Three years after it began, the prison experiment known as Camp Delta at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has reached a crossroads in its incarceration of those captured in the war brought on by Sept. 11.Military officials have completed tribunal hearings for all 558 detainees and have compiled their most comprehensive report detailing what they have learned about potential future terrorist attacks. But the Bush administration now is battling efforts by lawyers for some of the prisoners to have the cases moved to federal courts in Washington.
Should that happen, it could end the military's long-held goal of keeping those it has identified as "enemy combatants" out of the public spotlight and ensconced in the island prison.
The new report appears to buttress the military's claim that it should be allowed to run Camp Delta without outside intervention because the camp has become "the single best repository of Al Qaeda information."
The declassified summary cites more than 4,000 interrogation reports and says that some indicated Al Qaeda operatives were pursuing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The summary does not elaborate on what that information is or how close the terrorist organization might be to getting such weapons.
According to the report, captives have described how Al Qaeda trained them to spread deadly poisons, and at other times armed them with grenades stuffed inside soda cans, bombs hidden in pagers and cellphones and wristwatches that could trigger remote control explosions on a 24-hour countdown.
The report also showed that not all those being held were suspected of being front-line soldiers and that 1 in 10 of the captives were well-educated — often at U.S. colleges — in fields such as medicine and law.
More than 20 detainees have been positively identified as Osama bin Laden's personal bodyguards and one as his close "spiritual advisor," according to the report. Another is listed as the "probable 20th 9/11 hijacker" — a Saudi man named Mohamed al-Kahtani who made it to Orlando, Fla., before being deported just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.One detainee vowed to his captors that U.S. citizens in Saudi Arabia "will have their heads cut off." Another prisoner, this one with strong ties to Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Chechen mujahedin leadership, said of Americans everywhere: "Their day is coming.... One day I will enjoy sucking their blood."
The information gleaned from prisoners has been shared with U.S. intelligence agencies and top military officials. It also is designed to get the Pentagon message out to the public that the interrogations at Guantanamo Bay have been valuable and should not be interrupted by the courts.
Administration officials have maintained that it is more important to keep the interrogations on track to help prevent future terrorist strikes than it is to afford constitutional safeguards to non-U.S. citizens captured as enemy combatants. The classification was created by the administration to cover adversaries ranging from Taliban soldiers to Al Qaeda members and others suspected of threatening the United States.
But that position has been attacked by defense lawyers and civil libertarians who have gained ground before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal district court in Washington. They have argued — successfully so far — that the detainees cannot be held indefinitely without greater due process to challenge their incarceration. They also contend that many of the detainees were bystanders or small-time militants.
At the same time, the military has been pounded with allegations that prisoners have been abused and humiliated to get them to talk. That scenario has been used by critics to attack the credibility of the information the military has gathered and to question whether the Pentagon has abided by the Geneva Convention prohibiting harsh treatment.