McClellanville man leaves U.S. base reassured, troubled
By Neal Petersen
Special to The Post and Courier
Monday, November 24, 2008

Editor’s note: Neal Petersen settled in the Charleston area after completing the 1998-99 Around Alone sailing race.

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — Gitmo? The images flow fast: Soldiers herding men in orange jumpsuits behind a razor-wire cage; prisoners with shackles and black hoods kneeling on Cuban dirt.

They mix with others we’ve all seen — soldiers treating prisoners like dogs at Abu Ghraib — along with my own memories of hardened lifers with the Irish Republican Army I once visited in an Irish prison.

These were the images I carried last week on a trip from my home in McClellanville to the military base at Guantanamo Bay.

During my visit, the military would give me an eye-opening look at one of the world’s most controversial detention facilities. New images would replace some of the old ones. I would leave both reassured and troubled.

It wasn’t a sightseeing trip. The military invited me to give four motivational speeches to the troops and their families. Since competing in the 1998-99 Around Alone solo sailing race, I’ve made numerous presentations, usually at high-level corporate gatherings, about the  importance of transforming barriers into solutions.

So when the invitation came to visit Gitmo, I had mixed feelings. Over the years, I’ve had limited contact with military service people. What kind of reception would I get?

But I also wanted to see this controversial place with my own eyes; and on Nov. 15, my wife, Darlene, and I found ourselves behind Gitmo’s gates, behind the mines buried on the Cuban side to prevent defectors from reaching American soil.

In between my speeches, we would be given surprisingly in-depth tours of Camp Delta and Camp Six, where most of the detainees are held, comparable, I was told, to what a U.S. senator might get.

Our military escorts had a story to tell: They had made mistakes. They talked about the inadequacies of Camp X-Ray, the primitive fenced-off area where detainees were first held. Camp X-Ray was the world’s first impression of Gitmo and the Bush administration’s policy of detaining terrorism suspects.

“We were arrogant, thinking we knew how to do things. We were wrong but so much has changed,” one enlisted man told me.

Today, Camp X-Ray is closed. It has been since 2002, though officers told us that media reports had surfaced recently claiming otherwise. Later, they took us to what was left of Camp X-Ray: Rusty barbed wire, roofs on buildings that had caved in, empty watchtowers, tall weeds. It was a dangerous place, but only because the buildings looked like they would collapse.

Then we were taken to the new detention facilities, Camp Delta and Camp Six. They were in modern buildings. Armed guards were in watchtowers; unarmed guards were inside. Our escorts told us it was a detention facility, not a corrections facility, and that this distinction was important. The goal isn’t to rehabilitate; it’s to protect America from attacks.

We were told that the military was following Geneva Convention rules. They showed us photos of interrogation rooms, which had sofas and blue pillows. These images reminded me of a nice living room. They told us that the world is judging them by the mistakes of the past and giving them no credit for improvements they’ve made.

During our tour of Camp Delta, we saw three detainees in the distance, but we weren’t allowed to talk with them. Camp Delta is for detainees who were “co-operative and demonstrated less hostility towards the guards,” one official told us. We saw a room, much like a school classroom, where they were taught in Arabic and given help with English, and another that had about eight dorm room beds. Behind a screen was a television. Detainees were given a list of vetted DVDs to choose from. Our guard said the detainees enjoyed cartoons and Harry Potter movies.

I found one tidbit of information particularly surprising and a reminder of the costs of keeping people locked up. We were told that the prison spends about $60 per person per day on detainee food flown in regularly from the Middle East, prepared like they would get at home. Most of the detainees have put on weight from getting three meals a day.

A nurse then showed us the detainee hospital. She told us that doctors were available at a moment’s notice. Later, I spoke with guards who said the detainees sometimes get more prompt medical care than they did. “Why does someone who wants to kill me get treated better?” was a common complaint I heard. “There are Americans with no health insurance and these (expletive) get anything they want,” was another.

Camp Six, the next level of detention, is in a gray, concrete complex. Here, to prevent retribution, guards don’t wear names on their uniforms. The chief warden showed us arrows that point to Mecca and told us how prison guards were not allowed to handle detainees’ Korans. She said prisoners had two hours of outdoor exercise. At one point we passed a cone in the hallway asking us to keep our voices down because it was prayer time. Cells had a toilet and two bunks.

This wasn’t the first prison I’d visited.

Between 1992 and 1994, I went to Portloise Prison in Ireland to speak about my sailing and life experiences to IRA and INLA terrorists who had been sentenced to life in prison. I felt more intimidated in Portloise than at Guantanamo Bay. At Portloise I felt an air of tension every second I was there. I remember the sounds of clanging steel doors and locks, the boots scraping the ground. At Guantanamo, there were fewer bars and more concrete. It felt calm, nothing like what I expected.

At the same time, it’s difficult to compare the two because I interacted with the IRA prisoners but was kept away from the Gitmo detainees. And I would later get a taste from the guards about the challenges they face.

In Gitmo’s early days, some guards had come straight from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Some had seen their friends killed or injured in combat. When they assumed the roles of prison guards, they were angry and bitter and prone to taking out their emotions on the detainees. The military officials who briefed us acknowledged that this had been a big mistake.

Now guards generally go to Gitmo before being deployed to war zones. They’re also given six weeks of special training and must shadow an experienced guard.

One enlisted sailor told me they are seen by the detainees “as a TV, because I have the remote control. I can turn you on or turn you off.” Each day a detainee would ask him the same question and get the same reply. If the guard deviated one day, then the detainee had won some control and power.

Guards wear face shields because detainees throw feces, urine and other objects at them. They work for 12 to 15 hours a shift. The guards we met were courteous, and I wondered about the psychological impacts they’re facing, short and long term. How will they fare after they leave the military?

In private conversations, I asked officers and enlisted personnel alike what they thought of the election and what ought to be done with Gitmo. They told me that they don’t trust the media to get the story of Gitmo right. Many also said they don’t have much faith in the current or future president, though they would follow orders no matter what. What they really want are clear orders with little wiggle room for interpretation or second-guessing.

I also asked if they thought it made sense to shut down Gitmo and move the detainees to the Navy’s brig in Hanahan, S.C.

“Who wants these guys in their back yard?” was the most common response.

Back in our home in McClellanville, I find myself wrestling with the complexity of what we’ve wrought. I hear how a judge has ordered the release of five detainees. Will this compromise our fight against Islamic radicals? What happens if a detainee is released and participates in a new attack on Americans? What reaction would we get if we ship detainees to their countries of origin only to have the detainees executed there? How do we balance these possibilities with the fundamentally American principle that people who are detained deserve certain judicial rights?

I went to Gitmo with certain preconceptions. Now I’m back reassured that the military learned from some of its mistakes but troubled by the storms ahead.

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Neal and Darlene with the Commanding Officer in Gitmo Detention Center,Cuba