But plan Guantánamo must, not only because the base is a crucial hub for what the U.S. Southern Command considers “hemispheric security,” but because of its notorious prison that holds the 40 forever detainees of the war on terror. And while President Donald Trump has promised to keep the prison open and even bring in new detainees, the base at Guantánamo finds itself in a geographic region particularly vulnerable to the very climate crisis the Trump administration refutes. Whether they acknowledge it or not, military commanders thus face a conundrum: spend enormous amounts of money to revamp the deteriorating detention camp to make it hurricane-proof, or put detainees lives in danger. The military has proposed a series of improvements to the base, some of which would address the threat of storms, but for the most part, work has proceeded piecemeal.

As extensive research demonstrates, human-caused climate change is “supercharging” hurricanes in the Caribbean basin and “exacerbating the risk of major damage” from the storms. In recent weeks, Hurricane Dorian’s 185 miles-per-hour winds razed parts of the Bahamas — less than 250 miles north of Guantánamo.

Though Dorian skirted the base’s location in eastern Cuba, Guantánamo has endured hurricanes in the past. In 2017, Hurricane Irma made landfall there. The Category 5 storm was at that time the strongest hurricane ever observed in the open Atlantic Ocean. None of the detainees imprisoned at the base were evacuated, despite the former head of the U.S. Southern Command and White House chief of staff John Kelly’s 2014 statement to Congress that “numerous facilities are showing signs of deterioration and require frequent repair.” Kelly highlighted Camp 7, the secretive prison where the military holds its “high-value” detainees, including accused 9/11 architect Khalid Sheik Mohammed. “[T]he High Value Detention Facility is increasingly unsustainable due to drainage and foundation issues,” Kelly told Congress as part of a failed bid to construct a new $49 million facility. Though no detainees were relocated during Irma, those held at Camp 7 were moved to a more secure location when Hurricane Mathew struck in 2016.

Congress declined to upgrade detainee facilities, but Guantánamo’s “Warfighters” now take their meals at a $12 million hurricane-proof dining room and kitchen.

Since Trump’s January 2018 executive order to maintain the prison at Guantánamo, the question of infrastructural shortcomings has reemerged. The detention mission at the base changed from “expeditionary” to “enduring” as a result of Trump’s order. Consequently, Joint Task Force Guantánamo, or JTF GTMO, was under a new imperative to plan for the future – a future comprised of an aging and increasingly ill detainee population, some of whom are already experiencing the physical and psychological effects of torture, detainment, and growing old at the base. In light of the current administration’s position, commanders received orders last year to plan for another 25 years of detention at Guantánamo. As journalist Carol Rosenberg reported for the New York Times, JTF is effectively planning for detainees to “grow old and die” there. Rosenberg wrote in April that then-JTF Commander Rear Adm. John C. Ring envisioned a “communal nursing home-style and hospice care confinement” facility.

Prior to his dismissal at approximately the same time as Rosenberg’s report, Ring was a leading proponent of the establishment of Camp 8, a proposed $69 million detention camp to hold the alleged 9/11 plotters and other “high-value” detainees. Camp 8 would have been constructed to withstand a Category 3 hurricane (despite the Category 4 and 5 storms of recent years), but Congress ultimately refused to fund it. Asked how it intends to navigate climate change-related extreme weather, a JTF spokesperson told The Intercept, “We do not discuss our plans or operations, but reaffirm our commitment to safe, humane, and legal detention of law of armed conflict detainees. Our Warfighters constantly train for multiple contingencies including destructive weather, and the safety of detainees is a priority for the Joint Task Force.” Though Congress declined to upgrade detainee facilities, those “Warfighters” now take their meals at a $12 million hurricane-proof dining room and kitchen that opened in summer 2018.

Moazzam Begg remembers “praying that there was some kind of hurricane and it hits this place because that would be some kind of way out.”

The JTF and the U.S. Southern Command did not provide information on contingency planning for ailing detainees in the event of extreme weather, but the impacts of storms are palpable for the men held at Guantánamo. Indeed, the hurricanes themselves are a form of punishment for detainees, one that former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg still remembers vividly some 14 years after his release.

In a phone interview with The Intercept, Begg recounted his imprisonment during the hurricane season of 2004. At the time, he had been in maximum-security solitary confinement for close to two years. He was allotted just 15 minutes outside of his cell approximately every three days, an all too brief reprieve he was denied when the hurricane hit. No one informed Begg of the circumstances, but he recalled a booming wind that rattled the roof of his cell, and officers “bolting and strapping things down, trying to make sure the guards were fully briefed in the case of any event that might cause the facility to be damaged and the possibility of our escape.” Begg, who was never charged with a crime, described “praying that there was some kind of hurricane and it hits this place because that would be some kind of way out.”

Pakistani national Ahmed Rabbani described a similar sentiment in a conversation with his attorney in fall of 2018, as the hurricane season began. In a statement that the human rights organization Reprieve provided The Intercept, Rabbani told his attorney Clive Stafford-Smith, “We are surrounded by a dark ocean, hurricanes each season, stormy seas of the Caribbean triangle, where everything disappears.” Rabbani, like the 39 other men still detained at the base, finds his fate caught in the crosshairs of the never-ending war on terror and the capriciousness of the Caribbean climate. “We hear only the sounds of shackles,” he told Stafford-Smith. “The sound is echoing around, overcoming even the sound of the seas.”

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets that aims to strengthen coverage of the climate crisis.

The post The Military Has Done Little to Prepare As Climate Change Threatens Guantánamo appeared first on The Intercept.

If one were to draw a map of the locales most pivotal to Vladimir Putin’s political trajectory, the bottom of the Barents Sea might not immediately come to mind. And yet, long before his incursions in Syria, Ukraine, and the U.S. elections, it was in those frigid waters off the navy base at Vidyayevo, in the northwestern corner of his country, that the Russian leader’s career took an indelible turn.

On August 12, 2000, a year after Putin took the helm as President Boris Yeltsin’s premier and less than six months into his own presidency, an explosion rocked the forward torpedo room of the Oscar II class Russian submarine Kursk. The blast was followed by a second, larger explosion that drove the vessel to the bottom of the Barents, inciting a crisis during what was to have been a milestone show of force by the Russian Northern Fleet.

A National Security Agency staffer monitored the dismal events from Oslo, Norway, where he had arrived as a signals liaison officer barely one month prior. The officer later described responses to the disaster from the NSA and its counterpart the Norwegian Intelligence Service in an account he wrote for an NSA internal news site, SIDtoday. The account, provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden and published with this article, indicates that Norwegian intelligence was aware the catastrophe had occurred two days earlier than it has said was the case, and provides new details on the timeline of the Russian naval response to the explosions, underscoring the extent to which the crisis was mismanaged.

“Three and a half hours passed before any [Russian] suspicion of problems on board OSCAR II 850 arose.”

For Putin, that mismanagement stood among the most prominent examples of how Russia’s military and diplomatic capabilities broke down after the fall of the Soviet Union, staining the early years of his presidency and ultimately spurring him to tighten his political grip.

The Barents is a contentious place, not only for its Arctic climate, but because it hugs the Russian and Norwegian coastlines. There, over decades of Cold War tensions, Western powers stood at their Soviet adversary’s doorstep, before geography and geopolitics merged to seal the fate of the 118 sailors who died aboard the Kursk.

Much remains unknown about the Russian navy’s handling of the disaster, and the official Russian narrative was not without its switchbacks. Initially, Moscow claimed that the Kursk collided with another vessel in the Barents, causing it to sink. In fact, a leaking torpedo blew up during a training exercise, Russia’s official investigation later concluded. Russian authorities also initially said that all aboard perished almost immediately; in fact, 23 sailors survived the blasts and sinking, likely for at least several hours, if not days, according to evidence later found by divers. Their resilience made it all the more lamentable that it took the Russian navy more than 15 hours to launch a rescue, which ultimately failed. As SIDtoday recounted, the Kursk’s sinking “occurred without any distress calls or communications of its problems.” By the time the Kursk landed on the seafloor, it was unable to contact the Northern Fleet command, and the aftermath of the explosion demonstrated a communication failure in which the Russian navy effectively lost track of its submarine.

“It seems as if the Northern Fleet was not aware that the explosions had occurred on one of their vessels,” an NIS report quoted in the SIDtoday article stated. “Thus, 3 ½ hours passed before any suspicion of problems on board OSCAR II 850 arose. Another 1 ½ hour passed before the sub call dissemination activity started.” Experts believe this dissemination activity was the fleet’s first attempts to communicate with the Kursk. These delays do not appear to have been reported previously.

SIDtoday also stated that the NIS report was issued on “Saturday 12 August,” the same day as the Kursk explosions. This is significant because the Norwegian military told the press in the wake of the incident that it did not realize an accident had occurred until Monday, the same day Russia announced the sinking — but the NIS report makes clear that Norway knew a Russian sub had been in a severe accident. Quoted at length in SIDtoday, it gives timings for the two explosions that are specific to the minute, adding:

THIS CATASTROPHIC CASUALTY CAUSING ENTRY OF WATER INTO THE NOSE COMPARTMENTS AND PL850 [Kursk] HIT THE BOTTOM PROBABLY A FEW SECONDS LATER [sic]. BASED ON UPDATED DATA, PL850 OSCAR II WAS LOCATED AT BOTTOM OF THE SEA IN POSITION 6936.59N 3734.32E ATA DEPTH OF 108 METERS WITH PERISCOPE AND ANTENNAS ERECTED.

A Norwegian spy ship, FS Marjata, was tracking the Northern Fleet exercise and collected information related to the Kursk, military officials told Norwegian newspapers, including Dagbladet and Bergens Tidende. The spy ship was within 15 nautical miles of the Kursk accident, said the latter publication; a Norwegian Defense Command spokesperson told the paper that the military recorded the sound of the explosions but did not register anything unusual at the time, only noticing the explosions when reviewing the recordings after Russia disclosed the accident on Monday.

Dagbladet reported that the Ministry of Defense said just after the accident, on Monday, that it received indications over the weekend of an accident involving a Russian nuclear submarine. But by Tuesday night, the ministry backtracked, telling Dagbladet that the information it received over the weekend could be interpreted in various different ways and that only on Monday was it certain that an accident had occurred.

The Norwegian report, apparently issued Saturday, gives timings for explosions specific to the minute. But Norway said it did not realize an accident occurred until Monday.

But journalist Robert Moore, in a 2003 book on the accident, “A Time to Die,” reported that Marjata’s “data are sent in real time to Oslo for analysis by naval intelligence specialists,” bolstering the idea that NIS could have been aware of the accident on Saturday, as indicated by SIDtoday.

NIS declined to comment for this article. The Russian government did not respond to a request for comment. NSA did not comment.

According to the SIDtoday document, “It was clear that the [Russian] Northern Fleet command had no information on the condition of the sub or crew” just after the sinking, and that once they managed to locate the Kursk, “the Russians did not have the ability to reach the sub to conduct any type of rescue/extraction operations.”

As European media began reporting on a “missing” Russian submarine in the following days, Britain, the U.S., and Norway offered publicly and, reportedly, through backchannel communications to aid in location and rescue efforts. In a move that would mar the early days of Putin’s leadership, the Northern Fleet waited until Wednesday — four days after the Kursk sank — before accepting any help from foreign powers. Norwegian and British rescuers wouldn’t arrive until that Saturday, a week after the accident.

Fourteen months after the disaster, the Dutch company Mammoet lead the initiative to lift the 17,000-ton submarine from more than 300 feet beneath the surface of the Barents. The recovery operation, which ultimately took 15 hours, proved particularly sensitive due to the twin nuclear reactors and stock of torpedoes and cruise missiles aboard the vessel. Upon surfacing, the Kursk was towed to dry dock at Roslyakovo.

How Kursk Lead to “Clear Subordination” Under Putin

The dysfunctional response to the crisis proved an unflattering revelation of the status of the Russian navy at the turn of the century, according to Michael Kofman, a senior research scientist at CNA, a Virginia nonprofit that operates the Center for Naval Analyses and developed early techniques for U.S. anti-submarine warfare. After a decade of economic and political instability following the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Russia’s defense infrastructure was underfunded and relied heavily on vestiges of Soviet military power. “Russia inherited a large percentage of the Soviet Union’s navy with a tiny fraction of its budget,” Kofman told The Intercept. Thus, Russia’s navy had on its hands equipment “meant to fight World War III with NATO,” Kofman said, without the need for such force and without the finances to maintain it.

Kofman also recalled that the Kursk’s grandeur — “an undersea atomic guided missile cruiser, as well as a capital ship and one of the largest submarines you can find at sea” — compounded the already unflattering optics surrounding the crisis. (A “capital ship” is one of a navy’s most important vessels and typically among its largest.)

“Putin learned you’ve got to get a lid on TV and control how they portray you.”

The crisis struck at a sensitive moment in Russia’s history. As the country was renegotiating its footing on the world stage, the Kursk disaster undermined equivalencies Russia drew between itself and other major Western powers. According to Sean Guillory, a scholar at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, a desire to reassert Russian geopolitical leadership offers one potential explanation for Putin’s unwillingness to accept assistance from Western powers immediately after the disaster. But for Guillory, there is also a security argument to be made, insofar as accepting military aid from NATO members would potentially expose sensitive Russian military information. “You can be sure that if the Americans are going to assist and rescue a submarine, they’re going to be taking notes,” Guillory said.

Whatever factors ultimately informed Putin’s delayed response to the crisis and to Western offers of aid, the historical moment Putin found himself in heightened the implications of the tragedy. Guillory pointed out that the events of August 2000 occurred at a time when, despite the formal demise of the USSR in 1991, “the Soviet system is still continuing to collapse,” the Kursk proving one of its most telling relics.

From a public relations standpoint, both domestically and internationally, the Kursk disaster was what one might euphemistically call a teachable moment. Media coverage of Putin’s handling of the crisis was less than flattering, largely because Putin had yet to yoke Russian media firmly to his bidding, according to Tony Wood, author of the recent book, “Russia Without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War.” “The lessons Putin learned were, you’ve got to be a bit smoother, and you’ve also got to get a lid on TV and control how they portray you, otherwise they could finish your presidency,” said Wood. While families of missing sailors sought information on the state of their loved ones in the days following the blasts aboard the sub, Putin could be seen on vacation at a Black Sea resort at Sochi. Though he did go on Russian national television to take responsibility for the mismanagement of the disaster in late August, he also gave a remarkable interview to CNN journalist Larry King some weeks later that demonstrated an altogether different sort of statesmanship. In response to King’s inquiry into just what happened to the submarine, Putin responded flatly, through a translator: “It sank.”

Such obfuscations from Russian leadership did not go unchallenged, however. The NSA document recounts another dubious development in the weeks following the disaster that recalled “shades of the KGB in the 50s.” During a meeting between Russian officials and the families of some of the Kursk sailors in late August, Nadezhda Tylik, the mother of Kursk sailor Sergei Tylik, was yelling at First Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov when a trench coat-clad figure appeared behind her with a syringe in hand. In a video that aired on several major European news outlets, Tylik can be seen receiving an injection before collapsing into the arms of surrounding military officials, her diatribe interrupted. The SIDtoday document, as well as a number of media outlets, described the event as a forced sedation intended to silence Tylik. In a subsequent statement, Tylik countered the sedation narrative, claiming that the syringe captured on video contained medication for her heart. Tylik declined to offer comment for The Intercept. “Sorry,” she wrote via email, “but it is hard for me to remember those tragic days and for that reason I refuse to do interviews of any kind.”

Much as the disaster and its aftermath forever altered the lives of those who lost loved ones aboard the Kursk, so too did it change the tenor of Putin’s distinct flavor of statecraft. According to Wood, what emerged in the aftermath of Kursk was a strict adherence to “the vertical of power,” a catchphrase ascribed to Putin in the 2000s. Wood describes this as the “clear subordination and hierarchical functioning of all parts of the government,” essentially “a strict chain of command.” While this effectively sounds like any well-functioning form of governance, it also became associated with what critics view as Moscow’s emerging authoritarian predilections. The concept of the vertical of power actually predated Putin. “Yeltsin talked about it in the 1990s as well,” said Wood. “The difference is that, at that point in time, it was talked about as something that didn’t exist.” While the Kursk might not have singlehandedly prompted Putin to impose a stronger grasp on Russia’s media and military apparatuses, the scandal and dysfunction surrounding the disaster do delineate a clear before and after in Putin’s political and diplomatic trajectory. Indeed, by the mid- to late 2000s, Russia had experienced significant economic growth and had made notable funding and infrastructural advancements within its military. “If a crisis like the Kursk had happened several years later, Russia probably would have had the money and the wherewithal to handle it themselves,” said Wood.

The post Sinking of Russian Nuclear Submarine Known to West Much Earlier Than Stated, NSA Document Indicates appeared first on The Intercept.

Cuba was the intended target of many such terror plots. Long before Donald Rumsfeld homed in on the country to imprison “enemy combatants” in the aftermath of 9/11, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy sought to visit “the terrors of the earth” on Cuba as part of Operation Mongoose, a covert CIA effort to overthrow leader Fidel Castro. Mongoose envisioned acts of sabotage, including U.S.-created food shortages, potentially induced via biological weapons. And another 1960s plot, Operation Northwoods, sought to create a pretext for invading Cuba. “We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area,” read a document presented to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We could blow up a U.S. warship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.” The U.S. famously concocted a number of contemporaneous plans to assassinate Castro; at least one involved enlisting the Mafia. These plots proved to be a less-than-subtle ideological precedent for George W. Bush’s 2003 jest to Iraq administrator Jay Garner that, following Garner’s efforts to rebuild that country, the U.S. would, “for the next one,” invade Cuba, which ranked among the Bush administration’s “axis of evil” countries.

Today, GTMO, as the base is called in military parlance, boasts a gift shop at its Navy Exchange, a stone’s throw from the Guantánamo McDonald’s. There, for $15, you can buy a Joint Task Force GTMO detainment operations T-shirt, embossed with a graphic of an armed prison guard tower and finished with barbed wire filigree. The memento is a troubling reminder of the normalcy with which U.S. empire has infiltrated our everyday, an iteration of what revisionist historian William Appleman Williams called “a way of life.” Indeed, U.S. malignancy in Cuba, from the Cold War to the so-called war on terror, is only part of the aggression that stemmed from the taking of Guantánamo. This June marks an important birthday for the Navy base, and for American overseas empire, too. Indeed, their origin story is one and the same.

Photos: Novelty mugs and t-shirts at the Guantánamo Bay gift shop. Miriam Pensack for The Intercept

In early June 1898, U.S. Marines arrived at Guantánamo Bay and staged the first successful landing in what would become known as the Spanish-American War. Aside from avenging the sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana harbor, the U.S. sought to “liberate” Cubans from imperial rule. That pretense conveniently ignored Cuba’s preceding 30-year struggle for independence from Spain, an effort born of plantation society in the eastern part of the island, not all too far from Guantánamo. Indeed, 1898 proved the denouement of the Ten Years’ War (1868-1878), the Little War (1879-1880), and the final Cuban War of Independence, which began in 1895.

The invasion at Guantánamo marked the formal beginning of an American penchant for intervening militarily in the affairs of other nations. Historians of U.S. empire have long acknowledged 1898 as a watershed in the trajectory of America’s global posturing. The U.S. had always had its eye on the Caribbean and Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of Florida: Southern-sympathizing filibusters sought to incorporate the island as an additional slave territory from the early-to-mid 1800s, and in 1823, John Quincy Adams predicted what many saw as the inevitable U.S. acquisition of Cuba, arguing that “if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba … can gravitate only towards the North American Union which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.” But the U.S. only got around to invading Cuba after its territorial acquisitions in North America had reached their western and southern limits — a fulfillment of Manifest Destiny and the realization of a settler-colonialist dream that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Thus, in 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier “closed.” Within a decade, the U.S. attacked the Spanish empire, achieving a swift victory that effectively handed Spain’s remaining colonial possessions to the United States: Puerto Rico and Guam became U.S. territorial holdings, and the United States undertook a brutal and bloody war against Filipino nationalists to annex the Philippines.

“Cuba can gravitate only towards the North American union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.”

Cuba, meanwhile, fell under U.S. military occupation from 1898 to 1902. An American military government ostensibly sought to guide the fledgling nation on the path toward full autonomy, and agreed to end the occupation once the first Cuban republic drafted and ratified a constitution to Washington’s liking — a constitution that would have to include the full text of the Platt Amendment, which granted the United States final say in Cuban treaties and made it legal for the United States to intervene whenever it deemed necessary “for the preservation of Cuban independence.” Article VII of the amendment mandated the lease of Guantánamo with no termination date, to be annulled only upon the agreement of both the U.S. and Cuban governments. The stated purpose of the lease was to ensure that, by granting the U.S. a space for a coaling and naval station, it would “enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba.”

So began a legacy of quasi-sovereignty in Cuba. Both governments renewed the coercive Guantánamo lease in 1934, and it is under the terms of that lease that the 40 detainees currently held at the base find themselves indefinitely incarcerated on a breathtaking 45 square miles of Cuban territory, the natural beauty of which they will most certainly never see.

A short drive from Camps 5 and 6, where “low-value detainees” are held, military personnel and their families enjoy the fruits of effectively stolen territory, land that Castro demanded be returned after his 26th of July Movement came to power in 1959 and sought to undo some 60 years of U.S. imperial machinations on the island. At one point, Castro shut off water to the base, a less-than-subtle suggestion that the United States vacate the premises. The U.S. retaliated: More than 2,000 Cubans employed at the base were summarily dismissed. Despite these antagonisms, the United States Treasury still sends the Cuban government a check of $4,085 annually for “leasing” Guantánamo. To this day, the revolutionary government refuses to cash the checks.

Indeed, Guantánamo is at once the oldest military base outside of the United States and the only one maintained against the expressed will of the government of the country it occupies. This rendered the legal status of those at the facility particularly murky, and this same legal ambiguity enabled the indefinite detention of suspected war-on-terror combatants, some of whom have never been charged with a crime. Prior to a handful of Supreme Court cases that have extended limited legal protections to detainees, the Bush administration seized upon Guantánamo’s legal liminality to argue, among other things, that the base was under the sovereignty of the Republic of Cuba, ostensibly negating constitutional protections or obligations to abide by international treaties, and thereby making the base an ideal place to commit human rights abuses. A handful of Supreme Court cases have mitigated some of this legal ambiguity: Rasul v. Bush ruled in 2004 that U.S. federal courts do have jurisdiction over Guantánamo Bay, thereby providing detainees access to the courts as a means of challenging the legality of their detention, though the ruling left unsettled the question of constitutional protections extending to noncitizens held at the base. And in 2008, Boumediene v. Bush established that detainees also have the right to a habeas corpus review.

There is a similarity in rhetoric and logic between the Platt Amendment and Guantánamo’s role in the war on terror: the United States’s argument for coercively leasing the territory as a coaling and naval station to “protect Cuban independence” closely echoes the call to torture and illegally detain enemy combatants for the sake of U.S. national security.

But these parallels run deeper, insofar as all roads lead back to Cuba, where the United States still somehow manages to do whatever it wants. Guantánamo persists as a place of imperial reinvention and forgetting, an ever-evolving hydra where stationed military personnel can receive their scuba diving certification and take their kids to the movies a short drive away from the black site where the CIA carried out torture at the base. Were it not for the “Cuba” section of the GTMO gift shop, where pictures of Havana adorn keychains, postcards, and magnets, you might forget you were in Cuba at all — indeed, this imperial amnesia, in conjunction with the  120 years of imperial machinations that began at the deep-water bay, may very well make Guantánamo the most American place on Earth.

Top photo: Photo of Gitmo’s northeast gate separating it from Cuba proper.

The post An American Century of Brutal Overseas Conquest Began at Guantánamo Bay appeared first on The Intercept.

According to JTF Guantánamo Commander Rear Adm. John Ring, that mission has shifted from “expeditionary” to “enduring” since President Donald Trump’s January 30 executive order mandating the continuation of detainment procedures at the military prison — a sharp contrast from former President Barack Obama’s unfulfilled campaign pledge to close it. “We were going away for eight years, and then we have a new president and our mission changed to something more enduring,” said Ring. “We have been putting Band-Aids on our infrastructure for a long time, trying to get it through the eight years until we close. And now we’re going to be enduring and stick around for a while, then we need to make some investments in infrastructure.”

To that end, a new hurricane-resistant galley that has been under construction since 2014 (under Obama, despite Ring’s insistence that “enduring” is new) is set to open on July 1, with state-of-the-art appliances for detainee halal meal prep, as well as standard meal prep to serve Joint Task Force personnel.

Forty detainees are still held at Guantánamo, some of whom have never been charged with a crime. Detainees’ food consumption has long been a contested issue – especially given that prisoners have engaged in on-and-off hunger strikes for years. At one point in 2013, 106 of the 166 detainees then at Guantánamo were on hunger strike — or engaging in what JTF euphemistically refers to as “non-religious fasting.” It’s one of many instances at Guantánamo of the rhetorical doublespeak that has enabled the legally and ethically contested detention of prisoners at the Navy base in perpetuity.

That doublespeak was particularly evident at a June 19 roundtable meeting for media with JTF leadership, during which the Task Force’s cultural adviser, Zak, a native Arabic speaker of Middle Eastern origin who doesn’t provide his last name out of concern for his family’s safety, made much of JTF’s accommodations for fasting during Ramadan. At the same time, he condemned those detainees who have gone on hunger strike or attempted suicide as “faking” in order to “discredit the United States.” This claim was difficult to square with a presentation from the chief medical officer at detention Camps V and VI, which acknowledged the practice of enteral feeding for those prisoners on hunger strike. (Former detainee Lakhdar Boumediene described the experience of being force-fed last year, writing that “a lengthy tube is jammed into your nose and snaked down your throat. You feel as though you are choking, being strangled, and yet somehow still able to breathe.” Physicians for Human Rights says the practice can amount to torture.)

When asked how one might fake a hunger strike, Zak compared detainee resistance to appeasing his parents’ demands to observe the Ramadan fast when growing up: “Just like I used to fake fasting with my parents, you say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m fasting,’ then you open up the fridge and eat quickly.” This claim, which Zak argued applied to all instances of hunger strikes at the base, did relate to one particular case the Miami Herald reported in November 2017. Forty-seven-year-old Pakistani national Ahmed Ghulam Rabbani was removed from forced tube feeding because, according to Trump administration lawyers, Rabbani had been cheating on his hunger strike. According to an unnamed physician overseeing “low-value” detainees like Rabbani, the forced-feeding procedure was “no longer medically indicated to preserve [Rabbani’s] life and health,” as he had been consuming a minimum of 1,200 calories per day.

Rabbani’s example, however, is very different from that of detainees who claimed last fall that JTF personnel were withholding force-feedings, in what lawyer David Remes called an intentional strategy to get them to abandon their hunger strikes. Remes, the New York Times reported, “accused the military of ‘playing chicken’ by withholding both force-feeding and medical care until the detainee was in danger of organ damage or even death.”

There were other inconsistencies in the way that different personnel portrayed the role of food on the base. Zak, for instance, was emphatic that food was never used as any kind of punishment or reward. But at the same roundtable, Ring stated that the task force continues to use meals from the base’s McDonald’s to incentivize detainees to provide information. JTF no longer carries out required interrogations of detainees – and at this point, many of them have been in so long, it’s unclear what kind of information they could provide.

For those who can’t exchange information for a Big Mac, the next best opportunity for some variety from the same food they’ve been eating for years is to demonstrate that they are “highly compliant.” Such detainees are permitted to enroll in a horticulture class, where they can cultivate an herb and vegetable garden in the recreation yard of Camp VI. Personnel asserted that gardening was but one of the detainees’ many learning opportunities that contributed to their high quality of life. During the roundtable, Joint Detention Group Commander Col. Stephen Gabavics emphasized that the meals detainees receive each day are an improvement over what conditions would be outside of the military prison, and that they are effectively better off at Guantánamo. “There are also certainly detainees here whose quality of life is better than what they had back where they were at,” he said.

Top photo: A task force member walks past the Camp VI detention facility at the Guantánamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba, on June 5, 2018.

The post Force-Feeding, Fasting, and Big Macs: the Doublespeak of Food at Guantánamo appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump now faces lawsuits over ending the Haiti designation, known as  Temporary Protected Status, the latest filed just last week by the National Lawyers Guild, citing the racist “shit-hole” comment along with another Trump slur, reported by the New York Times, that Haitians “all have AIDS.” His decision, one set of plaintiffs wrote, “harkens back to some of the darkest and most discredited chapters in U.S. history … when invidious discrimination drove immigration policy.”

There is a period when the dark histories behind Trump’s Guantánamo and Haiti refugee decisions intertwined, a particularly painful episode that played out between 1991 and 1993, when thousands of Haitians fleeing a military coup found themselves behind barbed wire at Guantánamo. An account provided by an Army intelligence staffer there at the time, contained in a document provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, sheds light on what went wrong, as do statements from an aid worker who was also at the U.S. base on Cuba’s eastern shore.

A lesser-known chapter in the history of Guantánamo, the internment of Haitian refugees followed the violent ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, and marked the first time the base was used for the purposes of mass incarceration. Why the U.S. military was tasked with overseeing the processing of asylum-seekers on the base remains unclear to Ninaj Raoul, co-founder of the organization Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees. Raoul, who worked as an interpreter for the incarcerated Haitians over the course of their internment, recounted conditions that were inhumane and administratively mismanaged.

“I felt like it was slavery days.”

The Snowden document shows how those conditions may have developed, stating that an Army general opted to send his best infantry battalion, rather than a more qualified engineering battalion. Before he became a key National Security Agency official, Charles Berlin was part of the Army’s intelligence staff inside an infantry division that sent 500 soldiers to build internment camps that would house 40,000 Haitians passing through Guantánamo. Berlin recalled, in a rosy article on leadership for an internal NSA news site, SIDtoday, how he had helped draw up a plan to send an engineering battalion to set up the camps, “the logical choice since they had equipment and expertise in construction.” The unit would be “suitably augmented with medics and cooks.”

Instead, the commanding general, Berlin wrote, “wagged his head and said we would send one of our infantry battalions instead! The staff, confused, asked why.  The general said he selected the best-led unit in the division, rather than the “logical” staff choice. He explained that the mission was going to be hard on the troops and was full of uncertainty. He wanted to bet on leadership rather than technical expertise. Boy, was he right.”

Berlin, who deployed to Guantánamo for the mission, concluded that sending infantry with no expertise in construction to build shelters made sense because that “best-led unit” worked decisively to help “very angry” refugees who “began to take their anger on the infantrymen of the 4th Division. Leadership made a difference.”

Berlin’s 2003 account, published as part of The Intercept’s SIDtoday files, clashes with what Raoul witnessed. The human rights advocate described the shelters built by Berlin’s division as “literally rows of tents; in each tent you had rows of cots just a few inches away from each other.” Refugees were held, some up to three years, in conditions without potable water, sanitation, and in exposure to extreme heat in spaces infested with rats and scorpions. Raoul described racist attitudes from guards at the camp, who at times ordered her to “stop fraternizing with the migrants.” “I felt like it was slavery days,” she said. (Reached by phone, Berlin said he was on vacation and declined to comment for this story.)

The violence that befell Haitians fleeing their homes was remarkable. The Coast Guard made the unprecedented decision to directly intercept Haitians leaving by boat in international waters. They would encourage the Haitians to come aboard Coast Guard vessels and subsequently, set the refugees’ small boats on fire, along with whatever possessions remained in them. Those who refused to disembark were driven off with fire hoses.

“An HIV Prison Camp”

Perhaps the most appalling legacy of the Haitian internment, however, was the treatment of HIV-positive refugees and their family members. After the tens of thousands passing through Guantánamo in the early 1990s were either forcibly repatriated or granted asylum in the United States, almost 300 remained quarantined in a separate facility within the base known as Camp Bulkeley. Caught in a legal purgatory, these refugees had been granted asylum status by dint of establishing a credible fear of persecution or torture in their home country, but were nevertheless effectively barred from the United States in accordance with a 1987 law sponsored by then-Sen. Jesse Helms, banning HIV-positive persons from entering the U.S.

According to A. Naomi Paik, professor of Asian-American studies at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and author of a book on the history of U.S. prison camps, some held at Camp Bulkeley were told that their indefinite detainment would last “until a cure for AIDS is found.” Hunger strikes ensued, as did a series of violent clashes between the Marines overseeing the camp and the refugees held inside its barbed wire perimeter, again undercutting Berlin’s suggestion that the camp came to be characterized by “cooperative working relationships.”

Haitians seeking asylum languished under the psychological and physical effects of their diagnoses. Despite entreaties from human rights attorneys to provide essential medical care to those diagnosed with HIV, the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused even the sickest of those interned at Bulkeley entry to the United States. A federal district court judge eventually overruled INS and permitted those refugees nearing death to seek care in the U.S. For a number of them, however, the judge’s decision came too late, and they died not long after arriving in the country. The internment finally concluded in June 1993, when U.S. District Court Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. declared the camp unconstitutional. In his opinion, he dubbed the facility “nothing more than an HIV prison camp.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that Trump, in ending the program to protect Haitian refugees, wrapped his racism in AIDS hysteria just as Helms had. “We in the Haitian community have always seen the approach of immigration policies toward Haitians as racist anyways, so this is nothing new,” Raoul told me. Instead, what is surprising to people who have studied the country is that the refugee program was extended to Haitians at all, after a 2010 earthquake devastated their island nation. Nonetheless, in the wake of the repeal of the status, it is important not “to disregard the fear and terror that millions of people in the United States are feeling right now and to disregard the tearing apart of communities and families,” said Paik, warning against normalizing the Trump administration’s recent decision. In recent months, the phones at the offices of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees ring more and more, the sound a troubling counterpoint to the applause echoing through the chamber where Trump announced his decision to maintain the violent carceral practices at Guantánamo Bay during his first State of the Union address.

Top photo: Jean Pierre, left, and Denisse Joseph, right, disembark with their 10-month-old child, center, after they were brought back to Haiti on Jan. 16, 1993 aboard the U.S. Coast Guard ship ”Independence” in Port-Au-Prince.

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