Attorney James Connell has visited his client inside the secret Guantanamo prison complex known as Camp 7 only once, taken in a van with covered windows on a circuitous trek to disguise the route on the military base.
Connell is allowed to say virtually nothing about what he saw in the secret camp where the most notorious terror suspects in U.S. custody are held, except that it is unlike any detention facility he’s encountered.
“It’s much more isolating than any other facility that I have known,” the lawyer says. “I’ve done cases from the Virginia death row and Texas death row, and these pretrial conditions are much more isolating.”
The Camp 7 prison unit is so shrouded in secrecy that its location on the U.S. base in Cuba is classified and officials refuse to discuss it. Now, two separate but related events are forcing it into the limelight.
In Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted April 3 to declassify a portion of a review of the U.S. detention and interrogation program in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attack. The report, the release of which is opposed by the CIA, is expected to be sharply critical of the treatment of prisoners, including some now held in Camp 7.
And today, a judge in Guantanamo will open a hearing into the sanity of one of those prisoners, Ramzi Binalshibh, whose courtroom outbursts about alleged mistreatment in Camp 7 have halted the already bogged-down effort to try five men in the Sept. 11 attacks, all of whom are held there.
Both issues are deeply intertwined. Binalshibh has accused the government of making noises and vibrations inside Camp 7 to deliberately keep him awake, reminiscent of the intentional sleep deprivation, along with other forms of abuse, that his lawyers say he endured at the hands of the CIA from the time he was captured in Pakistan in September 2002 to when he was brought to Guantanamo four years later.
Camp 7 has never been part of the scripted tours of Guantanamo offered to journalists, and there are no published photos. It’s not even mentioned on a military media handout about the detention center, which otherwise notes that the military “conducts safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detainees.”
Military officials, while insisting they adhere to international human rights standards, refuse to describe Camp 7. “I’m not even functionally allowed to discuss the place,” said Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, a Pentagon spokesman.
A few facts have come out through government reports and court testimony. It apparently holds 15 of the 154 prisoners at Guantanamo. Those held in Camp 7 include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has portrayed himself as the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attack and is on trial with Binalshibh. Also held there is a Saudi prisoner charged with orchestrating the deadly bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
Army Col. James Pohl, the judge in today’s hearing, granted all five defense teams a request to visit Camp 7 one time for up to 12 hours to inspect conditions. Because of an ongoing dispute over the rules for handling classified evidence however, only Connell, who represents defendant Ammar al-Baluchi, has been inside. He went in August, riding in the van with windows covered in heavy-duty paper and a makeshift interior barrier so he could not see the driver.
About the Author
