Main McElwain declined to say how a lot the consolidation value. Over time, he stated, the transfer would probably imply a discount in troops from the 1,500 principally Nationwide Guard members who primarily serve nine-month excursions of responsibility on the detention operation, which has been estimated to value $13 million per prisoner per yr.
Mr. Mohammed and the opposite high-value detainees have been held on the categorised Camp 7 web site after their switch to Guantánamo in September 2006. They’d spent three to 4 years within the George W. Bush administration’s secret abroad jail community, often called black websites, the place the C.I.A. subjected its prisoners to sleep deprivation, compelled nudity, waterboarding and different bodily and psychological abuse.
By segregating the prisoners, beneath the watch of a particular guard unit known as Job Drive Platinum, the intelligence businesses may strictly monitor and management their communications and forestall them from divulging what had occurred to them. Protection attorneys who have been finally granted entry to the lads have been certain by safety clearances to maintain their conversations categorised, together with in court docket filings that accused authorities brokers of state-sponsored torture.
Camp 7 was lengthy one in every of Guantánamo’s most clandestine websites. The Pentagon refused to reveal its value, which contractor constructed it and when. Reporters weren’t permitted to see it, attorneys have been required to acquire a court docket order to go to and its location was thought-about categorised, though sources pointed to it on a satellite tv for pc map of the bottom.
Within the brief time period, Main McElwain stated, Camp 7 “can be sanitized, shut down and locked.”
“A plan for its closing disposition has but to be decided,” he stated.
The previous C.I.A. prisoners have been saved principally remoted of their early years at Camp 7. Every was allowed to talk with just one different prisoner by a tarp throughout recreation time, in conversations that have been recorded for intelligence functions.
Their attorneys described the circumstances as mind-numbing till latest years, when the commanders permitted the prisoners to eat and pray collectively beneath strict surveillance. Additionally they had a cell the place they might put together meals to cross time.