Pentagon Seeks Money for New Gitmo Prison

$49 Million Plan Comes on Top of Already Broad Renovations

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.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.