Guantanamo Is Becoming a Nursing Home for Its Aging Terror Suspects
The Pentagon is required to give Gitmo detainees the same medical care as U.S. troops. How's that going to work?
KATIE BO WILLIAMSAPRIL 26, 2019
GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba — The oldest man still held in military detention here is 71 years old. Many others are in their 50s.
It’s not entirely clear how the U.S. government plans to care for them in their old age.
The 40 (reportedly at less than 20 now) remaining prisoners at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base have the same physical ailments of any aging population. They need hip replacements, eye surgeries, treatment for sleep apnea, mental health disorders and, one day, probably cancer and dementia. As the military commissions designed by the Bush administration lurch unevenly towards convictions — a federal appeals court recently tossed aside three years of litigation in the USS Cole case — it appears increasingly likely that many of these men will grow old and die on the U.S. taxpayer’s dime.
The aging population at Gitmo poses unique challenges for Adm. John Ring, the latest in a string of officers who have led the prison on one-year deployments. Defense attorneys say many detainees suffer the ill effects of brutal interrogation tactics now considered to be torture. The United States has committed to providing the same health care to the remaining detainees that it provides to its own troops, as required by the Geneva Conventions.But the secure medical facilities built to treat the detainees — Ring calls them “guests”— can’t cope with every kind of surgery geriatric patients typically need, and weren’t built to last forever. Congress has prohibited the transfer of detainees to the continental United States, which means any treatment they receive will have to take place at a remote outpost on the tip of Cuba.
“I’m sort of caught between a rock and a hard place,” Ring said. “The Geneva Conventions' Article III, that says that I have to give the detainees equivalent medical care that I would give to a trooper. But if a trooper got sick, I’d send him home to the United States.
“And so I’m stuck. Whatever I’m going to do, I have to do here.”
For now, with all of the detainees healthy enough to get around without assistance, that system is mostly working. Specialists and equipment are flown in as needed, including a handicapped-accessible cell sent to the war court facility so that a 57-year-old inmate recovering from emergency spinal surgeries could stay overnight at the complex rather than endure transport back and forth from the detention facility.
Officials on the island have been told to expect to keep the lights on for another 25 years.Most of the long-term planning Ring and his successors need to turn Gitmo into a nursing home for terrorists is up to policymakers at the Pentagon — and, it’s not clear how much planning has actually been done.
What is the Pentagon’s plan?
“We’re in the early stages of feeling this out,” Ring said. The long-term goal is to continue to house detainees in communal living configurations, so that they can help care for one another as they age. In the coming months, he is sending a team to study how Federal Bureau of Prisons facilities in the United States handle end-of-life care for elderly prisoners. And eventually, the senior medical officer, or SMO, expects to replace the detainee acute care unit, where surgeons have already performed both emergency and routine elective procedures, to include ramps, grab bars, and other amenities required by the Americans with Disabilities Act….
“This facility was built as sort of a stop-gap measure,” the SMO said. “It’s not the final solution. The detaineeacute care unit is designed with a seven-year time frame so somewhere around 2025, they’re going to have to look at a more permanent solution.”
But experts say that still leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the breadth of care that will be available.
A Pentagon memo from February 2018 — shortly after President Trump announced that he would be keeping Gitmo open— says that U.S. Southern Command will provide the detainees with the same level of care as the U.S. armed forces only “when it is possible” and “to the extent practicable.” If the appropriate care can’t be provided on the island, according to the memo, “a panel will be formed to provide direction…on medical courses of action.”
The memo directs the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop an "execute order" that would, among things, “refine medical options, address urgent and chronic health issues, long-term medical treatment requirements, staffing requirements, and structural changes to camps and medical facilities.”..
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2019/04/guantanamo-nursing-home-terrorist-suspects/156575/