CUBA: Carol Williamsdescribes a day in the life of a detainee at Guantánamo's detention centre
UNDER GREY skies all but obscured by an opaque canopy and high concrete walls topped with razor wire, two bearded young men in tan tunics are having "rec time" inside separate chain-link pens.
One jogs obsessively back and forth in the 30-foot enclosure; the other is curled like a foetus at the base of a cement block.
It's a dreary winter afternoon, but the scene could be any time of the day or night. The hour for recreation time is one of the few unpredictable features in a day in the life of a detainee.
Visitors to the Guantánamo Bay detention centre are allowed few and brief glimpses of the detainees. But in reporting trips over the past three years, details emerge through tours of the camp, conversations with lawyers, chance encounters and the military commission proceedings that offer outsiders their only sanctioned opportunity to see the prisoners.
Reveille is at 5am, when guards collect the single sheet allotted to each detainee. That precaution has been in effect since June 2006, when three prisoners hanged themselves using sheets.
Breakfast, like all meals, comes from the Seaside Galley. The Styrofoam containers are ferried to each of the camps three times daily, delivered to each prisoner in his cell by an unseen guard through the "bean hole", a small, covered portal at waist level in the cell's steel door. It is also opened during the five-times-daily Muslim prayer call, the only times prisoners can catch a glimpse of one another.
Detainee Meal Preparation has become part of the tour offered to visitors. According to civilian contractor Sam Scott each prisoner gets more than 4,000 calories a day, with five meal choices to accommodate vegetarians, the overweight, the toothless and sensitive of stomach. Prisoners eat their meals in their cells. They seldom leave them.
Each is equipped with a bunk, sink and toilet. Only the most compliant prisoners may keep their toothbrush, toothpaste and soap with them.
Those being disciplined or segregated from others must ask for their hygiene items from guards. To guard against a toothbrush being shaved into a shank, detainees are issued stout plastic rings with bristles attached.
When they do leave their cells, prisoners are shackled and escorted - to and from showers, recreation pens, interrogation interviews and a meeting or two each year with their lawyers.
They leave their cells in the "hard facilities" of Camps 5, 6 and the newly created 7 for no other reason, unless they need medical or dental treatment.
Once a man has refused nine consecutive meals, he is considered a hunger striker and brought to the medical centre. His head, arms and legs are strapped to a "restraint chair" while a tube is threaded through his nose and throat into the stomach. A doctor-recommended quantity of Ensure (a nutrition drink) is administered.
To limit the number of men outside their cells at any one time, recreation hours are staggered around the clock, leaving many to choose between sleeping at 3am or getting a work-out. No more than two are within speaking distance of each other during rec time and even then separated by a guard.The men do communicate, though. The guards call it DNN - the Detainee News Network. Accounts of world events are learned from visiting lawyers and somehow passed on through steel doors.
Several prisoners have been caught pencilling messages in the books they borrow each week from the visiting library cart, one of the few distractions they are allowed. More than 2,000 books and magazines in 18 languages are stocked, each vetted for its potential to incite. The Harry Potter series had been the most popular selection before a recent influx of nature and music books.
At the new Camp 7 facility for high-value detainees that military jailers have dubbed "the platinum camp," the book most in demand now is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, a nearly 20-year-old treatise by Steven R Covey.
The librarian, who didn't want to be identified, says books are inspected by intelligence agents after each return. Borrowers lose their reading privileges and are disciplined if found passing notes. Discipline or segregation status mean loss of CIs, or "comfort items". That includes toilet paper - each prisoner is given 15 sheets daily - change of clothing, a mattress, prayer beads, playing cards and a couple of hours' access to pen and paper.
Even bottled water is something that can be denied to those who break camp rules, as underscored during the recent war-crimes arraignment of Mohammed Jawad. The Afghan asked for water but was refused because he had balked at leaving his cell. Jawad had to be "ERF'ed" - code for being forcibly removed from a cell by the Emergency Reaction Force troops in riot gear.
Only at Camp 4, a barracks-like compound with fewer than 50 prisoners, do men take their meals together or congregate in groups. The communal-living camp designed for the most compliant prisoners once teemed with nearly 200 bearded young men kicking soccer balls or playing card games on their cots or at outdoor tables.
Older guards called it the "Hogan's Heroes Camp", after the 1960s TV show about US POWs in second World War Germany. But it was emptied after a May 2006 riot over searchers' mishandling of the Koran.
Now repopulated with about 40 men awaiting transfer home, Camp 4's dusty oval sports court is idle and the prisoners' outdoor activities consist mainly of doing their laundry. Hand-washed towels and white undergarments can be seen poking through the chain link of the surrounding fences as they dry in the warm Caribbean air wafting from an ocean that the prisoners never see - not even when they are transferred off the island, because they are blindfolded.
A schoolroom was added to the predominantly Afghan camp last year to teach the illiterate basic Pashtu and Urdu. Leather-and-steel shackles poke out from the floor beneath each desk where the prisoner's ankle is tethered during classes.
Two video screens were installed at Camp 4 last year with plans to show films to reward good behaviour. The opportunity to make phone calls to family abroad is being considered, says Lieut Col Ed Bush, a spokesman for the prison.
Only the occasional detainee being moved to the medical facility or the Camp 4 inmates hanging their laundry are visible to visitors. Every now and then a prisoner in the white garb that denotes the highly compliant waves or clowns for photographers, but any image showing his face will be deleted by censors.
The solitary life endured by the majority of detainees winds down each evening with the last bean-hole exchange and a final prayer call. A yellow traffic cone marked with a P for "prayer time" is positioned at the head of the cell block to remind guards to keep the noise down. The end of a day is signalled at 10pm by the arrival of the bed sheet.
But a detainee's day doesn't end with the usual prison ritual of "lights out". Lights are kept on in the cells 24 hours a day, seven days a week for what military jailers say are security reasons. Some prisoners grow their hair long and drape it across their eyes to aid sleeping, as Australian David Hicks, transferred home last year, told his lawyer in explaining his nearly waist-length tresses.
Sleep is probably fitful, with the guards' boots audible every few minutes as they look for "self-harm incidents" or signs of prisoners' "weaponising" their few belongings. Another day like the more than 2,000 most have spent here is heralded at 5am when a guard arrives to retrieve the bed sheet.