The Militant - January 18, 2005 -- CIA maintained secret prison at Guantánamo

Vol. 69/No. 2 January 18, 2005

CIA maintained secret prison at Guantánamo

BY ARRIN HAWKINS
The CIA has maintained a secret detention facility within the Defense Department’s prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, report several media sources. The naval base has been maintained against the will of the Cuban people for more than 40 years. The CIA facility, a prison within a prison, held a number of prisoners U.S. troops captured during Washington’s wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq two years later. The CIA held the inmates under strict secrecy, not disclosing their identities or accounting for them in military records.

According to the Washington Post, the CIA used a group of hidden buildings enclosed within the Defense Department’s Camp Echo complex to interrogate and detain the “most valuable al-Qaeda captives,” alleged to have information on the group’s “logistics, financing and regional operations.” These “ghost” detainees were held under separate rules from other prisoners at the Guantánamo base. “Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold certain classes of suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing the rules for their treatment,” the Post reported.

A New York Times article in May said that these secret rules “have provided a legal basis for the use of harsh interrogation techniques.” Similar to the CIA facilities at Camp Echo, other secret CIA detention centers were set up on the Bagram air base in Afghanistan and in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The CIA claims that the facility at Camp Echo is no longer in use.

The majority of those detained at the Guantánamo prison camp have been in the custody of the U.S. Defense Department. Many of those captured during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan were labeled “enemy combatants” by the U.S. government to justify denying them legal rights, including those accorded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. More than 550 prisoners are still detained there. Some have been held for several years without charges, legal counsel, or due process.

Under Supreme Court rulings earlier this year, these detainees have the right to challenge their imprisonment in U.S. federal courts. Several dozen inmates have filed habeus corpus petitions with the U.S. Justice Department to have their cases heard. In response to the high court rulings, the Pentagon set up military tribunals comprised of U.S. military officers and denied the prisoners legal counsel, claiming the trials were administrative proceedings.

Meanwhile, abuse of the detainees continues. A recent FBI memo details practices by U.S. interrogators in Guantánamo that are tantamount to torture, reported the Guardian. The memo described detainees being strangled, beaten and burned.

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