"We fight a different kind of war," said Maj. Hank McIntire, one of 10 Utah-based National Guard public relations officers recently returned from duty in Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. military is holding more than 500 prisoners it suspects of terrorism.
McIntire's fight - "a war of words," the Army public information officer calls it - was to offer a positive public image of the U.S. detention facility.
In the entire field of public relations, there may be no more difficult job.
Since its inception in 2002, the prison - initially built for prisoners captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan - has drawn heavy international criticism. Some of the detainees - called "enemy combatants" by the Bush administration - have been there more than three years without being charged with a crime. That treatment, many human rights advocates contend, violates the Geneva Conventions.
The criticism has reached a fever pitch recently. Highly publicized allegations that a copy of the Quran had been flushed down a Guantanamo toilet have been rescinded by Newsweek magazine, but not before reports of the charges sparked deadly riots in Afghanistan.
Another weekly news publication, Time, reported this week on the unusual - some say abusive - techniques used to interrogate Mohamed al Kahtani, a detainee believed to have been involved in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The report, later confirmed by the Defense Department in a two-page statement, indicates interrogators pumped Kahtani with large amounts of intravenous fluid, forcing him to urinate on himself. They allegedly also ordered him to bark like a dog, hung pictures of scantily clad women around his neck, played annoying American pop music to keep him from sleeping and rejected his request to pray, according to Time.
Former President Carter has recommended the prison be closed. So has Amnesty International, which in a recent report compared the facility to a Soviet gulag.
Sen. Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican close to the Bush administration, has also called for the prison to be shut down, calling it "an icon for bad stories." Fellow GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska added that Guantanamo was one reason the United States is "losing the image war around the world."
Such critiques are aimed at policy-makers, but they strike close to those who have been charged with selling Guantanamo's merits back home and abroad.
"The frustrations come from not being able to successfully portray what it is we actually do here," said Col. Brad Blackner, a Farmington resident recently appointed director of public affairs at the base in southeastern Cuba.
"The troopers who provide for the safe and humane detention are especially frustrated," he said. "They hear these allegations directed towards them and feel that the media has been very unfair."
Though Blackner is still new to the base, his frustrations are not.
McIntire's group, which returned from its 11-month deployment in mid-April, faced similar difficulties in trying to defend the facility and its reputation. The detachment arrived shortly after photographs were made public of detainees being abused by U.S. soldiers in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.
Already faced with the prospect of defending an incarceration system many viewed as illegal, the Utah spokesmen found it difficult to keep reporters from linking the two prison facilities.
"People made the assumption that what happened in Iraq was automatically going to happen anywhere," said 1st Sgt. Roger Jensen, a West Jordan resident who, at 61, was the oldest soldier serving at the base. "Of course that wasn't true."
McIntire, who currently serves as the Utah Guard's main spokesman, said his group spent considerable time "enlightening" station managers of television channels that used the Abu Ghraib photographs during unrelated segments concerning Guantanamo.
And they tried - often unsuccessfully - to persuade the same stations to use more updated footage of the prison. Though the facilities have been significantly modernized since the days of "Camp X-Ray" - a hastily constructed holding facility with small, open-sided wire cells resembling animal kennels - McIntire said the media still prefer to use older, more provocative images.
Knowing from such experiences they were fighting an uphill public relations battle, the Utah spokesmen often worried about how they would be personally scrutinized.
"A misstep on our part could be a headline," said Jensen, who figured a poor choice of words on the part of a member of his unit could result in a reaction like that seen in Afghanistan in the wake of the discredited Newsweek report. "We went to great lengths to protect ourselves from ourselves."
In response to the most recent onslaught of criticism, the White House and many GOP senators have come to the prison's defense. Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday called Guantanamo "essential" and pledged to keep it open for the foreseeable future.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld backed that position Tuesday. "As long as there remains a need to keep terrorists from striking again, a facility will continue to be needed," he said.
For military spokesmen assigned to Guantanamo, the war of words will go on.
mlaplante@sltrib.com
