GITMO has new maximum security unit.

[edward]

While many were busy talking about closing Guantanamo, a Haliburton subsidiary was busy building a new maximum security unit. It seems to me that $37 million is a lot to pay for a plain concrete building with only 178 cells. A number of prisoners, oops make that detainees, were being put into the building starting last December.

There was an interesting call in show on C-Span a week ago. One caller's comment on the detainee label was made in a Jeff Foxworthy manner: " If you have been a imprisoned for more than 5 years you might not be a detainee"

The person featured on the C-Span broadcast was an attorney for one of the detainees who is one of the few people that has been allowed inside of camp six. His overall assessment of the situation is that the government is trying to drive the detainees so insane that they can never be considered a credible witness to anything that happened at Gitmo. ( I'll try to find a transcript)

I had heard in the past that some of the detainees held at Gitmo were turned in by others for a bounty. After watching the broadcast I was shocked that the number may be much higher than just a few. The C-Span program was the first I had heard of a camp six.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — The U.S. military has begun transferring detainees to a new, high-security prison at Guantanamo Bay and will close one of the first detention camps built to hold men swept up in the war on terrorism.
The first 42 prisoners assigned to the $37 million facility arrived Thursday morning, said Navy Cmdr. Robert Durand, a spokesman for detention operations at the remote U.S. naval base in eastern Cuba.

The detainees were moved from Camp 3, which opened in 2002 with walls of thick-gauge, chain-link metal. The others inside that prison were transferred to other camps, allowing it to close, Durand said. Other old camps will remain open.

Along with another maximum-security facility on the same plateau overlooking the Caribbean, the new prison, Camp 6, will hold detainees who are least compliant — an assessment the military says it bases on detainees' adherence to base rules rather than their cooperation with interrogators.

Durand did not say how many more inmates would be transferred to the new prison in addition to the 42, but the facility has 178 cells.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-12-08-guantanamo_x.htm

Picture of camp Six below. $37 million ??

http://www.defenselink.mil/home/features/gitmo/images/finals/Camp6sign.jpg

Edit: Here is a link to CSpan videos. It is the "Washington Journal" video. move the slider to about 52 minutes.

http://www.c-span.org/search/basic.asp?ResultStart=1&ResultCount=10&BasicQueryText=guantanamo&image1.x=27&image1.y=6

It is a long video. You can listen to the audio only while making posts on the forum. Click on the original link to stop the audio.

 

[denverdoc]

37 million for that, must have a lot of fancy surveillance stuff, or is that being contracted to someone else?

What I find disheartening is that there are no plans therefore for moving forward anytime soon, sort of like detainment in perpetuity w/o formal charge. How Orwellian is that?

 

[devil-fire]

The person featured on the C-Span broadcast was an attorney for one of the detainees who is one of the few people that has been allowed inside of camp six. His overall assessment of the situation is that the government is trying to drive the detainees so insane that they can never be considered a credible witness to anything that happened at Gitmo. ( I'll try to find a transcript)

this is a disturbing idea. if they finally did start clearing that place out and people claimed to have been abused at the facility, there could be a case made that everyone's phobia of water, electricity and authoritative figures prevents them from being a credible witness of years of water boarding, electroshocking and being forcibly sexually humiliated or assaulted.

i don't know how to describe how much of a farce such a judicial system would have to be to allow such a thing to happen.

 

[edward]

The new Secretary of defence has recently scaled back Rumsfeld's 1200 seat court facility at Gitmo.

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates has scaled back a planned compound for war-crimes trials, telling Congress he thought the initial Pentagon plan for a $100 million facility was "ridiculous."

That is a lot of money to spend on a court facility to try detainees who have had no charges filed against them.

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/w...ates_trims_planned_guantanamo_court_facility/

The original plan was to build a court facility without the permission of congress by using Bush's so called war powers.

As of December:

The Defense Department recently sent a letter to Congress announcing its intention to fast-track the Guantanamo complex by reallocating $102 million of its authorized funds by invoking its emergency powers to bypass congressional approval, Feinstein said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/10/AR2006121000906_pf.html

Was Rumsfeld having illusions of grandeur? They only have 14 'detainees' where there will be a pretty much guaranteed guilty conviction.

Even if the detainees were captured on the battle field, we would still be held to the standards of the Geneva convention.
The attorney in the video has FBI documents showing that nearly half of the detainees were turned in by war lords who were paid a bounty.

 

[Frankenkitty]

Halliburton's war then? I find it stunning that in this day and age, torture can be legislated as legitimate legal action, times of war or not. The long historical literature concerning the witch trials reveals that people will say anything under torture. Guantanamo is really a giant mind control camp.

There's a profusion of people on the internet claiming to be victims of mind control, some estimates say up to 10,000,000. That, is a bit ridiculous, especially when you consider that the mind control experiments more or less failed. They failed at creating Manchurian candidates - conditioning and bribery works much better. Dr Cameron failed at imprinting or re-writing psyches. What they did find, was that they could induce psychosis with easy predictability and the research conducted on mind control has left us with what we see at Guantanamo.

Sensory deprivation or over-stimulation, absolute invasion of privacy, self induced pain, sleep deprivation are all consistent catalysts of psychosis, and self induced pain can be something as simple as forcing a person to stand in one postion for a long period of time.

So while the Time magazine article presenting conditions at Gitmo seemed quite banal, for those in the know, it's a giant, psychosis inducing camp.

edward said:

"His overall assessment of the situation is that the government is trying to drive the detainees so insane that they can never be considered a credible witness to anything that happened at Gitmo. ( I'll try to find a transcript)"

This is true, it is the Bush administration's version of a Chinese re-education camp. It's highly likely their advancing their research into torture and mind control while they practice what they know.

The obvious advantage of having Chinese style re-education camps is that the Patriot Act now permits anyone under suspicion to be labeled a terrorist and the subliminal threat is there for the whole populace.

It's especially frightful to think that Halliburton is advancing the research by building that structure, when one keeps in mind Ralph Nader's opinion of corporate fascism. It is important that due process and constitutional rights be restored, however, it might get worse before it gets better.

A prisoner of war is, as Winston Churchill said - A man who has tried to kill you - but are all of the prisoners who have gone through rendition, guilty - we already know about the German fellow who was innocent and yet still went through rendition. (The practice of sending suspects to other countries for toture.) NO doubt, many of the inmates at Gitmo are also innocent. They tend to have been picked up in dragnets and not even specifically investigated before detainment.

It's worse than Orwellian, the country that once held the example for the world of constitutional rights and amendments as well as the due process that protects the individual against the arbitrary application of power from the vastly more powerful state, has betrayed the mantle.

Pastor Niemoller poem, 'First they came' applies to our present circumstances as well as the banality Hannah Ardent knew as attendant to evil.

 

[denverdoc]

FK,
Thanks for the post. You will find spirited debate here. We often forget that in WW2, we had mass internmant camps for anyone vaguely japanese. Gitmo is not new. They nay or may have not sufficient reason to detain after 911, but thus far the collective effort and expense has been zilch. If we thought they were so dangerous why in Gitmo? The answer is too obvious.
Lots of reaearch has been done on issue of coercive confessions, worth zero,