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WASHINGTON - When the first prisoners arrived at Guantanamo in January 2002 they were handcuffed, shackled and wearing hoods.
The reason for these exceptional measures, explained General Richard Myers, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that the prisoners were highly dangerous.
"These are the sort of people who would chew through a hydraulics cable to bring a C-17 [transport plane] down," he said. "They are very, very dangerous people."
Five years later none of these "worst of the worst" has been brought to trial. Just 10 have been formally charged while hundreds of others have been returned to their own countries and released. Meanwhile, three have committed suicide, at least 40 others have tried and there are concerns about the mental health of most of the 400 or so remaining prisoners.
"It is remarkable that Guantanamo still exists five years on," said Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of the British group Reprieve, which represents three dozen inmates. "But what is also remarkable is that Guantanamo has distracted attention from other secret prisons the United States has. As of August last year, we know there are 14,000 prisoners in US custody around the world."
Critics say the low point of the past five years perhaps came in June last year when three prisoners - Ali Abdullah Ahmed, 28, from Yemen, and Saudis Yassar Talal al-Zahrani, 21, and Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi, 30 - hanged themselves using torn sheets. Lawyers said they did so out of desperation but the base commander said it was "an act of asymmetric warfare waged against us".
Controversy had previously been stirred in December 2005 when it emerged the US military was strapping prisoners into "restraint chairs" to force-feed those who had gone on hunger-strike.
General Bantz Craddock, head of the US Southern Command, defended repeatedly inserting feeding tubes into prisoners' throats and nostrils, saying: "Some of these hard-core guys were getting worse."
There have been numerous reports of abuse, humiliation and torture. Prisoners have allegedly been held in stress positions, locked in solitary confinement, deprived of sleep and been smeared with fake menstrual blood.
Three Britons who were held for more than two years before being released without charge - Asef Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul - claimed they were repeatedly punched, kicked, slapped, injected with drugs, hooded, photographed naked, subjected to body searches and forced to endure sexual and religious humiliation. Ahmed said he was questioned by a British interrogator while a gun was held to his head.
One of the more unusual reports was the so-called Harry Potter torture. Visiting US legislators watched through a one-way mirror as a woman interrogator sought to wear down a prisoner's resistance with a reading of the adventures of the boy wizard, which reportedly lasted for hours.
Campaigners believed they had achieved a breakthrough last June when the US Supreme Court ruled that the Bush Administration's use of military tribunals was unconstitutional. It also ruled that the prisoners had the right to have their cases heard in court. But though Bush said at the time he wished to close Guantanamo, just three months later he was successful in getting Congress to pass new legislation that circumvented the Supreme Court ruling and opened the way to proceed with the tribunals. It also backed the Administration's decision to refuse prisoners the right to see the evidence used against them.
Britain's Government, meanwhile, refuses to help eight British residents still at the prison even though the US has sought their repatriation.
The High Court ruled that the men did not have the right to be treated in the same way as British nationals. The Foreign Office says it has no power to intervene on behalf of foreign nationals, even if they were long-term residents of the UK.
- INDEPENDENT
