Senators seek answers on Guantanamo protections
WASHINGTON — A group of senators has written the defense secretary expressing concern about the potential for a “significant outbreak” of the coronavirus at the Pentagon prison at Guantanamo Bay, seeking answers to how the military is safeguarding the 40 prisoners there and the U.S. forces responsible for them.
In the letter, circulated by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and signed by 13 other Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, the lawmakers cited “the lack of a comprehensive medical infrastructure” at the base, which sends all residents except the detainees to health care facilities in the United States for complex or protracted medical care.
The senators sent the letter to Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Wednesday as the Pentagon was delegating to military commanders around the world some authority to ease restrictions related to the virus, consistent with the Trump administration’s guidelines. They set a deadline of June 10 to provide details about available care and prevention procedures.
The Defense Department has acknowledged only two confirmed cases among Guantanamo Bay’s 6,000 residents, both of them U.S. service members who have recovered, and declined to say whether there were others. But some troop rotations have continued during the pandemic, with flights from Navy bases in Florida and Virginia taking new residents and family members. New arrivals must isolate themselves for two weeks before they can move about the base.
The Guantanamo Navy base has a small community hospital, which has been checking the temperatures of potential patients in a triage tent and sending some samples to the United States for testing.
By law, the prisoners are forbidden from entering the United States for any reason — trial, medical care, detention. So the Pentagon has for years dispatched medical teams with sophisticated equipment to the base to carry out procedures and surgeries that the other residents receive elsewhere. Visiting surgeons have done spine operations, colonoscopies, amputations and rectal reconstruction. In one instance, the military brought in a team to conduct a cardiac catheterization, but the prisoner refused to consent to it.
In their letter, the senators describe the 40 men imprisoned at Guantanamo, whom the United States has detained for 12 to 18 years, as an “aging and chronically ill population, some of whom retain the mental and physical wounds of torture.”
The prisoners range in age from their mid30s to 72, and the military has for years been planning for their endoflife care. Some prisoners have recently told their lawyers that while some communal confinement continues, the guards have segregated more medically atrisk detainees, such as those with heart conditions and diabetes, from the younger prisoners.