Guantánamo Bay - seven shameful years

9 January 2009, 01:39PM

© US Department of Defence

Following the first transfers to the detention facility at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba on 11 January 2002, pictures of silenced, shackled men in cages filled television screens around the world.

Since then, nearly 800 detainees have been held at the camp, most subjected to conditions that violate the international prohibition against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, including solitary confinement. Some were tortured and otherwise ill-treated in secret detention before they arrived.

See a timeline of Guantánamo Bay-related events since 2001.

Detainees are typically confined for a minimum of 22 hours a day in tiny individual steel cells with no windows to the outside. See a panoramic online simulation of the cell inhabited by David Hicks for the more than five years he was held at Guantánamo Bay.

The results of their treatment are clear - at least four men are reported to have died in Guantánamo as a result of suicide, and dozens more suicide attempts have been reported. See the latest facts and figures on prisoners of Guantánamo and conditions in the prison.

Not a single detainee has yet received what any democratic country would consider a proper trial, and the vast majority have received no charge or trial at all.

Amnesty International was one of the first organisations to call for the closure of Guantánamo. Right now we are urging US President-elect Barack Obama to honour his stated commitment to undo some of the wrongs authorised by the US government in the name of national security, and close Guantánamo Bay.

Please join our call to President-elect Obama to announce a date for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay military prison now.

See our news story for more information and requirements for any workable plan to close Guantánamo.

A prisoner describes conditions

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and former UK resident now aged 30, was arrested at Karachi airport in Pakistan in April 2002 and handed over to US custody three months later. He was transferred first to Morocco and then to Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured. In September 2004 he was flown to Guantánamo where he is currently held in isolation in Guantánamo’s Camp 5.

Binyam Mohamed spoke to his lawyer and described his treatment and the conditions in the prison, and the results on his physical and psychological health.

"It was pitch black, no lights on in the rooms for most of the time. They hung me up for two days. My legs had swollen. My wrists and hands had gone numb. There was loud music, Slim Shady [by Eminem] and Dr. Dre for 20 days. Then they changed the sounds to horrible ghost laughter and Halloween sounds. At one point, I was chained to the rails for a fortnight. The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."

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