The man’s bearded face appeared at the narrow cell window, eyes dark and raging, his arms gesticulating wildly. From the confines of the 12ft by 8ft cell at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp V — the maximum security unit for the “least compliant” inmates — he made violent slashing motions across his wrists, pounded the side of his head, and jammed imaginary feeding tubes up his nose. “Alpha-3,” he kept mouthing as he tried to tell us that the inmate in Alpha-3 cell was suicidal and on hunger strike.
Then he began to place family pictures up against the glass, including two little boys staring at the camera clutching a fluffy toy deer. Soon another face appeared at another cell window — he covered his face with the Koran and disappeared from view — and another, screaming: “What is freedom? Ask them, what is freedom?”
These are strange, unnerving days inside this prison complex on the sweltering Cuban coast toured by The Times this week — a vast maze of chain-link fences topped by millions of feet of razor wire.
Spotlights blaze through the night while guards watch from towers emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes. Life inside the jail continues unchanged, because nobody here knows — from the guards to the 241 remaining inmates — just how President Obama is going to make good on his increasingly shaky promise to close this symbol of US brutality and extra-judicial excess by January.
The uncertainty has begun to take its toll. On Sunday one detainee, Adnan Latif, a Yemeni held without charge at Guantánamo since 2002, slashed his wrist and hurled a plastic cup full of blood at his lawyer. He had used a piece of veneer from the table to saw through a vein.
The lawyer, David Remes, said that his client was a “very sick man, physically and psychologically”. Prison officials said that he did not need stitches and returned him to his cell. Mr Latif alleged in a letter to his lawyer last month that since Mr Obama took office, “oppression has increased, torture has increased and insults have increased” — something officials at the jail deny fiercely.
Another detainee, Mohammad al-Qaraani, a Chadian national, said in a phone call to the al-Jazeera television channel last month that he had been beaten and mistreated since Mr Obama was elected.
“They will make up just about anything to make the US look bad,” said Petty Officer Wilson — he declined to give his first name — a baby-faced 20-year-old who has been a guard at Guantánamo for 15 months. “We treat them humanely and safely.”
For his first six months, he patrolled Camp VI, a medium-security, $37 million facility opened in January 2007. Nearly every day, he said, inmates would hurl faeces at him or cover themselves in their own excrement. The job, he says, “wears you down, but it’s a great experience”. Forced extractions, where a six-man team of guards enter a cell in black helmets and riot vests, are not uncommon, he said.
The prison commander, Rear Admiral David Thomas, told The Times that Mr al-Qaraani’s allegations were “categorically untrue”. He added: “There’s nothing that goes on here that I wouldn’t be proud to show my mum or my kids.” On election nght in November, a celebratory chant of “Obama! Obama! Obama!” spread through the jail as inmates learnt that he was heading to the White House. When Mr Obama announced, on his second day in office, that he would close the prison, detainees were excited, shouting at guards: “Have you heard? We’re getting out of here!”
The executive order to close Guantánamo by January 22, 2010, was posted by prison officials on noticeboards in the recreation yards where the well-behaved inmates kick around a plastic children’s ball.
All the excitement of January has gone, according to detainees’ lawyers, as Mr Obama’s pledge runs into ever greater problems in Washington. Now a joke is making the rounds among the detainees, told with gallows humour. “At least Bush released people.”
Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, is now talking of sending up to 100 inmates to Saudi Arabia. Up to 100 more could be transferred to US jails, with many facing indefinite detention, but the opposition to such a move is intensely fierce from Republican and Democrat politicians, who are declaring not-in-my-backyard. Between 50 and 100, Mr Gates estimates, can neither be tried nor released, because they are either too dangerous or because the evidence against them is tainted. Nobody knows what to do with them.
“The mood is grim,” one lawyer who represents several of the inmates told The Times. “There is a growing belief that the order to shut the jail was more about showing a good PR position to the world and less about having a plan to get them out.” He had just spoken by phone to one client, he said, who had gone from being “happy” back in January to asking: “Am I ever going to get out of here? Where am I going to go?” He was, the lawyer added, “desperate, hopeless and mentally ill”.
Yet since the first detainees, blindfolded and shackled, landed in Guantánamo Bay from Afghanistan in January 2002, when they were transferred in orange jumpsuits to the outdoor steel cages of Camp X-Ray, huge advances have been made in the way they are handled. Of the approximately 800 who have passed through the facility, about 550 have been released.
Camp X-Ray, which was used for four months and gave the world the infamous images of shackled prisoners being wheeled around in wheelbarrows, is now besieged by vegetation, giant rodents known as banana rats, and boa constrictors. The new facility is a sprawling complex that includes Camps V and VI; Camp IV, and the almost mythical, top secret Camp VII, which is run by the CIA and houses roughly thirty “high value” detainees including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the September 11 attacks. Only a handful of people have ever seen it.
A mile up the coast sits Camp Iguana, which houses 17 Chinese Uighurs who have been cleared for release — but whom no country will take. As we looked at them through fences on Wednesday, one proffered a middle finger; another, looking at a female photographer, shouted: “Hey, beetch.”
Remarkably, officials at Guantánamo say that 90 detainees are still being interrogated to glean intelligence from them, although most have not had contact with the outside world for years. They are “interviewed” sitting on blue sofas, their feet in shackles bolted to a concrete floor. The session — which is voluntary — is filmed. Admiral Thomas says that they are primarily useful to get prison information to keep his own guards safe.
Inside the complex there is a library with 15,000 books in 20 languages, including copies of King Lear and Asterix the Gaul in Arabic. In Camp IV there is a classroom with the English and Arabic alphabets on the wall, leg shackles by each desk, two rusting step machines, a table football set and a communal dining area. The television, which beams two Arab news networks and the Abu Dhabi soccer channel, sits behind a Perspex screen. The previous one was destroyed when the detainees were confronted by a half-naked lady advertising Palmolive soap.
They are provided with Arabic newspapers and USA Today, censored before arrival. Painted on the concrete floors are black arrows, pointing to Mecca, for the five daily prayer sessions. When The Times entered, Camp IV was in “shakedown” mode, an unannounced search of every cell and detainee. As eight guards looked on, a line of four detainees at a time were slowly frisked. One man left his cell using a walking frame.
Inside the medical facility, staff boast that the detainees get better access to healthcare than most Americans. The military says that over the years there have been 5,000 vaccinations, 7,000 dental procedures, 25 colonoscopies and eight prosthetic limbs fitted. Each detainee is fed between 4,500 and 5,000 calories a day, and can choose from six halal menus.
Hunger-strikers have no such choice. The equipment used to keep them alive as stacked on tables in the hospital: yellow feeding tubes that are pushed up their noses and into their stomachs, and small tins of high-protein drinks. Each hunger-striker — there are 34 at present — is shackled to a chair in his cell before the procedure.
“This is the worst posting I’ve ever had,” one guard said. “There’s so much sadness here. But why are they closing it? There are some here you can’t release. I can’t think of a better place in the world to keep ’em.”
