End of POW-style detention

The Pentagon introduced communal, POW-style detention while George W. Bush was still president.

Defense Department contractors built the first barracks-style prison camp in 2004 as a pre-release lockup for some of the first of the 500 or so captives that the Bush White House would eventually send home.

Once Barack Obama was elected, communal became the norm. Prison camp managers, Zak included, would boast that by letting captives pray together, eat together, study together, the Pentagon was both complying with the Geneva Conventions on how to treat war prisoners and reducing friction between men held for years and their guards, who pass through on roughly one-year rotations.

Even as Congress blocked closure, communal Camp 6 became the showcase of calm coexistence — guards watched from the outside, some in towers air conditioned for their comfort, prisoners got PlayStations, food pantries and permission to roam inside their expanding areas. The holy month of Ramadan passed peacefully, according to both sides, with the captives laying out festive meals at dusk for the break-fast prayers and feast that followed.

Whatever detente existed ended on Jan. 2, around the date soldiers relieved sailors guarding the communal camp.

A captive started to climb a fence and a guard fired rubber pellets into the sprawling soccer field the Pentagon built for $744,000. Then on Feb. 6, guards undertook the most aggressive shakedown of the communal cells in years. The captives responded with protest: They launched the hunger strike, refused to shut themselves in their cells for two hours of nightly lockdown, and one by one obscured more than 100 cameras that had let guards peer in every cellblock corner.

On April 13, troops stormed Camp 6 to lock each captive alone inside a cell. Troops with shotguns fired rubber pellets and rubber bullets. Detainees wielded broom handles and other improvised weapons. Somebody whacked two guards’ helmeted heads and a detainee bled on two other guards during a five-hour operation that injured five prisoners and put all but a few of Guantánamo captives on lockdown.

New troops follow ‘the book’

The commander of the guard force, Army Col. John Bogdan, described the February shakedown as tightening what is now seen as an era of permissiveness in the prison before Navy sailors turned over their cellblocks to Army guards.

For a one-named Afghan hunger striker named Obaidullah that means knocks on his cell door between 2 and 4 a.m., offering a shower, according to his lawyer, Marine Maj. Derek Poteet. Guards had yet to issue the man a bar of soap and toothbrush by his 10th day in lockdown, the lawyer said.

That account, according to Army Col. Greg Julian, could not possibly be true. Every captive gets basic issue items, said Julian, who works at Southern Command, the Pentagon’s South Florida headquarters that supervises the prison and U.S. military interests throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Obaidullah, in his 30s, is one of just a few hunger-striking prisoners to have a military defense lawyer. This week, the Marine said, the Afghan man was so weak and so withered that he presented a “a bag of bones” when he reached out with a handshake.

Bogdan told reporters that he has met with some captives, heard their requests for “any number of things” that he did not detail.