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The hell that is Gitmo

Most of us have little idea what Gitmo is like. Needless to say the Americans have denied most people any access to the facility or restricted what they can report on if they have been able to visit.

TimesOnLine has had access to Gitmo and reports in "Inside Guantánamo Bay: Desperate prisoners ask ‘where 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.

The lawyer, David Remes, said that his client was a “very sick man, physically and psychologically”. Prison officials said that he did not need stitches and returned him to his cell. Mr Latif alleged in a letter to his lawyer last month that since Mr Obama took office, “oppression has increased, torture has increased and insults have increased” — something officials at the jail deny fiercely."

AlterNet also has a piece on Gitmo "Little Known Military Thug Squad Still Brutalizing Prisoners at Gitmo Under Obama" which makes of sobre reading. Despite all the hype things haven't got better at Gitmo since Obama came into office. According to the article, a squad of little known thugs still operates at the facility.

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