Jan. 11--Ten years ago Wednesday, U.S. troops marched 20 men in chains off a military cargo plane at Guantanamo Bay to launch America's war on terror experiment in offshore detention and justice. Now, the prison camps enter their second decade with death penalty tribunals on the horizon and President Barack Obama still struggling to find a formula for closure.
Here are 10 developments Guantanamo watchers can expect to see:
Pressure to add to the prison population: Congress has, through a variety of legislation, tried to grow the enterprise that has hundreds of empty cells in the crude complex that sprawls along the U.S. Navy base's waterfront. But the Obama administration goal is to shrink the population, then close the prison.
"It's the president's stated objective to never send anyone to Guantanamo again," Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said on Tuesday. As of this week, the military had 1,850 U.S. troops and Defense Department contractors on staff of the prison holding 171 captives. The prison camps can hold at least 800 captives.
Prison camp unrest
Tensions are high over a toughening of rules at Guantanamo. Captives complain that the camps have instituted a new 25-day punitive segregation regime for rule breakers, in cramped cells in a once-secret disciplinary block. They say that after years of a more liberal policy, guards are now seizing captives' spare blankets and clothing; and that they are shackling a captive's four limbs, not just his ankles, at medical appointments.
On Tuesday, captives told their guards that for three days around the anniversary, they'd be refusing meals, staging sit-ins and hanging protest signs, according to accounts from the military and defense lawyers.
No crackdown is intended in the penitentiary-style lockup where the majority 140 captives are allowed to pray, eat and congregate in groups of 20 or so. "Detainees may participate in these nonviolent forms of protest and have the opportunity to reasonably express themselves without losing those privileges," said Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese. The prison spokeswoman had no comment on what was happening in the secret prison camp for former CIA captives or in the more severe Camp 5 for convicts and rule breakers.
Spending scrutiny
By the Obama administration's reckoning, U.S. taxpayers spend $800,000 a year to keep a single captive at Guantanamo Bay, a figure the prison camp staff won't explain. In September, the Miami Herald filed a Freedom of Information Act for documents that show how that money is spent.
Now, the Pentagon's Southern Command in Miami is assembling the documents, and an attorney there is deciding which might be released, says Southcom's Army Col. Scott Malcom. Next, the Pentagon's Freedom of Information office will get a chance to scrub the documents the public may get to see that explain, in detail, prison-camp spending.
Talk of Taliban releases
The White House wants to wind down the war in Afghanistan. Congress OK'd it in the Sept. 18, 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, from which the Pentagon designed its indefinite detention regime.
But, "If there are peace talks and if the war is considered over, what will the courts say about continued detention?" says Andrea Prasow, senior counter-terror counsel for Human Rights Watch.
