� Aminda Marqués Gonzalez VP/Executive Editor April 4, 2014 Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel U.S. Department of Defense Pentagon Washington, DC 20301 Secretary Hagel: From March 17-21 four Miami Herald journalists visited your detention center at Guantanamo Bay and conducted a reporting trip under new expansive ground rules that forbade the media that week from photographing the faces of anyone but the detention center commander, his spokesman and the contractor in charge of catering. Under these new more restrictive ground rules, written by the public affairs officer and adopted by the U.S. Southern Command, my journalists were forbidden to report the names of any other members of the 2,100-member staff of JTF GTMO. During their trip, two sergeants and a private introduced as "your operational security officers” systematically deleted any imagery that showed the face of any other member in a superstructure of censorship that portrayed any face, even those previously disclosed through public affairs imagery, as an operational security threat to the 13-year-old detention center. Their military escorts ordered them to photograph troops from the neck down, and forbade the soldiers we interviewed from giving their true names. Yesterday, soldiers assigned to the same operation as your enlisted “operational security officers” published a story and photos under the headline, “There and Back Again: Guantanamo guards return 12 years later.” It showed the names and faces of four soldiers on the 2,100-member staff, quoted them by name and published a routine interview on the web and in print, journalistic style. If we at the Miami Herald do the same thing, under Southcom's new gag order on troops talking to media and new ground rules governing civilian media access, the people who censored my journalists at Guantánamo have the authority to expel them from the base and permanently ban them from reporting there. In short, under your rules, the story your media wing published would have been defined as an operational security violation had we published the same thing. Mr. Secretary, a culture of censorship has set in at Guantánamo of a scale we have not experienced in the past 13 years of reporting from there. Your troops are wielding editorial instruments on independent journalists with an ever-expanding interpretation of their power to influence the story of Guantanamo in the free press. And in doing so, the organization whose motto is “Safe, Humane, Legal, Transparent” detention is implementing a dishonest double standard that snuffs out the reporting of basic information the public was once allowed to know.

Secretary of Defense Chuck HagelApril 4, 2014Page 2

As an example: For nine months the detention center routinely released a daily count of thenumber of detainees on a Navy medical list of those eligible to receive enteral feeds. OnDecember 3, Marine Gen. John F. Kelly imposed a gag order on that information. The LondonDaily Mail reported that the military considers hunger strike figures to now be "classified."

Another example: In December, your troops seized the video of a visiting French journalist whorecorded a scene of Santa Claus at the Guantanamo commissary, with permission of an escort.They deleted the imagery and then days later staged a similar photo and published it on thecover of the detention center's in-house newsletter, The Wire.

We write this letter to protest the prison camp's recently adopted unilateral ground rules and toask you to order their immediate withdrawal. We respectfully request that you order Joint TaskForce Guantanamo to resume using the Office of Secretary of Defense ground rules that stillgovern reporters' visits during OSD-sponsored Military Commissions trips. Those September2010 rules were negotiated through a protracted, respectful process of negotiation between themedia and your Office of Public Affairs. While we do not approve of everything in those rules,they do not give a soldier the power to in one moment delete a journalist's photo and ·in the nexttake the same image and publish it as Pentagon product. They do not prevent us frompublishing the name, rank and service of a detention center staff member while empowering anArmy journalist to do it.

Respectfully yours,

~cdt ??;~;;/lAminda Marques Gonzalez

3511 NW 91 Avenue, Miami, FL 33172 1305-376-3429 I fax 305-376-8910 I amarques@miamiherald.com I www.miamiherald.com

miamH~eral~MEDI,\COMPANY

Mami Herald photo from March 17-21 reporting trip deleted all but neck-down photography.

Pentagon photo published April 4, 2014 by same unit that imposed restrictions 0 I visiting journalists. Caption:

"Members of the 339th Military Police Company, pose with their guidon atCamp X-Ray, Thursday, March 27,12

years after their first deploymentto Joint Task Force Guantanamo. From left to rig t: Army Sgt. 1st Class Larry

Nilmeier, Army 1st Sgt. John Nelson, and Army Staff Sgts. Seve Prokup and Curt Jackson."

4/4/2014 DVIDS - News - There and back again: Guantanamo guards return 12 ~s later

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am News: There and back again: Guantanamo guards return 12 years later

Joint Task Force Guantanamo Public Affairs

Story by Staff Sat. Carrren steinbach ~ ~

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba - When thedetention facility at Joint Task ForceGuantanamo makes news or appears in a

Hollywood movie, the accompanied images

are generally the same: wooden watch towers,cells made out of chain link fence anddetainees kneeling in a square, wearingorange jump suits while their armed guardslook on.

W~at manyfail to realize is that theseportrayals are spun from footage over adecade old, taken mere months after the war

on terror began, Witness to that initial scene

were four members of the 339th Military PoliceCompany, an Army Reserve unit based out ofDavenport, lowa,thatwere among the first

Soldiers assigned to detainee operations atCamp X-Ray in 2002. Twelve years later, they havereturned with their unitto canryout the same mission: the safe, legal and humane care, andcustodyofthe detainees here.

Pvt. Kourtney Grimes

Members of the 339th Military Police Company. posewith their guidon at Camp X-Ray, Thursday, March 27,12 years after their first deployment to Joint TaskForceGuantanamo. From left to right: AnmySgt. 1sf:ClassLany Nilmeier, Anmy1stSgt. John Nelson, and AnmyStaff S9tS. Seve Prokup and Curt Jackson.

Army Staff Sgt. Steve Prokup is one of the four retuning guards. He said the media often portrays

detainees in Camp X-Ray, despite getting tours of the modem camps.Troesn't make a goodnews story that they're being treated well:

When the 339th first arrived in January2002, Camp X-Ray was still under construction. Sea bees

were working day and night, welding all the cells together. The guard force actually lived in a tent

city just above the camp called Freedom Heights which was located on a landfill and overrunwith banana rats. Their showers consisted of a plywood box where they stood on a pallet andbathed with a garden hose strung over the top.

While there, the 339th, assigned as interior guard force, oversaw the in-processing of alldetainees, taking them to identification and medical stations, and took care of their basic needsas well. This was difficult, as there was no indoor facilities until Camp Delta was opened andthe detainees transferred there a few months later.

"The environment was different, definitely," said Army Sgt. 1st Class LarryNilmeier. "We wereoutside. We had to empty the feces outofthe buckets ourselves and now they have flushable

plumbing."

"We still respected everything about them. We just did a job and we did our job humanely. Wetried to keep the order and discipline of the camp and we did it together," said Nelmeier.

Army 1st Sgt. John Nelson, a platoon sergeant during his previous rotation, recalled how ageneral would come through and ask for complaints from the detainees. In one memorableinstance a detainee had spoken up and said that the water was bad; thatittasted odd. Thegeneral drank the same water straight from the garden hose to ensure that its quality was good

for them.

In April, the detainees were transferred to Camp Delta, a location with indoor and communal

living. The guard force were moved to Camp America and housed in wooden buildings calledsea huts. While conditions improved for both parties, the mission remained the same.

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"Since we opened in 2002, we actually treated every detainee humanely," said Nilmeir. "We took

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Twelve years later, the returning members of the 339th are overwhelmed by the improvementsmade from their first tour at GTMO. Camps Five and Six are air-conditioned, quality facilities that

are a testamentto detainee care, comparable to detention facilities in the United States. Thereare medical treatment centers and a library, as well as recreation and entertainmentcapabilities."1 was interested in seeing how things had changed down here since we were able to be here atthe beginning and after 12 years see how they look now," said Nelson, "Obviously things have

progressed quite a bit. We now have state-of-the-art facilities that the detainees are housed in."

The operational lessons learned have developed further for the guard force as well, especiallywith regard to Soldier and Trooper care.

"This is not your typical overseas deployment, but yet it can be mentally exhausting as you nowsee you also have things in place like JSMART," said Nilmeir. "We didn't have that back then."

With JTF potentially closing in the coming years, there is no wayofknowing how long the guardforce will be in the business of caring for detainees, but untu the last one is transferred,members of the 339th and their peers will perform all of their duties to their best of their abilities;carrying outthe mission of safe, legal and humane care and custodyofdetainees.

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RELEVANT LINKS: Guantanamo prison article: There and Back Again, published 4/4/14 http://bit.ly/1lwfaae Guantanamo prison staff photograph, released 4/4/14, released http://bit.ly/1lGsyev OSD-PA’s negotiated Ground Rules for Guantanamo Reporters: http://bit.ly/1gXagTf Joint Task Force Guantanamo’s unilaterally Issued Ground Rules: http://bit.ly/PtqWau Nine months of Hunger Strike Disclosures: http://hrld.us/18kPPIm Guantanamo Prison Newsletter, The Wire, 12/27/13: http://bit.ly/1eg01EN