Camp

While browsing the DefenseLINK site looking for some good public domain photos, I found a bunch the Pentagon had recently released of the new U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay.

The United States was harshly criticized for the brutal, crude design of Camp X-Ray. Photos were widely circulated of prisoners at squatting in their chain-link cells in the blazing Cuban sun.

Five miles down the road, Camp Delta is now open for business. Photos of a detention block and spotless cells make it seem like an improvement. (Even the name “Camp Delta” reads like a hokey PR move.) Camp Delta has indoor plumbing, each unit its own flush toilet, metal bed-frame and a sink with running water. None of this was available at Camp X-Ray where buckets and portable toilets were used. No detainees in any of the new photos, though.

The $9.7 million dollar contract for the construction of the camps went to Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton. The contract could eventually total as much as $300 million if additional options are exercised. Vice President Dick Cheney is the former chief executive officer of Halliburton.

In addition to the new cells, Camp Delta has its own recreation and exercise area, library, outdoor shower, hospital and ward. “Comfort items” distributed to detainees including a prayer mat, cap, flip flops and two-piece suit.

And, dental care is provided at the detainee hospital.

Free dental care? It’s more then most Americans get.

But then another look at that chair and the skin starts to crawl. One suspects the U.S. isn’t terribly concerned with the beautiful smiles of its “enemy combatants.”

Indeed, this morning’s Washington Post describes secret overseas CIA interrogation facilities where detainees are being tortured. The same torture techniques are of course denounced by the U.S. State Department in its annual survey of human rights violations in other countries. In fact its in some of those very countries where the CIA is setting up shop. Says one U.S. official, “If you don’t violate someone’s human rights some of the time, you probably aren’t doing your job.”

Says Human Rights Watch:

“Direct involvement or complicity in torture, as well as the failure to prevent torture by subordinates, may subject U.S. officials to prosecution under international law. Such acts are ‘grave breaches,’ or war crimes, under the 1949 Geneva Conventions. In addition, the Convention against Torture [which the U.S. has ratified] obligates all countries to prosecute persons within their jurisdiction who are implicated or complicit in acts of torture. Any competent court anywhere in the world is required to prosecute violations of the prohibition against torture.”

According to U.S. officials, nearly 3,000 suspected al Qaeda members and their supporters have been detained worldwide since September 11, 2001.