Inside the wire Guards feel brunt of Guantanamo prisoners? aggression

[thedrifter]

Issue Date: December 01, 2003

Inside the wire
Guards feel brunt of Guantanamo prisoners? aggression

By Nicole Gaudiano
Times staff writer

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba ? Barely a month into her job at the U.S. prison camp here, Sgt. Jen McWilliams walked past a detainee?s cell and felt a warm fluid splash over her. It was a cup of his urine.
A single mother, McWilliams steels herself through long days at Camp Delta ? the detention center for 660 accused terrorists ? with the knowledge that her 6-year-old daughter in Rhode Island needs a good role model.

But as a maximum-security prison guard, this woman in Army battle dress uniform has never felt so tested. The assault made her feel angry and degraded, she said. But she followed orders ? she walked away and reported the incident.

?I could take all of the lessons I?ve learned in life, and it never would have prepared me for what we deal with here,? said McWilliams, in the Rhode Island Army National Guard. ?You expect the unexpected to happen when you walk in the camp.?

This is life ?inside the wire,? where about 135 guards work daily with accused Taliban and al-Qaida fighters ? feeding them, changing their laundry, escorting them to showers and keeping an eye out for any surprises under a hot Cuban sun.

When they are cursed, spit at or urinated on, they must respond with restraint ? they write reports.

When the detainees try to hurt themselves ? more than 20 have attempted suicide with bedsheets or clothing ? the guards are the people who find them.

Intense job stress

So intense is the mission here, troops assigned guard duty must see a combat stress team every six weeks and take off for training and decompression.

?It just seems like the only good days are when [the detainees] are tired or sleeping,? said Sgt. Nick Barker, of the 463rd Military Police Company from Fort Leonard Wood, Mo.

Barker said guards quickly learn what?s likely to set off the cellblock. They know not to touch detainees? Korans ? given to each one, along with prayer beads, a prayer cap, oils and an arrow pointing to Mecca.

?To them, the only thing they have that nobody can take away from them is their religion,? he said. ?If they feel that?s been disrespected or violated, maybe they?ll decide they don?t want to comply with something.?

Sometimes inside the wire, detainee insults are simply amusing.

?They love to call us donkeys,? Barker said. ?They think it offends us.?

But then there is the spitting and water tossing if a guard were to, say, ignore a request for toothpaste.

?Sometimes they?ll mix soap in [the water] and throw it on you,? he said. ?They?ll mix toilet paper in there. They just want to make you as mad as possible. It?s pretty much their justice system. If they think we?re not doing something right, that?s their way of punishing us.?

Guard routines

The stress and the long hours are reasons why McWilliams said she felt betrayed when she heard that a chaplain and two translators were charged with security breaches at the camp.

?It was almost like a kick in the face to us as soldiers,? she said. ?It?s almost like they didn?t care about how hard we work.?

With four guards assigned to each block of 48 cells, two are constantly walking the block, putting a set of eyes on every detainee every 30 seconds. Their conversations must remain solely ?operational,? so if a detainee asks where he is, for instance, the guard can?t answer.

About 12 percent to 15 percent of the guards are women, who handle all tasks except escorting detainees to the shower. The presence of women doesn?t please the detainees. McWilliams said some refuse to take orders from a woman, and guards from earlier tours told her the detainees had exposed themselves to female guards.

?We were trained to know they don?t respect females, and females are less than males in their culture,? she said.

Such behavior doesn?t get them far. Through the withholding of prayer oils and comfort items, detainees are taught that if they cooperate, life gets better for everyone. The most cooperative ultimately can leave the camp?s three maximum-security areas for Camp 4, where they can live communally, shed their orange garb for cooler white clothes and pray on authentic prayer mats with less intense supervision.

Human rights advocates have voiced concerns over the detainees? undefined legal status.

?It comes as no surprise that prisoners who are being held without any opportunity to challenge the legality of their detention express their feelings about that the only way they can,? said Alistar Hodgett, a spokesman for Amnesty International.

Until the legal issues are resolved, however, the guards must continue to show up for work at cells filled with people whose target for aggression often can be the one handing them dinner.

Despite the friction, the day-to-day contact the guards have with detainees can arouse concern for their welfare, said Army Reserve Chaplain (Maj.) Daniel Odean, assigned to the JTF.

?The human part of it is there,? he said. ?It?s difficult to work with the human element that is locked up and you?re having to meet their basic human needs.?

According to Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the Joint Task Force commander, it has taken a while to sort through aliases just to figure out who the detainees are.

Even so, he said, the system is working.

?We are developing five times as much intelligence last month as we did in January 2003 with the same detainees,? he said.

So far, 70 detainees have been returned to their home nations, which will decide whether to release or further detain them. Three juveniles ages 13 to 16, who live in a separate camp, have been recommended for transfer back to their home countries.

McWilliams, the Rhode Island Guard member, says she?s not due to go home for another nine months. A full-time Guard member, she has been an MP only since June. Her Guard bureau ?volunteered? her for duty at Guantanamo, she said, because so many MPs are deployed to Iraq.

In her three months on the cellblock, she?s learned at least one thing: ?You can never let your guard down.?

Nicole Gaudiano covers the Air Force.

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Sempers,

Roger