America's European Gulag

According to Jerome at European Tribune, the frontpage on tomorrow afternoon's edition of Le Monde will be about America's "little Guantanamo" - in Kosovo:

According to our informations, the US military camp "Camp Bondsteel", in Kosovo, hosted a prison similar to that in Guantanamo. 6,000 US soldiers live on that base, which occupies 300 hectares near Ferisaj, a town south of Pristina, the "capital" of the UN-administered province.

If you have a copy of Google Earth, Camp Bondsteel's ICBM-address is 42^o21'39" N by 21^o14'36" E. Thoughtfully, half the camp is in high-resolution, so you can count the HMMWVs outside the barracks. There's also a nice aerial photo here.

I wonder which part is the prison? And which bit they do the waterboarding in? Update: European Tribune (link above) has more. The story is based on a report from Alvaro Gil Robles, the commissioner for human rights of the Council of Europe, who visited the camp in September 2002:

"From one of the towers, the camp looked like a smaller version of Guantanamo. Small wood houses were surrounded by high barbed wire. I saw between 15 and 20 prisoners, locked in these houses, all dressed in orange coveralls like in Guantanamo. Most were seating, some were locked in isolated cells. Some were bearded, some were reading the Koran. There was room between the cells for guard rounds. A female US soldier working in the prison told me that she had just come here after having served in Guantanamo."

"I was shocked by what I saw"

He was invited to the camp by a French general, who was unhappy with what was going on there.

There's more on the story here and here.