At times, detainee leaders would order other men to break camp rules so that the guards would send them to higher-security blocks, where they could carry messages from their leaders, said Charles "Cully" Stimson, who was the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs from January 2006 to February 2007.

"The communications network there is like the communications network in any jail," Stimson said. "When Americans are in captivity, they respect rank. . . . I suspect it's no different down there."

Buzby, the Guantánamo commander, said that he, too, suspected that information flowed freely between militant leaders and their men at Guantánamo's camps.

"It would be foolish to not believe that there is a hierarchy of information being passed up and down the chain of command," Buzby said.

Abdul Zuhoor, an Afghan detainee who spent time in Camp Four, said that radical detainees used the system to their full advantage.

Zuhoor said he remembered watching groups of senior Taliban and Arab detainees meet in the exercise yard.

"They considered themselves the elders of Guantánamo," Zuhoor said in an interview in the Afghan town of Charikar. "They met as a shura (religious) council."

The group, Zuhoor said, acted in concert with others across Guantánamo to issue fatwas, which then were disseminated by detainees who were being moved to other areas for medical checkups, interrogations or transfers to higher-security blocks.

An attorney for one Arab detainee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared implicating his client, said his client told him at one point that he couldn't meet with his legal team anymore.

"He said there were five or six detainees who had assumed positions of leadership in the camp, and that he had to deal with them," the attorney said. "And they said that he would need a fatwa to continue speaking with us, to continue speaking with Americans."

The fatwa, the shura council told the attorney's client, couldn't come from just any imam; it had to be from a senior cleric in Saudi Arabia, a hotbed of fundamentalist Sunni Islam.

In June 2006, Zuhoor said, a Taliban member at Guantánamo bragged to him that there soon would be three "martyrs."

"The Arabs and some Taliban sat together and issued a verdict," Zuhoor said. "Three of the men volunteered to kill themselves to get more freedom for the other detainees."

The next morning, Zuhoor said, the news spread across Guantánamo: Three Arabs had committed suicide.

The Guantánamo commander at the time, Rear Adm. Harry Harris, called the suicides acts of "asymmetric warfare."