Guantanamo terror plot uncovered

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When Camp X-Ray at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba was closed to new arrivals two weeks ago, it was not because the facility was full, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained.

Neither did it have anything to do with public-opinion pressure to grant the 158 detainees eligibility for POW rights under the Geneva Conventions.

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According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly's intelligence and counter-terror sources, the intake was suspended after intelligence was received that a large group of Muslim terrorists, led by Algerian GIA members linked to al-Qaida, had arrived on the island of Cuba from the Persian Gulf and Europe. They came to survey the chances of carrying out a major terror operation against Camp X-Ray. Their plan was to damage the facility and kill the fundamentalist detainees, transforming them into martyrs.

Camp security is directed equally at keeping interlopers out and preventing detainees from killing themselves for their faith.

U.S. intelligence was alerted to the Algerian extremists on their way to Cuba by Canadian and Cuban intelligence. The Canadians reported that a group of Canadian women married to Algerians affiliated to the GIA, who dropped out of sight two or three years ago, suddenly received phone calls and letters from their absent husbands and appeared to have traveled to Cuba to join them.

The camp, when reopened for new arrivals yesterday, had undergone substantial security improvements, with a larger number of sentry posts and better protection for its airstrips, the only means of entry and exit from the facility. The U.S. Navy has also stepped up its patrols in Guantanamo Bay. The American camp authorities believe that trespassers attempting to break into the detention camp by air or sea will be destroyed. But they do not rule out a long-distance missile attack or a suicide pilot coming in low and crashing his plane on detention cages, raising a huge international furor.

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