Never Again by Harvey A. Schwartz

Author:Harvey A. Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633937314
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2015-01-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 37

The Camp Edwards detainees were sorted into categories. Families were moved to barracks where they could remain together. Some even included a small kitchen. That portion of the base was called Camp Foxtrot. Those age fifty and above were in Camp Alpha, with unmarried men and women in separate buildings. Residents of both camps could visit one another, and they ate in a communal mess hall.

At the far side of Edwards was Camp Echo, named nostalgically by Base Commander Dancer after the Camp Echo at Guantanamo, where the least cooperative detainees were housed. The residents of Camp Echo were all between eighteen and forty-nine and all potential members of the Israel Defense Forces. Camp Echo was surrounded by a wire fence topped with coiled razor wire. A second identical fence stood a dozen yards outside the inner fence. Wooden guard towers stood at each corner.

The barracks at Camp Echo showed their hasty and recent renovation. Plywood partitions created a series of separate rooms, each ten feet by eight feet. Windows were covered by plywood. Air circulated from ceiling vents. No light entered from the outside. Each room had a single wire-covered fluorescent fixture. There were no light switches in the rooms, no electrical outlets of any kind. The lights were never turned off—never during the day, never at night.

Each room had a loudspeaker mounted high on a wall. There were two plastic pails in each room. One held drinking water. The other was the toilet. A plastic pad served as a mattress. Detainees were issued plastic foam blankets that tore when twisted or stretched, designed to prevent suicides. The pads and blankets were collected every morning and handed back every evening.

When inmates moved from one place to the other, they were shackled at wrists and ankles, blacked-out ski goggles over their eyes, and sound-deadening muffs covered their ears.

Maj. Dancer designed Camp Echo as a replica of Guantanamo Bay. His only regret was that because he was limited to the existing facility and because of time constraints, the rooms were built from plywood rather than steel shipping containers.

Keep them guessing, uncomfortable, with absolutely no control. That was a lesson learned at Guantanamo. Hot, then cold. Light, then dark. Silent, then loud. All out of their control. Completely dependent on their interrogator. “Womb rooms,” the soldiers manning the camp called them. Not cells. Womb rooms cut off from everything. From everybody.

The most important building at Camp Echo was the JIF, the Joint Interrogation Facility. It was constructed from cinderblocks, with sound-deadening vermiculite pellets poured through the holes in the blocks. It, too, had no windows and it, too, was separated into a warren of small rooms accessible only by a single door from the common hallway. Each room had a wall-mounted camera.

Following the pattern created at the interrogation camp established at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and continued at Guantanamo Bay, the detainees at Camp Echo were nameless, identified in camp records only by numbers, bestowed on them sequentially in the order in which they were processed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.