Here, in a nutshell, is what I picked up: 1. Guantanamo is not a prison. The official term is "detention facility". Although the two most recently built complexes, Camps Five and Six, were modelled on prisons in Indiana and Michigan, it is not acceptable to use the word "prison" at Gitmo.

2. Guantanamo has no prisoners, only "enemies". As in "unlawful enemy combatants" or "detained enemy combatants". 3. Once an enemy combatant, always an enemy combatant. "Today, it is not about guilt or innocence. It's about unlawful enemy combatants," Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the commanding officer of Guantanamo, told us. "And they are all unlawful enemy combatants." This despite the fact that the Government also has a category for those deemed "no longer an enemy combatant", which was not mentioned. Nor was the possibility of mistaken detention. 4. No trustworthy lawyers come to Guantanamo. The handlers used the term "habeas lawyers" as a seemingly derogatory catch-all for those who are defending detainees.

It was clear that at Gitmo, detainees are believed to be using lawyers in accordance with directives in an al-Qaeda training manual that was discovered in Manchester in 2000: "Take advantage of visits with habeas lawyers to communicate and exchange information with those outside." 5. Reporters misrepresent Guantanamo. The media arrive with ostensibly open eyes,

yet graciously hosted from morning to night, they go home perversely refusing to be complimentary to their hosts. They suffer from "the chameleon effect", as I was told more than once, taking on the colours of betrayers, and "we just don't understand it". 6. The detainees still possess valuable information. Harris explained: "We have up-and-coming leadership in al-Qaeda and in the Taliban in Afghanistan, (and) we don't know what they look like … But their contemporaries … are quite often the same individuals that are in the camps here today … Sketch artists will work with these detainees … and those pictures will be sent out to the forward fighting area." But how reliable would anyone's memory be after five years of isolated detention? 7. Abandon individuality, on either side of the wire. The prisoners were referred to by number.

8. Hard facts are scarce. "You'll notice that we speak vaguely. We can't be specific. You will notice that we talk in approximate terms and estimates only. Those are operational security measures."

9. Guantanamo houses no contradictions. Islam is treated with respect. The prisoners' food is halal. Every prisoner, even the non-compliant, has a Koran if he wants it. But if you ask about other basic rights, such as the presumption of innocence, a sergeant without a name will chastise you about the dangers posed by enemy combatants. "We allow two hours of recreation a day in order to comply with the Geneva Convention," we were told. But an escort also pointed out that the authorities need prisoners "to go outside so that we can search their cells for weapons and contraband". Try to explore these differing motives and an officer will reprimand the guide for giving out "misinformation". 10. One final lesson: visitors who fail to reproduce the official narrative will be punished. "Tell it the wrong way and you won't be back," one of our escorts warned me over lunch.

Only time will tell if I got it right. Karen Greenberg is executive director of the Centre on Law and Security, New York University School of Law, and editor of The Torture Debate in America.