THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Liker Dachau in Germany, the first US concentration camp will continue in existence after releasing most of its original inmates with a new crop of prisoners to be found to fill it.

Earlier this month, in a drill shrouded in secrecy, prison guards practiced for something that hasn't actually happened at Guantánamo in a decade. They rehearsed receiving a new war-on-terror detainee.

Medical evaluation? Check. Notification of the International Red Cross? Check. Assignment to a cell? Check. Security and more security. Gone are the iconic orange uniforms that made Camp X-Ray infamous. The man who played the role of new captive wore white.

Navy Rear Adm. John Ring, the prison commander, says he hasn't gotten any word that new prisoners are coming. But since President Donald Trump signed an order keeping the prison open, Ring's staff is now preparing for what spokeswoman Navy Cmdr. Anne Leanos calls an "enduring mission.”

"I have not been told we’re getting new people. I have no order to receive new people. I’ve been asked some hypothetical questions about capacities and things like that, but we are not imminently expecting anybody," Ring told reporters in early June.

Guantánamo today has 40 prisoners and a staff of 1,800 troops and civilians. With the maximum-security Camp 5 prison just reopened, after a cellblock was remade into a clinic and mental health ward, the detention center can now take in another 40 men.

One wrinkle is that any new detainees are likely to be members of the Islamic State, not al-Qaida. And while some people see ISIS as offshoot of al-Qaida, the militant movements are not allies and have vastly different aims.

"Unless we got some al-Qaida from Afghanistan, which is possible, most of the conversation is about Syria, and most of those guys, I understand, are ISIS," said Ring, who doesn't decide who comes and goes from Guantánamo. "So it’s possible we could get folks from either place."

Any new prisoner would be the first to arrive at Guantánamo since the CIA delivered an Afghan "high-value detainee" in March 2008. That was years before the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria declared its worldwide caliphate, invaded and controlled a huge swath of Iraq and Syria and released a series of brutal videotaped killings of captives in orange jumpsuits.

Al-Qaida has "a different ideology" than ISIS, says Leanos, the prison spokeswoman. Besides, after more than a decade in military detention, there's also a "different mentality" among the captives — who are profiled as al-Qaida members or affiliates — and have come to understand Guantánamo prison's incentive system says the admiral's cultural adviser who is only identified with one name, Zaki. Captives who follow the guards' commands get to live communally, pray and eat in groups, take art, language and gardening classes and read more books, for example.

"If suspected ISIS fighters are transferred to Guantánamo I would expect that a legal challenge to their detention would be filed within days if not hours of their arrival," said Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been at the forefront of representing and finding attorneys for military detainees.

He and other opponents of Guantánamo detention argue the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, Congress' permission for the president to wage war on al Qaida and the Taliban over the Sept. 11 attacks, does not apply to ISIS. “The one thing that's guaranteed is it will create years more of litigation,” Dixon said.

If you have the camp, you just naturally have to fill it. And with out military spread out in Imperial outposts across the globe, we should be able to find enough to do so. Whether they are worthy of indefinite imprisonment is irrelevant.