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Some in Congress object to new soccer field at Guantanamo

By Carol Rosenberg, McClatchy Newspapers –

MIAMI — Some members of Congress are questioning the wisdom of the Pentagon’s spending $744,000 on a soccer field to keep captives busy outside a $39 million penitentiary-style building at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars for crying out loud?” Rep. Gus Bilirakas, R-Fla., said in a television interview. “Our deficit this year is $1.2 trillion and we’re spending this kind of money on terrorists?”

Prison camp commanders unveiled the 28,000-square-foot soccer field during a visit last week by reporters to cover a Pakistani man’s guilty plea to war crimes. Commanders called it part of the cost of doing business at the remote outpost and keeping captives diverted at the detention center.

The yard opens in April after contractors install latrines and goals.

Bilirakas, in his third term representing some Tampa suburbs, led the charge of indignation over the expense, dashing off a letter to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Fla., went further, and introduced the “NO FIELD Act.”

It’s short for None of Our Funds for the Interest, Exercise, or Leisure of Detainees Act, and would strip the Defense Department’s 2013 budget by $750,000.

“Gitmo should not be a place of comfort,” said Ross, a freshman in Congress. “It should house the worst of the worst of the world’s terrorists, not be a training ground for the World Cup.”

Rep Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., made a social media moment out of his dissatisfaction. He asked an apparently unaware Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about the expense at a hearing Wednesday — then tweeted the Pentagon chief’s ignorance.

“Just asked Sec. Panetta if he knew about Gitmo Soccer Field. He said ‘No,’ ” the former farmer from Fowler, Kan., reported on his Twitter page.

He then posted the exchange on YouTube.

A military contractor, BRDC (Burns and Roe Dick Corp. Services), is building the new recreation yard outside Camp 6, a six-year-old, 200-cell prison where about 120 of the most cooperative of Guantanamo’s 171 captives are kept.

Camp 6 already has two smaller yards so troops call the new recreation yard the “Super Rec.” Each cellblock is also equipped with large flat-screen televisions and exercise machines.

Also, military psychological staff members teach an optional 90-minute weekly session called “Enriching Your Life” to help captives manage their indefinite stays.

It’s “based on acceptance and commitment therapy,” said Air Force Maj. Michelle Coghill, a Guantanamo spokeswoman.

Detainees engage in “experiential exercises” that include “mindfulness breathing meditations,” story telling and lectures to manage depression or anxiety and “flexibly handle unhelpful thinking and intense emotions while engaging in value-driven, life-enriching behaviors.”

The U.S. military also said, for the first time, that Guantanamo staff had given watches to “a very small number” of Camp 6 captives.

Watches were taboo for years, although guards posted schedules for Islam’s five-times daily prayers in prison recreation yards.

In the earliest years of Guantanamo, the Pentagon presumed possession of a Casio wristwatch was a justification for indefinite detention as an “enemy combatant” because, the military said, a captured al-Qaida manual showed how to configure a Casio as a timer for an explosive device.

“While we won’t discuss specifics on makes, models or types,” said Coghill, “we can say that these items have been assessed not to pose any force protection concerns.”

The new soccer field is surrounded by guard towers and surveillance cameras and accessible by a secure walkway from the prison building, to reduce contact and conflict between captive and captor.

Construction costs are high because all equipment and supplies are imported to the 45-square-mile base in southeast Cuba, said Rear Adm. David B. Woods, who is in charge of the detention center.

“That’s probably the biggest misperception and lack of understanding of the expense of doing things down here,” he said. “It’s unlike any place else in the world mainly because we don’t have the opportunity to capitalize on the local economy.”

The Obama administration calculates that it costs $800,000 a year to keep a prisoner at Guantanamo, compared with about $26,000 a year on U.S. soil. The base imports and consumes $100,000 of fuel a day to make its own electricity and water and does no business with the Cubans across the minefield. An economic embargo on the Castro government forbids Americans from doing business with Cuba.

Soccer has long been popular since the Pentagon permitted sports in its evolving 10-year effort to conform to the Geneva Conventions and reduce tensions between captives and a rotating guard force and detention center staff of 1,850 troops, agents and government contractors.

Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, a former judge, ridiculed the new soccer field in a congressional floor speech on Thursday.

“These radicals should be doing hard time, not soccer time,” he said, conjuring up a future “terrorist soccer league.”

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