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GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Its very existence was a secret at first. Camp 7 housed detainees thought of by the Bush administration to be among the many world’s most needed Islamic extremists.
All had been introduced there from C.I.A. prisons. They included the 5 males charged with serving to to plan the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults and a Palestinian often called Abu Zubaydah, the primary individual subjected to a torture regime that the company referred to as “enhanced interrogation.”
Now abandoned, its former occupants moved to the primary jail complicated at Guantánamo Bay, the power has turn out to be one other entrance within the tangled authorized battle that crawls alongside twenty years after the occasions that led to the jail’s creation.
Contending that the circumstances in Camp 7 had been substandard and exceedingly disturbing, legal professionals for the boys who had been held there from 2006 to 2021 are inspecting the location. They’re attempting to make the case that prisoners who had been held there, at occasions in solitary confinement, ought to obtain diminished sentences or dismissal of the dying penalty if they’re convicted.
The protection legal professionals additionally need something the boys stated whereas they had been saved there — both in F.B.I. interrogations or secretly recorded conversations — excluded from their circumstances as a result of, they are saying, the place was indistinguishable from the abroad black websites the place the boys had been tortured in C.I.A. custody.
They’ve been utilizing the visits to assemble proof, together with taking pictures of the decaying detention web site and bringing consultants with them to supply assessments. A few of the legal professionals say it’s too early to know the way the fabric could be used, together with the photographs, that are thought of labeled. However they are saying the visits, typically with the prisoners they characterize, can assist construct relations between the prisoners and the American legal professionals who’re paid by the Protection Division to defend them.
Prosecutors within the struggle crimes trials are arguing towards the protection efforts. Within the Sept. 11 case, which is at present in plea negotiations, a prosecutor has described the statements the defendants gave the F.B.I. as key trial proof. The prosecution’s place is that, as soon as the C.I.A. prisoners had been delivered to Guantánamo, something they stated in interrogations or to different prisoners was voluntary, and so can be utilized at a trial.
The Persevering with Aftermath of the 9/11 Assaults
Susan Hensler, a protection lawyer, visited Camp 7 for 2 hours final month along with her consumer, an Iraqi accused of struggle crimes. She described it as “chilling” and “akin to being entombed.”
Ms. Hensler; the prisoner, who makes use of a wheelchair; and different members of her entourage crammed inside his former cell and pulled the door practically shut. “It was like being buried alive,” she stated, calling it “clearly a facility custom-built for exploitation.”
She was not allowed to elucidate any additional as a result of, though the prisoners are gone, one thing concerning the place continues to be labeled. The authorized groups which have visited in latest months had been allowed to explain their impressions of the power however not particular options.
Neither navy nor C.I.A. spokesmen would focus on the circumstances. The U.S. authorities has persistently refused to say what Camp 7 value, what contractor constructed it or what makes its design so particular, including to its thriller.
No pictures have emerged of the power, which is hidden in hills removed from the suburban-style housing, Okay-12 college and McDonald’s for the 6,000 residents of the 45-square-mile base. After President George W. Bush all of a sudden introduced in September 2006 that the C.I.A. had transferred 14 “high-value detainees” from secret abroad websites to Guantánamo Bay, it took the navy one other 12 months to acknowledge that they’d been segregated from the 450 detainees who had been already there.
“You’re disappeared off the face of the map at Camp 7,” stated Alka Pradhan, who represents Ammar al-Baluchi, a defendant within the Sept. 11 case and Mr. Mohammed’s nephew.
Ms. Pradhan spent fewer than three hours there and located that “the isolation was oppressive.”
Courtroom testimony has proven that the C.I.A. managed the jail for an undisclosed interval and staffed it with guards who had been civilians in navy apparel, apparently company contractors.
She stated the isolation, clandestine guard drive and different circumstances make it the final recognized remnant of the C.I.A.’s black web site program, which from 2002 to 2006 held greater than 100 prisoners in Afghanistan, Poland, Thailand and different international locations.
Funding requests in previous years gave a fleeting sense of a spot whose infrastructure was deteriorating so quickly it was turning into hazardous for the particular unit of Military guards who labored there as Activity Power Platinum.
By 2013, senior navy officers had been describing it as a failing facility shored up by short-term fixes. It had shifted on its basis. Some doorways couldn’t shut, or open. Roofs couldn’t maintain again rain water. In time, human waste from an overflowing sewage system sloshed by way of cells and corridors.
“Electrical, mechanical, and safe communications techniques inside the present services are burdened and vulnerable to failure,” the Military stated in a 2018 request for $69 million to construct a brand new facility. Employees had been “in danger,” it stated, due to the “inefficiencies skilled in correct separation, seclusion, and management of occupants.” A funding request the subsequent 12 months put the associated fee at $88.5 million and stated the failing complicated required 74 further guards.
As an alternative, the Southern Command, in session with the intelligence companies, determined to maneuver the boys to Guantánamo’s most important detainee complicated. Commanders had stated consolidating all of the prisoners at a single web site, made up of two adjoining jail buildings, could be extra value environment friendly.
The detention operation employs 1,500 troopers and civilians, stated the jail spokesman, Maj. Dustin W. Cammack, the identical variety of workers it had earlier than the consolidation on April 4, 2021.
Christine Funk, a prison protection lawyer, visited the location with the Malaysian prisoner she represents as a Pentagon worker.
“It looks like there’s a component of unpredictability constructed into that jail at Guantánamo, by design, that’s its personal type of torture,” she stated. “I’ve by no means seen something prefer it.”
Her consumer, Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, was held for 14½ years at Camp 7 with out prices. He was solely lately arraigned in a Southeast Asia bombing case, which has no trial date.
“I’ve been out and in of Minnesota jails and prisons for greater than 30 years,” Ms. Funk stated. “I’ve seen all the things from minimal to medium to most safety. I’d keep in any considered one of them relatively than keep in that jail down at Guantánamo.”
The navy judges have up to now declined to situation a preservation order on the property. A few of its most secretive intelligence techniques are gone, however the deterioration has worsened.
Attorneys reported seeing snakes, tarantula carcasses, rodent droppings and black mildew. On completely different visits, the groups needed to step by way of or round puddles of water that had come from damaged ceiling sections. Reporters have been denied comparable entry.
“I had a very darkish thought after I went inside Farik’s cell,” stated Lt. Col. Chantell M. Higgins, a Marine lawyer for 2 former C.I.A. prisoners — Mr. Bin Amin and Abu Zubaydah, whose true title is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn. Though held since March 2002, he has by no means been charged with against the law.
“My ideas had been, How is that this a suitable cell for anyone who’s been detained long run like that?” Colonel Higgins stated.
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