With heightened security and lowered transparency
Silence descends on Gitmo With heightened security and lowered transparency, Convergence interviews veteran journalists on the changes brewing at Guantanamo detention camp. BY HERMIONE WILSON
S
afe. Humane. Legal. Transparent. That is the motto of the Guantanamo detention camp. And yet reporters who have been covering the Guantanamo Bay detention camp since it opened in 2002 would beg to differ, especially with that last part. “We can only see what they allow us to see and in this moment . . . we’re blind,” said Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg. “They’ve created this incredibly hostile, blind, non-transparent atmosphere down there.”
And she should know. Rosenberg, the Miami Herald’s military affairs correspondent, has been to Guantanamo Bay, or “Gitmo” as it is popularly known, so many times in the last 12 years she has lost count. An average of one week every month since 2002 is her best guess. With the rapid turnover of reporters and personnel alike at Gitmo, the Herald’s Rosenberg is one of the few constants. Journalists consult her when they are preparing to visit the detention centre, seeking her advice on
PHOTO COURTESY MICHELLE SHEPHARD
The Toronto Star’s national security reporter Michelle Shephard in Guantanamo Bay.
what to expect and where the real stories might be hiding. Soldiers leading media tours sometimes look to her to confirm their facts about the facilities. “They’ll be giving tours of the camp and Carol is constantly correcting them” said her
colleague and friend, Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard. Shephard has been to Gitmo 26 times. Her first visit was in January 2006 when she came to attend Canadian detainee Omar Khadr’s first day in a military court. Shephard was surprised to see a drive-in theatre and a McDonald’s. “It was absolutely surreal. It’s just so hard to put together all you’d heard about this place and then come to this base in Cuba that, like most military bases around the world, they try and make into a little America,” said Shephard. Shephard has been with the Toronto Star since 1997, but it wasn’t until after she covered the September 11 attacks in New York that the Star decided to make her their fulltime national security reporter. “At first it was a very steep learning curve because I knew very little about the field and... the countries I’d be reporting on and then later travelling to,” said Shephard. “From the beginning Guantanamo was of great interest to me, mainly because of Omar Khadr.” Rosenberg recalls her trip in January 2002 when she and a group of 19 other journalists were invited to tour the new Guantanamo Bay detention facilities. It was only intended to be a tour of the buildings at the camp, but as luck would have it Rosenberg was on hand to witness the arrival of the first 20 detainees. As the media relations strategy shifted and journalists’ movements in and out of Gitmo became more controlled, Rosenberg dug in and ended up covering the initial months of the brand new facility. “The military was very eager to have reporters there and to tell their story. Guards were eager to be named and identified and quoted,” Rosenberg said of those early days. Fast-forward to Dec. 3, 2013. Marine General John F. Kelly, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, the military body that operates the prison, made a controversial decision: Gitmo staff would no longer be allowed to give out the number of detainees engaged in hunger strikes and those who were being tube fed because of it – numbers Rosenberg said have previously been reported almost daily for years. Guards and employees at Gitmo have always been hesitant to speak to
reporters, said Rosenberg, but with coaxing she was able to get some to agree to be identified. Now directives from on high have taken that choice away from them. In December 2013, Kelly decided only a handful of senior officers could give their names to reporters when being interviewed. “It’s clear to me that when the military is confident in their ability to show us a safe, transparent, legal detention centre ... we get to see the place, and when they’ve lost confidence in that message, they don’t show us much,” said Rosenberg. “There’s a really dark feeling to the camps,” said Shephard. “I’ve been in lots of prisons in the U.S. and Canada, and I’ve seen conditions that are similar, in some cases worse than Guantanamo, but it’s knowing that all these men are detained but haven’t been charged or tried, for the most part.” A former crime reporter, Shephard said reporting on the military commissions at Gitmo is nothing like court reporting in Canada. At Gitmo, already a self-contained little world, the military commissions under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Secretary of Defense are in a world within a world. The commissions, which will eventually put the alleged September 11 co-conspirators on trial, have been in pre-trial phase since 2012. Courtroom access is limited for both reporters and the public. No electronic recording devices are allowed in the courtroom, only pen-to-paper note taking. At one point, Shephard recalls, reporters weren’t allowed to bring in spiral-bound notebooks, for security reasons. She said the rules are constantly changing. “There was a ridiculous period there where they had a rule...that you could only bring one pen into the courtroom, not two,”
“
said Shephard. In 2010, Rosenberg, Shephard and two other reporters were banned from Gitmo for identifying a key witness in the Omar Khadr case. Former army Sgt. Joshua Claus, the interrogator who had obtained Khadr’s confession, was testifying that his confession had not been obtained under torture or threat of abuse. Two years earlier Claus had spoken on record to Shephard about a case in which he had been court-martialed in connection with the death of another detainee, an Afghan taxi driver. However, in the Khadr case Claus was considered a protected person and was only identified as Interrogator Number One. The judge had not specifically ordered the press not to reveal Claus’s identity, so the four journalists tried to seek clarification from him before going to print. “He didn’t even acknowledge that we asked him a question,” said Shephard. Shephard, Rosenberg and their two colleagues eventually decided to print Claus’s name in their media reports. That night word came from Washington: the four of them had been banned from Gitmo for life. Rosenberg and the Miami Herald immediately hired a lawyer and appealed the decision. “It was a big deal because it looked like the Obama administration was trying to censor the coverage,” said Shephard. The ban was eventually lifted and three or four months later the four reporters were invited to attend a round-table discussion at the Pentagon about how to better media relations. “I follow their rules,” Rosenberg insists. “I protest, I object, I point out the inconsistencies of them, but I never ever ever disobey the rules.”
We can only see what they allow us to see and in this moment . . . we’re blind CAROL ROSENBERG CONVERGENCE Spring 2014
47
ILLUSTRATION BY: DOMINIKA GUDANIEC
Still, 12 years of reporting from a place where the shifting administrative landscape is reflected in the ever-changing rules has often put Rosenberg in some bizarre situations. Like the time she almost but not quite broke the one written-in-stone rule at Gitmo: never talk to the detainees. Rosenberg happened to be visiting Camp Four, a cooperative camp that allows detainees with good track records to live together in a less restrictive setting, when one of the detainees tried to speak to her through the chain-link fence. It was Omar Khadr and he looked bored.
48 CONVERGENCE Spring 2014
“Hey, are you National Geographic?” he asked her. For some reason he didn’t seem concerned that Rosenberg was flanked by two military escorts. Not wanting to be rude but also not wanting to break the rules herself, Rosenberg turned to her escort and said, in a voice loud enough for Khadr to hear, “‘I guess he doesn’t know that I’m not allowed to talk to him and if I were allowed to talk to him I’d tell him that I don’t work for National Geographic, I work for the Miami Herald.” Khadr seemed satisfied with her indirect response to his question and walked away.
“The idea that I can’t talk to him but I can communicate to the guy next to me so that he can hear it is kind of a bizarre interpretation of their rules,” said Rosenberg. “No media ever has in the 12 years of operation [spoken to a detainee] and I’m guessing . . . no media ever will,” said Gitmo’s current public affairs director Commander John Filostrat. “Even when [the media] gets to go into the camps and see detainees, we make sure they try not to see the reporters because then it gets dangerous and threatens operational security.” Filostrat has been at his post since September 2013, and expects to be at Gitmo until July 2014 before someone else replaces him. The relationship between the media and Joint Task Force Guantanamo personnel has been professional and congenial, he said. Filostrat said he’d had no complaints from the press so far. “We understand that these folks have spent a lot of time and effort and money to come down here and regardless of what they write or what they air, it’s our job just to try to facilitate the media as much as operational security allows,” he said. “We have nothing to hide down here.” “Nothing” doesn’t seem to include the number of hunger strikers at Gitmo. Those numbers are misrepresentations of the situation, Filostrat said; just detainees trying to gain attention. But Al Jazeera America contributor Jason Leopold has a different perspective on the issue. “Last year, during the height of the hunger strike, several policies were put into place and these policies ... ultimately did give rise to the hunger strike,” said Leopold. He is referring to policies like the controversial genital searches detainees were subjected to just before meeting with their attorneys, something that had previously been banned due to cultural insensitivity. Leopold traced the renewal of the genital search policy to the death of a detainee in 2012 under what he calls “troubling circumstances”. “They suspected that the prisoner who died was hiding drugs in his genital area,” he said. Leopold has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the detainee’s autopsy report. The FOIA request is only one of many. Leopold, who is known in some govern-
ment circles as “the FOIA terrorist”, has filed requests for everything from statistics about Gitmo guards suffering from PTSD to who made the decision to allow CBS’s 60 Minutes news crew unprecedented access to the camps for their September 2013 documentary, in which they were allowed to show the faces of prison guards (camera crews are usually instructed to film from the neck down) and record the vocal protest of a detainee. Filing FOIA requests is costly and time-consuming, something Rosenberg herself tries to avoid. When she does though, she files for a specific document that she is sure exists, like when she filed a request for a list of detainees who were being held at Gitmo indefinitely. “I was trying to find something extremely specific that I believed was both newsworthy and important for the public to know,” said Rosenberg. “It worked.” That’s a common refrain from journalists who cover Gitmo: the public has a right to know. The administration doesn’t always agree with that. The arrival of Gen. John F. Kelly in November 2012 marked the begin-
ning of a new era of secrecy at Gitmo, said Rosenberg. The commander of U.S. Southern Command, whose headquarters are right next door to Rosenberg’s Miami Herald offices in Florida, is “old school” she said. “He’s a legacy of a time, I think, when distrust of the media was at its height in America and when manipulation of the message was considered acceptable,” said Rosenberg. That may change, she said, once Kelly leaves. “You may actually find someone who’s an advocate for transparency.” Despite the increased restrictions on the press at Gitmo however, journalists like Rosenberg continue to tell the stories coming out of America’s most controversial offshore prison. “The difficulties of reporting on it is part of the attraction,” Leopold explained. “It’s the fact that I’m always trying to figure out what’s happening. Where can I snoop around to get info? It’s sort of the ultimate investigative story.” Sometimes, however, the challenge is not digging up the story on Gitmo, but keeping readers interested in what is going on half a
world away. “I get people saying all the time, ‘Oh, is Guantanamo still open?’” Shephard said. The Toronto Star reporter has written two books based on her coverage of Gitmo and is now in the process of producing a documentary with a Montreal film director about Gitmo’s 22 Uighur detainees. It’s frustrating, said Shephard, when the public seemed to have moved on from Gitmo. She is hopeful public engagement will increase as the 9/11 trials draw closer. Twelve years on, Gitmo remains a goldmine of news stories and despite presidential promises that it will eventually close, Rosenberg doesn’t see that happening anytime soon. She once assumed that her Gitmo beat, which she describes as a cross between being “a foreign correspondent and a small town reporter,” would have an expiry date. “The President said he was going to close it so I thought it was going to have an end. So I hung in for the end, and now I don’t think there’s an end in sight,” said Rosenberg. “I can’t figure out when would be the appropriate time to stop.”
Media access to Guantanamo Bay is tightly controlled, and the rules are always changing. PHOTO BY: MICHELLE SHEPHARD
S
afe. Humane. Legal. Transparent. That is the motto of the Guantanamo detention camp. And yet reporters who have been covering the Guantanamo Bay detention camp since it opened in 2002 would beg to differ, especially with that last part. “We can only see what they allow us to see and in this moment . . . we’re blind,” said Miami Herald reporter Carol Rosenberg. “They’ve created this incredibly hostile, blind, non-transparent atmosphere down there.”
And she should know. Rosenberg, the Miami Herald’s military affairs correspondent, has been to Guantanamo Bay, or “Gitmo” as it is popularly known, so many times in the last 12 years she has lost count. An average of one week every month since 2002 is her best guess. With the rapid turnover of reporters and personnel alike at Gitmo, the Herald’s Rosenberg is one of the few constants. Journalists consult her when they are preparing to visit the detention centre, seeking her advice on
PHOTO COURTESY MICHELLE SHEPHARD
The Toronto Star’s national security reporter Michelle Shephard in Guantanamo Bay.
what to expect and where the real stories might be hiding. Soldiers leading media tours sometimes look to her to confirm their facts about the facilities. “They’ll be giving tours of the camp and Carol is constantly correcting them” said her
colleague and friend, Toronto Star reporter Michelle Shephard. Shephard has been to Gitmo 26 times. Her first visit was in January 2006 when she came to attend Canadian detainee Omar Khadr’s first day in a military court. Shephard was surprised to see a drive-in theatre and a McDonald’s. “It was absolutely surreal. It’s just so hard to put together all you’d heard about this place and then come to this base in Cuba that, like most military bases around the world, they try and make into a little America,” said Shephard. Shephard has been with the Toronto Star since 1997, but it wasn’t until after she covered the September 11 attacks in New York that the Star decided to make her their fulltime national security reporter. “At first it was a very steep learning curve because I knew very little about the field and... the countries I’d be reporting on and then later travelling to,” said Shephard. “From the beginning Guantanamo was of great interest to me, mainly because of Omar Khadr.” Rosenberg recalls her trip in January 2002 when she and a group of 19 other journalists were invited to tour the new Guantanamo Bay detention facilities. It was only intended to be a tour of the buildings at the camp, but as luck would have it Rosenberg was on hand to witness the arrival of the first 20 detainees. As the media relations strategy shifted and journalists’ movements in and out of Gitmo became more controlled, Rosenberg dug in and ended up covering the initial months of the brand new facility. “The military was very eager to have reporters there and to tell their story. Guards were eager to be named and identified and quoted,” Rosenberg said of those early days. Fast-forward to Dec. 3, 2013. Marine General John F. Kelly, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, the military body that operates the prison, made a controversial decision: Gitmo staff would no longer be allowed to give out the number of detainees engaged in hunger strikes and those who were being tube fed because of it – numbers Rosenberg said have previously been reported almost daily for years. Guards and employees at Gitmo have always been hesitant to speak to
reporters, said Rosenberg, but with coaxing she was able to get some to agree to be identified. Now directives from on high have taken that choice away from them. In December 2013, Kelly decided only a handful of senior officers could give their names to reporters when being interviewed. “It’s clear to me that when the military is confident in their ability to show us a safe, transparent, legal detention centre ... we get to see the place, and when they’ve lost confidence in that message, they don’t show us much,” said Rosenberg. “There’s a really dark feeling to the camps,” said Shephard. “I’ve been in lots of prisons in the U.S. and Canada, and I’ve seen conditions that are similar, in some cases worse than Guantanamo, but it’s knowing that all these men are detained but haven’t been charged or tried, for the most part.” A former crime reporter, Shephard said reporting on the military commissions at Gitmo is nothing like court reporting in Canada. At Gitmo, already a self-contained little world, the military commissions under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Secretary of Defense are in a world within a world. The commissions, which will eventually put the alleged September 11 co-conspirators on trial, have been in pre-trial phase since 2012. Courtroom access is limited for both reporters and the public. No electronic recording devices are allowed in the courtroom, only pen-to-paper note taking. At one point, Shephard recalls, reporters weren’t allowed to bring in spiral-bound notebooks, for security reasons. She said the rules are constantly changing. “There was a ridiculous period there where they had a rule...that you could only bring one pen into the courtroom, not two,”
“
said Shephard. In 2010, Rosenberg, Shephard and two other reporters were banned from Gitmo for identifying a key witness in the Omar Khadr case. Former army Sgt. Joshua Claus, the interrogator who had obtained Khadr’s confession, was testifying that his confession had not been obtained under torture or threat of abuse. Two years earlier Claus had spoken on record to Shephard about a case in which he had been court-martialed in connection with the death of another detainee, an Afghan taxi driver. However, in the Khadr case Claus was considered a protected person and was only identified as Interrogator Number One. The judge had not specifically ordered the press not to reveal Claus’s identity, so the four journalists tried to seek clarification from him before going to print. “He didn’t even acknowledge that we asked him a question,” said Shephard. Shephard, Rosenberg and their two colleagues eventually decided to print Claus’s name in their media reports. That night word came from Washington: the four of them had been banned from Gitmo for life. Rosenberg and the Miami Herald immediately hired a lawyer and appealed the decision. “It was a big deal because it looked like the Obama administration was trying to censor the coverage,” said Shephard. The ban was eventually lifted and three or four months later the four reporters were invited to attend a round-table discussion at the Pentagon about how to better media relations. “I follow their rules,” Rosenberg insists. “I protest, I object, I point out the inconsistencies of them, but I never ever ever disobey the rules.”
We can only see what they allow us to see and in this moment . . . we’re blind CAROL ROSENBERG CONVERGENCE Spring 2014
47
ILLUSTRATION BY: DOMINIKA GUDANIEC
Still, 12 years of reporting from a place where the shifting administrative landscape is reflected in the ever-changing rules has often put Rosenberg in some bizarre situations. Like the time she almost but not quite broke the one written-in-stone rule at Gitmo: never talk to the detainees. Rosenberg happened to be visiting Camp Four, a cooperative camp that allows detainees with good track records to live together in a less restrictive setting, when one of the detainees tried to speak to her through the chain-link fence. It was Omar Khadr and he looked bored.
48 CONVERGENCE Spring 2014
“Hey, are you National Geographic?” he asked her. For some reason he didn’t seem concerned that Rosenberg was flanked by two military escorts. Not wanting to be rude but also not wanting to break the rules herself, Rosenberg turned to her escort and said, in a voice loud enough for Khadr to hear, “‘I guess he doesn’t know that I’m not allowed to talk to him and if I were allowed to talk to him I’d tell him that I don’t work for National Geographic, I work for the Miami Herald.” Khadr seemed satisfied with her indirect response to his question and walked away.
“The idea that I can’t talk to him but I can communicate to the guy next to me so that he can hear it is kind of a bizarre interpretation of their rules,” said Rosenberg. “No media ever has in the 12 years of operation [spoken to a detainee] and I’m guessing . . . no media ever will,” said Gitmo’s current public affairs director Commander John Filostrat. “Even when [the media] gets to go into the camps and see detainees, we make sure they try not to see the reporters because then it gets dangerous and threatens operational security.” Filostrat has been at his post since September 2013, and expects to be at Gitmo until July 2014 before someone else replaces him. The relationship between the media and Joint Task Force Guantanamo personnel has been professional and congenial, he said. Filostrat said he’d had no complaints from the press so far. “We understand that these folks have spent a lot of time and effort and money to come down here and regardless of what they write or what they air, it’s our job just to try to facilitate the media as much as operational security allows,” he said. “We have nothing to hide down here.” “Nothing” doesn’t seem to include the number of hunger strikers at Gitmo. Those numbers are misrepresentations of the situation, Filostrat said; just detainees trying to gain attention. But Al Jazeera America contributor Jason Leopold has a different perspective on the issue. “Last year, during the height of the hunger strike, several policies were put into place and these policies ... ultimately did give rise to the hunger strike,” said Leopold. He is referring to policies like the controversial genital searches detainees were subjected to just before meeting with their attorneys, something that had previously been banned due to cultural insensitivity. Leopold traced the renewal of the genital search policy to the death of a detainee in 2012 under what he calls “troubling circumstances”. “They suspected that the prisoner who died was hiding drugs in his genital area,” he said. Leopold has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the detainee’s autopsy report. The FOIA request is only one of many. Leopold, who is known in some govern-
ment circles as “the FOIA terrorist”, has filed requests for everything from statistics about Gitmo guards suffering from PTSD to who made the decision to allow CBS’s 60 Minutes news crew unprecedented access to the camps for their September 2013 documentary, in which they were allowed to show the faces of prison guards (camera crews are usually instructed to film from the neck down) and record the vocal protest of a detainee. Filing FOIA requests is costly and time-consuming, something Rosenberg herself tries to avoid. When she does though, she files for a specific document that she is sure exists, like when she filed a request for a list of detainees who were being held at Gitmo indefinitely. “I was trying to find something extremely specific that I believed was both newsworthy and important for the public to know,” said Rosenberg. “It worked.” That’s a common refrain from journalists who cover Gitmo: the public has a right to know. The administration doesn’t always agree with that. The arrival of Gen. John F. Kelly in November 2012 marked the begin-
ning of a new era of secrecy at Gitmo, said Rosenberg. The commander of U.S. Southern Command, whose headquarters are right next door to Rosenberg’s Miami Herald offices in Florida, is “old school” she said. “He’s a legacy of a time, I think, when distrust of the media was at its height in America and when manipulation of the message was considered acceptable,” said Rosenberg. That may change, she said, once Kelly leaves. “You may actually find someone who’s an advocate for transparency.” Despite the increased restrictions on the press at Gitmo however, journalists like Rosenberg continue to tell the stories coming out of America’s most controversial offshore prison. “The difficulties of reporting on it is part of the attraction,” Leopold explained. “It’s the fact that I’m always trying to figure out what’s happening. Where can I snoop around to get info? It’s sort of the ultimate investigative story.” Sometimes, however, the challenge is not digging up the story on Gitmo, but keeping readers interested in what is going on half a
world away. “I get people saying all the time, ‘Oh, is Guantanamo still open?’” Shephard said. The Toronto Star reporter has written two books based on her coverage of Gitmo and is now in the process of producing a documentary with a Montreal film director about Gitmo’s 22 Uighur detainees. It’s frustrating, said Shephard, when the public seemed to have moved on from Gitmo. She is hopeful public engagement will increase as the 9/11 trials draw closer. Twelve years on, Gitmo remains a goldmine of news stories and despite presidential promises that it will eventually close, Rosenberg doesn’t see that happening anytime soon. She once assumed that her Gitmo beat, which she describes as a cross between being “a foreign correspondent and a small town reporter,” would have an expiry date. “The President said he was going to close it so I thought it was going to have an end. So I hung in for the end, and now I don’t think there’s an end in sight,” said Rosenberg. “I can’t figure out when would be the appropriate time to stop.”
Media access to Guantanamo Bay is tightly controlled, and the rules are always changing. PHOTO BY: MICHELLE SHEPHARD
