Every day in Guantanamo is Groundhog Day... whether you're a guard or a prisoner: A gripping dispatch from inside the notorious terrorist detention camp

President Barack Obama repeated his pledge to close Guantanamo in May

Originally promised to close it in 2009 but barely mentioned it for years

In January 2013 he shut the department set up to close the site

The move resulted in a prisoner hunger strike



David Rose revisits Guantanamo ten years after his first visit



Thursday evening at Guantanamo: Mongolian stir-fry night at the Bayview bar and restaurant, just as it is every week. In the queue for food, I chat with an off-duty member of the prison camps’ military Joint Task Force, or JTF.



He’s wearing a T-shirt with an image of the actor Bill Murray. He points to it, recalling one of Murray’s best-known films: ‘You know that movie, Groundhog Day? That’s how it is in Gitmo. It doesn’t much matter if you’re a guard or a detainee. Every day’s the same as the last, and there’s no escape.’



Ten years after my first visit, I was granted five days’ access, a media privilege which has become increasingly rare. From the moment I arrived, it seemed clear that, just as in 2003, Gitmo remains in a state of conflict – a conflict made all the more depressing by its length.

Kept in chains: A guard wearing rubber gloves escorts a shackled prisoner at Guantanamo Bay

In May, four-and-a-half years after President Obama promised to close Guantanamo within 12 months, he repeated his pledge. But so far, progress has been as sluggish as the iguanas who lurk beside the razor wire in the broiling Cuban sun.



For years, Obama barely mentioned Guantanamo at all, and in January 2013, he shut not the camps but the special department he set up in 2009 in order to accomplish the task. The response was a prisoner hunger strike, and in April – after detainees disabled most of the cameras that were supposed to be watching them and collected makeshift weapons – the storming by guards of one of the two main prison complexes.

In this incident, The Mail on Sunday has learned, JTF troops fired shotguns loaded with what one officer termed ‘rubber buckshot’.



In its wake, many detainees were placed in ‘single cell occupancy’, which means 23 hours a day lockdown – virtual solitary confinement. Meanwhile, the hunger strike continued to spread, accompanied by a sharp increase in both assaults on guards and ‘forcible cell extractions’ – the removal of prisoners from their cells by seven-person teams for refusing to co-operate. It’s a process which detainee lawyers say often leads to injury.

Closed: Detainees at the abandoned Camp Delta in 2004

Capt Loneshia Reid described the most common assault method – ‘splashings’. These are spray attacks with a cocktail of milk, urine and faeces, hurled from cups through cell food hatches or squirted from plastic water bottles.



Specialist Andrew Stark, a Gitmo guard since January, said: ‘I got splashed one day when I was in the recreation yard. It hit me on my chest and my arm.



‘It wasn’t so bad: I’ve seen women splashed in the face. All you can do is clean yourself up, get tested for disease, and go back to work. The stress comes and goes. When I feel I’m close to my limit, I cope by going outside and smoking a cigarette.’



'My hope is Obama will now manage to close it. My fear is that he’ll leave office with eight years of Gitmo egg on his face' - A senior Washington DC official

With the onset of Ramadan, the holy month when Muslims fast in daylight hours, fewer than 70 prisoners are now officially on hunger strike, down from 106.



The number being force-fed liquid nourishment while strapped in ‘restraint chairs’ is also down by two from a peak of 46.



This process has been condemned by the American Medical Association. For years, the JTF insisted on calling it ‘enteral’, rather than ‘forced’ feeding, and rejected claims it is painful and causes nausea and bleeding. In the camp hospital, medical staff said detainees are offered a choice between a numbing agent or a ‘culturally appropriate lubricant’ – household olive oil – when the feeding tubes are inserted through their nostrils, and that most, once restrained, submit to it voluntarily.



Asking not to be named, several Gitmo officers told me they felt deeply offended when Obama used the term ‘forced feeding’ in his speech in May.



By repeating his closure promise, he eased the tension slightly – according to JTF spokesman Capt Robert Durand, some of the hunger strikers believe they have ‘achieved their strategic objective’. But since Obama’s speech, the administration has announced it is to release just two of the 166 prisoners still at Gitmo, though 86 were ‘cleared’ for transfer back in 2009 – including the London father of four Shaker Aamer, the last Briton in Guantanamo.



In May, four-and-a-half years after President Obama promised to close Guantanamo within 12 months, he repeated his pledge

It won’t take much for Gitmo’s conflicts to intensify once again.



William Lietzau, the Pentagon official in charge of Gitmo and all other US military detention sites, told me that the rate of post-traumatic stress among Gitmo guards is double the level in combat troops, between 20 and 30 per cent. Gitmo’s head chaplain, Cdr Terry Eddinger, explained: ‘I was in Iraq in 2005, and we came under frequent attack from rockets. That’s more intense, but you take a moment to catch your breath, then it’s over. Here, it’s 12 hours, every day, under constant pressure.’



The rules for media visits state that although one can observe the detainees, anonymous bearded men who now usually wear not orange but white, one can’t, on pain of immediate banishment, communicate with them. How do these men feel, 11-and-a-half years after their arrival? One is not allowed to ask.



There have been physical improvements. Camp X-Ray, the open cages where the first prisoners were held, was long ago abandoned to the cacti and ‘banana rats’. Its replacement, Camp Delta, a sprawling complex of prefab cell blocks and interrogation rooms, had more than 750 inmates a decade ago, but it is also empty, its fences turning to rust.



In 2003, most prisoners were allowed out of their airless Camp Delta cells for just a couple of hours a week. They were totally isolated, with no phone calls to relatives, access to lawyers, newspapers or television – privileges only granted after the US Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that Gitmo is not a ‘legal black hole’, and that US laws and the Constitution must apply.



Now housed in air-conditioned wings in Camps 5 and 6, detainees have slightly bigger cells of about 100 sq ft, though they still contain only a metal toilet and sink, a shelf, chair and a concrete bed with a thin foam mattress. If they are considered ‘compliant’, and so not in ‘single cell occupancy’, they may socialise, play football or pray together for 18 hours a day. They can choose from 25 TV channels, or borrow PlayStations and games from the Gitmo library.



However, their lives are palpably stagnating. Only 12 prisoners have ever been charged with crimes or tried by Gitmo’s special military commissions. Last year, just six prisoners left Guantanamo: five were released, while the Yemeni Adnan Latif, who like Aamer had been cleared for transfer years earlier, took his own life.



A guard wears a protective face shield. The shields are used to protect the guards from human waste which is thrown at them by the detainees

A U.S. Army soldier stands guard over Camp Delta in January 2006

While their lives pass them by, those who remain are ageing. The chief medical officer said his staff don’t only have to manage forced feeding. They also treat an increasing number of conditions associated with advancing years: diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and dementia.



Starved of funds because of the uncertainty over its future, Gitmo is also falling apart. The 300 extra personnel brought in this year to deal with the hunger strikes live in communal tents, with no privacy.



The huge field kitchen for both JTF and prisoners was opened in 2002, designed to last three years. It now has large holes in the walls, so it leaks whenever it rains. Its manager, Sam Scott, showed me a cabinet containing high-voltage wiring – caked in brown corrosion. As for the internet, it’s erratic and there’s not enough bandwith to make calls using Skype. That might not sound like a big deal, until one remembers that more than half the JTF are not full-time soldiers: their deployment to Gitmo has wrenched them from their civilian jobs and families.



Detainees sit in a holding area at Camp X-Ray at US Naval Base Guantanamo Bay in January 2002

Most are bright, ambitious people from humble backgrounds, who signed contracts whereby the government paid their college fees. In return, they can’t say no when ordered to spend a year at Gitmo – during which they can expect just one four-day home leave.



Aside from the stress of the job, there are high emotional costs. Many have children back home. One young woman told me that her husband – himself a reservist who had served in Iraq, and returned so stressed he turned to drink and drugs – had ‘taken it [her going to Gitmo] really badly’. One reason was that in his own unit, 40 per cent of his comrades had been divorced during or after their deployment.



Yet in 2009, when he first made his promise, Obama could have seen it through. He was enjoying his political honeymoon, and had a majority in both houses of Congress. Preoccupied with healthcare and the economic crash, he did almost nothing.



Now the obstacles are much higher. For example, nearly 100 detainees are from Yemen, but at the start of 2010, Obama announced a ban on sending any Gitmo prisoner back there. In May, the President announced he was lifting the Yemen ban. But now the Republican-controlled House of Representatives is seeking to enshrine it in legislation – a move affirmed by a huge majority last month.



Obama also faces fierce opposition to his plans to relax another prohibition imposed by Congress, against any detainee being tried in or allowed to travel to America.



That means that even if the other detainees were released, those facing prosecution could not be housed in American prisons and tried in US courts, but would have to stay at Guantanamo. If prisoners and guards can both be seen as victims of bad decisions taken years ago, there is a third category: the families of those killed by terrorism.



FROM TWILIGHT TO GITMO - KRISTEN'S SHOCKING NEW ROLE

She is known to a generation of teenagers for her starring role as Bella Swan in the five hit Twilight films.

Now Kristen Stewart (right) is taking on a very different role as a young Guantanamo Bay prison guard who begins a relationship with one of the camp’s Muslim detainees.

The film, called Camp X-Ray, is set to be the most potentially provocative and divisive Hollywood production in decades.

It will show the abuse faced by female guards at Guantanamo, which is the first assignment for Stewart’s character, Cole, after joining the military to escape her small town.

In 2009, Obama said that Bush’s military commissions system would be scrapped. Many months later, he changed his mind, and the reconstituted commissions are now bogged down in a morass of procedural, pre-trial hearings which are set to last years.



Cdr Walter Ruiz, a military lawyer defending one of five men accused of plotting 9/11, was at Gitmo to visit his client. He said: ‘I’ve met a lot of 9/11 victim family members who feel badly let down. Because America’s leadership hasn’t had the courage to do the right thing – to hear these cases in ordinary courts – people who suffered great loss are no nearer a sense of closure.’



Faced with frustrations, some lash out. In Washington, two officials separately made the preposterous claim that Aamer’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith of the British human rights charity Reprieve, planned the hunger strike with his client, adapting lessons he had learned from representing the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands – who starved himself to death in 1981, years before Stafford Smith became a lawyer.



On my first morning at Gitmo, General John Kelly made a speech to 500 troops. Complaining about the lawyers and journalists who reported alleged human rights abuses, he described them as ‘bull****’, lies spread by an ‘agenda-driven chattering class’.



Yet in an interview afterwards, Kelly admitted: ‘If I told the detainees, look, you’ll be out of here soon, they probably would behave themselves for a year or two, and that would make the lives of the guards much easier. But I don’t want to give them false hopes.’



‘My hope is Obama will now manage to close it,’ a senior Washington DC official said. ‘My fear is that he’ll leave office with eight years of Gitmo egg on his face.’

