thedrifter
01-10-07, 10:56 PM
Posted on Wed, Jan. 10, 2007
Reporter reflects on covering Guantánamo Bay
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
There were only a few reporters and military escorts allowed to observe the airstrip at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the afternoon of Jan. 11, 2002, when the U.S. military cargo plane touched down bearing its bizarre and scary cargo -- 20 men in Day-Glo orange jumpsuits, chains and masks.
Marines surrounded them, shouting as they led them -- stumbling and shackled at the ankles -- down a steel ramp. Then, one by one, the captives crumpled to their knees on the tarmac in that searing Caribbean heat.
It was a scene that, to me, still symbolizes the controversies that would soon entangle the Bush administration's effort to imprison and interrogate war-on-terrorism captives -- mostly Arab men held beyond the routine reach of U.S. courts.
Was it the sudden blast of heat after a 27-hour, 8,000-mile sensory-deprived flight from icy Afghanistan that left them collapsing?
Were the Marines at their elbows easing each man to the ground as they collapsed? Or was it overpowering force to show each prisoner that the U.S. Marines were now in charge?
Was it a humiliating end of what had to be a surreal odyssey inside the belly of a noisy, chilly American military cargo plane? Or the start of a humane captivity that military briefers emphasize meets the Pentagon's highest standards of American values?
America's experiment in detaining terrorist suspects offshore turns five years old today.
And the policy questions that occurred to me during that raw, frightening, bitter aftermath of the 9/11 attacks are still relevant today.
• The military has the right to hold war-on-terrorism captives indefinitely, without charge, because President Bush declared it so -- and, so far, the U.S. courts have upheld those powers. But how long is indefinite? Will we know when the war has ended?
• The Bush administration says at most one-fifth of the men and teens held there today could someday face trial. But what kind of trial? By whom?
• Since Vietnam, Americans have expected their leaders to provide the military with an exit strategy. How do you undo a far-flung, international roundup from dozens of countries, especially after years caged up without charge?
• The Bush administration argues this is an extraordinary war that requires extraordinary means. But when does a combination of tactics constitute abuse, as some allege? When does it add up to torture? In the end, who will judge?
I now know that aboard that first cargo plane was an Australian named David Hicks, who, allegedly in league with the Taliban, fired on U.S. troops invading Afghanistan. He was ISN #002, an internment serial number that still belongs to him and his paperwork today -- his 1,826th day of confinement at what I came to call the Alcatraz of the Caribbean.
It was little more than two weeks after then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took to the Pentagon podium to declare the 45-square-mile swath of U.S.-controlled Cuba ''the least worst place'' to hold alleged terrorists.
Hicks and the others on that first flight -- we still don't know their names -- would be the vanguard of hundreds of others on later flights to fill to capacity the crude compound called Camp X-Ray.
As reporters we were allowed to watch from afar -- even as interrogators, Red Cross delegates, congressional day-trippers on a field trip to the war on terror walked inside.
But never have I been permitted a conversation with a single detainee.
Pentagon policy shields captives from media interviews, under an interpretation of the Geneva Conventions that casts news interviews as humiliating.
Covering this story has been difficult, especially digging up the numbers from the offices along the 17 miles of Pentagon corridors -- eerily analogous to the mileage of the fence-line surrounding Guantánamo.
I've been invited to report from Guantánamo Bay dozens of times.
Somewhere there's a count of how many times I paid $12 a night for my share of four-bedroom military accommodations.
I've been ejected once, by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, after three Arab captives were found hanging in their cells.
Rumsfeld's public affairs staff said it was swamped with so many requests it decided to pull the plug on news coverage of the episode from the island base.
A spokesman told me last week that the U.S. government has spent $199.9 million for detention center-related construction projects there; Rumsfeld estimated an annual $95 million operating budget. But nobody will give a global figure on what the enterprise has cost taxpayers.
But here is one figure I know: Three U.S. soldiers have died on assignment there, none through detainee violence.
That is the same number of captives who died there, ostensibly by suicide in June, though their autopsies are still shielded from public scrutiny as part of a Navy investigation.
Ellie
Reporter reflects on covering Guantánamo Bay
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
crosenberg@MiamiHerald.com
There were only a few reporters and military escorts allowed to observe the airstrip at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the afternoon of Jan. 11, 2002, when the U.S. military cargo plane touched down bearing its bizarre and scary cargo -- 20 men in Day-Glo orange jumpsuits, chains and masks.
Marines surrounded them, shouting as they led them -- stumbling and shackled at the ankles -- down a steel ramp. Then, one by one, the captives crumpled to their knees on the tarmac in that searing Caribbean heat.
It was a scene that, to me, still symbolizes the controversies that would soon entangle the Bush administration's effort to imprison and interrogate war-on-terrorism captives -- mostly Arab men held beyond the routine reach of U.S. courts.
Was it the sudden blast of heat after a 27-hour, 8,000-mile sensory-deprived flight from icy Afghanistan that left them collapsing?
Were the Marines at their elbows easing each man to the ground as they collapsed? Or was it overpowering force to show each prisoner that the U.S. Marines were now in charge?
Was it a humiliating end of what had to be a surreal odyssey inside the belly of a noisy, chilly American military cargo plane? Or the start of a humane captivity that military briefers emphasize meets the Pentagon's highest standards of American values?
America's experiment in detaining terrorist suspects offshore turns five years old today.
And the policy questions that occurred to me during that raw, frightening, bitter aftermath of the 9/11 attacks are still relevant today.
• The military has the right to hold war-on-terrorism captives indefinitely, without charge, because President Bush declared it so -- and, so far, the U.S. courts have upheld those powers. But how long is indefinite? Will we know when the war has ended?
• The Bush administration says at most one-fifth of the men and teens held there today could someday face trial. But what kind of trial? By whom?
• Since Vietnam, Americans have expected their leaders to provide the military with an exit strategy. How do you undo a far-flung, international roundup from dozens of countries, especially after years caged up without charge?
• The Bush administration argues this is an extraordinary war that requires extraordinary means. But when does a combination of tactics constitute abuse, as some allege? When does it add up to torture? In the end, who will judge?
I now know that aboard that first cargo plane was an Australian named David Hicks, who, allegedly in league with the Taliban, fired on U.S. troops invading Afghanistan. He was ISN #002, an internment serial number that still belongs to him and his paperwork today -- his 1,826th day of confinement at what I came to call the Alcatraz of the Caribbean.
It was little more than two weeks after then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took to the Pentagon podium to declare the 45-square-mile swath of U.S.-controlled Cuba ''the least worst place'' to hold alleged terrorists.
Hicks and the others on that first flight -- we still don't know their names -- would be the vanguard of hundreds of others on later flights to fill to capacity the crude compound called Camp X-Ray.
As reporters we were allowed to watch from afar -- even as interrogators, Red Cross delegates, congressional day-trippers on a field trip to the war on terror walked inside.
But never have I been permitted a conversation with a single detainee.
Pentagon policy shields captives from media interviews, under an interpretation of the Geneva Conventions that casts news interviews as humiliating.
Covering this story has been difficult, especially digging up the numbers from the offices along the 17 miles of Pentagon corridors -- eerily analogous to the mileage of the fence-line surrounding Guantánamo.
I've been invited to report from Guantánamo Bay dozens of times.
Somewhere there's a count of how many times I paid $12 a night for my share of four-bedroom military accommodations.
I've been ejected once, by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, after three Arab captives were found hanging in their cells.
Rumsfeld's public affairs staff said it was swamped with so many requests it decided to pull the plug on news coverage of the episode from the island base.
A spokesman told me last week that the U.S. government has spent $199.9 million for detention center-related construction projects there; Rumsfeld estimated an annual $95 million operating budget. But nobody will give a global figure on what the enterprise has cost taxpayers.
But here is one figure I know: Three U.S. soldiers have died on assignment there, none through detainee violence.
That is the same number of captives who died there, ostensibly by suicide in June, though their autopsies are still shielded from public scrutiny as part of a Navy investigation.
Ellie