To the Death

Here on the 45-square-mile compound there are still close to ten thousand U.S. troops, training and working, right on the southeastern edge of Cuba, on the only U.S. base in the world located on Communist soil.

No interrogation center in the free world has a more feared reputation. Outside of the more barbaric nations, no interrogation center has ever been more successful at prying information out of known terrorist hard men, at mentally breaking down illegal combatants, at making them reveal to the U.S. military precisely what their cutthroat brothers-in-arms are planning.

Almost all the West’s major hits against terrorist organizations come as the result of “information received.” Guantánamo Bay, and its interrogation teams, are entitled to a massive share of the credit for that. They are not, of course, ever going to get it, since, in their trade, credit is an almost unheard-of commodity.

Those teams confer in secret, they work in secret, they turn the screws in secret, they make their demands on prisoners in secret, and they report in secret. Over the years, thousands of lives have been saved, hundreds of plots have been exposed, thanks to the skill and determination of America’s unseen maestros in the cages of Guantánamo Bay.

The Cuban government has for years loathed and detested the American presence down there in the remote razor-wired compound which lies nearly five hundred miles from Havana, Cuba’s capital city up on the northwestern shore. But America came by this territory thanks to a treaty signed by Cuba’s first president, Tomas Estrada Palma, in 1903.

To this day there are God knows how many clauses, steel-rimmed, protecting America’s rights—“complete jurisdiction and control,” “perpetual sovereignty over Guantánamo Bay,” “lease termination requiring the consent of both governments.”

Fidel Castro once made a determined attempt to break the lease by citing the 1969 Vienna Convention. And by asserting that any agreement between the U.S. and Cuba had been dependent upon the threat or use of force by the Americans.

But Uncle Sam banged an iron fist on the table and told Comrade Fidel he was talking nonsense, and reminded him he had accepted a substantial lease payment from them at the outset of his rule, thus ratifying the lease agreement. The Americans were not going anywhere.

Unsurprisingly, diplomatic relations could not exist between the two countries, and cooperation was zero. But the great sheltered Bay of Guantánamo is essentially a U.S. naval base, and is easily supplied from the American mainland.

Independent, a law unto itself, secretive, and highly successful, this hot, dusty, subtropical detention center can more or less do what it likes. Hated and feared by the jihadists of the Middle East, Guantánamo has been home to operatives from Hamas, Hezbollah, and just about every Muslim terror group including al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The dread of every terrorist commander in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or Pakistan is that one of their senior men will end up in the Cuba facility and spill the beans, as many of them have. The seizure and subsequent transportation of Ramon Salman, Reza Aghani, and Mohammed Rahman sent a shiver of dread through clandestine enclaves in Damascus, Gaza, Tehran, Kabul, and the high caves in the Hindu Kush.

Could these three important al Qaeda men withstand the mental onslaught of U.S. interrogation — a process which would not only be relentless, but also conducted in secret? All of the Middle East terror organizations had access to lawyers, and they frequently succeeded in presenting them at civilian proceedings in the U.S., and, more especially, in England. Also they had a thousand hotlines to the Arab television network, al Jazeera, which often cited examples of brutality, bullying, and torture by the West. But none of this applied to Guantánamo.

The procedures there were strictly on American terms, just the way Admiral Arnold Morgan liked it. And this was about as bad as it gets, if you had just attempted to blow up a U.S. airport, or, worse yet, the Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

It was not much comfort that things might have been a lot worse. Back in the early days of al Qaeda and Taliban interrogation, in 2002, temporary holding facilities for three hundred detainees were built at Guantánamo Bay right out in the open.

This was the feared Camp X-ray, where satellites occasionally photographed prisoners kneeling, shackled, or squatting under a burning hot sun with no overhead cover, in the presence of armed guards. Many prisoners were also seen to be wearing earmuffs, face masks, and covered goggles.

The more modern Camp Delta was quickly constructed for two thousand detainees, but Middle Eastern propaganda television stations still refer to Camp X-ray, because of its association with harsh treatment for its inmates. Human rights groups have called such measures “sensory deprivation,” citing such levels of restraint as unnecessary and inhumane.