Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
Miami Herald
April 23, 2008
Pg. 3
By Carol Rosenberg
An Arab captive at the Guantánamo Bay prison camps spent about an hour on the phone speaking with his family in Saudi Arabia earlier this month, inaugurating a Pentagon program that lets cooperative ''enemy combatants'' phone home once a year.
Since then at least six other men were allowed family phone calls, said Michael Kambatta of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Washington, D.C.
The Islamic Red Crescent, a Red Cross affiliate, arranged the first call on April 3, free of charge to detainees and their families. The others spoke to family in the oil-rich kingdom as well as in neighboring Yemen.
At the remote U.S. Navy base, a prison camps spokeswoman, Cmdr. Pauline Storum, confirmed that the calls had taken place.
Only those considered ''compliant'' can participate -- about 170 of the 280 captives, Storum said.
The prison staff declined to say whether the 16 formerly CIA-held captives now held at Guantánamo are entitled to the once-a-year call.
The men, including three the intelligence agency now confirms it waterboarded in secret custody, are segregated from the other prisoners in a maximum--security compound called Camp 7, set up for ``high-value detainees.''
They include Pakistani native Majid Khan, whose family lives in suburban Baltimore; Hambali, an Indonesian who allegedly ran a radical al Qaeda affiliate in southeast Asia, and reputed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
The Guantánamo program came months after the Defense Department worked with International Red Cross affiliates to set up video conferences between Afghan families and select U.S.-held captives at the Bagram Air Base, another war-on-terror detention center 25 miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan.
April 23, 2008
Pg. 3
By Carol Rosenberg
An Arab captive at the Guantánamo Bay prison camps spent about an hour on the phone speaking with his family in Saudi Arabia earlier this month, inaugurating a Pentagon program that lets cooperative ''enemy combatants'' phone home once a year.
Since then at least six other men were allowed family phone calls, said Michael Kambatta of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Washington, D.C.
The Islamic Red Crescent, a Red Cross affiliate, arranged the first call on April 3, free of charge to detainees and their families. The others spoke to family in the oil-rich kingdom as well as in neighboring Yemen.
At the remote U.S. Navy base, a prison camps spokeswoman, Cmdr. Pauline Storum, confirmed that the calls had taken place.
Only those considered ''compliant'' can participate -- about 170 of the 280 captives, Storum said.
The prison staff declined to say whether the 16 formerly CIA-held captives now held at Guantánamo are entitled to the once-a-year call.
The men, including three the intelligence agency now confirms it waterboarded in secret custody, are segregated from the other prisoners in a maximum--security compound called Camp 7, set up for ``high-value detainees.''
They include Pakistani native Majid Khan, whose family lives in suburban Baltimore; Hambali, an Indonesian who allegedly ran a radical al Qaeda affiliate in southeast Asia, and reputed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed.
The Guantánamo program came months after the Defense Department worked with International Red Cross affiliates to set up video conferences between Afghan families and select U.S.-held captives at the Bagram Air Base, another war-on-terror detention center 25 miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan.