps up. "They know they're being watched," he explains, "so they'll stare at you, and while they stare at you, they'll, uh, masturbate."

According to these Marines, they don't just pleasure themselves to freak out the snipers, but also to embarrass the female Army guards in the camp's interior. The weirdness doesn't end there. They've also eaten their toiletries and urinated on equipment. "The other day," says Westbrook, "one of the guys tried to do a naked cartwheel." In the most bizarre twist, Lance Corporal Devin Klebaur says a few have also been known to "put toothpaste in their ass." "What's the purpose?" I ask. "I'm not sure," he says, puzzled.

After leaving the snipers, I collar other grunts who say they believe the prisoners are more apt to act out whenever they see one of the regular visitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross enter the camp. "They're looking to be disciplined," says one, so that any aggressive guard behavior will make it look as if they're being brutalized by the American military in front of international witnesses. ICRC visits, says another soldier, are the highlight of a prisoner's day, since they've been spotted "giving the unshackled prisoners cookies and milk, cigarettes, shaking their hands." Many organizations who haven't been to Gitmo, like Human Rights Watch, have been extremely critical of the prisoners' treatment, while the ICRC has aired no complaints. Still, says another soldier, "They're a pain in the ass. We see them offering them cookies, hugging them like they're best buddies. They're undermining everything we're trying to do."

What we're trying to do isn't exactly clear at this point. We are certainly interrogating the prisoners, though base sources won't divulge any information that's been gleaned. The prisoners will likely be formally charged and tried, though when I called a senior Pentagon source to find out by whom and when, the source said, "If you find out, will you please tell me?"

ON SUNDAY, Rumsfeld visits, and we hope for illumination. Sitting on a bus on the tarmac, waiting for the secretary to emerge from his plane, we pass the time as journalists do, discussing the AP-style spelling of "bin Laden," speculating whether the prisoners will get an Internet cafe (one of them has asked for video games), and making fun of the fresh-meat Pentagon press corps, who are overdressed in heavy wools instead of our much cooler island linens.

One of Rumsfeld's security agents mounts our bus, telling us the ground rules: no photos on the tarmac, no fighting, no hitting Rumsfeld in the head with a boom mike. After Rumsfeld tours Camp X-Ray with four senators and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers (who is so overshadowed by the secretary's rock star aura that one reporter has to ask who he is), Rumsfeld meets the press on Heartbreak Ridge. He gives the sort of hooah performance that has endeared him to both the troops and the press. While he remains as firm as ever that the detainees are "illegal combatants," not "prisoners of war," which would afford them more rights under the Geneva Convention, he nicely avoids plucking the only hair worth splitting--whether the captives' status is his call. (Human rights hawks say the matter should be decided by a "competent tribunal," whatever that is.)

Even if it isn't up to Rumsfeld, the argument seems rather academic. It's hard to imagine anyone who has actually read the Geneva Convention wanting to confer POW status on alleged al Qaeda members. Doing so would not only make the terrorists eligible for repatriation to their home countries, but also would forbid their being punished for trying to escape, allow them to receive "scientific equipment" from home, and even confer upon them the right to dentures--in case they lost their teeth while, say, biting a guard. Most ludicrous, they would be afforded "advances of pay" in an amount "never . . . inferior" to that which we pay our own armed forces. If you're a terrorist from Central Asia, it's not a bad deal: Kill Americans, get arrested, then get a pay raise from America.

With all the global bellyaching about the detainees' right to humane treatment, it's hard to imagine them getting better treatment than they're already receiving. On my last day at Gitmo, all I have time to eat is a stale Ding Dong and a greasy plate of onion rings. My public affairs keepers couldn't care less. By contrast, for breakfast and lunch alone, the prisoners are served oatmeal, an orange, peanut butter, margarine, a "culturally appropriate" halal meal, and a giant snack pack containing Froot Loops, raisins, a Nature Valley granola bar, baked garlic bagel chips, and Bullseye barbecue-seasoned sunflower kernels. Still, the overseers of the prison are concerned that detainees aren't getting enough pita bread with their meals, and they're planning to make the food spicier, just the way the prisoners like it back home.

While we wait, we journalists have to stand in the hot sun most of the day. After hours, we are confined to our Consolidated Bachelor Quarters, sleeping four to a duplex room on cots, some without pillows or blankets. We aren't even allowed to go the beach, a few hundred yards away from our building (though, emboldened by the rum we imported from Puerto Rico, a colleague and I make a mad dash under a guard searchlight for the bathwater Caribbean anyway). Besides drinking, our only entertainment is a pool table--one cue is cracked, the other is missing its tip. The prisoners, by contrast, get to read their Korans, while novels and more "religious books" are on the way.

At the end of their day, they get a good night's sleep in a single cell. At the end of our day, we are told that a C-141 (the same plane that transported the detainees) just became available, and we are prematurely hustled off so the military can dump us in Nowheresville, New Jersey, on a Sunday night after every rental car place in the state has closed.

Perhaps the international community is right. The treatment being meted out at Guantanamo is inhumane. To see for yourself, don't bother canvassing Camp X-Ray prisoners. Just get a Gitmo press pass.


Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

[Galadria]

Wow, Ziroc, that was great. I laughed all the way through.

Personally the Press has lost all credibility with me, there is no longer even a hint at an unbiased report of facts on any story, all we get are slaneted reports or spin on this or spin on that. Journalism was supposed to be about reporting the facts, not writing in a manner to bias the readers one way or the other. ahh well I will just note that the guy admits in the first paragraph that he went out all night pub crawling so knowing the delights of Old San Juan quite well myself, I can guess that his "discomfort" may well have been more due to his....umm recreation when he knew he was going to have to get up early the next day. To me the guy just sounded like a whiner.

Unless he is not aspiring to be a serious journalist, in which case I can see that he does have a pretty sharp wit and would make a decent comedy writer...

[ 02-02-2002: Message edited by: MagiK ]

[Ryanamur]

ROTFLMAO, the first part where he complains about PR officers is way to funny... but how true [img]smile.gif[/img] [img]smile.gif[/img] [img]smile.gif[/img]

[Galadria]

Magick, he writes for The Weekly Standard, a conservative newspaper. He's just doing "gozo journalism," like P.J. O'Rourke, more opinion than journalism.

quote:

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Originally posted by Galadria:
Magick, he writes for The Weekly Standard, a conservative newspaper. He's just doing "gozo journalism," like P.J. O'Rourke, more opinion than journalism.

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Heh Ok my mistake then I thought he was trying to be serious.
thanks for the info Galadria