Pearl of the Antilles

East Caravella. It sounds like a meadow in Narnia but looks like a suburb of Phoenix. East Caravella is a complex of townhouses situated along a curved road. The streets look newly paved, but the lawns are uniformly dead. Fifteen dollars a night here gets you a two-level apartment to share with a German Public Radio reporter, a back-yard patio overlooking a neatly manicured slope of brown grass, and a fully equipped kitchen.

The bedspreads match the window dressings. Dried floral centerpieces and plastic plants adorn tables and corners. Each townhouse has three televisions with cable, fake wood floors, and toiletries (Gilchrist & Soames; Est. London, England). Central air conditioning purrs cool breezes over pillow-bedecked beds. In the bathroom, a paper strip labeled "Sanitized for your protection" is attached to the toilet seat like the ribbon on a gift-wrapped present.

Also under the pretense of protecting you, just a few miles away, the government has imprisoned 460 men in metal cages, communal barracks, and concrete cells. Surrounded by concentric chainlink fences topped with concertina wire, they fall asleep under dimmed fluorescent lights. They are dressed in orange, beige, or white: the Guantanamo Bay color spectrum that distinguishes bad behavior from compliance with prison rules. Rotating shifts of 300 vigilant guards in desert camouflage keep watch.

In recent weeks, this epicenter of the war on terrorism, 400 miles southeast of Miami, has reached a crisis point. As the camp's population has dwindled from more than 700 to about 460 detainees, frustration and anger among those left behind appears to have increased. The morning of May 18, three detainees attempted suicide by ingesting large doses of antianxiety medicine. That evening, a fourth staged a suicide ruse in a communal barrack. When guards entered the bay to investigate, ten detainees wielding improvised weapons of fan blades and broken fluorescent lights pounced en masse. Just a few days ago, a Guantanamo spokesman announced 89 prisoners were on a hunger strike.

The whole thing was planned in advance, said the military, from the hoarding of pills to refusal of meals. It was just an "attention-getting" tactic — ostensibly Al Qaeda attempting to eclipse the American public's hatred of terrorists with something like worried concern.

It's difficult to know whether the detainees are worthy of concern. The evidence against them is often classified — to them and to the rest of us. Even for those found innocent of war crimes charges, the future is detention, perhaps indefinitely.

The United Nations and many of America's closest allies — including the United Kingdom — have called for Guantanamo's closure, complaining of inhumane treatment and the suspension of fundamental legal rights. But you'd never know it from visiting the base. If ten days at the camp teaches you anything, it's a lesson on acting like nothing is wrong.

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If you hear anything or see anything that hasn't been heard or seen before, they screwed up.
— Carol Rosenberg, who has covered Gitmo for the Miami Herald since before the detention center opened in 2002

The most important things are what you won't be seeing. The most important thing to remember is that nobody who has spoken to the detainees can speak publicly about it.
— Katherine Newell-Bierman, an attorney with Human Rights Watch

The food is good, the bedrooms are clean, and the health care is very good. There is a library full of Islamic books, science books, and literature.... Sport, reading, and praying, all of these options are not mandatory for everyone, it is up to the person.
— Unattributed "contrasting detainee comment" from the Joint Task Force press kit

The media tour of the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay is a near-weekly event. Dozens if not hundreds of reporters have visited the base, along with VIPs like U.S. senators and governors, foreign diplomats, even Miami Police Chief John Timoney. It's a two-day excursion that covers the basics of detention and the various ways prisoners' cases are reviewed.

"We are making a conscious effort to reach out to all the media so that you can see what's happening here — that it's good, that it's not all the horror stories you hear out there," said Army Brig. Gen. Edward Leacock, deputy commander of detention operations, in an introduction to reporters May 10.

The tour begins with Camp Delta. The sprawling complex contains five detention camps and a sixth presently under construction. It's located a fifteen-minute drive from East Caravella, through a hilly cacti-filled landscape. Iguanas waddle along the side of the road, and vultures gaze down from telephone poles. Four enormous windmills — futuristic, three-prong propellers — rotate slowly atop a distant ridge. Satellite dishes and radio towers mushroom periodically from the hilly landscape. Occasionally a winding turn reveals a sudden glimpse of the Caribbean.

The security measures begin well outside the camp where prisoners stay. First there's a canopied checkpoint about a half-mile away that looks like a tollbooth with guns. When a van arrives there, two soldiers open its doors, check identification, and salute. Another young man, perched on a platform some eight feet high, watches over the proceedings while holding an M-16. The guards work twelve-hour shifts. They appear bored and hot.

A series of orange construction barriers follows the checkpoint. Only one vehicle can pass through at a time. Then there are signs: Camp Delta. "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom." No Photographs.

The three fences that surround the camp, which opened in April 2002, are enmeshed in an opaque green cover. Upon entering, you pass through a series of three large cages, called sally ports. They work like this: A guard opens a gate to the port. The van is driven in. The guard locks the gate behind. All passengers disembark, show IDs, and then stand around in the beating sun for five minutes as guards check under the vehicle with a mirror, a jumbo version of what a dentist uses to look for cavities in molars.

Then there's a review of the rules: No photographs of empty guard towers. No photographs that include two guard towers in one frame. No photographs of the guards without their permission. Photographs of detainees are allowed only below the neck or from behind. These rules are cautionary, because everything is reviewed and censored. No visits are unannounced.

The interior side of the third sally port is opened. You are now, in the local parlance, "inside the wire."

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The U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba measures 45 square miles and is located near the southeastern tip of the island. The United States began leasing land on both sides of the natural harbor in 1903, an agreement that can be terminated only by mutual consent. The arrangement has withstood the dissolution of cordial relations between the two countries. The U.S. sends an annual check for $4080 to the Cuban government, and every year Fidel Castro fails to cash it. A seventeen-mile perimeter fence separates the base from Cuba proper, and an hourly ferry travels between its two shores.

Because the land is technically in a foreign country and is not a U.S. territory like Guam or Puerto Rico, the White House long ago determined that U.S. laws were not necessarily applicable here for noncitizens. From 1994 to 1996, more than 40,000 Haitian and Cuban rafters were housed here while politicians debated their refugee status, a history that links the naval base closely to many immigrants in Miami.

In 2001 George Bush faced a difficult problem. After declaring that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to enemy soldiers in his war on terror, he couldn't bring them to the United States. Stateside they could pose a threat or more easily sue the government. So the White House began sending what it termed "enemy combatants" to the extrajudicial haven locals call "Gitmo." The first arrivals were housed at Camp X-Ray, where unruly migrants had been kept in earlier days.

The Herald's Carol Rosenberg remembers watching the first prisoners arrive in January 2002. Dressed in orange jumpsuits, blacked-out goggles, and face masks, they had just completed a twenty-hour flight from Afghanistan. "As soon as they got off the plane and hit the heat, they wobbled, and the Marines just eased them down on the ground," she says.

Though the facility was open only four months, the photographs from Camp X-Ray remain the most pervasive Guantanamo Bay images. They show detainees in chainlink cages, shackled to stretchers, and kneeling on the ground in masks.

The old migrant cages were ill-equipped to deal with maximum-security inmates. Detainees were issued buckets for toilets. The doors lacked the rectangular openings (called "bean holes") to pass food through, so Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) were slipped through the door frame.

"I wouldn't call it a dog kennel. I call it a cell ... an outdoor cell," Col. Terry Carrico, commander of the military police unit at the time, told reporters in January 2002.