Major McElwain did not say how much the consolidation cost. Over time, he said, the move would likely mean a reduction in troops for the 1,500 members of the National Guard serving nine months in the detention operation, which was estimated at $ 13 million per prisoner per year.
Mohammed and other high-value detainees were held at the classified site of Camp 7 after their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006. They spent three to four years on the George W. Bush government’s secret network of overseas prisons, known as black sites, where the CIA subjected its prisoners to sleep deprivation, forced nudity, drowning and other physical and psychological abuse.
By segregating prisoners, under the surveillance of a special guard unit called the Platinum Task Force, intelligence agencies were able to strictly monitor and control their communications and prevent them from disclosing what had happened to them. Defense lawyers who eventually had access to the men were forced by security clearances to keep their conversations confidential, including in lawsuits that accused government agents of state-sponsored torture.
Camp 7 was for a long time one of the most clandestine places in Guantánamo. The Pentagon refused to disclose its cost, which contractor built it and when. Reporters were not allowed to see him, lawyers were required to obtain a court order to visit him, and his location was considered confidential, although the sources pointed to it on a satellite map of the base.
In the short term, Major McElwain said, Camp 7 “will be sanitized, closed and locked”.
“A plan for its final disposition has not yet been defined,” he said.
Former CIA prisoners were mostly kept in isolation in their early years at Camp 7. Each was allowed to speak to only one other prisoner through a tarp during recreation time, in conversations that were recorded for intelligence purposes. .
His lawyers described the conditions as narcotic until recent years, when commanders allowed prisoners to eat and pray together under strict surveillance. They also had a cell where they could prepare food to pass the time.