An Inside Peek st GITMO

This is the end of the road in the War on Terror.

Razor-ribbon-bedecked prison camps hold 149 detainees suspected of war crimes. All but 15 — the so-called "high-value" suspects — live and eat and sleep in Camps Five and Six, which could pass for prisons in the United States. That's by design. They were built in bits in America, shipped to the shores of Cuba and assembled "like Lego blocks," an officer here says.

A few miles away, over cactus-studded hills and dry creek beds sits Court Room II, where hearings for the 9/11 suspects, including alleged attack mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, inched forward this week with no trial date in sight.

More than a decade — and $5 billion — later, here's the GTMO scorecard: eight convictions, one of them overturned by a civilian court; six others face trial; and 779 detainees have been transferred to other countries, including the five Taliban members recently traded for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Rear Adm. Richard Butler, commander, Joint Task Force,
Guantanamo.(Photo: Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY)

The Pentagon this week afforded an inside glimpse of the camps and the court. For some detainees, days are filled with reading and praying, painting and, frankly, aging. Others, however, mount hunger strikes and strike out at guards.

"These people are still in the fight," says a military nurse, who can't be named because the identities of most people stationed at Guantanamo are not allowed to be named publicly.

BUILT TO LAST

President Obama has vowed to close the prison camps, and Attorney General Eric Holder has said he can try the suspects in federal court. Yet the prisons and courtroom at GTMO, the military abbreviation for the base, have rock-solid construction that suggests something permanent.. And they may have to be: There is no will in Congress to shutter them. Indeed, Republicans this week called for Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the suspect in the deadly attacks on the American consulate in Benghazi, snatched by U.S. special operators in Libya, to be held at Guantanamo for questioning.

Meanwhile, a hearing this week for KSM and the four other 9/11 suspects inched them toward trial. The issue on the docket this week: a defense request for the prosecution to reveal what it knows about FBI investigations into defense teams. Judge James Pohl is expected to rule on the request by August.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

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