Inside Guantánamo Bay: Desperate prisoners ask ‘where is freedom?’

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Inside Guantánamo Bay: Desperate prisoners ask ‘where is freedom?’

A detainee at Guantanamo Bay detention gestures from his cell



Tim Reid in Guantánamo Bay

The man’s bearded face appeared at the narrow cell window, eyes dark and raging, his arms gesticulating wildly. From the confines of the 12ft by 8ft cell at Guantánamo Bay’s Camp V — the maximum security unit for the “least compliant” inmates — he made violent slashing motions across his wrists, pounded the side of his head, and jammed imaginary feeding tubes up his nose. “Alpha-3,” he kept mouthing as he tried to tell us that the inmate in Alpha-3 cell was suicidal and on hunger strike.

Then he began to place family pictures up against the glass, including two little boys staring at the camera clutching a fluffy toy deer. Soon another face appeared at another cell window — he covered his face with the Koran and disappeared from view — and another, screaming: “What is freedom? Ask them, what is freedom?”

These are strange, unnerving days inside this prison complex on the sweltering Cuban coast toured by The Times this week — a vast maze of chain-link fences topped by millions of feet of razor wire.

Spotlights blaze through the night while guards watch from towers emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes. Life inside the jail continues unchanged, because nobody here knows — from the guards to the 241 remaining inmates — just how President Obama is going to make good on his increasingly shaky promise to close this symbol of US brutality and extra-judicial excess by January.

The uncertainty has begun to take its toll. On Sunday one detainee, Adnan Latif, a Yemeni held without charge at Guantánamo since 2002, slashed his wrist and hurled a plastic cup full of blood at his lawyer. He had used a piece of veneer from the table to saw through a vein.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6289629.ece