Military retracts Guantánamo PTSD claim

Military retracts Guantánamo PTSD claim
Miami Herald
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
December 8, 2013

The U.S. military is retracting a claim made to “60 Minutes” that Guantánamo guards suffer nearly twice as much Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as combat troops.

“There are no statistics that support the claim of twice the number of troops diagnosed with PTSD,” said Army Col. Greg Julian of the U. S. Southern Command in response to a query from the Miami Herald.

Southcom has oversight of the 12-year-old detention center, including the consequences of duty there on the thousands of troops that have guarded the Guantánamo prisoners. At its height, the prison held about 660 men at the sprawling detention center complex. Now, a staff of about 2,100 troops and contractors holds 162 captives, 82 of them cleared for release.

Army Col. John V. Bogdan, the current commander of the guard force, offered up the surprising Cuba-to-battlefield ratio of PTSD in a September interview with CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl. It aired Nov. 17, without verification, and was echoed in a BBC broadcast Nov. 20 by the female Army captain in charge of Guantanamo’s maximum-security prison, Camp 5, where, she said, a captive on most days hurls at a guard a home-made brew that can include excrement, blood, semen and urine.

She told the BBC her guards suffer PTSD as a consequence of “that constant threat of being in enemy contact for up to 12 hours at a time,” and said the prison’s Public Affairs Officer or guard’s mental-health unit could provide precise statistics.

But, after weeks of research from the island prison to the Pentagon, Julian, Southcom’s Public Affairs Officer said late Friday: “Col. Bogdan was mistaken about twice the level of PTSD.”
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