Six months ago this week President Obama, on his second day in office, promised to close the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, and to undo the secretive and coercive detention and interrogation policies of George W. Bush. But has Obama been as good as his word?

I went to Guantánamo last month to see for myself what difference, if any, Obama’s election had made. My trip was surreal from start to end. I was in line for the rotating junket to the island, and had been given a date by a nervous-sounding and very young Lieutenant Cody Starken. I signed papers that committed me to not reporting classified information – on pain of prosecution. Then I got on a tiny aircraft – unmarked on any announcement board – out of Fort Lauderdale airport.

On the aircraft were bland-looking contractors, male and female, who deflected my small talk, and two young staffers from the Centre for Constitutional Rights, the organisation representing the detainees when no one else would touch the work, and which now co-ordinates hundreds of lawyers from across the country doing so: Pardis Kebriaei, a staff lawyer, and Jess Baen, a legal worker, tried to answer all my questions until my military handler determinedly parted us on our arrival. Lawyers are kept in a compound on one side of the military base at Guantánamo, journalists housed on the other side; they may never communicate with or run into one another. As a journalist, a handler sticks within 18in of you at all times, standing outside when you go to the bathroom and near by when you buy personal items at the commissary; your phone calls and e-mail are monitored.

Passport check was followed by our descent over the glittering curve of the sea on to the edge of Cuba, which was studded with lights. A tired, courtly Navy media specialist, MC1 Mapp, whisked me through security checks; I took in the heat, humidity, mosquitoes and languid crowds of Filipino and Jamaican contractors. We stepped into a ferry; then a young, chipper Sergeant Hillegass – in his other life, a 911 dispatcher – met us in a van and drove us to a street of identical townhouses. I was left alone in the house.

My mobile phone could not call out directly, my BlackBerry did not work, there was no internet access for my computer. My press kit had a scene of a lush sunset on the cover, and a speedboat.

Breakfast – with a TV crew from Poland and another from Russia, and our military handlers – was at a lively mess hall that looked like something out of summer camp, except that all the tired, strapping young people were in pressed fatigues. Then two African American soldiers, Petty Officer Bennet, a genial woman in her thirties who wanted to be a graphic designer, and a charming man a bit older, Petty Officer Dwight, took us to our first stop, Camp X-Ray.

As the military handlers made pleasant jokes about the heat, I took in a low-tech vision of Hell. This was the site of the first scenes from Guantánamo, where men sweltered in kennel-like cages. These were the cages themselves: about 50, each about 8ftx12ft, an aisle down the centre for guards to move in, a slab of corrugated iron on top of each cell, and a pipe with a funnel at groin level, in which to urinate; open to the elements; no walls, no true shade. Concrete floors. There had been buckets for defaecation, MC1 Dwight told us; but the prisoners had thrown the faeces at the guards. There was a communal shower, now crumbling – but the prisoners had not liked to shower in groups, naked.

The scene was being reclaimed by nature: vines and brambles were swallowing the wire, twisting around the doors. At 10am the humidity was so intense that sweat was pouring down our faces. The temperature was close to 40C. I went into a cell; grinding heat, drenching humidity, pure exposure to the sun. It was as if you were being cooked in a man-sized convection oven. “Look out!” shouted Petty Officer Dwight. “Banana rats!”

I looked up and shrieked, staggering to my feet: climbing across the wire walls and on to the roof of the cell was a 40lb rodent, with a long wiry tail, the size of a bulldog. Another one scurried along the base of the wall, a baby on its back; a third made itself at home in the undergrowth of the neighbouring cell – big, grotesque creatures with no fear. I imagined what it must have been like to try to sleep in that black heat, these animals slipping in and out of the cages with their great claws and teeth.

Behind the cages was the interrogation hut – a plywood shack painted with a red cross. A one-man cage stood near by. From Human Rights Watch reports and documents in Michael Ratner’s book Guantánamo: What the World Should Know, I knew that this was the notorious isolation cell. Prisoners in a detention camp are so cowed by the sight of the isolation cell and those held in it that they become compliant, since isolation is far more damaging psychologically to many prisoners than anything else.

“This is the isolation cell?” I asked Petty Officer Dwight. “Yes,” he said. Then he advised us that the detainees themselves had requested it. “They asked that other detainees who were disruptive and disturbing them be taken here for a ‘time out’. This was a ‘time-out’ area … if someone was to act up and they needed a ‘time-out’.”

It was the first of many times I would look at PO Dwight – a decent guy whose true passion was hairstyling – and wonder if he believed what he had been trained to say. But he gave this, and other “facts”, with a kind of innocence. He took us into the interrogation rooms. About 25 chairs were stacked in a corner – unusual chairs for a military setting. The seats were padded; the structure itself was made of a bamboo material; and, oddest of all, each of the arms of the chairs curled into an elaborate spiral. I leant in more closely: on each chair’s arms was a clear mark from what appeared to have been several layers of gaffer tape. I looked at the legs of the chairs, where a prisoner’s ankles would be: the same apparent gaffer-tape marks.

I went into the interrogation room. A table, two chairs. Gaffer tape remained in long strips on the plywood walls, not holding anything together, but positioned near by like an office supply; a pile of wadded-up grey gaffer tape remained on the floor.

PO Dwight reminded us of the scenes we had witnessed on TV of prisoners at Camp X-Ray being transported restrained, lying on stretchers – though no one had asked about it; the stretchers were, he said, for the wellbeing of the prisoners; to move them more easily. It was not, he was keen to assure us, that they had been sick, or hurt.

On to lunch at the mess hall. After lunch, we were taken on a bizarre tour of a baking facility, where an exuberant, smiling South Korean woman in a hairnet (“I love food service! I love my job!”) showed off trays of hot, fragrant buns and baklava. We heard for the third or fourth time from our military handlers that they, too, wished that they could have that delicious baklava, but that it was reserved for the prisoners’ discerning palates.

The food-service employee displayed a set table of detainees’ actual meals – meat, rice, sauce, salad, and those tasty buns and pastries. She pressed us to try them: the ground meat was spiced in a “culturally appropriate” Middle Eastern style and was not bad. Then she showed off a dozen fridges filled with fresh produce – strawberries, watermelon, maple syrup.

She politely refused to answer questions about what her role was, or who employed her. Private-sector contractors take care of the manual, building, cleaning and service work: to a casual observer, it is they, and not the military, who run Gauntánamo. Military men and women have, if minimally, to answer reporters’ questions; contractors do not even have to identify themselves. Contractors work in medical facilities; clear journalists’ video; deal with classified material; but they are answerable only to their employers. Their houses are far more luxurious, on the island, than are those of the military.

Military spokespeople must give answers, but the answers are maddeningly evasive. Can detainees get mail from their loved ones? I asked often. What if someone dies of natural causes, who notifies the family? If a loved one calls, can prisoners take the call? What happens to care packages from loved ones? What if a spouse asks to visit? Can I see the letter that tells her that she can’t? I put these questions “in writing” and asked them at least five times up the chain of command, and followed up multiple times on my return. Most of my questions were met – from higher-level “media specialists” such as Lieutenant-Commander Brook DeWalt or Major Haynie – with non-answers. “I don’t know, but I can ask for you.” “That is above my pay grade.”

The detainee handlers and the lawyers for detainees often flatly contradict each other. The handlers and my press kit claim that “Detainees get a call every couple of months” or quarterly, and that “they make phone calls on a regular basis – every few weeks”. But Kebriaei says that her clients can make calls “every six months if they are lucky”. “Detainees get mail all the time,” the handlers claim. “Care packages are destroyed,” says Kebriaei, who described the security-driven destruction of the orthopaedic shoes that her elderly client needed for his swollen feet.

And so, on we went in the afternoon, to Camps 5 and 6 – hulking state-of-the-art maximum-security prison edifices. But with a difference, as a smiling nameless blonde soldier said to us (name tags are stripped from uniforms when soldiers are inside the detention centres – the process is called “sterilising” – and the prisoners themselves are addressed by number, never by name). These soldiers looked as if they had been chosen from the coolest fraternity and sorority on campus. They were unusually physically attractive. Our guide, Lieutenant Fulghum, was a bright, charming Irishman with a twinkle in his eye and killer abs. When he greeted the twentysomething blonde soldier with the phrase, “Honour bound, Ma’am”, it was as good as a wink. (“Honor Bound to Defend Freedom” is the motto). “Honour bound, Lieutenant,” she smiled back.

As we moved down the corridor the weird intimacy of the place – which had, according to many detainees and reports such as Broken Laws, Broken Lives, a study by Physicians for Human Rights, been the scene of so much abuse – hit me.

There in front of me was a shower stall fully fronted with glass, facing into a public central hallway where military men and women passed regularly. It forced male prisoners daily into a state of public nudity, which is illegal according to US and international law.

The guards showed us a demonstration cell: it was spotless. Hooks folded down so that no one could hang himself; there was a toilet in a corner, a plastic wedge of a bed, and high-tech mechanical doors that shut of their own accord. No sun, no sightlines, no natural light. I noted the guards’ use of facemasks. “Facemasks are to help protect soldiers,” our tour guide said. “We do have assaults – spitting, throwing faeces and urine.”

Another diorama was set up in another cell, of “comfort items”. It looked unchanged from photos of Guantánamo that I had seen in the Bush era. Here was a Koran; toiletries; a padded mattress the thickness of a yoga mat, for those who “co-operated”; a thinner mattress, fewer “comforts”, for those who did not.

Opposite this room was yet another cell, which the military handlers were most proud of. “The TV room is a big change,” one of the handlers said. There was a big blue squishy sofa facing a nice big flat-screen TV. We were told that the detainees get to watch TV three hours a day; that their favourite TV show is The Deadliest Catch, about fishing; and that they also love Harry Potter. There was a tray table where prisoners could eat baklava while watching Harry Potter – and there, at the base of the sofa, were leg shackles, bolted to the concrete floor.

At the end of the hall I opened a door. Before me was an unused cell, packed halfway to the ceiling with hundreds of cans of Ensure, the liquid nutrient used in force-feeding. (Jen Nessel, of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, had told me that 24 detainees were being force-fed daily, in restraining chairs, because they were on hunger strike.) Lieutenant Fulghum came to get me, annoyed. “No one is supposed to go this far down the hall,” he snapped. I asked if anybody was on hunger strike. “We are not allowed to say. The medical staff handles that,” Lieutenant Fulghum said.

We were taken outside to Camp 6: there was a modest-sized recreation area surrounded by wire; and there they were, the causal heart of the whole monster. The detainees – Pakistani, Afghan, Iraqi and Yemeni men in their twenties, thirties and forties, wearing white T-shirts and khaki shorts – milled about; one or two threw a basketball out of range. The journalists were moved back down the hallway before they could see us, as if we were on safari. I asked if I could speak to them. My handler smiled. “No way.”

Our handlers took us out of the first structure to the grassy area between the buildings. In the second building, our handlers promised, we would see – since Obama had taken office – art classes; English classes. A library.

Outside, all around us, we saw a facility – one scheduled to be closed by December 2009 – under massive new construction: dozens of labourers were digging, surrounded by the grinding noise of building. A facility that Congress thinks it is discussing the “how” of closing – and that the President has claimed for six months is already slated for closure – was metastasising under our very eyes. When I asked about this I was told that the money had been allocated already and so it would be more expensive to stop construction than to keep it going. Through that open causeway of construction, the detainees in their central cage caught sight of us.

A sharp, sudden roar arose from the knot of men who spotted us. One of the prisoners looked straight at me and, his face twisted with an emotion that I could not read, screamed: “Go! Go!”

“Why are they saying ‘Go?’” I asked.

The handler looked at me. The Muslim men in the cage were being managed by guards who were mostly African American, and who shouted in colloquial English to get their attention: “Yo! 289! Stop that!” “They learn English from the guards,” he explained. “They aren’t saying ‘Go’.”

What they had screamed out to us – across the greatest possible distance – was: “Yo!”

After these camps, our handlers showed us Camp 4, part of Camp Delta, used to house “more compliant” detainees. A dozen prisoners milled about in a bigger central space (“We call this ‘The Patio’ or ‘The Lanai’,” our handler said; the new talking points also refer to communal meals as “feast days”.) This cage, too, was surrounded by mesh and guards.

I asked a guard if he had formed any personal opinions about the men he was guarding. He paused for a moment. “They don’t complain. They are needy,” he said. I asked what he meant. “Emotionally needy,” he said. “It comes out as asking for things all the time – a certain brand of shampoo, extra blankets … it is a kind of dependency.” The guard was suddenly whisked away. We were then taken to a medical bay. In the white-on-white bay was a military nurse – her name removed from her uniform; she refused to identify herself. And a psychologist stood ready to brief us, next to yet another diorama. Before us was a display of Ensure fanned out across a medical tray table. The nurse, a pleasant, pretty white middle-aged woman with a soft hairstyle and a rueful smile, gestured at the display like a car showroom model. She gave us a rundown of how they feed the prisoners who were on hunger strike.

The nurse confirmed that some detainees were on hunger strike and said that they were fed forcibly “when they refuse to take feeding fluids”. But she didn’t call it force-feeding: “We call it ‘enteral feeding’,” she corrected me. “It goes down the nose and into the stomach.The patients are given a variety of flavours,” she said, going back to her infomercial-style presentation and gesturing at the cartons. “Strawberry, French vanilla, butter pecan – they have a choice. Our admiral did this for a week and he gained four pounds,” she said fondly.

I turned to the psychologist, a dark-haired man in his late forties, heavily muscled, with the same featureless area on his chest where name tags ordinarily are. He, too, refused to give me his name when I asked. I asked him what happens if a detainee is depressed. “We will go see them. They can request the Behavioural Health Unit.” He said that they get “talk therapy” if they need it. “I can empathise,” he said. “I see it as being very similar to people who are detained in any correctional facility.”

I pointed out to the man that perhaps his patients were “depressed and anxious” because of what they had suffered in Guantánamo. (It is now well documented that detainees were subjected to “stress positions”, sleep deprivation, waterboarding and extremes of hot and cold. But for those working at Guantánamo, the talking points on torture seem to be that “abuse may or may not have happened, there is no way to know”: A Department of Defence spokesman, Joe Della Vedova, had called the claim that prisoners had been tortured at Guantánamo, “a posture of the defence”; Petty Officer Dwight called it “a matter of opinion”. And Lieutenant-Commander DeWalt called it “an assertion” and “a point of view”.) I would subsequently discover that the day before I met the psychologist and the nurse, a detainee, Muhammad al-Hanashi, had died, in what the Joint Task Force Guantánamo press office reported as an “alleged suicide”. Six weeks later, that death still has not have been investigated by an independent body.

But Andrew Selsky, of Associated Press, interviewed Binyam Mohamed, a former prisoner who knew the young man; Mr Mohamed said that suicide was “totally out of character” for Mr al-Hanashi. He was, according to Mr Mohamed, a positive person who had been elected by the prisoners as their representative. Associated Press reported that on January 17, 2009, Mr alHanashi had been summoned to a meeting with Admiral David Thomas, Commander of JTF Guantánamo, and the head of the Guantánamo guard force; Mr al-Hanashi never returned to his cell, but was taken directly to the psychiatric ward. Elizabeth Gilson, a lawyer for a detainee who was also in the ward, knows more about what happened; but she can’t tell anyone; it is classified.

The JTF Guantánamo press release reporting the death would be terse; the details nonexistent; there would be little follow-up in the media – because there was nothing the Guantánamo press office would release that would give anything to go on. His body would, presumably, go somewhere – but Mr al-Hanashi himself would, during the days I was at Guantánamo, simply disappear.

here was a final stop: another trailer inside the same area as Camp Delta, where the Combat Status Review Board takes place. There were security cameras in the corners of the room covered with towels for, we were told, “classification reasons”. There Captain Dan Bauer, another handsome, dark-haired, pleasant man, explained the combat status review tribunal (CSRT) process. Twenty serious-looking high-ranking military men sat to our right watching his presentation to us. In the room was his desk: and two chairs facing it. I turned on my little Flip camera and started recording. Captain Bauer claimed in his talk that witnesses were brought in from outside“whenever reasonable”. I looked at the base of both chairs. Both chairs had shackles. The process had been “formed”, Captain Bauer explained, “to afford the detainees the opportunity to attend and provide witness statements that were relevant and readily available on behalf of their own defence”. The system, he repeated several times, sorts them into those who are “enemy combatants” and those who are “no longer enemy combatants”.

He explained that “about 520 detainees were designated as enemy combatants, the remaining 40 or so are no longer enemy combatants”. Why, I wondered, was there no category for “never been enemy combatants”? A Russian reporter with us asked if the detainees have access to telephones or the internet, so that they can communicate with people in their country, to get documents and witnesses.“No,” Captain Bauer said. “In that case what would happen is that there was something that – if there was a process by which if they felt made their case, then what the board would do is the Dept of Defence works with the Department of State to contact, er . . . the nations of detainees to try to make arrangements just to get whatever information – er, that they need.” He said that detainees are taken “in the heat of the battlefield” and that there they “put the pieces together”.

I asked if everyone in the room with the detainee was employed by the US Government. Captain Bauer confirmed that.

“As I understand the process,” the Polish reporter said, “it is the detainee alone against the US Government?”

“I don’t understand the question,” Captain Bauer replied.

I asked why there were two different chairs with shackles. Captain Bauer explained that if the detainee had another detainee as his witness, then he would be present. In sources provided by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and the American Civil Liberties Union I had read that prisoners had been abused to provide false confessions implicating other prisoners, in just this setting, and that their “enemy combatant” status had been based on these false confessions. Testimony of witnesses who were not from within the prison system, so not subjected to coercion, was of course crucial for the review to be effective. Have there ever been any, or were any witnesses there, on the island right now?

“I can’t confirm whether there have or not.”

“Would you fly them here?”

“The Department of Defence, the Department of State, work with foreign agencies to make those arrangements.”

“Have they made those arrangements – ever?”

“Ummm … we afford the opportunity. Whether it’s been done or how often it’s been done, I don’t, I don’t know the answer.”

That afternoon we got to Guantánamo’s main street, which was like a main street anywhere in the US – McDonald’s, a Wal-Mart-style store: T-shirts for sale reading “It Don’t Gitmo Better Than This”, “Guantánamo Resort and Spa” and “Guantáanamo, Pearl of the Antilles”. You could get postcards of the banana rats.

Dinner was more salad displays; a pasta fiesta; a make-your-own sundae bar. It was like a food court in a really good mall. I tried to watch the sunset, under the scrutiny of my handler.

t six the next morning we awoke, dressed and convened outside, but – something was wrong. Petty Officers Dwight and Bennet were looking sadly at a flat tyre on the white van in the driveway that was to transport us. I tried my computer in the backyard for the hell of it, and to my surprise found that I got a thin thread of access to the outside world. A friend in Egypt had sent me a bombshell news clipping about Mr al-Hashani’s alleged suicide. While we had been at the medical bay, the Guantánamo press office had been scrambling to word a bland press release. The whole world knew about this death.

Only we, the journalists actually present at the scene, had had no idea. Petty Officers Dwight and Bennet eventually got us on wheels – taking us through the chic, upscale neighbourhoods of the contractors, with their barbecues, playstructures and verandas, through the boxy, hut-like quarters of the enlisted men and women – and back to the site of the military commissions.

There a new set of handlers showed us another sterile portable cell where detainees conferred with their lawyers. I asked our guide if there was lawyer-client privilege, or was the cell under surveillance? “I can’t answer that,” the guide said. (The defence lawyer Wells Dixon said that he always assumed that his conversations with his client were being listened in to.) We were taken in to the state-of-the art “courtroom” itself, where the ill-starred military tribunals meet. It is unbelievably expensive-looking: rows of gleaming wooden tables for the lawyers of the detainees – and seats with shackles at the base for the detainees at the end of each table; a raised dais where the “panel” – about 20 members of the military – sits facing the tables; and a raised platform in the front of the room, where the “judge” sits in the middle and on one side sits the detainee and on the other, the witness for the defence. Two contractors showed me around. One, “Mo”, showed me how you can put a $5 note under a light on a desk and it shows up onscreen behind the judge’s chair much magnified. I looked up: “In God We Trust”, the motto read.

Then he showed me the stop-motion button system on the audio feed that means that a censor can redact any information that comes out that he wishes to cut – so the press in the galley area behind glass at the back of the room, and down in the hangar, will never know what was redacted. The button system is in the same area as the “witness chair”, which seemed odd to me.

I asked if the chair had ever been used.

“Well … no,” he said. Not to his knowledge. Then he showed me again with great pride the live feed that was hooked up directly into the “courtroom” that could “transmit witness testimony into the courtroom from anywhere in the world”.

“Has it ever been used to transmit actual witness testimony?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “But we have the capability.”

At the end of the trip, I asked Deputy Press Officer Major Haynie to respond to the statement that no witnesses had ever been called to the CSRT process. I did not get an answer. Five weeks later I asked the Pentagon spokesman Vedova for a response – no answer – and six weeks later I called Lieutenant-Commander DeWalt to confirm or deny that external witnesses had never been called to the CSRT process.

He said that the 9/11 families were coming down to witness motions at the military tribunals and they would be housed in townhouses or officers’ quarters. I asked if the families of defendants would be allowed to observe the motions as well. “I don’t believe there are defendants’ families on this visit.” I asked him if defendants’ families have ever been brought in. “Not to my knowledge,” he conceded. I asked DeWalt if, in the rebranded military commissions under Obama’s Administration, real witnesses will be flown in from outside the prison system. “It’s a fair question – I’ll get back to you,” he said. So far, he has not done so.

The next morning I was due to depart when word came that the one flight out was cancelled. Instead, I was to fly out on military transport. On the aircraft I chatted with those seated around me. To my right was a military doctor, who acknowledged that he had been flown to the island to attend to the post-mortem of the dead prisoner.

“Will there be an investigation?” I asked.

That was the investigation, he explained. When I later asked Lietenant-Commander DeWalt about the death of Mr al-Hanashi, he said that there was an ongoing investigation, and that he could not give “details of that situation – we are holding off on any speculation – because it would get in the way of investigators doing their job”.

Sitting behind the doctor on the aircraft was a genial young clergyman, Chaplain Mubarak, who turned out to be one of four Muslim chaplains in the Navy. He, too, had been flown in for the death – from Chicago. He had been tasked with “culturally sensitive” treatment of the corpse. He explained that in Islam only another Muslim could wash the dead man’s body. Had he been allowed to give spiritual support to Mr al-Hanashi’s fellow prisoners? No.

I made my way down the aisle to join another lawyer, whom I had met in the waiting room: George Clarke, a corporate lawyer with Miller and Chevalier, a big law firm in Washington. He works pro bono for his clients who are detainees. “I represent two of the 17 Uighurs that are still here. They were all cleared to go – by the Department of Defence, by the courts, by the military . . . innocent guys. But they have been here for seven years.”

To explain why the detainees are not permitted to speak to reporters, Clarke says, the Department of Defence is citing the Geneva Conventions. “Which is kind of interesting because their position has been that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply to these guys. If the Geneva Conventions applied they would be able to have a canteen from which to buy things, tobacco that they could have, a right to organise themselves and have a representative.”

“Remember,” Clarke says, “for a lot of these guys, there’s no evidence. The military said that of the 240 guys left here maybe 80 will eventually be ‘tried’ in some form. What about the rest? A lot of these people have been held because they stayed at a guest house or they had some supposed connections or affiliations [with al-Qaeda]. ‘Connections’ are like … someone’s brother was a member. Or allegedly a member. The whole world has a misconception that these guys were picked up on the battlefield. And a whole lot of them were not.

“This country is based on the rule of law,” Clarke continued quietly. “If you truly have no reason to hold someone, you can’t hold them. National security cannot override freedom.

“At the end of the day our freedom is more important. If we lose our freedom – what are we trying to secure?”

What, indeed?

We landed, the lights of Washington now twinkling brightly below us, but the answer still unclear.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article6725411.ece

A seventeen-year-old boy is locked in an interrogation cell in Guantanamo.

 He breaks down crying and says he wants his family. The interrogator senses the boy is psychologically vulnerable and consults with a psychologist. The psychologist has evaluated the boy prior to the questioning and says, “Tell him his family has forgotten him.” The psychologist also prescribes “linguistic isolation” (not letting him have contact with anyone who speaks his language.) The boy attempts suicide a few weeks later. On the eve of the boy’s trial, the psychologist apparently fearing her testimony will only further implicate her, indicates she will plead the Fifth Amendment if she is called to the stand. The trial is postponed, leaving the boy in further limbo.

The military psychologist is merely a foot soldier in psychology’s participation in torture. It goes much deeper. We now know that psychologists helped design and implement significant segments of George Bush’s torture program. Despite their credo, “Above all, do no harm,” two psychologists developed instruments of psychological torture. They “reversed engineered” psychological principles. They used the very therapeutic interventions psychologists use to ameliorate psychological suffering, but “reversed” their direction to create psychological distress and instability. If one’s reality sense is threatened, a good therapist validates and supports it as appropriate. In reverse engineering, the environment is deliberately made more confusing and the victim’s trust in his own perceptions is intentionally undermined. In extreme form, this can ultimately drive a person to insanity from which some never come back. These were the types of techniques that were used on the seventeen-year-old detainee and others.

Military psychologists also colluded with the Justice Department to help CIA operatives circumvent the legal prohibitions against torture. Under the Justice Department definition of torture, if a detainee was sent to a psychologist for a mental health evaluation prior to interrogation it was per se evidence that the interrogator had no legal intent to torture the detainee because the referral “demonstrated concern” for the welfare of the detainee.

Most remarkably of all, this whole process occurred under a protective “ethical” seal from the American Psychological Association (APA), psychologists’ largest national organization. The APA governance repeatedly rejected calls from its membership for APA to join other health organizations in declaring participation in Bush detention center interrogations unethical.

Most psychologists are appalled at what the APA has done, and many, like me, have resigned from the APA. But the true story behind APA’s involvement with torture has not been fully told.

I have had ample opportunity to observe both the inner workings of the APA and the personalities and organizational vicissitudes that have affected it over the last two decades. For most of the twenty-year period from 1983 to 2003, I either worked inside the APA central office as the first Executive Director of the APA Practice Directorate, or I served in various governance positions, including Chair of the APA Board of Professional Affairs and member of the APA Council of Representatives. Since leaving APA I have maintained a keen interest in the organization.

The transformation of APA, in the past decade, from a historically liberal organization to an authoritarian one that actively assists in torture has been an astonishing process. As with many usurpations of democratic liberal values, the transformation was accomplished by a surprisingly small number of people. APA is an invaluable case study in the psychological manipulations that influence our governmental and non-governmental institutions.

To explain APA’s behavior two questions have to be answered. First, how did the APA develop the connections with the military that fostered the shameful role it has played in torture? Second, why did the APA governance not join other health professions in prohibiting participation in the Bush Administration’s “enhanced interrogations,” as APA’s rank and file members were demanding?

The APA-military connection  

One source of APA’s military connections is obvious to anyone who has worked at APA over the last twenty-five years. Strangely, it has been overlooked by the media. Since the early 1980’s, APA has had a unique relationship with Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye’s office. Inouye was an honored WWII veteran, a Japanese American who himself was a medical volunteer in the midst of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He entered office in 1962. For much of the ‘70s, he was Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Later he became, and is currently, the chair of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, which, of course, makes up the largest chunk of federal discretionary spending and is why economists often split discretionary government funding into defense spending versus “everything else.” This appropriations committee covers not only all of the armed forces but the CIA as well. Put succinctly, Inouye controls the military purse strings, and is very influential with military brass.

One of Inouye’s administrative assistants, psychologist Patrick Deleon, has long been active in the APA and served a term in 2000 as APA president. For significant periods of time DeLeon has literally directed APA staff on federal policy matters and has dominated the APA governance on political matters. For over twenty-five years, relationships between the APA and the Department of Defense (DOD) have been strongly encouraged and closely coordinated by DeLeon.

Inouye himself has served as an apologist for the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (“Gitmo”) since the inception of the War on Terror. In a press briefing at the U.S. State Department, held shortly after his trip to Gitmo in February of 2002, Inouye affirmed Rumsfeld’s propagandist vision of the site, and then remarked: “Watching our men and women treat these detainees was rather impressive. They would go out of their way to be considerate. …”

From what we know now, that is true, but not in the benevolent way Inouye implied. Inouye’s comments bore a chilling similarity to Barbara Bush’s famous comments about the alleged good fortune of Katrina victims, in the Houston Astrodome. The detainees, he said, are being treated “in some ways better than we treat our people.” (R. Burns, Associated Press, 2002). And he compared the Guantanamo climate to Hawaii’s. (It is “somewhat warmer.”)

More significantly, it was Inouye who recently stripped the funding needed for closing Gitmo from a supplemental appropriations bill. This “Inouye Amendment,” threw a stick in the spokes of any U.S. movement away from the worst of global war on terror policies. In announcing the funding cut, Inouye’s press release was a remarkable illustration of Orwellian “newspeak,” ostensibly supporting the very opposite of what he was doing

But let me be clear. We need to close the Guantanamo prison. Yes, it is a fine facility. I, too, have visited the site. Yes, the detainees are being well cared for. Our servicemen and servicewomen are doing great work. But the fact of the matter is Guantanamo is a symbol of the wrongdoings which have occurred, and we must eliminate that connection. (Inouye, Press Release May 20, 2009).

DeLeon’s connection with Inouye is not by any means the only APA connection with defense interests. In 1951 the military established The Human Resource Research Organization (HumRRO) to develop techniques for “psychological warfare.” HumRRO was run by psychologist Dr. Meredith Crawford who spent ten years as APA treasurer and was deeply involved in APA activities for three decades. Crawford’s former student, Raymond Fowler, became Chief Executive Officer of APA in 1989 and stayed in that position until 2003. Today, fifty-five percent of HumRRO’s budget comes from the military.

As CEO, Fowler hired his two most important lieutenants from HumRRO, Chief Financial Officer, Charles “Jack” McKay, and in-house attorney, James McHugh. Both men have now, after lengthy APA tenures, left the APA and returned to HumRRO in  very senior roles. McHugh is Chairman of the HumRRO Board of Trustees and McKay is Vice-Chairman and Treasurer. The current President of HumRRO, psychologist William Strickland, has been an outspoken supporter of APA’s policies on the torture issue. He served on the APA Council of Representatives throughout the APA deliberations on torture.

Whether and how the longstanding relationships and frequent circulation of key personnel between APA and HumRRO positions have shaped APA’s involvement with the military is unclear, but given recent events, it certainly warrants more careful scrutiny than it has received from psychologists. In fact, I do not believe many psychologists are even aware of these relationships.

Regardless of HumRRO’s role, however, as psychologists, most APA governance members have little Washington political experience. For them, Patrick DeLeon, because of his connection with Inouye, is perceived as a canny psychology politician and political force on Capitol Hill. Regardless of the accuracy of that perception, I have no reason to think DeLeon is a corrupt or evil person. Instead, from my perspective, the most interesting aspect of DeLeon has always been his apparent preoccupation with issues of status for psychologists, irrespective of the issues’ actual significance either for psychologists or the public.

DeLeon wanted to make sure a psychologist, not just physicians, for example, would be eligible to fill this or that position in the Veteran’s Administration, and he campaigned for years for VA psychologists to receive a minuscule pay increase when they became board certified. On the whole, I found these matters harmless and of at least some marginal benefit to people. Using funding from the Department of Defense he has also launched a campaign for psychologists to be given legal rights to prescribe psychiatric medications.

The torture issue is, of course, quite different. Viewed through the eyes of DeLeon’s adherents, psychology’s new found role as architects of a central component of the war on terror was a tremendous “victory” for the field of psychology. That it involved torture was peripheral, obscured by the headiness of being involved in high-level, important, clandestine government affairs. In discussions about APA’s role in the interrogations, a senior member of the APA governance described himself as “addicted” to the television show 24. Now he had his own reality TV show.

DeLeon’s influence in the APA and with many individual psychologists, especially those from Hawaii, came in very handy for Inouye in his efforts to support the Department of Defense. When the military needed a mental health professional to help implement its interrogation procedures, and the other professions subsequently refused to comply, the military had a friend in Senator Inouye’s office, one that could reap the political dividends of seeds sown by DeLeon over many years.

While we are only now uncovering the names of the individuals who participated most directly in the interrogations, I think a surprising number of them will turn out to be people brought into the military through Inouye’s office, many by DeLeon himself.

APA’s Organizational Decline

But this leads to the second and more complex question. Why did the governance of the APA let this happen under the apparent imprimatur of the world’s largest organization of psychologists? Some people assume APA’s horrifying recent behavior involved large sums of money changing hands. I could certainly be wrong, but I think the more likely (and more remarkable and pressing) mechanism has little to do with money. For reasons described below, the APA leaders who were making these decisions simply exercised judgment that was both bad and insensitive to the realities of human suffering. In my opinion, schooled by 25 years of experience with the APA, it was neither greed nor financial corruption that brought the APA governance into alliance with the Bush Administration. Instead, it was a malignant organizational grandiosity that first weakened the APA and then, ultimately, allowed military and intelligence agencies to have their way with the APA throughout the Bush Administration.

But how did the APA, of all organizations, get this way? What led to this grandiose culture? An organization does not rise or fall with a single event any more than the fall of Rome truly occurred in 476 AD. The culture of grandiosity was carefully cultivated for more than a decade by a few self-interested individuals.

What has been observable and unarguable about the APA of recent years is that the pluralistic and multi-faceted governance process I witnessed when first entering the APA in the early 1980’s was sharply curtailed during the 1990’s. Differences of opinion disappeared, and the APA suffered a terrible organizational decline. Increasingly inbred and infantilized under the tightly controlled administration of Raymond Fowler, the association agenda was primarily and at times exclusively financial, focused on making money either through real estate ventures or through what I and others felt was the unnecessarily harsh financial treatment of lower level APA employees.

Whatever one’s view of APA, few can dispute that Fowler, more than any other individual, made APA what it is today. The CEO of APA for almost fifteen years, Fowler served in one capacity or another on the APA Board of Directors for twenty-five consecutive years. While his supporters would characterize him as “astute” and his critics as “devious,” few could reasonably disagree that Fowler was the main mover in the APA for the fifteen years leading up to the torture debacle.

Most peculiarly, Fowler’s “agenda” for APA was encapsulated in the phrase “Working Together,” a noble idea that to the best of my knowledge was never attached to any actual substantive agenda. Instead, it served as a means of social control, a subtle injunction against raising any of the conflict-laden issues, challenges, or ideas that need to be addressed in any vital and accountable organization. The governance of the APA became either conformist or placid and increasingly detached from the real world.

The result was that much of the activity of the APA Council of Representatives, the legislative group with ultimate authority in the APA governance, turned away from substantive matters into an odd system of fawning over one another. Many members appeared to simply bathe in the good feeling that came from “working together.” The bath was characterized by grandiose self-referents and shared lofty opinions of one another. As it became more and more detached from reality, the organizational dysfunction became more pronounced, but this was ignored and obscured by the self-congratulatory organizational style. During this period, isolated dissent from rank-and-file members was stifled with a heavy-handed letter from the APA attorney threatening legal action or by communications from prominent members of the APA governance threatening “ethics” charges if policy protests were not discontinued. (It is unethical for psychologists to lie, and I can attest that one former APA president concluded that disagreeing with him was per se “lying.”) 

Deliberations on Torture

This same grandiosity was ubiquitous in the governance’s rhetoric at the heart of the Association’s discussions on torture. Banning psychologists’ participation in reputed torture mills was clearly unnecessary, proponents of the APA policy argued. To do so would be an “insult” to military psychologists everywhere. No psychologist would ever engage in torture. Insisting on a change in APA policy reflected a mean-spirited attitude toward the military psychologists. The supporters of the APA policy managed to transform the military into the victims in the interrogation issue.

In the end, however, it was psychologists’ self-assumed importance that carried the day on the torture issue. Psychologists’ participation in these detention centers, it was asserted, was an antidote to torture, since psychologists’ very presence could protect the potential torture victims (presumably from Rumsfeld and Cheney, no less!). The debates on the APA Council floor, year after year, concluded with the general consensus that, indeed, psychology was very, very important to our nation’s security.

We psychologists were both too good and too important to join our professional colleagues in other professions who were taking an absolutist moral position against one of the most shameful eras in our country’s history. While the matter was clearly orchestrated by others, it was this self-reinforcing grandiosity that led the traditionally liberal APA governance down the slippery slope to the Bush Administration’s torture program.

During this period I had numerous personal communications with members of the APA governance structure in an attempt to dissuade them from ignoring the rank-and-file psychologists who abhorred the APA’s position. I have been involved in many policy disagreements over the course of my career, but the smugness and illogic that characterized the response to these efforts were astonishing and went far beyond normal, even heated, give and take. Most dramatically, the intelligence that I have always found to characterize the profession of psychology was sorely lacking.

Outside the self-absorbed culture of the current APA governance, to the rest of the world, the APA arguments simply do not pass the red-face test for credibility. Instead, their transparent disingenuousness only made the APA sound embarrassingly like apologists for the Bush Administration. 

The Conclusion

The inability to deliberate rationally on the torture issue was but the tragic denouement of an organizational process that was actually set in motion in the early 1990’s, largely to serve the convenience of a very small number of individuals. As a result of the management style of the 90’s, the governance of APA was ill prepared for thoughtful deliberation on a matter as important as the torture issue. The governance was simply over its head in trying to effectively address such a socially and ethically consequential issue. This was especially true in a debate in which one side had organized support from powerful military interests, then-current APA presidents like Gerald Koocher and Ronald Levant, and Senator Inouye’s office all pushing for APA involvement in the interrogations. Few people stood up to them, and those who did were people who were inexperienced in the duplicity and manipulative style of politics that characterized APA.

With the increasing uproar from the membership and the media, APA’s more recently elected leaders and the current CEO, Norman Anderson, have been extraordinarily quiet on the subject of psychologist and APA involvement in the torture issue. Instead, second level APA employees have been put out front to defend the APA position to the membership and to the public. These are almost exclusively people hired by Fowler to fit into his carefully designed model of an organization that would be controllable, if somewhat non-dynamic and uncreative. Thus, the public relations staff Fowler hired, the staff legal and psychological expertise he hired, and most remarkably his ethics director have all served as the “face of APA” on the torture issue in recent years. Not surprisingly, forced to function under the watchful eye of the public they have not acquitted themselves in credible fashion.

In a recent book, I used several organizational examples to illustrate that many of the same techniques of political manipulation used in the Bush Administration were used in other organizational settings. Many of those examples were drawn from the APA. At the time of writing I never dreamed the techniques would lead to APA’s complicity in torture.

At the end of a hectic week at Guantánamo, which saw the Obama administration overcome its previous inability to release prisoners (just two were released from January to May), it was announced that, following the release of four Uighurs to Bermuda, the return of Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, to Chad, and the repatriation of the last Iraqi in Guantánamo, three Saudi prisoners had also been repatriated, leaving 230 men at the prison.

As I explained in March, the release of the Saudis was long overdue, because military review boards, convened on an annual basis under the Bush administration, had approved their release from Guantánamo, having concluded that they were no longer a threat to the U.S. (although it is also worth noting that they did not necessarily pose a threat in the first place). As a result, there appeared to be no excuse for the men not to be returned to the custody of the Saudi government, which has been running a well-respected rehabilitation program for former prisoners for several years.

In the case of one of these men, Khalid Saad Mohammed (who was 28 years old when seized), the decision to approve his transfer from Guantánamo had taken place in 2006, but no explanation was provided as to why he was not released when 63 other Saudis were repatriated in 2007, especially as he had so clearly been seized by mistake.

In the publicly available documents from Guantánamo, he explained that he had traveled to Pakistan to provide humanitarian aid to Afghan refugees fleeing the chaos of Afghanistan, following the U.S.-led invasion and the fall of the Taliban, and was injured while buying food and supplies for the refugees in a market at Spin Boldak, on the Pakistani border, when U.S. forces began bombing the area.

He was then seized from a hospital in Quetta, Pakistan, by Pakistani forces, and sold, with a number of other wounded men, to the U.S. military, but the authorities in Guantánamo had never managed to build up anything resembling a credible case against him, resorting instead to claims that he “was identified” by another, unnamed prisoner as having stayed at a guest house in Afghanistan, and that an unidentified “senior al-Qaeda member” had identified him as “possibly having clerical status amongst Saudi fighters.”

The first allegation is worrying, because, as recent court cases dealing with the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions have demonstrated (see the stories of the Uighurs, the Bosnian Algerians, Mohammed El-Gharani and the recent case of a Yemeni, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, discussed below), the authorities have frequently resorted to relying on claims made by other prisoners whose reliability has been called into question by military personnel and agents from the intelligence services.

The second allegation is just as troubling, because the unidentified “senior al-Qaeda member” could have been one of the supposed “high-value detainees” — including Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — who were held for many years in secret CIA prisons, where they were subjected to torture, and who, as documents released to the ACLU have just demonstrated, both stated in Guantánamo that they made false confessions as a result.

The second prisoner released is Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, whose case I wrote about just a month ago, in an article entitled, “Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies.” He was one of 17 men seized in a guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, ostensibly because the house had some tangential connection to Abu Zubaydah, although, as I discussed in my book The Guantánamo Files, there appeared to be little or no evidence connecting the men seized in the house — mostly Yemenis, and mostly aged between 18 and 24 — to Zubaydah or to any kind of terrorist activity.

Most of the men stated that they were students, and that the house functioned as a university dorm for the nearby Salafia University. Al-Noofayee, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, had a slightly different story, as he explained in Guantánamo, but this too had no connection whatsoever with terrorism or militancy. Like another house guest (Mohammed Salam, a Yemeni), he said that he had traveled to Pakistan to receive medical treatment — specifically, for a back problem — and had never set foot in Afghanistan.

As with most of the prisoners seized in the guest house, the U.S. authorities had struggled, in the years following his capture, to come up with anything resembling evidence to justify his detention, and, in fact, had managed to produce only two pieces of information, neither of which appeared to be remotely reliable. The first was that an unidentified “senior al-Qaeda operative” — under the same unknown circumstances as Khalid Saad Mohammed’s accuser — had stated that al-Noofayee had attended the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan “in approximately 1997,” and the second was that he “was captured with a Casio F-91W watch,” allegedly “used in bombings that have been linked to al-Qaeda and radical Islamic groups with improvised explosive devices,” a ludicrous allegation which, nevertheless, has been leveled at dozens of prisoners over the years.

As with the majority of the Guantánamo cases, it was, until last year, impossible for al-Noofayee’s lawyers to challenge the basis of his detention, but last June, after the Supreme Court ruled in a historic case, Boumediene v. Bush, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask a judge why they were being held), his case — like those of the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners (except a handful who, either by accident or design, had not secured a habeas lawyer) — was assigned to a District Court judge, whose intention, under the directions provided by the Supreme Court, was to ensure that, after six and a half years of detention without adequate review, “The costs of delay are no longer borne by those who are held in custody.”

It was a worthy aim, but on the first anniversary of Boumediene (last Friday), only 29 cases had been decided. In 25 of these, judges had ruled that the government had failed to establish a case against the prisoners concerned. This is an 86 percent success rate, which is a vindication for those, like myself, who have maintained for years that the cases against the majority of the prisoners would not stand up to any kind of independent scrutiny, but it is disappointing that so few cases have been heard, and more disappointing still to realize that the main reason for the delay is obstruction by the Justice Department.

When a schedule for hearing the cases was first established last July, the Justice Department resorted to delaying tactics almost immediately, first by complaining that it was understaffed to deal with the task, and that it needed more time to compile allegations against the prisoners (despite having already had six and a half years to do so). The DoJ followed up with what appears to be a systemic failure to provide the prisoners’ defense attorneys with exculpatory material — in other words, material that tended to disprove the government’s claims — or, in fact, any of the material they required to mount a successful defense. More disturbing still is the realization that this policy of obstruction did not change at all when Barack Obama and Eric Holder took over from George W. Bush and Michael Mukasey.

Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, like Khalid Saad Mohammed, left Guantánamo a year after Boumediene without having had the opportunity to have his case heard in a U.S. court, but he at least had the opportunity to hear about the success in court of one of the other men seized with him, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni student whose habeas case was heard last month by Judge Gladys Kessler. I described this ruling in an article at the time, entitled “Judge Condemns ‘Mosaic’ Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses,” and summarized it as follows in “Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies”:

Authorizing Ali Ahmed’s habeas claim, Judge Kessler demolished the government’s case against him, painting a disturbing picture of unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a “mosaic” of intelligence, purporting to rise to the level of evidence, which actually relied, to an intolerable degree, on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.

Moreover, although Judge Kessler was ruling only on Ali Ahmed’s habeas case, she made it clear that, in her review of the government’s supposed evidence, she had also concluded that identical problems plagued the cases of the majority of the other men seized in the guest house. “It is likely, based on evidence in the record,” she wrote, “that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.”

For Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, Judge Kessler’s conclusion no longer addresses the question of whether he will ever be released, but it’s noticeable, as the Obama administration finally begins to free prisoners from Guantánamo, that the rest of the men seized in the Faisalabad guest house, who are still held, have not yet received any confirmation that senior officials have taken Judge Kessler’s criticisms on board.

There is, moreover, no word from the administration about its plans for three other Saudi prisoners who were also cleared for release after military review boards at Guantánamo, but in the end what is revealed most of all through the story of Khalid Saad Mohammed, Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee and the third released prisoner, Ahmed Zuhair (who will be discussed in an article to follow) is that the Obama administration not only dawdled on taking office when it should have acted swiftly to release prisoners whose repatriation posed no difficulties, but also that these delays prevented President Obama from seizing a priceless opportunity to refute the damaging propaganda of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the many politicians who have jumped on his fearmongering bandwagon, and who, as a result, have not only derailed the President’s plan to raise funds to close Guantánamo, but have also succeeded in putting their distortions back in the headlines, where they most emphatically do not belong.

The irony is that, while Obama did little to counter this unprincipled attack on his promise to close Guantánamo, he could have fought back by simply stating that he did not have time to address Cheney’s lies and distortions about the “hardcore terrorists” still in Guantánamo, because he was too busy ensuring that prisoners who did not pose a threat to the United States, and never had, were being released after their long, cruel and pointless ordeal at the hands of his predecessors.

Obama’s failure to do so has made his mission far more complicated than was necessary, and he is still playing from a defensive position, by refusing to state categorically why nine prisoners were released in the last week (because the courts found that the Bush administration had failed to provide evidence to justify the men’s detention, or because his own inter-departmental review reached the same conclusion), but at least while prisoners are being released the public has some opportunity to understand the lies peddled by Dick Cheney, nearly eight years after he embarked on his aberrant assault on America’s core values.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and maintains one of the most important blogs of our time.

As representatives of the world’s media descended on Bermuda to meet the four Uighurs (Muslims from China’s oppressed Xinjiang province) who had just arrived in the capital, Hamilton, after being freed from Guantánamo and given a new home by Bermuda’s Premier Ewart Brown, they gave their first interview to Bermuda’s Royal Gazette, reveling in their early experience of “a small country of people with big hearts,” and explaining, as the Gazette described it, that they “had never even heard of al-Qaeda” until they arrived at Guantánamo seven years ago. They added that they “had never seen pictures of what happened on September 11, 2001, but they did not approve of the terrorist attacks that killed about 3,000 people in the US.”

An exclusive photo of the Uighurs, as provided by Rushan Abbas. From L to R: Salahidin Abdulahad, Ablikim Turahun, lawyers Sabin Willett and Susan Baker Manning, Khalil Manut, and Abdulla Abdulqadir.

One of the men, Salahidin Abdulahad, explained, “We had not seen anything of the 9/11 attacks, but from what we have heard, it was a terrible tragedy that happened to the American people. We are very sympathetic with the families of those who lost their lives. We’d never heard of al-Qaeda until we came to Guantánamo and heard about them from our interrogators. From what we have heard about them, they are an extremely radical group, with totally different ideals from ours. We are a peace-loving people.”

As someone who has studied the Uighurs’ stories since 2006, first in my book The Guantánamo Files and then in several dozen articles over the last few years, the men’s lack of knowledge about al-Qaeda did not surprise me, as they left their homeland before the 9/11 attacks, and ended up in a small, rundown settlement in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains that was almost totally cut off from the outside world. Such is the taint of Guantánamo, however, that, despite being cleared of being “enemy combatants” by the Bush administration, the US military and the US courts, the Uighurs are still required to prove that they had no connection to terrorist activities.

In the interview, the men took issue with an allegation that has plagued them since being cleared for release: that they had attended “a terrorist training camp” in Afghanistan. Such is the nature of political maneuvering in the United States that this allegation still clings to them, because the Justice Department, first under President Bush, and then under President Obama, used it in an unprincipled attempt to find a reason to deny them entry into the United States (after a judge ordered them to be resettled in the US last October), despite the fact that it contradicts the Bush administration’s own finding that the men never had any involvement in terrorist activity.

Responding to the allegation, Salahidin Abdulahad told the Gazette, “That is a totally false accusation. We were just fleeing Chinese suppression when we went to Afghanistan. We did not go to a military or terrorist training camp. We were in a little village and stayed in some abandoned buildings there. If you saw it you would know it’s ridiculous to call this place a military training camp.”

After explaining that they “were persecuted in their homeland by the Chinese authorities and fled over the border into Afghanistan to escape,” Abdulahad added, “We wanted to go to a peaceful country in Europe, but because of the difficulties with visas and passports, we had to do the next best thing, which was to cross the border into Afghanistan, which was much easier to do.”

The Uighurs then gave the Gazette a brief history lesson, explaining that they “had their own country until it was seized by China in 1949,” and adding that they “have been an oppressed minority for decades.” Providing an example, the men explained that “a mother who had two children and who was pregnant would be subject to a forced abortion at the hands of the authorities,” even though abortion is against the Uighurs’ religion.

The men also explained that, after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, when the settlement was bombed by US forces, they fled to Pakistan, where they were “tricked by Pakistani tribesman, who handed them over to the US military for cash.”

Another exclusive photo provided by Rushan Abbas. Kahlil Manut gets to grips with a moped.

Moving on to Guantánamo, the men said that their “worst moments” came not during their “long stretches of solitary confinement in the spartan cells,” but “when the Americans allowed a visit by Chinese military officials,” who were permitted to interrogate them for two weeks. This was indeed a cynical move on the part of the US authorities, who were currying favor with the Chinese government in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and was in marked contrast to the situation that prevailed in previous years, when the Uighurs’ plight was recognized in some US political circles as being akin to that of the Tibetans.

Describing the visit of the Chinese intelligence agents, Salahidin Abdulahad said, “The Chinese delegation treated us very badly. They brought me out and interrogated me for six hours straight with no food or rest. They took me back to my cell and I was extremely tired. But then they came straight back to my cell and took me out for another six hours of interrogation. It went on that way for one-and-a-half days.” Another of the men, Ablikim Turahun, added more disturbing details. “When the Chinese came they wanted to take my picture, but I didn’t want them to, because I was afraid they would harm my family.” He said. “But one of the American guards grabbed my beard and the other held my hands behind my back so they could take the picture.”

Everything the Uighurs told the Gazette – with the exception of Ablikim Turahun’s recollection of being restrained by US guards while Chinese agents took his photo – has, of course, been reported before, as the Uighurs’ explanations of how they ended up in Guantánamo were unwavering throughout their long ordeal in US custody. Nevertheless, Premier Brown has come under pressure for accepting the men, partly from the British government, which has claimed that it was not informed about the decision to accept them (although, as I reported previously, I find this claim unconvincing), and partly from opposition politicians, who appear to view the men’s arrival as an opportunity to score political points at the expense of Premier Brown, and have threatened to call for a vote of no confidence in the current administration.

On Bermuda itself, however, the men appear to have sidestepped the fallout from the political wrangling, at least in their personal dealings with the islands’ citizens. One of their lawyers, Sabin Willett, told the Gazette that when they went into a local store to buy clothes, the radio was on, and various participants in a talk show “were complaining about ‘terrorists’ not being welcome in Bermuda.” Willett explained that the storekeeper, who “looked at the men and quickly realized who they must be,” ignored the voices on the radio and said, “Well, I welcome you here.”

Abdulla Abdulqadir, photographed by Susan Baker Manning.

A welcome – and the opportunity to work, and to prove themselves capable of contributing positively to their new home – is all the men seek. “Bermuda had the courage to step up and do this,” Salahidin Abdulahad explained. “It’s a small place but the people have extremely big hearts. We want to live a peaceful and beautiful life here and we are ready to work hard. People know we have been in Guantánamo and they have a picture of us which is very different from who we are. When people get to know us they will know what kind of people we are. We are peace-loving people.”

Other reporters who have met the men in the last few days have confirmed their joy at their new-found freedom, and their desire to integrate as swiftly as possible. Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star noted that, in the apartment provided for them by the US government until they find work – “which likely won’t be a problem since local companies have reportedly already made six offers,” as she put it – the men have “managed to form a makeshift family,” helped by their American translator Rushan Abbas, who initially worked with US interrogators after arriving at Guantánamo in 2002, before joining the Uighurs’ defense team. As Shephard described it, Abbas, who alternated between typing emails and “kneading dough for a traditional Uighur dinner … joked that, despite only being a few years older, she considered the men her children.” Shephard also explained that the men “have the assistance of a retired Bermudian army major, Glenn Brangman, who now works with the government,” and who “has become their energetic guide.”

In the New York Times, Eric Eckholm found Maj. Gen. Brangman to be a strong advocate for the Uighurs’ acceptance in Bermuda. After speaking to the men’s lawyers, who explained that they “have been promised work visas and, in perhaps a year or so, possible citizenship,” which “would give them passports and a right to travel,” Eckholm sought the opinion of Brangman, who said, simply, “The intent is that they shall become Bermudians.” Eckholm also wrote more about the islanders’ response to the new arrivals, noting that, “As the men venture from the seaside cottage where they temporarily live until they get jobs and figure out next steps, people often come up to shake their hands and wish them well, and the men said they were deeply touched.” He added that, “While some less affluent residents said they felt it was unfair to offer jobs and citizenship to men the United States itself would not take, many others shrugged and expressed pride at Bermudan hospitality.”

As the men settle into their new lives, they are all hoping that, after seven years of wrongful imprisonment, Bermudan hospitality will prevail over the rumors and innuendo that are a peculiar side-effect of Guantánamo, in which men held outside the law, never charged or tried, and treated abominably for seven long years, are, perversely, regarded with suspicion for the rest of their lives by all manner of people who should know better, and who should realize that holding prisoners based on a presumption of guilt, and attempting to prevent them from ever having the opportunity to challenge the basis of that presumption, will remain a particularly low point in the history of the United States, until Guantánamo is finally closed, and those still held are either charged or released.

In the meantime, the men also want the world to remember that 13 of their compatriots are still in Guantánamo, although according to information leaked last week, the US government is hoping to resettle them on the Pacific island of Palau, and is, it must be noted, anxious to do this before June 25, when the US Supreme Court is scheduled to meet to discuss whether US courts have any authority to order Guantánamo prisoners to be released into the United States. Speaking to a reporter from Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Abdulla Abdulqadir made a point of saying, “Our 13 brothers still in Guantánamo are just the same as us. People need to understand that.”

Salahidin Abdulahad and Khalil Manut, photographed by Michelle Shephard for the Toronto Star, enjoy their new-found freedom by fishing in the ocean.

Note: There seems to be an enormous amount of confusion regarding the men’s names. Salahidin Abdulahad was previously identified as Abdul Semet and was known to the Pentagon as Emam Abdulahat, Ablikim Turahun was previously identified as Huzaifa Parhat, Khalil Manut was previously identified as Abdul Nasser and was known to the Pentagon as Abdul Helil Mamut, and Abdulla Abdulqadir was previously identified as Jalal Jalaladin and was known to the Pentagon as Abdullah Abdulquadirakhun.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison