U.S. troops at Guantanamo take on new mission: Haitian relief

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba
— A dirt lot behind the war court the Bush administration built is now
a landing zone. If the Cuban government agrees, U.S. military
helicopters could ferry relief supplies straight into Haiti, a 170-mile dash directly over Cuban soil.

Relief flights now land night and day at the base runway, cargo planes and helicopters shuttling between here, Port-au-Prince and a Navy armada helping Haiti from the sea.

Friday was meant to be a bittersweet date — President Barack Obama’s missed one-year deadline to empty the Pentagon
prison camps of the last 195 or so war-on-terror captives. In its
place, there was an air of elation and purpose that the military at Guantanamo was helping out in an unambiguously good assignment.

“You see the look, the smile on a parent’s face if
you ease the suffering of an injured child, that’s more exhilarating at
the moment than walking the block in a detention camp,” said Rear Adm. Thomas Copeman, the prison camps commander. “Not to say that walking the block is not an extremely important mission for the United States. But probably not as gratifying as saving somebody’s life.”

Helping Haiti is the latest assignment for this 45-square-mile outpost better known for the prison camps controversies and the Hollywood hit, “A Few Good Men,” set in the Cold War.

In that drama, the Cubans were the enemies across the 17.4-mile minefield that divides the two sides. This time, Havana swiftly approved medical evacuation flights straight through Cuban airspace to Miami for U.S. victims evacuated from Haiti.

Now, the Cuban government has provisionally approved U.S. military relief flights straight to Haiti rather than continue to zigzag around Cuban soil, said Navy Capt. Steve Blaisdell, the base commander. The Federal Aviation Administration, he said, is ironing out the agreement.

“Clearly Haiti
has eclipsed everything else in the short term,” said Blaisdell, ” …
independent of any other things that are swirling around.”

Meantime, a tent city that could house 12,000 or
more migrants is slowly rising in case any Haitians are intercepted off
their shore — and can’t be immediately repatriated. The Department of Homeland Security and a troop force from the U.S. Army South in San Antonio would handle an influx.

But, the U.S. Coast Guard says photos of
Haitians taking to rafts so far are victims sailing away from the
earthquake-stricken capital for safe haven in rural portions of the
country.

To keep it that way, the U.S. has sent the Navy — a floating hospital, the USNS Comfort, and triage and treatment centers aboard the USS Bataan and carrier Carl Vinson, to handle casualties at sea, close to home, and stem an exodus.

Here, troop rotations are continuing. But family visits are canceled to make space for more troops and federal agents.

The prisoners, who are forbidden to speak to
reporters, learned long ago from news reports that the closure deadline
would be missed — and, staff say, more recently saw protesters in
orange jumpsuits from London to Washington condemn the United States as the prison camps entered their ninth year, on Jan. 11.

They learned of the earthquake in Haiti the same way and discovered live — on al-Jazeera’s English-language network — that Cuba was under a tsunami watch that included the clifftop prison camps on the edge of the Caribbean.

“They asked, ‘Where’s the manual? What are our
instructions?,'” said Zaki, a Muslim-American who acts as intermediary
between the military and detainees as the prison camps’ cultural
adviser.

He predicted that the missed closure date would pass
like any other Friday prayer day, because 70 percent of the captives
live in communal, POW-style confinement and about half have received
notice that they’re cleared to leave — once the United States negotiates their repatriations or new countries to settle them.

Moreover, he said, while some detainees were gleeful
when they heard a Nigerian man tried to blow up an American passenger
airliner on Christmas Day, they soon realized that
failed underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s supposed links to a
former detainee likely slowed any release plans under way.

“They constantly watch the news. They know more than I do,” said Petty Officer Bradley Golden, 23, a Southern Californian and Navy air traffic control specialist who does Camp 6 guard duty.

For now, the prison camps are on a business-as-usual footing because Congress
has so far thwarted the president’s plan for closure with
intelligence-reporting requirements, blocked funding and a ban on most
transfers to U.S. soil.

Civil liberties groups this week marked the missed
closure with a series of protests and advertising campaigns. “Help us
stand up against the fear-mongers,” said a Human Rights Watch campaign. “We made this video to show how many people across America support closing Guantanamo.”

Army Col. Bruce Vargo, the guard
force commander, says he advises his young troops to focus on their
work, and regard the debate over closure as the price of holding war
prisoners in a democracy.

“There’ve been a lot of people detained through the
history of warfare. Your end-date is when you’re released,” said Vargo,
whose two-year assignment here ends Feb. 9. “It’s gotta be tough that you don’t know an end date.”

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