Camp al Qaeda

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba -- Built to block the advance of communism but left nearly idle in the decade since the Cold War ended, the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay was a sleepy remnant of a different time in geopolitics. This sweltering Caribbean outpost, consisting of a cluster of squat, dusty, and dilapidated beige buildings surrounded by cobalt blue waters, was for years an isolated but plum assignment for sailors. "Gitmo," as it is affectionately known, was used sporadically for training and fleet support, and for many sailors became a low-stress finale to a long naval career.

But on January 6, just three months after the first American air strikes in Afghanistan, the Pentagon began assembling a new anti-terror nerve center here and started an extraordinary makeover of the base. What the military calls its "Anti-Terrorism Detainee Operations Mission" is now the paramount assignment at Guantanamo. The changes, equivalent to an ambitious urban renewal plan, include a new hospital, interrogation center, and detention facility, and they signal that the base will be an active part of the war on terrorism for years to come.

At heart, however, Gitmo remains a remote Caribbean outpost. The increasing numbers of troops stationed here quickly learn the limits of the base's diversions--a McDonald's and a sandy bar called the Clipper Club. The troops also learn they are as susceptible to isolation as the detainees, and that they are not immune from the occasional visits from scorpions and tarantulas.

The 45-square-mile Guantanamo base in eastern Cuba is actually two bases separated by a 21/2-mile-wide bay. The base's sole airstrip is on the "Leeward Point" side, as is the Clipper Club, the newest place for beer and local variations on chicken wings and fried clams. Everything else--housing, places of worship, the bowling center, and the fenced-in encampment for the
detainees--is on the "windward" side.

Soldiers, sailors, and Marines, along with civilians and contract workers, take a 30-minute ferry ride to cross from one half of the base to the other. Land transportation ranges from Humvees to the so-called Gitmo bay rapid transit fleet, which is essentially a convoy of converted old school buses.

Assimilating the new terrorism fighting operation and its personnel so rapidly into the existing base framework is a remarkable challenge for the Pentagon. For starters, the number of inhabitants at Guantanamo has risen dramatically since January. The population has swelled from about 2,400 sailors and Marines and their family members last year to 6,000 people today, including the approximately 1,600 members of Joint Task Force 160, which was deployed to oversee the detainee mission; the 300 captured Taliban and Al Qaeda members; and the hundreds of additional permanent military personnel, foreign workers, private contractors, and civilians.

There are indications that Guantanamo is sagging under this weight. Since February 6, 1964, when Fidel Castro cut off water and electricity to the base, the base has been proudly self-sufficient, but at a high cost. A desalination plant produces 3.4 million gallons of water per month, and a power station churns out more than 800,000-kilowatt hours of electricity daily.

Apparently, this output is not enough. Water consumption rose so high in March that commanders had to dip into emergency water reserves. During the week of March 24, the base consumed 1,035,000 gallons of water--up from the 700,000 gallons a week used before January 6. Fresh fruits and vegetables used to arrive once a month on a barge from Florida in quantities sufficient for all. Now residents complain that if they don't grab the items they need at the Navy exchange as they arrive, they are likely to be unavailable until the next shipment.

In the stupefying heat and relentless sun, no one and nothing moves very quickly here. Until this week, the detainees were confined in Camp X-Ray. Locked in individual 6-by-8 open-air chain-link cells, the prisoners shifted only occasionally and lethargically on their concrete slabs. The plaintive sounds of the Al-Azan, a recorded Muslim call for prayer, filtered through a loudspeaker five times a day. A green and white "Quibla" sign written in Arabic was nailed to a post and points in the direction of Mecca, an ocean and continent away.

The name Camp X-Ray dates from the 1990s, when the holding facility was built for the tens of thousands of Haitian and Cuban migrants who were plucked from rickety boats at sea and held at the base before being processed for asylum in the United States or returned to their native countries. The name is fitting, because the compound is stark and skeletal and has a makeshift quality: the nine watchtowers on the perimeter of Camp X-Ray are constructed from plywood, as are the Joint Interrogation Facility's five windowless huts. All the buildings seem ready to wilt in the muggy Caribbean heat.

A few miles away from Camp X-Ray, in the base's "Radio Range" section, is Camp Delta, the new two-acre permanent prison that the detainees were transferred to on April 28. It is composed of 75 air-conditioned, 16-by-32 foot "Seahuts," which house 408 cells, estimated to cost $16 million in all. The huts were built by Brown & Root Services, a construction subsidiary of Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton. Conditions at Camp Delta are much improved over Camp X-Ray, with each detainee getting a bed, a hand basin with running water, and what the military calls an "Asian-style" toilet whose hole is flush with the floor. The new cell walls are made from a rigid steel mesh.

The detainees get regular medical care. When a trip to the hospital is warranted, prisoners are chained backwards in the back of a golf cart and driven to Navy Fleet Hospital 20--a collection of yellow air-conditioned tents erected over dry, loose dirt. The hospital--used for detainees only--was assembled in a few days. The well-organized and clean facility can handle almost all medical emergencies. It has a surgical suite, a casualty receiving area, an intensive care unit, a lab, and a pharmacy.

Navy Capt. Samuel "Pat" Alford, the hospital's commanding officer, boasts that the hospital "is exactly the same thing we would deploy for our own personnel." Most of the hospital staff members, including its nine physicians, hail from the fleet hospital at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Alford, who has served in or commanded naval hospitals for more than three decades, notes the different challenges this hospital faces. Normally the role of a fleet hospital is to stabilize patients before sending them to bigger hospitals in the United States for further treatment. But in Guantanamo Bay, the detainees' stay is indefinite, and many of them have arrived with extensive injuries, including lost limbs. "We are rehabilitating the detainees to regain strength and range of motion and [giving them] prosthetics," Alford says.

Joint Task Force 160 and Joint Task Force 170--the two multiservice task forces made up of men and women from the Marine Corps, Army, Navy, and Coast Guard--support the new mission of guarding and interrogating the detainees. On a typical day, the guards might escort a detainee, wearing orange scrubs and wrist and ankle chains, to the interrogation huts. They also escort detainees, naked but for a towel around their waist, to the bathing facilities.

When asked about how they feel about guarding suspected terrorists, the deeply tanned troops emphasize that they check their emotions at the front gate. But it is clear that they feel some compassion for their charges, as a soldier from Illinois describes one detainee's "bad week." The troops assisted the same man twice within a couple of days after hearing his shrieks and seeing him climb the chain link of his enclosure. As it turns out, the detainee had discovered a tarantula sharing his cell. Later, it was a scorpion. Troops delicately removed both creatures from the man's cell. The Illinois reservist was stoic, however, when he found a scorpion in his own tent a few yards away at Camp Alpha, the tent city where the military guards live.

The occasional humorous touch pops up at the base, such as the handmade wooden sign reading "Motel 6" that hangs on the fence of Camp Alpha. The sailors who keep the hospital stocked with supplies and equipment jokingly refer to themselves as the "dirt people." They keep a pet iguana that they call "Dusty," so named because she is frequently covered by dust from the cloud kicked up by her belly that drags low on the ground as she hunts all the scraps of human food left for her. These whimsies help offset some of the crude conditions that the troops face: the male troops, for example, shave in basins made from old car tires, and the 130 female troops shower in what amounts to an open-air wooden box.

Many of the new military personnel at the base are reservists from very diverse backgrounds and occupations. Sandra Orlandella, a New York City police officer, was poised to retire from crime fighting to care for her infant son before she was called up by the Army to be a public affairs captain here. Before arriving at Guantanamo in the first week of April, the beginning of baseball season, Army Reserve Maj. Lee Reynolds, was one of two men hired to alternate as "Mr. Met"--the mascot for the New York Mets. Reserve Navy Lt. j.g. Matthew Miller normally spends his days on Capitol Hill as the administrative assistant to Rep. Kenny Hulshof, R-Mo.

Although Camp Delta and the war on terror are new, the pace of life at Gitmo is not, and it's sometimes a challenge for military leaders to keep up morale. T. Michael Toole, who supervised a Navy Seabee construction battalion detachment in Guantanamo Bay in 1985, understands what these troops are going through: "There is not much going on, and the goal is keeping the enlisted guys motivated. It was a neat, tight community. You either had the right attitude and made the most of it, or were hanging around with nothing to do."