IT’S the shadowy location where torture and abuse were routine, an inhumane hellhole that became a terrorist breeding ground.

Now it could finally be consigned to history, with Barack Obama this week promising to close Guantanamo Bay during his final year as President.

The US is now poised to turn the page on one of the worst human rights abuses in history.

This is the dark legacy the infamous prison will leave behind.

ISLAMIC STATE BREEDING GROUND

While some may not care about the fate of alleged terrorists in a distant country, what unites the Western world is the fear of terrorism and the rise of the extraordinarily brutal Islamic State.

Guantanamo has been a breeding ground for extremists, providing dozens of mistreated inmates and alienated onlookers with a legitimate grievance against the US. Obama this week said it was “expensive, unnecessary and only serves as a recruitment program for our enemies”.

Former detainee Mullah Abdul Rauf became the top recruiter for IS in Afghanistan after his 2007 release, before he was killed in a US drone strike last February. Of 620 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay, defence officials say 180 have returned or are suspected to have returned to the battlefield.

Twenty to 30 reportedly joined IS or other militant groups in Syria, or began helping those groups from outside the country. Others assisted with propaganda and financial operations.

A top US defence official called it “no coincidence” that IS execution videos of Jordanian and Japanese hostages showed victims in orange jumpsuits, a “symbol of the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay”. Brian McKeon said national security was convinced the continued operation of the naval base was “used by violent extremists to incite local populations”.

Hugh de Kretser, executive director at the Human Rights Law Centre, told news.com.au: “The whole episode has been a human rights and foreign policy disaster for the US and its allies. It has gifted terrorist groups a recruitment and propaganda tool. The closure can’t come soon enough.

“Australia’s role in the saga has been deeply regrettable, including by failing to secure the earlier release of David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, by failing to do more to prevent their mistreatment and by arguing that sleep deprivation isn’t torture.”

‘LOSE YOUR SIGHT OR LOSE YOUR MIND’

It’s barely surprising Guantanamo has had this effect. Accusations of torture, humiliation and abuse have flooded in over the years.

British inmates Asef Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed, Jamal Al-Harith and Shafiq Rasul claimed in 2004 that they were beaten, threatened with guns and watched beatings of mentally ill inmates. They said one man was left brain damaged after a beating as punishment for attempting suicide and another inmate told them he was shown a video of hooded men, apparently inmates, being forced to sodomise each other.

They said guards threw prisoners’ Korans into toilets and tried to force them to give up their religion, and that camp commander Major General Geoffrey Miller brought in practices including shaving inmates’ beards, shackling detainees in squatting positions and locking them naked in cells.

The methods didn’t work, leaving victims angry and uncooperative, or willing to admit to anything, as in the case of Rasul, who falsely identified himself as a jihadist in video with Osama bin Laden after long periods of extreme isolation in darkened rooms.

Prisoners reported being forced to listen to aggressive music played at ear-splitting volume for hours. British inmate Binyam Mohamed told The Guardian so-called “psyops methods” were worse than physical pain. “Imagine you are given a choice,” he said. “Lose your sight or lose your mind.”

In Guantanamo Diary, a memoir released last January but littered with black “redactions” ordered by US intelligence, Mauritanian inmate Mohamedou Ould Slahi described “months of strictest isolation, weeks of sleep deprivation, extremes of temperature and sound, and other elaborate tortures set out in a ‘special plan’ approved personally by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.”

The University of Wisconsin’s Professor McCoy, author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, told Lateline in 2006: “Guantanamo is not a conventional military prison ... It’s a system of total psychological torture, designed to break down every detainee contained therein, designed to produce a state of hopelessness and despair.

“The standard techniques used on countless detainees — blasted with sound, blasted with light, confined in the dark, short shackled, long shackled.”

Professor McCoy said FBI officers had reported that people were shackled on the floor for days, until they began huddling, quivering and showing signs of psychological breakdown, “One detainee so desperate that overnight he pulled his hair out, hair by hair. Others covered in faeces, their own waste.”

HUNGER AND HIV

The entire existence of Guantanamo violates human rights laws. Since it was established as a military prison in 2003, only two of its 780 prisoners have been convicted of a crime, and 149 have never been charged. Nine have died in custody, all under undeclared circumstances, and 15 children under 18 have been detained.

Inmates are imprisoned indefinitely, often on flimsy evidence. Many are left in the facility for years after they are cleared for release.

The site is shrouded in secrecy, with human rights groups banned from meeting detainees in private, journalists kept at arm’s length and even delegates from countries considering taking ex-inmates finding it hard to gain access.

Tariq Ba Odah was imprisoned in February of 2002 and has spent nearly nine years on hunger strike and in solitary confinement. His lawyer, Omar Farah of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Democracy Now! news hour this week that his client was in “an utterly disastrous physical condition. According to the government, not me, (he) is just 74-and-a-half pounds [34 kilograms], and that’s 56 per cent of his safe body weight.”

Like other hunger strikers at Guantanamo, Ba Odah is force-fed twice daily through a nose tube, a practice that has been called torture by the UN Human Rights Commission.

Ba Odah is from Yemen, but the Obama administration will not release Yemenis directly to their home nation because of civil war there.

Guantanamo’s ghastly history stretches back to before the current prison existed. Until 1993, the facility housed Guantanamo HIV Camp, where hundreds of Haitians were imprisoned simply for having the disease. They reported hunger, humiliation and being manipulated into injections of a birth control drug that has potentially serious side-effects, The Nation reported. At least four attempted suicide. They were detained in squalid cramped conditions, despite their immune system deficiencies, and when they protested, they were met with attack dogs, batons and tanks.

‘AN AFFRONT TO MORALITY AND THE RULE OF LAW’

Today, closure may finally be on the horizon, although commentators are cautious of celebrating too soon.

Four detainees have been transferred so far this year, with ten due to be sent to the Middle East this week, leaving 103 still trapped in the nightmare.

Pentagon officials say 44 more inmates had been approved for transfer, and the US is trying to find countries to take them. The remaining inmates are expected to stay in indefinite detention.

For those who do get out, the horror isn’t always over. Many are left with horrific memories and psychological problems including post traumatic stress disorder.

De Kretser told news.com.au: “These are positive moves but they are long overdue, coming 14 years after the first men were sent there and seven years after President Obama promised to close it. The torture, horrific conditions, indefinite detention and the attempts to subvert legal and other scrutiny have been an absolute affront to morality and the rule of law.”

Naureen Shah, director of Amnesty International USA’s Security and Human Rights Program, said: “President Obama has just one year left in office to make good on his commitment to close Guantanamo. Guantanamo has become an international symbol of torture, rendition and indefinite detention without charge or trial. His human rights legacy, and that of the nation, are on the line.

“President Obama’s proposal to relocate some detainees for indefinite detention in the US would merely change Guantánamo’s zip code. It would also set a dangerous precedent that could be exploited by future administrations. President Obama must end, not relocate, indefinite detention without charge.”

Shaker Aamer, Guantanamo’s last British inmate, was released in October after 14 years in detention and this week protested for its closure outside the US embassy. He told RT that after three inmates took their lives in 2005, prison authorities removed all basic necessities, claiming even a blanket could be used for suicide.

He described inmates as “hostages” and rejected the term “enhanced interrogation techniques”, used by the US politicians to describe what happened to them. “Keeping a man for nine days not going to sleep or even lay down on the floor, the freezing cold floor … hogtied [tying the person’s limbs together, rendering him immobile] … rectal-feeding people, which truly is not feeding because we know why they are doing it.

“If that all is not torture — what’s torture?”

— With wires

emma.reynolds@news.com.au / @emmareyn