Guantanamo preps for new prisoners, maybe ISIS fighters
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, CUBA » Earlier this month, in a drill shrouded in secrecy, prison guards practiced for something that hasn’t actually happened at Guantanamo in a decade. They rehearsed receiving a new war-on-terror detainee.
Medical evaluation? Check. Notification of the International Red Cross? Check. Assignment to a cell? Check. Security and more security. Gone are the iconic orange uniforms that made Camp X-Ray infamous. Theman who played the role of new captive wore white.
Navy Rear Adm. John Ring, the prison commander, says he hasn’t gotten any word that new prisoners are coming. But since President Donald Trump signed an order keeping the prison open, Ring’s staff is now preparing for what spokeswoman Navy Cmdr. Anne Leanos calls an “enduring mission.”
“I have not been told we’re getting new people. I have no order to receive new people. I’ve been asked some hypothetical questions about capacities and things like that, but we are not imminently expecting anybody,” Ring told reporters in early June.
Guantanamo today has 40 prisoners and a staff of 1,800 troops and civilians. With the-maximum-security Camp 5 prison just reopened, after a cellblock was remade into a clinic and mental health ward, the detention center can now take in another 40 men.
One wrinkle is that any new detainees are likely to be members of Islamic State, not al- Qaida. And while some people see Islamic State, or ISIS, as offshoot of al- Qaida, the militant movements are not allies and have vastly different aims.
“Unless we got some al- Qaida from Afghanistan, which is possible, most of the conversation is about Syria, and most of those guys, I understand, are ISIS,” said Ring, who doesn’t decide who comes and goes from Guantanamo. “So it’s possible we could get folks from either place.”
Any new prisoner would be the first to arrive at Guantanamo since the CIA delivered an Afghan “high-value detainee” in March 2008. That was years before the so- called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria declared its worldwide caliphate, invaded and controlled a huge swath of Iraq and Syria and released a series of brutal videotaped killings of captives in orange jumpsuits. Al- Qaida has “a different ideology” than Islamic State, says Leanos, the prison spokeswoman. Besides, aftermore than a decade in military detention, there’s also a “different mentality” among the captives — who are profiled as al- Qaida members or affiliates — and have come to understand Guantanamo prison’s incentive system says the admiral’s cultural adviser who is only identified with one name, Zaki. Captives who follow the guards’ commands get to live communally, pray and eat in groups, take art, language and gardening classes and read more books, for example.
Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights and other opponents of Guantanamo detention argue the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, Congress’ permission for the president to wage war on al Qaida and the Taliban over the Sept. 11 attacks, does not apply to ISIS. “The one thing that’s guaranteed is it will create years more of litigation,” Dixon said. Two possible new prisoners could be Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, The Washington Post reported, who are held by U.S.-allied Kurdish militia in Iraq as suspected members of “the Beatles,” a British cell blamed for the torture and killings of at least four Americans in Syria.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has said it is the U.S. preference to repatriate foreign fighters from allied nations. But in February, Britain stripped Kotey and Elsheikh of their citizenship, leaving the United States with three options: Let the Kurds keep them, bring them to the U.S. for federal trials, if a case could bemade; or bring them to Guantanamo for possible trial by military commission, making them the first U.S. test case of the president’s authority to indefinitely hold Islamic State suspects without charge.
Guantanamo is not a good idea, according to the parents of slain journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff and the two other Americans killed by Islamic State, and neither is seeking a capital trial of Kotey and El Sheikh. Either move would make them “martyrs in the eyes of their fanatic, misled comrades in arms,” they argued in a New York Times opinion piece in February.
President Barack Obama’s administration, which saw Guantanamo prison as a recruiting symbol for al- Qaida, sought to shut it down by moving to U.S. lockups the last of the nearly 800 post-9/11 captives seized during the George W. Bush years. Congress thwarted that ambition by forbidding the transfer of Guantanamo prisoners to the United States.
But on Jan. 30, President Donald Trump revoked Obama’s closure order. So the prison leadership is now making plans for 25-35 more years of detention, said Army Col. Steve Gabavics, the guard force commander.