Gitmo prisoners get news through the grapevine
Source: Reuters
By Jane Sutton GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Nov 2 (Reuters) - News and gossip spread so efficiently among prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention center that many are sufficiently informed to debate the potential outcome of Tuesday's U.S. congressional election, their captors say. The approximately 430 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners held at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba have no access to television, radio, newspapers or the Internet and receive only censored mail and carefully screened books and magazines. But they pick up bits of information about the outside world from lawyers, guards, interpreters, interrogators and other visitors and relay it from cell to cell in what a former camp official used to call jokingly the "DIN" or detainee information network. "There's very little that they do not learn," said Paul Rester, the camp's intelligence director. "They'll be out there in the rec yard talking about the upcoming election and the impact if the Democrats are elected. They believe, like a lot of people, that a change in administration would change policy. I guess there's some who might speculate it would change in their favor, meaning you know, the closure of the facility." Washington has long been under international pressure to close the prison. Camp officials believe the Guantanamo grapevine played a role in the synchronized suicides of three prisoners who hanged themselves in June and in a May scuffle with guards in one camp that followed two non-fatal drug overdoses in another camp. SHOUTING THROUGH CONCRETE Detainees are spread among six separate camps in the barbed wire enclosure known collectively as Camp Delta. In the older cell blocks with metal mesh walls they can easily chat with their neighbors. In the newest camp, modeled after a maximum-security prison in the United States, visitors walking the chilly barren corridors can hear detainees shouting to each other through the concrete walls of their cells. Camp officials are trying to cut the flow of information by reducing opportunities for detainees in one camp to spread messages to those in another. In the past few months they have moved prisoners from cell to cell less often and tried to space out medical and dental appointments and interrogations so detainees would not encounter other detainees. They have also opened attorney meeting rooms in the basement of one building rather than ferry its inmates to another camp where lawyer meetings were traditionally held, said Rear Adm. Harry Harris, commander of the task force that runs the detention operation. Guantanamo officials will not discuss exactly how the suicides were coordinated, which is the subject of an investigation. But they said in at least one instance a prisoner had deliberately misbehaved in order to get transferred to a disciplinary cell block and relay a message to someone there. "I do not want to set the conditions to facilitate something like that happening again in the future," said Col. Wade Dennis, a senior detention officer who functions as a warden.
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