• Pentagon ponders Gitmo overhaul amid growing detainee unrest

    Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images file

    A U.S. Army guard stands ready in a "pod" inside the Camp 6 detention facility at the U.S. Naval Station Oct. 2, 2007 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Modeled on maximum security prisons in the United States, Camp 5 and Camp 6 allow easier observation of detainees with fewer guards.

    By Michael Isikoff, NBC News

    The Pentagon is considering plans for a $150 million overhaul of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- including building a new dining hall, hospital and barracks for the guards -- as part of an ambitious project recommended by the top general in charge of its operations, officials tell NBC News.    

    The proposed spending spree comes amid mounting signs of unrest among Guantanamo detainees that lawyers say is threatening their  lives. U.S. military officials confirmed Wednesday that the number of hunger strikers at Guantanamo has more than tripled in the last two weeks -- from 7 to 25 -- and that eight of them are being force fed through tubes. Defense lawyers said in a letter to Congress this week they have gotten reports that “over two dozen men have lost consciousness.”

    The most expensive prison that the U.S. maintains, Guantanamo Bay, may get a $150 million overhaul while remaining detainees engage in a hunger strike. NBC National Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff reports.

    U.S. military officials denied any lives were in danger but acknowledged that resistance and frustration among the detainees is growing, a development that a senior general said is because they are “devastated” that President Barack Obama’s pledge to shut down the facility has not been fulfilled.

    “They had great optimism that Guantanamo would be closed,” said Gen. John Kelly, the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, when asked about the hunger strikes during testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “They were devastated, apparently… when the president backed off -- at least their perception -- of closing the facility.

    “He said nothing about it in his inauguration speech,” Kelly continued, referring to President Obama. “He said nothing about it in his State of the Union speech. He has said nothing about it. He's not -- he's not restaffing the office that… looks at closing the facility.”

    White House officials say they remain committed to closing Guantanamo but have been blocked from doing so by Congress, leading officials to close the small State Department office charged with finding new homes for the detainees. At the same time, Kelly –- who took over as Southcom commander last year -- began laying the groundwork for a substantial overhaul of Guantanamo, testifying that many of the buildings there are “falling apart.”

    Brennan Linsley / AP file

    A Guantanamo detainee, center, is escorted by U.S. military personnel on the grounds of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base, Cuba, in this May 15, 2007, file photo reviewed by U.S. Department of Defense Official.

    “Gitmo seems to be the one place they don’t care about spending money,” said David Remes, a defense lawyer who represents detainees, noting that the plans for the overhaul are moving forward even as the sequester is forcing costs and layoffs throughout the government.

    “They will spare no expense to keep these men there rather than bring them to the United States.”

    Guantanamo is already considered the country’s most expensive prison per capita by far, with an operating budget this year of nearly $177 million, which means that taxpayers are paying more than $1 million for the care and maintenance of the 166 detainees.

    But Lt. Cmdr. Ron Flanders, a spokesman for the Southern Command, told NBC News that Kelly has recommended substantial new spending that includes nearly $100 million slotted to build new barracks for the 848 guards stationed at the facility. The current guard barracks are plagued by mold, he said.

    In addition, Flanders said, Kelly has signed off on construction projects that include:

    - a new $12 million dining hall for the troops;

    - a new $11.2 million hospital and medical units for the detainees;


    - a $9.9 million “legal meeting complex” where lawyers can meet their detainee clients;

    - a $10.8 million “communications network facility” to store data, including computer records and tapes of interrogations, which has been required by a federal court order.

    All these projects have been signed off by Kelly in the last few months and been forwarded to the Pentagon, where they are being reviewed by budget officials in Secretary Chuck Hagel’s office, Flanders said.

    At the same time, Flanders said, the operations budget for Guantanamo has already increased substantially this year with the construction of a $40 million fiber optic cable being built from south Florida to the facility in Cuba. The cable is needed to improve Internet access, thereby allowing officials to have improved live video feeds of the military commission proceedings of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

    In his testimony, Kelly emphasized that the costs of running Guantanamo are substantially higher because of its remote location at a U.S. military base on the eastern tip of Cuba.

    “Everything that’s built down there is at least twice as expensive,” said Kelly. “So a ten-penny nail costs 20 cents. So, everything is more expensive. So we have to take care of the barracks. We have to replace the dining hall…It’s literally falling apart.

    “And there’s other projects…none of them have to do with creature comforts for the detainees. They’re already living humanely and comfortably, acknowledging the fact they’re in jail.”

  • Lawyers for 9/11 suspects ask military judge to preserve secret CIA prisons as evidence

    Brennan Linsley / AP file

    In this photo, reviewed by a U.S. Dept of Defense official, a detainee shields his face as he peers out through the so-called "bean hole" which is used to pass food and other items into detainee cells, at Camp Delta detention center, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Dec. 4. 2006.

    By Jane Sutton, Reuters
    GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba - Lawyers for five alleged conspirators who attacked America on September 11 and say they were tortured in secret CIA prisons have asked a U.S. military judge to order that the prisons be preserved as evidence.

    The issue is one of more than two dozen on the docket for a week of pretrial hearings that began on Monday in the war crimes tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba.

    The defendants include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the hijacked plane attacks that killed 2,976 people on September 11, 2001. He wore a camouflage jacket to court over his white tunic and defiantly refused to answer the judge's questions.


    Defense lawyers also have asked the judge to order the U.S. government to turn over all White House or Justice Department documents authorizing the CIA to move suspected al-Qaida captives across borders without judicial review and hold and interrogate them in secret prisons after the September 11 attacks.

    President George W. Bush announced in 2006 that the September 11 defendants were among a group of "high-value" captives sent to Guantanamo from the secret prisons.

    The CIA has acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding. The defendants said they were also subjected to sleep deprivation, threats, and being chained in painful positions.

    The defense lawyers will argue that their clients' treatment was illegal pretrial punishment and constituted "outrageous government misconduct" that could justify dismissal of the charges, or at least spare the defendants from execution if convicted.

    "By its nature, torture affects the admissibility of evidence, the credibility of witnesses, the appropriateness of punishment and the legitimacy of the prosecution itself," the defense lawyers wrote in court documents.

    At least one potential witness was also held in the CIA prisons and his treatment could raise questions about the admissibility of his testimony, said James Connell, defense attorney for Mohammed's nephew, defendant Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali.

    The chief prosecutor, Brigadier General Mark Martins, said the prosecution does not plan to introduce any evidence obtained from the defendants or anyone else via torture, cruelty or inhuman treatment - which is prohibited by U.S. law and international treaty.

    In a departure from the Bush administration, the Obama administration has made it clear that any interrogation techniques must adhere to those long established in the army field manual, which prohibits torture.

    The defendants have been in U.S. custody for a decade, but there are still numerous legal and evidentiary issues that must be resolved before their trial begins on charges that include murder, hijacking, terrorism and attacking civilians.

    Abu Ghraib as 'crime scene'
    The judge presiding over the September 11 trial, Army Colonel James Pohl, ordered in 2004 that the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq be preserved as a "crime scene." He was at the time presiding over the trial of U.S. military police officers accused of torturing and photographing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. 

    Iraq was then under U.S. occupation. It was unclear whether Pohl had authority to order the preservation of the CIA prisons, whose location the government has kept secret, arguing that disclosure could threaten U.S. national security and put allies at risk.

    Polish prosecutors are investigating allegations that one of the sites was in Poland, and there is evidence the CIA set up others in Romania, Lithuania and Thailand, according to reports by the Council of Europe and the United Nations.

    Lawyers for the September 11 defendants first made the request for preservation of the secret CIA prisons under seal in September of last year. The request was unsealed about a month later. But this week's pre-trial hearing marks the first time it has been presented in the Guantanamo court.

    Before considering the CIA prisons issue, the court on Monday began slogging through issues such as whether the defendants had agreed to add lawyers to two defense teams and drop one from another and whether they must show up in court for pretrial hearings.

    When two of them refused to answer whether they had approved the personnel changes, the judge took their lawyers' word for it that they had.

    But he said he would not grant their request to skip some court sessions unless they first acknowledged vocally that they understood they had the right to be present for discussions that could affect their legal rights.

    "They're going to have to tell me out of their own mouths, or they'll be here," Pohl said.

    After a chaotic May 2012 arraignment session that dragged on for 13 hours, the defendants have alternated between refusing to speak to the judge and making accusatory statements against the United States. Although they largely ignored the judge on Monday, they whispered to their lawyers and appeared to be reading legal documents.

    Mohammed and his nephew are Pakistani citizens. The other defendants are Walid bin Attash and Ramzi Binalshibh, both Yemenis, and Mustafa al Hawsawi, a Saudi.

    Family members of 9/11 victims have traveled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to watch the arraignment of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who reportedly refused to listen to the judge or answer questions during Saturday's proceedings. NBC's Michael Isikoff reports.

    Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

  • Gitmo's youngest and last Western detainee returned to Canada

    Reuters

    Omar Khadr is seen at left in an undated family handout photo and in the most recent artist rendering from a courtroom.

    By NBC News staff and wire services

    A one-time teen al-Qaida fighter who was also Guantanamo Bay’s youngest prisoner and last Westerner has been transferred to his native Canada on Saturday, the Canadian government confirmed.


    Canadian Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said Omar Khadr, 26, was flown from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Saturday on a U.S. government plane and transferred to Millhaven maximum-security prison in Bath, Ontario.

    Khadr's case has been controversial both in Canada and abroad given his age when he was captured, the nature of his detention and hearing, and the reluctance of Canadian officials to accept his return.

    "I am satisfied the Correctional Service of Canada can administer Omar Khadr’s sentence in a manner which recognizes the serious nature of the crimes that he has committed and ensure the safety of Canadians is protected during incarceration,” Toews said.

    A U.S. war crimes tribunal in 2010 sentenced Khadr to 40 years in prison, although he was expected to serve just a few more years under a deal that included his admission he was an al-Qaida conspirator who murdered a U.S. soldier.

    Khadr was 15 when he was captured in 2002 in Afghanistan, and has spent a decade at Guantanamo, the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

    Khadr admitted planting 10 roadside bombs in Afghanistan as part of an al-Qaida cell and throwing a grenade that killed an American special forces medic, Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer of Albuquerque, N.M.

    Over a decade since the war began, TODAY's Lester Holt visits the battlefields outside Kandahar Province and the Horn of Panjwai to see where things stand.

    Khadr was the first person since World War II to be prosecuted in a war crimes tribunal for acts committed as a juvenile. He was the youngest prisoner still at Guantanamo, but younger boys were previously held there.

    Khadr, born in Toronto, was taken to Afghanistan by his father, Ahmed Said Khadr, himself a senior al-Qaida member and confidant of Osama Bin Laden.

    Bin Laden apprenticed the boy to a group of bomb makers who opened fire when U.S. troops came to their compound. Khadr was captured in the firefight, during which he was blinded in one eye and shot twice in the back.

    In a written statement, Toews said Canada received Khadr's application for transfer from the United States on April 13. He said U.S. officials assured Canada it would receive a videocopy of an interview with Khadr, but it, along with other videos of interviews and unedited reports, was not sent until this month.

    Former Canadian Ambassador Gar Pardy, however, said Canada's Conservative government -- which cultivates an image of being tough on crime -- dragged out the transfer.

    "I think the government was mainly very mean-spirited in how it handled the case," Pardy said to CTV News.

    Toews said he continues to be concerned that Khadr "idealizes" his father and denies Ahmed Khadr's association with al-Qaida. The Canadian public safety minister said he is also troubled by how "radicalized" Khadr has become from his time in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Guantanamo Bay.

    Girls in Afghanistan were not allowed to attend school under Taliban rule, but now millions of girls across the country attend classes. It's a dramatic social change the Taliban is still fighting. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

    “From the age of 15 to 26, he has been in some kind of jail, incarcerated. He has had no normal adolescent development at all,” CBC’s Susan Ormiston told CBC News.

    Khadr's defense team and human rights groups had argued he was a "child soldier" who should have been sent home long ago for rehabilitation and challenged the notion that a battlefield killing amounted to a war crime.

    Khadr was prohibited under the deal from calling witnesses at his sentencing hearing that would support defense claims that he was a "child soldier," forced into fighting the U.S. by a radical father who was an associate of bin Laden.

    Khadr's sentence will expire on Oct. 30, 2018.

    The U.S. Department of Defense also confirmed Saturday that it transferred Khadr to Canada, leaving 166 detainees at Guantanamo.

    In the 2008 presidential election campaign, President Barack Obama promised to close the Guantanamo prison during his term, but that pledge has gone unfulfilled amid security concerns and opposition from Congress, which enacted laws making it more difficult to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo.

    Reuters contributed to this report. 

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  • 'Tortured' Guantanamo Bay prisoner seeks release of secret videos

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    U.S. Navy guards escort a detainee after a "life skills" class held for prisoners at Camp 6 in the Guantanamo Bay detention center on March 30, 2010.

    By Jeff Black, Staff Writer, NBC News

    A new lawsuit seeks to force the U.S. government to make public “extremely disturbing” videotapes of a Saudi national whose abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison has been called “torture” by a former Bush administration official.

    The suit, filed in New York federal court on Monday, comes 10 years after the first prisoners in the United States’ global war on terror arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. The prison, within a U.S. Navy base, was considered by Bush administration lawyers outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

    The controversial prison was ordered closed within a year by President Barack Obama when he took office, but stiff resistance in Congress over housing detainees in the United States and trying them in civilian courts has left most of 171 detainees in limbo as the base remains open.

    Indeed, 46 of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay have been designated as too dangerous to be released at all by the Obama administration and have been assigned for indefinite detention without charges or trial. Through the years, 779 detainees have been incarcerated there with Bush releasing more than 500 and Obama 67.

    “Sadly, Guantanamo is becoming a fixture,” Baher Azmy, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has helped defend detainees, told msnbc.com. “We come to think that during wartime that there are these blips of decreased civil liberties, but eventually we restore ourselves to normalcy. That dynamic 10 years on is not happening now. …The president who so eloquently criticized it has accepted its existence.”

    The Obama administration disputes that characterization. A State Department spokesman told NBC News that it has made clear that closing Guantanamo is in the interest of national security and is continuing its efforts to close the facility.

    Benjamin Wittes, of the conservative-leaning Brookings Institute, has suggested that Guantanamo has changed since the Bush years.

    "Alone among facilities used by the military to detain enemy forces in the war on terror," Wittes wrote, "detentions at Guantanamo are supervised by the federal courts in probing habeas corpus cases. Detainees there, unlike at any other detention facility, have access to lawyers. Their cases are followed closely by the press, and many hundreds of journalists have been to Guantanamo."

    Harsh interrogation techniques
    In their lawsuit filed Monday, Lawrence Lustberg and Sandra Babcock seek to shed light on the treatment of their client Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was captured in Afghanistan during the hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2001 and was whisked to Guantanamo Bay, where government investigators later identified him as a man who had planned to participate in the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

    The case of Qahtani first came to light in 2005 when Time magazine published secret log files from Guantanamo that detailed harsh interrogation techniques on the Saudi suspect.

    In February 2008, he was charged with war crimes and murder, but on May 11 of that same year those charges were dropped. The reasons at the time were not made public.

    In 2009, a Bush administration official revealed the reason to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post:

    "We tortured Qahtani," Susan J. Crawford said. "His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case" for prosecution.

    Now, Qahtani's attorneys, who have been to Guantanamo, seek to shine more light on what happened nearly a decade ago.

    "It’s important at this juncture for the public to have access to visual images of what happened at Guantanamo,” Babcock told msnbc.com. “I think people have become desensitized to the plight of the men that came to Guantanamo. They don’t see them as human anymore. It’s easy to distance yourself to what happened."

    The tapes remain classified, according to Lustberg and Babcock, but the lawyers have viewed them and say the government should release them.

    "I can’t tell you what’s in the tapes," Babcock told msnbc.com, citing their secrecy. "But I can tell you that they are extremely disturbing and I think they could change the tenor of the debate in this country about our nation’s interrogation and detention practices."

    Lustberg points out that "the Army field manual still allows our government to engage in some of the same abuse that was visited on Qahtani. We think that when this sort of thing goes on, detainee abuse should continue to be a robust debate."

    The lawsuit says Qahtani's treatment included severe sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations and isolation. It also cites threats by military dogs, exposure to extreme temperatures and religious and sexual humiliation.

    A spokeswoman for government lawyers told The Associated Press that there would be no comment. 

    Other cases at Guantanamo are still pending. Five prisoners accused of helping to organize the Sept. 11 case are expected to be arraigned at the base in 2012 in what would be the most high-profile U.S. war crimes tribunal since the World War II-era. The five, including the self-proclaimed mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, are facing charges that include murder and could be sentenced to death if convicted.

    There is no judge yet in the Sept. 11 case.

     

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