Guantanamo Bay detention camp

The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, or Guantanamo detention camp, are unofficial terms for a prison facility at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay on a U.S.-leased area in Cuba. Official documents (such as the Executive Order from President Barack Obama that states his intention to close it) refer to the detention facilities at Guantánamo.. The camp is run by Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), which is part of United States Southern Command.

Like other bases outside the territory of the U.S.A., the camp is under military jurisdiction rather than that of the U.S. civilian justice system. This is, however, a complex and controversial legal issue.

This base was one of several detention facilities created as part of the war on terror as defined by the George W. Bush Administration (others include Bagram Airport), and it was first used to hold detainees captured in Afghanistan. The Administration ruled that these were not entitled to prisoner of war status under the Third Geneva Convention. Subsequent concerns about their treatment led to the Detainee Treatment Act and rulings, including Rasul v. Bush, by the Supreme Court of the United States. The Obama administration stated in February, 2009, that it intends to close the facility.

Creation and organization
On January 4, 2002, United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM) was told to take custody of designated detainees within the United States Central Command area of responsibility, and to hold them at a facility to be built at the Naval Station Guantanamo Bay. This task was assigned to Joint Task Force 160 (JTF 160). JTF 160 was principally a security operation, with a core of military police fom all the services; more than 1,000 U.S. service members, commanded by U.S. Marine Corps BG Michael Lenhart were sent to Guantanamo Bay to provide security for the detainees. In addition, on 22 January 2002, the Secretary of Defense directed Southern Command to implement a Department of Defense/Interagency interrogation effort. This became the reponsibility of Joint Task Force 170 (JTF 170), commanded by MG (U.S. Army Reserve) Michael E. Dunleavey, an intelligence officer on active duty. In civilian life, he had been a trial attorney. JTF 170's mission included strategic intelligence collection, force protection, and law enforcement and tribunal activities. Interrogations, however, were not necessarily intended to meet the evidentiary or procedural needs of tribunal or law enforcement processes; the emphasis was on information gathering for counterterrorism.

Southern Command had the two task forces working in parallel, establishing Joint Interagency Interrogation Facility (JIIF) on January 22. In March 2002, BG Rick Baccus and a Rhode Island Army National Guard Military Police Brigade were sent to Guantanamo, replacing the ad hoc Marine-based unit with military police. Baccus was a Military Police officer, but not experienced in prison operations.

Baccus said "Let the interrogators handle interrogations, but our charge was to handle the detainees and make sure they were treated humanely... How do you set the conditions of the camp psychologically so that we don't have constant confrontations between detainees and the military police..." He denied that it was his job to gather intelligence, explaining that that role was assigned to JTF 170, "to interrogate the detainees and get whatever information they could."''

He continued, "I'm not an interrogator by trade, don't know anything about it, didn't get involved with it while I was at Gitmo. That wasn't my mission. And so the thing I would mention is just that they have to work the one-on-one with the individual detainee. They have to work their interrogation plans."

Merger: JTF-GTMO
On August 27, 2002, GEN James T. Hill became the new commander of USSOUTHCOM. He knew MG Miller as a competent general military commander, and chose him to command JTF-GTMO on November 4, 2002. Some reports said that Baccus was relieved, but he countered that he was decorated for service, given an outstanding performance review, and JTF-160 received the "Joint Unit Meritorious Award for their time period in Guantanamo, of which I was the commander of that joint task force seven out of the nine months in the period of time of the award. ...my leaving Guantanamo was on a part of a plan to join the two task forces together. I left on the seventh of October; Miller was in place on the first of November."

Policy Changes
In 2002, senior political and military leadership were dissatisfied with the quality of intelligence coming from detainees and pushed for changes.

In the summer of 2002, GEN Jack Keane, Vice Chief of Staff for the U.S. Army, visited GTMO; and found that "... the police are guarding the detainees, and the interrogators are trying to get information out of them, and the two never work together towards common objectives."  It certainly is reasonable to have a common senior leadership, but, as discussed above, police and intelligence approaches to information gathering are different. After subsequent problems such as Abu Ghraib, it became clear that while the intent of Army regulations were that military police did not take part in intelligence interrogation, the current versions, applicable when Keane made his assessments, were not clear on the subject.

A major basis for Administration policy was a legal opinion, dated August 1, 2002, sent from the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Department of Justice to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.

Dunlavey requests stronger measures
In the fall of 2002, LTC Diane Beaver, Staff Judge Advocate to Dunlavey, led brainstorming sessions about stronger interrogation techniques. Given President Bush's determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to prisoners at Guantanamo, she proposed that extreme techniques could be undertaken with advance permission, or even advance immunity. She assumed that Bush could also decide that the Uniform Code of Military Justice did not apply, and so torture-like methods could be used. "Who am I," she asked later, "to second-guess the President?"

On October 11, 2002, MG Dunlavey asked for permission to use interrogation techniques "...designed to convince the detainee that death or severely painful consequences are imminent" and actions designed "to induce the misperception of suffocation," Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld did not accept all the requests.

Captives' identities and legal status
The policy of the Bush Administration on captives apprehended during the war on terror was to keep their identities and locations secret. From 2002 through 2006, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and various non-governmental organizations tried to identify captives held at Guantanamo detention camp and other facilities for extrajudicial detention, after reports that some captives had apparently disappeared. The Associated Press issued many Freedom of Information Act requests, requesting documentation of the captives' identities. The Department of Defense denied these requests, arguing that they infringed the captives' rights to privacy.

In January 2006, judge Jed S. Rakoff, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, rejected this argument, and ruled that the Department of Defense had to publish the captives' identities. The Department of Defense supplied the Associated Press with PDF files on March 3rd, 2006. Fifty-three of the 59 files contained 360 sumarized transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals, held in 2004. Three other files were the first of 19 that contained transcripts from the first annual Administrative Review Board hearings, held in 2005. The transcripts however were identified only by the captives' Internee Security Number (ISN).

The Department of Defense published a first official list of captives on April 20th, and a second, longer list on May 15th, 2006.

Legal status of detainees
While the legal status continues to develop, both as a result of a new Administration and ongoing court actions, the principal legal guidance comes from the Detainee Treatment Act and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Susan Crawford is now the convening authority for military commissions. President Obama, almost immediately after taking office, repudiated the most recent Executive Order of the Bush Administration.

Tribunals and Review Boards
In early 2004, the Department of Defense made recommendations to provide a semi-public program to review the captives' status.

Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) were held in small rooms, with three chairs for press observers. Only 37 of the 574 Tribunals were observed.

Annual Administrative Review Board hearings were convened for captives who had been determined, by a CSRT, to be an enemy combatant.

In the summer of 2004 Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense created the Office for the Administrative Review of Detained Enemy Combatants (OARDEC), to be headed by a "Designated Civilian Official" (DCO). Rumsfeld appointed Gordon England to be the first Designated Civilian Official. England was the Secretary of the Navy at the time. When England was promoted to Deputy Secretary of Defense, he remained the Designated Civilian Official.

Rasul v. Bush
In Rasul v. Bush the Supreme Court ruled that the Bush administration had to provide a venue for the captives to learn the reasons why they were being detained, and give them an opportunity to refute those allegations. The Supreme Court advised that this venue should be modeled after the Tribunals described in Army Regulation 190-8. It lays out the procedures American military personnel should follow to make sure the USA's treatment of captives complies with the Third Geneva Convention.

Military commissions at Guantanamo
In 2004 President Bush authorized the Office of Military Commissions to charge and try Guantanamo captives, which subsequently charged ten captives. However, in July 2006 the Supreme Court ruled that the President lacked the constitutional authority to set up Military commissions, declaring that only the United States Congress had that authority. This led to the passing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Twenty captives have since been charged under the Congressionally authorized Commissions. Most of the captives who originally faced charges have faced new and different charges under the new Commissions.

Guantanamo captives' living conditions
The first captives were housed in open-air cages in Camp X-ray, in the northeast corner of the base. As the number of captives grew, Camp X-Ray was closed, and Camp Delta was opened near the coast. At its high point it held about 650 captives (in all about 780 captives have been held there). 558 captives had their enemy combatant status reviewed by the Combatant Status Review Tribunals in late 2004, or January 2005.

The Board hearings were authorized to establish whether particular captives continued to be a threat, or continued to hold "intelligence value. These determined the 'Security Level of each detainee, which to some extent determined where in the camp he was housed and how he was treated. Most Level 1 detainees were held in Camp 4:  Level 1 detainees wear white "uniforms" and share living spaces with other detainees. At the other end of the spectrum, Level 4 detainees wear orange, hospital scrub-type outfits and have fewer privileges. Other privileges unique to Camp 4 include electric fans in the bays, ice water available around the clock, plastic tubs with lids for the detainees to store their personal items, and the white uniforms. White is a more culturally respected color and also serves as an incentive to detainees in other camps.

Many transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals and Administrative Review Board hearings mention these uniforms.

Religious observances

 * Early provision of directions to Mecca
 * Alleged abuse of Qu'rans
 * Muslim chaplains and issues

Hunger strikes and forced feeding
There have been repeated food strikes. Several inmates petitioned against force-feeding, butGladys Kessler, judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, rejected their petition.