Imagine a place so ruthless that doctors are told to put aside their usual ethical concerns
and help interrogators torture prisoners without actually killing them.
An environment so brutal that humans are subjected to sensory deprivation on a regular basis.
The whole time you know your stay is indefinite, even if you’ve not been charged or convicted,
and you fear you might have to stay there forever…
And worst of all, you have to wear an orange jumpsuit all day.
But oh wait, it’s sunrise – time to rise and shine!
This is no place for chit-chat – we’re in Guantanamo Bay.
After feeling badly rested from a terrible night’s sleep, it’s time to start the
day.
And consider yourself lucky if you got any shut-eye at all.
Guantanamo Bay officers often deprive prisoners of their sleep at night thanks to guards under
strict orders to make as much noise as possible by slamming doors and stomping noisily around.
Well, nobody likes a night shift after all.
Then, at 8 am, you hear the distant sound of the military broadcasting the national
anthem to their officers.
It’s time for another day of misery to begin.
You’re sitting alone in a cell with a heavy steel door, a corrugated metal roof, and a
concrete floor.
The place is tiny – it’s 2.4 meters wide at its longest part and 1.8 meters at its
smallest.
The walls are made of wires.
In your cell with you, there are a few bare necessities.
Your bed consists of a sleeping mat that’s not even one-inch-thick, and a cheap blanket.
You have two buckets for your waste – but hey, it’s better than one bucket.
There’s one bath towel, a washcloth, toothpaste, soap, and shampoo.
You’ve been provided with a few luxuries like a skullcap, prayer beads, the Koran,
and a prayer rug, but very little else.
Still, count yourself lucky.
Sometimes you might be handcuffed, blindfolded or masked for hours on end – last night
was plain sailing.
This isn’t a scene from a dystopian film, something that happened fifty years ago, or
even a prison from a country we expect to do barbaric things, like maybe North Korea.
In fact, this is happening in a prison owned by none other than the United States of America.
Almost everyone has heard of Guantanamo Bay, and most of us have already formed some kind
of opinion about it.
Maybe you believe it’s a hypocritical human rights abuse or perhaps you think it’s a
necessary evil to keep the rest of the world safe.
Yet true, reliable information about the prison colloquially known as Gitmo is few and far
between.
Journalists and photographers face serious restrictions over the photos they can take
and release out of fear the images could violate secrecy or privacy – hmm, slightly convenient.
And the only way you can go and see for yourself is by obtaining permission from the military
base commander.
Most of the people who make the complicated trip are base workers or families of those
stationed there – journalists are rarely allowed inside.
When you think of Cuba, you might think of salsa dancing, idyllic beaches, or Havana-oonana
(in tone of Camilla Cabello song).
You might be wondering how they ended up with some of the world’s most dangerous detainees
and one of its toughest prisons.
Guantanamo Bay has actually been a US military base since 1898.
It was the year of the Spanish-American War, and a US fleet was heading elsewhere to attack
when it ended up stopping in Guantanamo for protection against the wind.
Well, they must have ended up growing fond of the place, because they persuaded Cuba
to rent it to them and then basically just never left.
Kind of like that guy sleeping on my couch … except he isn’t even paying me rent,
the cheeky...
But anyway.
Guantanamo Bay’s prison part of the base was opened in January 2002 by President Bush.
Most of the prisoners detained there were unlawful combatants from the Afghanistan War
or involved in a certain incident from 2001 involving two towers.
But enough of the history lesson, it’s time for breakfast.
You must be hungry after a sleepless night!
Oh no, wait.
You can’t actually eat – you’re on hunger strike.
It’s tough going since you can’t even fill yourself up with water – the liquid
that comes out the tap is a suspicious yellow color.
But it’s part of a protest against the poor conditions in the prison and the fact they’ve
still not even given you a trial, ten years in.
If you did want to eat, the breakfast menu would be bread, cream cheese, an orange, a
pastry, and a roll.
But for you, it’s a choice between liquid nutritional supplements and force-feeding.
Prisoners who refuse to eat food are first offered drinks filled with their essential
nutrients and often shut in their rooms with the stuff until they feel pressured into drinking
it.
If you refuse this too, military medical teams who flew out especially for the job will strap
you into a restraint chair and shove tubes up your nose and down your stomach.
It’s a painful process that causes a gagging sensation as the liquid travels up your nose.
There have been various hunger strikes throughout the history of Guantanamo Bay, but the largest
and best-known took place in 2013, with more than half the prison population taking part
at its height.
Exactly what happened after this is unknown as the government stopped releasing official
fingers.
A hunger strike might not sound like the worst of crimes, but it’s a strong form of rebellion
that complicates everything.
The people running the place must have been seriously stressed out.
So they did all they could to discourage prisoners from not eating.
Many detainees had their most basic necessities taken away as a punishment for resisting food,
including blankets, shoes, and even medical equipment.
Some were left sleeping on cold, hard concrete.
Sometimes food would be left in an inmate’s cell all day to force them to smell it knowing
they hadn’t eaten in months.
We don’t know much about what’s happening in Guantanamo now, or if there are still any
hunger strikes going on.
All we really know is that most prisoners are in buildings called Camps five and six.
There are communal spaces for well-behaved general population prisoners here, with perks
like the chance to watch a select few TV channels.
It doesn’t sound that terrible so far…but there’s also a top-secret Camp 7 for high-value
detainees, and no outsiders are allowed in.
Nothing dodgy going on there then.
Judging by the past, it might not be a pretty sight.
Guantanamo Bay used to contain somewhere called Camp X-Ray, where prisoners were kept in eight-foot-tall
cages fenced in by barbed wire.
Clearly, in many ways, Guantanamo Bay remains shrouded in mystery.
Well, breakfast time is over.
What next?
If it’s a quiet day, breakfast is followed by the chance to have a shower.
Just don’t drop the soap! (forced laughter) Oh, never mind…
There’s then some time for personal activities like praying, thinking, and trying to get
some sleep, before a quick visit from the doctor.
It might seem excessive to see a doctor every day, but I guess when you’re living in life-threatening
conditions it’s kind of understandable.
If you’re not on a hunger strike you can enjoy a delicious lunch dish, like cereal
accompanied with, erm, cereal bars.
Then more time to enjoy some more praying, thinking, and trying to get to sleep.
You might get the chance to exercise for a couple of hours or go outside.
Your evening meal consists of white rice, beans, a banana, and bread.
And then you’ve got a full night of – you guessed it – thinking, praying, and trying
to get asleep.
You might be thinking ‘oh hey, that doesn’t sound so bad,’ but remember you’ve had
no food and no sleep.
Plus, you could be subjected to arbitrary beatings at any point, making existing injuries
worse, and every time prisoners need to move, they’re clamped into irons on a trolley.
And if it’s not a quiet day?
Oh boy, you might want to stop and have a long, hard think about whether you really
want to know the answer to that question…
Just around the corner from prison life are the thousand-odd military personnel stationed
at the military base.
Life isn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows for them either, thanks to a daily routine
that might involve heavy abuse and having prisoners throw literal feces at them as they
walk by, then going to see a doctor to check they haven’t caught any diseases from those
human liquids before continuing with their day.
However, they do have more amenities available to them.
Officers get stationed at Guantanamo for nine months at a time, often without their families,
and have to try to go about their lives as normal.
Believe it or not, the base boasts a McDonalds, a Pizza Hut, a Subway, a TacoBell, and a Starbucks.
Jamaicans and Filipinos make up the bulk of service workers there.
As well as fast food outlets, there are bars and water sports to take advantage of the
beautiful surroundings.
Many officers go water skiing or sailing on their days off.
But no McDonalds or water ski-ing for you, inmate.
If it’s a bad day, you might just get wheeled off to an interrogation hut.
Enhanced interrogation is the name authorities gave to procedures designed to extract information
from the prisoners that totally weren’t anything like torture.
This not-torture regime often involved doctors monitoring the vital signs of prisoners to
make sure they weren’t accidentally killed.
I can tell you’re just dying to know exactly what happened to the inmates while they were
being tortured – sorry, I mean, interrogated through enhanced means – in vivid detail,
and I wouldn’t want to let you down.
The main techniques used were based on the idea that, if prisoners were made to feel
completely helpless, they’d stop resisting and give away secret information.
For instance, sensory deprivation was often used.
Because there was no concrete evidence of these techniques causing significant psychological
harm, lawyers concluded it was legal.
But it wasn’t just mental techniques that were used in the end.
There’s a Forcible Extraction Team that work at Guantanamo whose responsibilities
include beating detainees, often for no reason at all.
They’d slam inmates into walls, frequently leading to medical problems.
Prisoners also have to wear shackles every day, which causes swelling in the ankles.
Another common procedure was water dousing, which involved being placed on a plastic tarp
with your hands shackled above the head as buckets of ice-cold water are poured on top
and around you until you choke and feel a drowning sensation.
Sometimes, officers locked prisoners into tiny boxes or kept them shackled in painful
positions.
One prisoner was even hung from an iron shackle until all the blood rushed to his feet and
his hand was about to be cut off.
Humiliation would be used against the detainees too, with techniques like forced nudity, aggressive
naked searches, or being made to wear diapers.
One prisoner urinated on the floor during an interrogation and was dragged through his
urine like a human mop.
As a result of the techniques used, many prisoners who survived and got away from Gitmo ended
up with similar symptoms to prisoners of war captured by some of the most brutal regimes
in history, including illnesses like PTSD, paranoia, depression, and psychosis.
There are only forty prisoners in Guantanamo Bay now, and many people are campaigning for
the government to close it altogether due to a controversial history.
But it’s not quite that simple.
Obama tried to shut the prison down as soon as he was elected, but he faced one tiny problem
– there was nowhere for the detainees to go.
Congress made sure it was illegal for anyone held as a detainee in Guantanamo to be transferred
to the US, even for a trial, detention or medical care.
This is how many people end up as so-called forever prisoners, who never face a charge
or conviction.
If you’re lucky enough to be convicted of a war crime, you might finally be sent back
to your own country.
But many nations don’t want to take prisoners convicted of some of the worst crimes in the
world, so some prisoners end up being repatriated to another, similarly murky prison elsewhere
in the world.
On the bright side, Guantanamo Bay might not be as bad as its reputation these days.
Some recent visitors to the prison claim the American government has overcompensated for
past scandals by giving current inmates far better treatment than those detained in mainland
USA.
Yet there’s also some evidence that officers continue to use sleep deprivation techniques.
So, who knows?
The only way to find out for sure is to see for yourself – just don’t send me to find
out.
Sounds like a job for our local Infographics Challenge guy!
If your curiosity has been piqued by this topic, maybe you’d be interested in watching
our video about why nobody can escape from Guantanamo Bay, or the differences between
US and Swedish prisons.
We know you’re going to like them both but choose one and go watch it now!