US to build new Cuba jail

A HALLIBURTON company will build a new$30 million (€24.5m) detention facility and security fence at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States is holding about 520 foreign terrorism suspects.

The announcement comes the same week that US Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld defended the jail after legislators said it had created an image problem for the US.

Critics have decried the indefinite detention of Guantanamo detainees, whom the US has denied rights accorded under the Geneva Conventions to prisoners of war. The prison was called “the gulag of our times” in a recent Amnesty International report.

An air-conditioned two-storey prison, known as Detention Camp 6, will be built at Guantanamo to house 220 men. It will include exercise areas, medical and dental spaces as well as a security control room, the contract announcement said.

The contract announcement did not specify whether the new prison would also hold foreign terror suspects.

Under the deal with the Norfolk, Virginia-based US Naval Facilities Engineering Command, Atlantic, the work is to be wrapped up by July 2006.