GITMO's camp 7 fails… prisoners moved, because it's still a thing
The jewel of the US prison-industrial-complex, GITMO still has 40 prisoners. Austerity comes to pseudo ‘black-site’.
“Washington: A once-secret unit within the Guantanamo Bay detention centre that had fallen into disrepair has been closed and the prisoners moved to another facility on the American base in Cuba. The prisoners at Camp 7 were transferred to another unit as part of what US Southern Command said in a statement on Sunday (Monday AEDT) was an effort to “increase operational efficiency and effectiveness”.
Guantanamo's crumbling, super-secret Camp 7 is kaput, Southcom announces. (The high-value ex-CIA detainees it housed, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Muhammed, have been transferred to Camp 5.)/1 https://t.co/ab2CwYY4B4 pic.twitter.com/3JXy9LHtQt
— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) April 4, 2021
Today I read on TechCrunch that Google had figured out a way to make its satellite maps clearer, and checked Camp 7 of the Guantanamo Bay wartime prison, where the “high value” detainees who were formerly held in the Central Intelligence Agency’s black-site prisons are kept. They include Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other four 9/11 defendants, as well as Abu Zubaydah (the first prisoner to be waterboarded), Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (U.S.S. Cole defendant), and eight other men. Although I did not save a version of the image before, I’m pretty sure its resolution is indeed now clearer. I’ll make screenshots this time to preserve it for news value/comparison purposes, in case the website changes, and discuss what we can see.
First, for context, the military and intelligence community drape Camp 7 — marked on the military’s “for official use only” maps of the base as an “intelligence operations center” — with security theater. Journalists who visit the prison complex have been able to walk through Camp 5 and Camp 6, where lower-level detainees are held, but the military’s press handlers will not talk about Camp 7 – not even where it is located. In 2014, when James Connell, a defense lawyer for Ammar al-Baluchi, another defendant in the 9/11 military commission case, went to inspect his client’s cell, the military blocked out his van’s windows and drove him in circles before taking him there. (Al-Baluchi’s defense team is currently asking a military commissions judge to order the military to let the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture visit Camp 7, a motion that I estimate has approximately zero percent chance of being granted.)
As an aside, the lawyers for a former CIA prisoner who was held at Camp 7 until he pleaded guilty and turned informant had asked a military judge to let his sentencing jury see Camp 7 later this year. I wonder what closing and sanitizing it means for that request. #KhanAE069 pic.twitter.com/OIcH83sKGC
— Carol Rosenberg (@carolrosenberg) April 4, 2021
—& sterilized hundresds of Haitians living with HIV.
That fear of viral infection—even as the US caused the viral and political conditions that led them to flee!—created an excuse for keeping refugees out of the US. And also the architecture for infinite detention at Gitmo.
— Dr. Thrasher (@thrasherxy) April 1, 2021
Includes reference to the US detaining Uyghurs in Gitmo based of Chinese reports, allowing Chinese officials to question them there, and even after determining they were not a threat and that returning to China would be dangerous, refused admittance to the US, leaving some stuck. https://t.co/SOq8U4CPk2
— for the self abolition of the proletariat (@thecoleslaws) April 3, 2021
In adjacent criminal activity:
Opinion | @FrankFigliuzzi1: If Rep. Gaetz exposed a pending criminal case he may have endangered the safety of FBI informants, undercover agents, cooperating witnesses and even his father. https://t.co/TPMJ5KLCJn
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) April 5, 2021
To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: It wants only to show what actually happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen)”.[20]
