A visit to the detention facility reveals a disquieting but almost tranquil scene, where tales of horror mix with glimpses of the mundane – and Barack Obama’s pledge faces doubts: ‘There’s not a hope in hell of closing it’

A man with grey beard, loose white T-shirt and sandals silently paces around the cellblock, appearing and disappearing from our view with the regularity of a comet. He is reading a book; his gait is slow; he seems oblivious to the visitors watching him like a zoo animal, through a one-way mirror and mesh fence.

“Welcome to Guantánamo Bay,” said a light aircraft pilot who delivered media, including the Guardian, to the US naval station on the south-east corner of Cuba last week. The two-day tour, rigorously controlled by the Pentagon, was intended to show that the 91 remaining detainees receive “safe, humane, legal and transparent” custody, and also assail the prison’s reputation as a scar on the world’s conscience, an American version of Robben Island.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detainees in the facility’s Camp 6. Photograph: Simon Leigh/The Guardian

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But it also came at a moment of reckoning. Barack Obama signed an order on his second full day as president declaring that the detention facility would be emptied within a year. It is a promise he failed to keep. Now in the eighth and final year of his presidency, Obama, long hampered by Congress, is apparently poised to release one more attempt at a plan which he hopes might finally shut the prison down. For a man who has an eye on his legacy and has invited presidential historians to dine at the White House, it is now or never, especially with Donald Trump and other Republican election contenders vowing to keep the facility open if they win the presidency.

Yet there are contradictory signals amid the mesh fences, razor wire and watch towers of Guantánamo itself, where the annual running cost is $400m. The number in detention is a fraction of the peak of 697 in May 2003, and less than half the total when Obama came to power. Officers speak of “winding down” and being ready for the final order. “I have a gut feeling we’ll close it,” one said. However, the 1,200-strong Guantánamo guard force has been not reduced, and about 400 contractors are at work patching up the buildings, which includes fixing ageing air conditioners, obsolete locks and leaking roofs. One journalist who has followed the saga closely commented: “There’s not a hope in hell of closing it. It will be politically impossible.”

Few spectacles in the 21st century war on terror could be stranger or more disquieting than the ghostlike figures that are displayed behind glass to visiting media. This week all were of South Asian appearance and wearing beards and baggy white or brown T-shirts and trousers. One rubbed his face with a paper towel, another paced to and fro, another laughed with a fellow inmate. Two ageing men came down a steel staircase. Another reached over to a TV set-top box – they are now provided with 300 channels, including live news – and spoke with a uniformed guard.

Here in Camp 6, each triangular cellblock has three steel tables, each with six steel stools, bolted to the bare concrete floor. There are 22 cells on two levels, painted yellow and typically containing a bed with foam mattress, clothing, mirror, toilet, table and Sensodyne toothpaste, Oral B toothbrush, Freshscent soap, Head & Shoulders shampoo, “maximum security” deodorant, toilet roll, bottle of water, earplugs, pad of lined A4 paper, headphones, prayer rug and the Qur’an.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A cell with prayer mat and a detainee’s personal belongings. Photograph: Simon Leigh/The Guardian

The scene was muted, almost tranquil, hardly in keeping with narratives about the world’s most dangerous Islamist extremists or past revelations of waterboarding and other forms of torture. The US says the detainees include terrorists, bomb makers and bodyguards of Osama bin Laden plucked from the battlefields of Afghanistan or Iraq but “all but two or three” are now highly compliant. Some, a number that officials will not disclose, still protest through “splashing” – throwing a mix of excrement, urine, vomit or blood at guards – or maintaining a hunger strike that necessitates force-feeding. A small percentage are punished for non-compliance by having to wear the notorious orange jumpsuits.

Detainees can pray for 20 minutes, five times a day – arrows on the floor point to Mecca – take classes such as art, computing and life skills and, 22 hours a day, access an outdoor recreation yard. There is a medical clinic with about 100 personnel and a library with more than 34,000 books, magazines, DVDs and video games in 15 different languages. Harry Potter, National Geographic and Fifa Soccer are hugely popular and Austen, Bronte, Conan Doyle, Dickens, Dumas, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged are all available. There are biographies and nonfiction, including Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope; on one copy, someone has scribbled ink over his face.

A trolley reveals what the inmates have been watching most recently: The Avengers, Hulk, The Lord of the Rings, Master and Commander, Night at the Museum, Pride and Prejudice, Tom & Jerry and Away from Her, in which Julie Christie plays a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. Every item is screened for extreme violence, nudity, terrorism or jihadism. The Avengers was cleared for viewing, despite the Hulk and Iron Man running riot in New York, whereas The Martian, starring Matt Damon, was refused due to nudity.

Many of the military serving here believe the world’s perception of Guantánamo is outdated and warped. Colonel David Heath, commander of the Guantánamo guard force, which contains many Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, told reporters he has a thank you letter from a detainee framed on his wall. “We treat detainees with dignity and respect, whether you believe that or not, even when they don’t deserve it, even when they’re throwing faeces or urine or spitting on guards or scratching guards,” he said. “There have been 300 and some assaults on the guards since I’ve been here and not a single time has any guard ever retaliated against a detainee, not verbally and not physically, and that’s what I’m proud of.”

Recently, one detainee decided he would rather stay at Guantánamo than walk free. Selected for transfer to an unknown country, the man, handcuffed and shackled, got to the bottom of the aircraft ramp only to change his mind at the last minute. Heath recalled that the man had “angst” about his destination “because he didn’t have any family there. So we had got him all the way to the airplane and ultimately he refused.

“He made it clear that, ‘I do not want to leave. I want to go back to my cell.’ So that’s what we did. He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t acting out, he was very calm. I have never had that happen before. All the others we’ve transferred have walked willingly on the plane, some smiling, some not, but I’ve never had anyone refuse to go.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A detainee is seen in Camp 6. Photograph: Simon Leigh/The Guardian

But like the quietly dignified inmate pacing his cellblock, passing in and out of view, there is the seen and then there is the unseen at Guantánamo. The detainees are in effect prisoners of war in a conflict that will apparently never end, suspended in a legal twilight zone that denies their right to trial. Visits by family members are still banned, although letters and monthly phone and Skype calls are permitted. Navy commander Walter Ruiz, a military lawyer, said: “We call it the show tour, what you’re going on. They show you all the nice stuff like the nice cells.”

The conditions are not consistent with international norms for prisoners of war, he added. “It’s the government calling them war criminals, and you’re supposed to hold them according to certain principles in the Geneva conventions including proper medical care, access to families, religious accommodations. Those are issues that we’ve been litigating for a long time … They’re falling short and they know it.”

The 15 “high value” detainees deemed to pose the biggest risk to the US, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged chief architect of 9/11, are held separately at Camp 7, the location of which is officially classified secret. Even the army and navy officers escorting reporters said they had not been briefed on Camp 7 and did not know its whereabouts.

Ruiz, assigned to the case of Mustafa al-Hawsawi of Saudi Arabia, won a court order allowing him 12 hours at Camp 7, although he is yet to visit. He has also asked for the entire US Senate torture report running to thousands of pages, not just the executive summary, to be made publicly available.

Ruiz said he does not have any evidence of torture still being inflicted but added: “What I do think is that the fruits of the torture are not being remedied. So for instance, the Senate torture report revealed that Mr al-Hawsawi had been penetrated rectally with large objects. He suffers from a collapsed rectum from several tears that were caused during those years of captivity.

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“Those very serious medical conditions have not been properly addressed medically, so, in some sense, the fruits of that torture have not been remedied, and to the extent they have not been remedied, you could say that’s an extension of the torture itself. If you consider everyday pains, my client Mr al-Hawsawi has to make a choice between eating and defecating because it’s so painful to go to the bathroom. Could you characterise that as ongoing torture? I think so.”

To many, the very name Guantánamo Bay still carries the stigma of the US at its imperial worst. Yet its curious history long predates Camp X-ray, the original detention facility used for a few months soon after 9/11, where the image of nearly two dozen kneeling and blindfolded men in orange jumpsuits, held in open-air eight-by-eight-foot cells made of chicken wire, became definitive.

US forces gained a foothold here in 1898, defeating Spain and helping Cuba achieve independence, and were given “complete jurisdiction and control” over 45 square miles of land and water in 1903. Washington pays a rent of $4,085 per annum, which President Fidel Castro refused to cash after 1960, describing the naval base as “a dagger plunged into the heart of Cuban soil”. In the 1990s, thousands of Haitian and Cuban refugees were held in camps ringed by barbed wire, a grim foreshadowing.

Even if there were no prison here, it would be a profoundly weird place. Like a military base in Afghanistan or Iraq, this is an ersatz, stage-set version of the US, with McDonald’s and Subway, yellow school buses and suburban-style houses. At 8am every day, the Star-Spangled Banner blares out from tinny loudspeakers and everyone stops and salutes with Stepford-like conformity.

There is also a medical facility (only one dentist), playgrounds, a post office, schools, supermarkets, a yacht marina, an airport souvenir shop and a radio station with an enviable collection of albums on vinyl. An open-air cinema showed all six Star Wars films before screening the latest, The Force Awakens, but filmgoers are pestered by mosquitoes. The Iggy Cafe has shirts purportedly signed by Pelé, Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan while O’Kelley’s sells Guinness, shepherd’s pie and T-shirts, declaring itself “the only Irish pub on communist soil”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Barack Obama’s face is scribbled out on a copy of his book The Audacity of Hope. Photograph: Simon Leigh/The Guardian

There is baseball (“Team Gtmo”), basketball, a bowling alley, scuba club and golf course with small greens and parched fairways because Guantánamo is energy self-sufficient: wind farm turbines spin serenely on the green hills. It is easy to forget the bay is a wonder of nature with iguanas, banana rats that can be the size of cats and a rocky coastline running beside the brilliant blue Caribbean sea.

A dwindling band of Cubans are left from those who opted to remain on the US side of the fence when diplomatic relations were severed in 1961. Many of the 2,980 civilians living and working in the bay are from elsewhere. “Without the Jamaicans and Filipinos, this base could not operate,” one soldier said.

Life will go on here if the prison that put Guantánamo on the map of infamy is finally shuttered. Obama succeeded in reducing the number of detainees to fewer than 100 last month when 10 Yemenis were transferred to Oman after a decade without charge. “I will keep working to shut down the prison at Guantánamo,” he pledged again in last month’s State of the Union address. “It is expensive, it is unnecessary, and it only serves as a recruitment brochure for our enemies. There’s a better way.”

The speech was watched by Guantánamo’s inmates, illustrating how much is riding on the coming political battle. Zach, who declined to give his surname, a Jordanian-born cultural adviser who has worked here for a decade, recalled: “They listened to the last State of the Union – they were able to hear it in Arabic, one of the TV stations did translate it as it was going on – and the next day they were asking the guard force, ‘OK, when are we leaving? What time?’ That’s the only thing that’s in their mind right now … They see the light at the end of the tunnel and they are working to earn their way out of here.”

But this is also the year of a presidential election, and Republicans Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have all thrown their weight behind Guantánamo. Critics object to the prospect of further mass releases, pointing out that 18% of freed detainees have subsequently returned to the battlefield. The rate was, however, far higher under George W Bush – of 532 released, 110 were confirmed to have re-engaged, according to the director of National intelligence. According to figures which go up to January 2015, of 115 freed under Obama, only six were confirmed to have engaged in some subsequent violent act..

Thirty-four detainees have been cleared for transfer pending security arrangements, while the White House has argued that maximum security prisons on US soil are capable of holding the remainder. Should his latest plan be blocked by Congress, as expected, Obama could put the legality of executive action on the issue to the test. But time is not on his side for a lengthy court battle and history may come to judge him unkindly.

Ruiz said: “It seemed like he lost steam there for a while. He lost the special envoy who was in charge of closing Guantánamo and didn’t replace him for a long time. It seemed like Guantánamo did take a back seat there for a while. Could he have taken on the fight more than he has? Yes, he could.”