Despite the supposed budget crunch across the military, the Pentagon continues to find all sorts of things it feels the need to squander millions on. With news already out of a $150 million plan to “renovate” Guantanamo Bay, SOCOM has upped the ante with a request for another $49 million on top of that for a new prison building at the base.
The “new prison” is distinct from the existing overhaul, which is focusing on improvements for troops and for the conditions of the vast majority of detainees, held in the crumbling “camp six.”
Rather, the new prison appears to be a replacement for the notorious “camp seven,” which the Pentagon rarely acknowledges to even exist and which has been described as a camp for “special” detainees.
The original camp seven was constructed to hold 14 people coming out of CIA black sites, but it is no longer clear how many people are even in such detention, and the administration has made much of its intention to bring the “high value” captives to trial, since those are some of the few detainees they seem to have any actual evidence on. A new facility suggested that either there is more to camp seven than meets the eye, or that officials foresee a new influx of “high value” captives that need to be sequestered from the rest of the camp.
I've got a better plan: Restore the entire Guantanamo Bay enclave to its rightful owner Cuba, from whom the US extorted it at gunpoint in 1903. Gitmo is held by the US under a so-called "perpetual lease" — a pseudo-legal term that has no existence in Anglo-American law. There are plenty of available federal prisons to house whatever Gitmo prisoners need to be detained; and it appears that there are very few who actually do need to be retained. Maybe none, if the Fifth Amendment due process clause has not completely disappeared.
The sign of an administration gone mad.
All funds to the concentration camp should be see-questered.
Gitmo is, and always will be, an embarrassment to America. Stolen in 1903 and abandoned by the Navy in the 1990's, we've spent billions keeping the place up under the disguise of the Monroe Doctrine. The few prisoners at Gitmo could be housed on Offutt AFB, Nebraska in the old StratCom building on SAC Blvd. It's curently filled with 2,700 spies from the State Dept., CIA, NSA, FBI, DISA and numerous sleazy defense contractors engaged in illegal hacking, stalking and spying. Gitmo should be closed down and given back to the Cubans.
Congress couldn't find the funds to close GITMO and transfer the illegal detainees but I'm betting they'll find the funds to expand the scar on the American soul.
Storm the BASTILLE !!!
Once the new site is complete, the prisoners will be transferred from the original. Then Obama will proudly close down the original gitmo, and claim he has kept his promise.