Guantanamo and High Price of Barbarity

The maximum security prison in Guantanamo is the focus of the U.S. war on Islamic terrorism, a place which has remained far outside many people’s view and whose cost of maintenance is economically and politically high.

To keep their 171 prisoners in Cuban territory, the U.S. spends $800,000 a year per prisoner, to which it is necessary to add the logistical costs of maintaining an American military base in territory completely cut off by land.

Trucks, construction material and even the fresh lettuce of the only McDonald’s in Guantanamo are brought by ship or airplane, with the consequent cost of maintaining a base that first started taking prisoners a decade ago in the U.S. war against al-Qaida, which has seen $500 million invested since then. According the Pentagon sources consulted by the EFE agency, it is difficult to detail the exact quantity of the cost of maintaining the base, with 10,000 soldiers and their families, plus a large number of Filipinos and Jamaicans, in part because some of the funds spent are not divulged.

The logistical complexity and the expense increase with the formation of “military commissions” in “Camp Justice,” a complex of pre-fab buildings that on Jan. 17-18 housed for the second time a military commission against the Saudi Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who is accused of planning the attack on the warship USS Cole, in 2000, in which 17 American officials died.

Nashiri’s civilian lawyer, Richard Kammen, called the prison a “monument to waste,” complaining during the hearing of the elevated cost of mobilizing an entire team of defense, prosecution, analysts, officials, observers, parents of the victims and journalists to this location in southwest Cuba.

The most expensive prison in the world is reached slowly by a street that crosses a residential zone and goes through a a landscape of cactus and bushes before letting out in a mountainous area.

Atop these hills sits the maximum security prison of Guantanamo, with its interminable perimeter of fences, coils of barbed wire and watch towers. In its interior there are various prisoner camps, and some international organizations believe that it guards innumerable secrets.

Keeping them is not cheap. In Camps 6 and 7 alone — the most full — there are 900 guards who mostly receive a salary comparable to a soldier deployed to a war zone, much higher than an official of a military prison.

Camp 6, dedicated to the best-behaved prisoners, holds 85 percent of prisoners, according to what was told to EFE by the boss of the unit, a soldier who did not have his name on his lapel and who also did not want to reveal it.

“This can give an idea of how the prisoners behave,” he explains, although he says without giving details that complicated situations may occur, seeing as, among other reasons, they “have access to news,” including the Al Jazeera network in English.

During the visit, the official comments behind one-way mirror as the detainees — observed without their knowledge — take part in a common area in an art lesson, in which they paint, always with their ankles chained to the floor.

The penal center for the most non-compliant is Camp 5 where there are more security measures and the prisoners, who number between 20 and 30, stay in cells designed to prevent them from hurting themselves.

These prisoners, who are monitored at all times, can only leave their cells to watch television or read newspapers, chained to the floor four hours a week with variable time to go out in the fresh air.

Questioned about whether secret camps exist in the base, one of those responsible for the prison said in a mysterious tone: “all of the secret camps are secret.”

But the highest cost for the U.S. government could be the loss of confidence in their capacity to see justice done, as Nishiri’s defense indicated, which characterized the military commissions as a “facade” full of obstacles that don’t exist in the federal courts.

The prosecution assures us that these tribunals offer all of the necessary guarantees in a prosecuting “enemy combatants,” but for most of the prisoners who remain in Guantanamo — of an initial group of nearly 700 — there is no clear proof that they were al-Qaida combatants, while they pass their days isolated at the base.