U.S. military taking tougher line with Guantanamo detainees

The authorities in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have clamped down decisively in recent months on terrorist suspects after two years in which the U.S. military sought to manage them there with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, The New York Times reported Saturday.

Security procedures have been tightened, and group activities have been scaled back at the military prison, the report said.

The shift reflected the military's analysis - after a series of hunger strikes, a riot last May and three suicides by detainees in June - that earlier efforts to ease restrictions on the detainees had gone too far, officials were quoted as saying.

With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That was a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.

The tightening of security at the detention center represents a significant shift in Guantanamo's operations.

Since spring 2004, the military's handling of the detainees had been heavily influenced by the political and diplomatic pressures that grew out of the Abu Ghraib scandal and other cases of prisoner abuse. At the same time, Guantanamo's focus was shifting from interrogations to the long-term detention of men who, for the most part, would never be charged with any crime.

With little guidance from Washington, senior officers there began in 2005 to edge back toward the traditional Geneva Convention rules for prisoner treatment that President George W. Bush had disavowed after Sept. 11, 2001, for the fight against terrorism, military officials said.

Military officers began listening more attentively to the prisoners' complaints, and eventually met a few times with a council of detainee leaders. Those talks were quickly aborted in August 2005. The hunger strikes were effectively broken last January, when the military began strapping detainees into padded " restraint chairs" to force-feed them through stomach tubes.

But those protests gave way to several drug overdoses in May and the hangings in June of three prisoners -- all of whom had previously been hunger strikers, according to the report.

Source: Xinhua