The Militant (logo)  
   Vol.66/No.26           July 1, 2002  
 
 
U.S. now holds 468 prisoners in
hellhole at base in Guantánamo, Cuba
 
BY MAURICE WILLIAMS  
Washington has sent 34 more detainees from Afghanistan to its prison camp at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The inmates arrived June 12, bringing the total number of prisoners held there to 468.

The men were brought to the newly constructed Camp Delta, which is made of concrete cells and covered by a dark green screen, designed to prevent anyone from seeing into the facility and inmates from being able to view their surroundings.

The U.S. government first began bringing prisoners captured in the war against Afghanistan to the naval base in January. Up to 300 were held in Camp X-ray, a makeshift prison with open-air, eight-foot-by-eight-foot cages, where inmates were kept in shackles.

In this hellhole prisoners paced "like caged animals" and were kept "awake all night under the glare of spotlights," wrote Associated Press reporter Tom Hays on April 28. "Months of confinement in crude, chain-link cells at Camp X-ray have left its 300 detainees from the war on terrorism at best a little stir-crazy, at worst suicidal."

Lt. Col. William Cline, the commander at the concentration camp, admitted that some "may be depressed. They’ve been asking, ‘When am I going to trial? When am I going to get out of here?’"

A psychiatric nurse at the facility, Navy Lt. Pamela Herbig, said that at least 13 inmates have been put on medication for mental disorders ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to the early stages of schizophrenia. Some of the prisoners’ problems did not come from their confinement or from battlefield trauma, she asserted, but from "long-standing, childhood-type issues that makes them more susceptible to depression."

Last February a number of inmates waged a hunger strike to protest their conditions and indefinite detention.

Meanwhile, U.S. military forces are holding dozens of captives in Afghanistan. Through interrogations some will supposedly be released and others will face military tribunals.  
 
 
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