Bad Men

An extract from Clive Stafford Smith's book on Guantánamo Bay and the secret prisons, shortlisted for the Book Prize 2008.

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HONOUR BOUND

Security on the twelve-seater civilian flight to Guantánamo Bay is relaxed. In Fort Lauderdale the passengers assemble at the commuter terminal and the crew steadfastly refuse to search anything. Finally one of the pilots waves a wand over each of the men, pointedly excluding both the women and all the baggage from the search. Curious, I ask why only the men receive the security check. The pilot confidently replies that most weapons are hidden around the ankles and men wear long trousers. I point out that here all five of his female passengers have spurned the skirt. He nods, smiles and walks away.

I am surprised to find such minimal security on the way to this island prison, reputed to house the most dangerous terrorists on earth. If anyone wants to commandeer a plane to attack Guantánamo, he only has to take a beginner’s course in hijacking. But it would not be a task for the weak-bladdered terrorist, as the pilot reminds us that there is no toilet on the plane, casually estimating the flight at somewhere between three and four hours. The co-pilot points out the cooler full of complimentary fizzy drinks that blocks the exit aisle, a temptation to the unwary. Before we arrive, one of the men will sheepishly apologise as he covers his lap, filling an empty bottle. We fly over blue sea and the occasional sandy archipelago. Most passengers have military haircuts and snooze once we get underway. I drown out the engine with my headphones and work on my laptop. I am heading down for another week at the naval base, as one of the volunteer lawyers representing the Muslim prisoners there. I am always excited to come to Guantánamo, as visiting the clients is my favourite part of the job. It is where theory meets reality, the human cost of President George W. Bush’s executive order establishing this secret prison full of ‘bad men’ shortly after the invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001.

On the way down, we stop for fuel at Exuma in the Bahamas. As we come in to land I notice a plane, of similar size to our own, sprawled in the undergrowth at the end of the runway. I wonder what happens to the island, perhaps ten feet above sea level at the pinnacle of a sand dune, when a hurricane sweeps through at this time of year. I assume that the plane must have been torn from its moorings and tossed among the stunted palm trees.

As I step out of the cabin for the refuelling, I ask the (very young) co-pilot if he knows the fate of the wrecked plane. He brightens. ‘Yeah, it was just last week. The pilot didn’t land till more than halfway down the runway and that was that. You see, they’re too cheap to keep the landing lights on here at night. Can you imagine? Don’t even keep the lights on!’

He seems thoroughly amused by this. In the breeze-block waiting room that serves as a terminal, there is a large map of the islands on the wall. There are three airstrips marked and another passenger asks where we are. The same young pilot looks doubtful. He waves vaguely between the three, saying that the Bahamas are really all one island. There is a lot of blue sea between them.

Eventually we are curving round the eastern tip of Cuba, keeping out of Fidel Castro’s airspace, and coming directly in towards the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Cacti struggling in hostile soil contrasted with the tropical foliage of the estuary remind me of parts of Spain, as the plane sets down on the very large and empty runway. It was built long enough to accommodate those huge planes that brought cargoes of orange-suited prisoners, starting in January 2002. The base is divided into two unequal parts, windward and leeward. The main base and the prison are on the windward side, across the bay from where we land. As we touch down, I can see the ferry plying its way towards us, backed by Cuban hills to the north. At the airport we are on the leeward side, which has little else but housing for nonmilitary personnel. Soldiers are standing by the plane as it comes to a halt, managing to project a vague sense of menace into their boredom. As I look around at nothing happening, I realise that the arrival of this little commuter plane is probably the most exciting moment of their day.

They search my bags and I am careful to make no jokes. Even pleasantries seem to sound like security threats here. Soon, I am allowed through to meet my military escort, an NCO who is charged with keeping an eye on the lawyers. He tries to affect a respectful stand-offishness. Most of them want to be friendly, but they are under orders to be careful around us. Loose lips sink ships on a naval base and the lawyers have been identified as ‘the enemy’. Today, one of the most affable escorts has come to meet me. I won’t identify him as the military are paranoid about names. The Pentagon seems to think that if we publish a soldier’s name, an al-Qaeda cell will swoop in and level the Midwestern town where he was born. He and I banter about the threat that the legal profession poses to national security: lawyers have to sleep on the leeward side, safely away from the main base. He drops me off at the motel where a sign boasts that it is ‘The Pearl of the Antilles’.

Here, for twenty dollars a night, I get a two-room suite with four beds. The first time I visited my Guantánamo clients was in November 2004 almost three years after we first sued to get the prisoners the right to counsel. I was here for four nights along with my friend and colleague Joe Margulies. A lawyer gets the entire ‘suite’ to himself and Joe tried out each bed. He discovered that every one was equally uncomfortable. Normally a military bachelor must share with three other soldiers. Even in the slightly less homophobic age of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’, where gay people can serve in the military so long as they don’t admit their orientation, the name – the Combined Bachelors’ Quarters or CBQ – is incongruous.

I am an old hand, now, after several trips and have my favourite ‘suite’. On the upper floor of the west wing there is a view over the placid Caribbean. The two rooms are joined by a kitchenette and a bathroom. Each bedroom has a table, a chest of drawers and two beds, all in sterile white, all cheaply prefab. Half the slats have fallen off the footboards of the beds.

The employees at the front desk are Filipinos, glad of their subminimum American wage. We have long since made friends, and they store my printer and supplies in a cabinet. Soon I have an office away from home set up in my room and try to sign on to the Internet. I have to set the computer on automatic redial, as the system is overloaded and constantly engaged, and it is fifty or sixty times before I hear the happy static of the connection. It is my lifeline to the outside world.

I check in with friends and family. Bizarrely, I sometimes feel more intimidated here on an American military base than anywhere else on my travels. Recently, I have been to various places categorised as dangerous by the US State Department – including Yemen and Jordan. I even got taken in for questioning by the secret police in Jordan, when I was there to seek out the families of the Guantánamo prisoners. But here, in the midst of the US military machine, I am more concerned about being detained on some trumped-up charge. I go to great lengths not to violate any of the US military’s censorship rules, no matter how silly they may seem, but obeying the law does not necessarily provide protection, as some of my Guantánamo clients can attest. I go outside, planning to walk down the road to find some kind of dinner. The motel sign bears the base motto: ‘Honor Bound to Defend Freedom’. Freedom is a relative term. Iguanas are free enough on both sides of the island and if a soldier accidentally runs one over it’s a $10,000 fine, since the US environmental laws apply in Guantánamo. Meanwhile, several hundred prisoners are more than five years into captivity. If a jailer feels the need to hit one of them, it’s called ‘mild non-injurious contact’ and there are no consequences. For these prisoners it’s a law-free zone. In 2004 we argued in the Supreme Court that it would be a huge step for mankind if they gave our clients the same rights as the animals on the base. ‘Equal rights with Iguanas!’ became our clarion call.

The ‘chow hall’ – the military terms seem like self-parody – closed some time ago, at six o’clock, so the only place left to eat is the Clipper Club, perhaps the most boring bar in the Caribbean. The Management’s ‘Standards of Appearance’ sign prohibits ‘clothing with bizarre, drug promoting, obscene and offensive insignia’. Patrons are warned that ‘shirts must cover excessive body hair on the chest, abdomen, and under arms’. I pass the test, but they check my ID to make sure I am over twenty-one and give me a wrist tag so I can drink. The barman warns me not to take it off. I have interrupted him, as he sprawled watching a film on a two-metre plasma screen. I am the only patron there.

The food is inedible, chicken sticks of cardboard, pizza slipped into the microwave. At least they cannot do much to harm a bottle of beer. Back at the motel, television is meant to be the diversion. There are two large televisions in each suite. The cable connection is distorted by static. This would spark a riot among the thousands of soldiers stranded for twelve months on the windward side, but there are too few people on the leeward side for their complaints to register. Only the movie channels are much of a loss, although I do like to watch the American Forces Network as an exercise in social studies. This is what the soldiers are meant to see: optimistic American voices booming positive news, where no setback in Iraq is significant and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is an interesting experiment with new weapons systems.

I check what films are playing tonight, without much interest since the TV is too blurred to watch. On the last two visits to the base I watched Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray wakes up over and again to the same morning. As his clock radio clicks over to 6 a.m. every day, Sonny and Cher are inevitably moaning ‘It ain’t me, babe’. Guantánamo Bay is Groundhog Day. I go to bed early, as I am up for Reveille at six o’clock myself. I walk back down to the ‘chow hall’ for breakfast, arriving on the stroke of seven, as the doors open. I sign in, pay my $1.95 and go to where the cook, who knows me from many visits, is already starting my cheese omelette. He asks me how long I am down for, as he nonchalantly treads on a scorpion that has wandered into the kitchen. Until I saw that I had not known what to make of the story told by my client Hisham Sliti, about the crunchy boiled scorpion that appeared in his meal one day. Now it seems credible.

I am surrounded at my table by more television monitors, one at each corner of the room, shouting the Armed Forces Network at me. The channels are indistinct here also, but the TVs are on full volume. ‘Fashion may come and fashion may go,’ says a fuzzy woman in a blurry uniform. ‘But not overseas. Dress so you won’t be noticed.’ She tells of the dangers to Americans of being obvious, disparaging the long-haired hippies of the Seventies and the tight white trousers of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. She turns to a picture of a man in khaki trousers and a stiff blue-collar shirt, the Army’s ideal of how one should blend into a foreign country. To me, the khakis scream ‘I’m American!’ in every language of the United Nations. I wonder whether there is anyone on the planet who would not be able to guess which country her model comes from.

I have always found breakfast TV disturbing and this is well before the time I would rather be having my breakfast. Each morning there is ‘This Day in History’, when we learn about the US military as superhero over the ages. After all the allegations of bias made against al-Jazeera by President Bush, I wonder idly whether anyone has ever done a content comparison between the Armed Forces Network and the Arabic station.

To make the eight o’clock ferry across to the windward side, I need to leave the chow hall by 7.35. There is a bus, but the Guantánamo thermostat has not yet risen to unbearable levels and it is a pleasant walk, allowing me some quiet time in which to plan my client meetings today.

I walk down First Street. On the leeward side there are two roads (First and Second Streets) running roughly in parallel until they converge near the ferry landing. Swimming Pool Road runs off up the hill. The sign points to a pool, a bowling alley and tennis courts. It used to offer something else, but that promise has long since fallen off, leaving only discoloration on the wooden uprights. I explored up there once on my evening stroll. The pool is empty and cracked. The leeward side is full of ghosts from fifty years ago, as Castro came to power and the importance of the only US base on communist soil suddenly magnified. Buildings once constructed to accommodate the influx of soldiers that coincided first with the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, and then the Cuban Missile Crisis, have now been allowed to decay.

The foot-long banana rats are blundering around in the grass this morning. They advertise their activities so loudly that if there were any predators on this island they would be doomed. But there is nothing that wants to eat them and the environmental laws also protect them from being crushed by patrolling military Humvees. Behind the banana rats lie vestiges of earlier wars. The reinforced concrete skeleton of a massive tower holds only a spotlight, long since disused. Peering out over the scene is a World War Two bunker, the heavy wooden beam cracked, only barely holding up the earth that covers the roof. I wonder whether the ten-foot snake that was outside my motel door this morning lives in there somewhere. The 7.41 bus passes me in the wrong direction at precisely the same place on the road each day as it winds up from the airport to fetch passengers for the morning ferry, including the other lawyers who prefer not to sweat on their way to see their clients. I wave to the driver. The tarmac begins to steam as the sun rises over the Cuban hills, stillness and beauty clashing with the rusted barbed wire.

I can see the ferry steaming stolidly across the bay. As it approaches the landing, tinny music pierces the drone of the engine. Last time I was here, every morning for a week it was Jimmy Buffett belting out ‘Margaritaville’, always that same song. It is the same again today. I remember from college that on this Buffett album there’s a song called ‘Let’s all get Drunk and Screw’. It amuses me to think that the US Navy might not have noticed and I fantasise that one day we will progress a track or two. But we remain stuck on the same song. A retired naval jet stands on metal stilts next to where we wait for our time to board the ferry. The plane has recently been repainted, with a clover – only three leaves – on its tail. There is a sudden rush towards the boat as a crew member beckons to the passengers. Most of the lawyers complain about staying on the leeward side, and the daily commute, but I enjoy the twenty-minute cruise each morning. As we pull out into the river, I look back towards the three ornamental palm trees that tower over what was once a boating pier. The roots of the pier prod out of the water, the walkway long since rotted away. The palm trees are tall and mature, put there for show many years ago. On the other bank of the river, the side towards the Cuban border, the foliage is lush. The trees lean into the water like a tropical forest.

The ferry passes the Oil Spill Response Unit on the estuary bank. Three more palm trees lean over the white concrete building. As the pilot steers us out of the river and into the bay, towards the windward dock, high in the hills four wind turbines slowly rotate. They are majestic, supplying a quarter of the electricity for the base. Beside the windward landing is the water desalination plant; further up the road, the recycling centre. The environmental correctness of the base is out of place set against this terrible prison.

The military escorts meet their flock of lawyers at the dock, as they must shepherd us at all times on this side of the base. We stop off at Starbucks, then drive down to McDonald’s. At the door, a soldier smartly salutes his superior, ‘Honor Bound, sir!’ The officer salutes his reply, ‘To Defend Freedom, soldier!’ The first time I saw this I chuckled, thinking they were joking. But it’s mandatory. It’s hard to believe they are still doing it, all these years into the Guantánamo experiment, but the naval base is deeply oblivious to irony. Some escorts are more talkative than others. I ask one, a veteran of two real battlefields, whether he plays along with this charade. ‘They’re lucky if I show up in the morning,’ he says with a snort. There is a new area marked off with a green netting in the Morale, Welfare and Recreation section of the base. In an area four times the size of a tennis court there are various inflated shapes. The escort is not sure what this new entertainment for the troops could be.

We pass along to Recreation Road, which runs alongside the Guantánamo golf course, besieged by the semi-desert around it. Officers lay a rubber mat on the gravel for each shot towards the green, a minimalist saucer of grass. Our escort says anyone who plays should rent clubs. ‘You don’t want to have to pay to play a round and have to replace your whole set as well.’ Local rumour has it that the course was ruined by the Haitian refugees, themselves housed here in makeshift camps in the early Nineties. Like so many of the Guantánamo rumours, this is false. God just did not design Guantánamo for golf courses. Another more optimistic military rumour had two pros donating hundreds of thousands to fix up the course. Actually, they just flew down some new equipment to encourage the men stuck on guard duty. One of the pros was Frank Lickliter II, whose link with the base goes back three generations. He still has the rifle his great-grandfather used during the Spanish-American War, when Guantánamo was originally taken by the US. Later, his father flew in P-3 Orions for the Navy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Once we leave the golf course behind, Recreation Road leads to the prison camp. An escort points out an iguana, sunning itself on a rock above the road. The hillside to the right as we drive along used to be daubed with all kinds of puerile soldier graffiti. It has all been cleaned off for the benefit of the media tours. As I look in awe, I wonder whether there has ever been another entire hillside scrubbed clean. It must have been an enormous and thankless task, and I feel for the soldiers who had to do it. Then I notice that they did it with camouflage paint. The graffiti have been painted over, with the colours matching the background.

I cannot write about the layout of the prison camp, as this would violate the security rules. Apparently there may be a plot afoot among al-Qaeda to traverse the Atlantic and storm the beaches. There is no rule, though, against saying that each camp has a given name. ‘Romeo’ is where the military forced the prisoners to wear only shorts, sexually humiliating to a devout Muslim. Forty Muslim men, forsworn from alcohol, live in ‘Whiskey’. I can’t decide whether the names are inadvertent, as is generally the case in Guantánamo, or deliberately demeaning.

For the past two years, meetings between clients and lawyers have generally been held in Camp Echo. Before June 2004, when the Supreme Court ordered that the prisoners be allowed lawyers, this used to be the harshest camp, where prisoners were held in total isolation. Each cell, sealed off from the others, is divided down the middle – the prisoner lived on one side and was only brought into the other half for interrogation sessions.

For a short time the legal visits were held in Camp Five, but they are back at Echo again now. I am going to stay there all day, until 4.30 – 16.30 hours here. The rules are more restrictive now than two years ago, when the lawyers were allowed to arrive earlier and stay longer. Back then, our arrival used to coincide with the national anthem. At precisely 7.55 a.m. each day the siren sounds on the tannoy, giving the five-minute warning. At eight the world comes to a halt and the soldiers stand rigid, saluting the nearest flag until the anthem is over. One of the soldiers explained to me that if you get inside, you don’t have to take part in the ritual and you can go about your business. At the siren there is a rush to get into a building.

Now we are not allowed to arrive before 9 a.m.

Visiting in Camp Echo feels like school, in a way. There is no going to the ‘latrine’ without permission and an escorting soldier. So I make a last visit to the toilet on the way in, with the hope of holding out. Inside the men’s toilet are the uniforms of the ERF squad piled up on the left of the door, ready in case they are needed in Camp Echo. ‘To be ERFed’ has entered the Guantánamo lexicon. The Emergency Reaction Force is sent in to control unruly prisoners. My clients call it the ‘Extreme Repression Force’, and describe how five soldiers come rushing into their calls with shackles and brandishing pepper spray. The uniforms are black boiler suits, with hard plastic breastplates and Darth Vader helmets. The pile of uniforms remind me that the verb ‘to ERF’ is very real. Omar Deghayes knows all about that. He’s originally from Libya, but he has lived most of his life in England, a refugee. He was badly abused before he got to Guantánamo, but the long-lasting damage has happened here. He got ERFed and they rubbed pepper spray repeatedly into his eyes. He already had a childhood injury to his right eye, where the patient work of a Swiss doctor saved his sight. Now that eye is a milky white and Omar sees only gradations of light. The flickering neon lights, never turned off, cause him constant pain.

I go into the camp and wait. In the early days, when the guards prepared the client for a visit, the prisoner used to be called a ‘package’. The static on the radio would tell us when the ‘package’ was ready. Thankfully, we have moved on. Now the prisoners have been elevated to numbers and the guards are identified in the same way. The lawyers had protested that it was impossible to bring complaints against those who used excessive force, since none of them had tags. It amuses me, in a childish way, to play snap with the prisoners and guards, trying to match their numbers.

Five years since they arrived here, fewer than half of the prisoners have met a lawyer. Today there are three lawyers waiting to be allowed in. The guards live a monotonous life and most are friendly. One tells me he saw a report on CNN recently where I had said most of the military were decent people consigned to a terrible task. He smiles as he asks me whether he is one of the bastards doing a terrible job.

Another confides that he has been told to keep his distance from the lawyers, as we are deemed ‘the enemy’. I am curious about the Cuban minefield that apparently still separates the naval base from the Cuban communists. The 75,000 mines on the American side were finally removed in 2000, under orders from President Clinton. ‘Every now and then you hear an explosion at night,’ says the soldier. ‘Those are Cubans trying to escape to freedom.’ I laugh. I assume he is kidding me. There have been at least five Cuban deaths in the minefield (the skeletal remains were dubbed, simply, ‘Fence Jumper’), but the last one was thirty years ago. He is serious. I suggest that any mine that goes off probably signals the demise of an errant iguana. He is clearly unhappy. I am a cynic and he does not talk to me again for several days.

A guard comes over and takes off his hat, putting it on the table. To remind him of his mission, he has taken a black marker to the inner rim: ‘Al Qaeda are Pussies’.

Finally the time comes to see the first client. As we go in there is a cooler of Freedom Springs water bottles on ice, the name fluttering on an American flag. A soldier tells us to strip off the plastic wrapper before passing a bottle to the prisoners, since they might be offended by the US flag. I smile. This is a new story. Last time they told me that the label should be taken off because otherwise the prisoners would desecrate Old Glory. Desecrating the flag reduces many Americans to spluttering apoplexy.

I spend the day talking to clients, normally one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Gaining the clients’ trust is not easy. When we finally won the right for counsel to visit the prisoners the military tried to outflank us. They began by sending in interrogators pretending to be lawyers. Yusuf, one of my clients, was just a kid when he was turned over to the US military in Pakistan. He is smart and has taught himself English as he has grown up over the past four years, but as he tells me the story of his interrogators he is childlike again. One female interrogator insisted she was there to represent him and told him about the cases she had taken to the US Supreme Court. She told him she would be his mother for as long as he was in Guantánamo. Yusuf seemed unsure whether to believe her.

The military has adopted various duplicitous tactics. They told the prisoners that all their lawyers were Jewish, relying on perceived Muslim prejudices to drive a wedge between us.

‘So you’re Jewish,’ says my client Shaker Aamer, with some accusation in his voice as soon as I enter the visitation cell. I am taken aback. Whenever I visit the base I plan for what could go wrong, yet some surprise always slaps me about the head. My father didn’t get around to telling me that he was Jewish until I was thirty-seven years old. How could Shaker know? Technically, in a matrilineal society it would have to be my mother for me to qualify, but that is not a point worth debating. Shaker and I discuss my ethnicity. Ultimately we agree that a shared Semitic background between the Jew and the Muslim is probably a good thing, and it is the Cornish half of me that he should worry about.

The next military gambit was arguably even sillier. ‘They have been saying . . .’ Usama Abu Kabir hesitates, not wanting to go on. Usama is another client from Jordan.

‘Tell me!’ I smile at him, curious.

‘They say . . . they said to another of your clients . . . he said . . . the interrogators have been saying . . .’ By this time Usama is scarlet. He is a courteous man, unworldly in some ways.

‘Come on, Usama, spit it out. I want to know what they’re saying! You know it isn’t going to be true.’

‘Well . . . that you like having sex with men!’ He finally gets it out.

Of course, I want to say that it should make no difference to him. I can’t afford to, as so many of my clients here have been brought up in conservative Islamic countries, and we don’t have time for a debate. I have to wave my wedding ring about and issue a denial. Meanwhile, there are some entirely valid reasons for the prisoners to mistrust their lawyers. What is to distinguish the lawyer in the eyes of the client after years of deception? To represent a prisoner here you must be an American citizen. ‘Hi! I’m from America and I’m here to help you.’

When a prisoner has a legal visit it is called a ‘reservation’, the same euphemism used for interrogation sessions. An American, who says he is a lawyer, comes in to see the prisoner, wanting to get the client’s version of events. ‘So, tell me, is it true that you went to Afghanistan to fight jihad? The lawyer is hard to distinguish from an interrogator.

Some lawyers actually tell their clients that the meetings are confidential, protected by the attorney–client privilege from the snooping ears of others. The prisoners laugh to think that anyone could be so soft in the head as to make promises like this. Everyone knows that there are cameras in the cell and microphones by the door. When you buzz to be let out, the guards can hear you whether you hold down the button or not. So they can listen in whenever they like. There are other problems that the lawyers accidentally bring on themselves. One showed up to see a client for the first time, not knowing that the firm was paying $1,500 a day for a translator who had previously worked for the US Department of Defense. The same prisoner had previously been introduced to the same translator by an interrogator working with US military intelligence. The only difference now was this man saying he was a lawyer.

Once gained, it is easy to lose your client’s trust. The little world of Guantánamo Bay is a conspiracy theory in a goldfish bowl. Even routine legal rules that apply in any American case stir up problems among prisoners who have little idea of Western culture. For example, a lawyer is never allowed to file a lawsuit seeking a prisoner’s freedom without permission of either the client, or a ‘next friend’ – someone close enough to him to act in his best interests. Obviously, the first option is not available, as all the prisoners who still need lawyers are being held incommunicado in Cuba and lawyers have no way of asking whether they want help. I spent several weeks travelling around the Middle East tracking down prisoners’ family members, offering to find legal assistance for their sons and brothers in Guantánamo. Normally, the families would respond gladly, signing the forms necessary for us to file the legal papers. At the same time they would give me letters and family pictures to take to Guantánamo, to try to prove my connection to a prisoner’s family.

The wife of one Middle Eastern prisoner gave me written authorization to help her husband, and told me about his background.

‘Why involve my wife in all this?’ the prisoner complained, angrily when I met him. ‘Why do you get her in trouble because I am here?’ She had provided an affidavit which included Western aspects of his life, to refute the US military’s view that he was a bearded Islamic extremist. He used to watch every Jean-Claude Van Damme film ever made and wore his hair long, emulating his cinema idol. When he saw the statement he became even more angry. ‘You are making me out to be a bad Muslim!’ he said.

The clients’ suspicions go far deeper than this. Sometimes a ‘reservation’ for a lawyer visit is worse than interrogation. One person I visited was Jamal Kiyemba. He is originally from Uganda, but he lived in England from the age of fourteen. He is quiet and well behaved, so the military generally kept him in Camp Four, where the conditions were relatively favourable. He lived in a cell block with ten other people and was allowed out into a common area during the day. When he was first brought over for a legal visit, the military moved him to Camp Echo ten days before I was due to arrive to see him.

‘Camp Echo is the most lonely place on earth,’ he wrote. ‘I was all alone for ten days. They brought me over here, they would not let me take my Qur’an and they put me in an isolation cell with nothing. There is no way to talk to any other prisoner, you’re not meant to talk to the guards. There is a camera and microphones in the cell to make sure this is obeyed. The camera seems to shrink the cell and make you paranoid. Showers and recreation were greatly limited – I got to go into the outside cage once for half an hour in six days and got one shower. If I complain about Camp Echo, I am told that it is the lawyer’s fault. If I did not have to come for a legal visit, I would not be treated like this.’

One client was held in solitary confinement in Camp Echo for eleven days after I left as well. I have never tried spending two weeks all alone, not knowing whether it would stretch into a month. Would it be worth a few hours with some lawyer who has failed to get me freedom, or even the promise of a fair trial?

I have dual British and American nationality, but I grew up near Cambridge. Because I have an English accent, I am taken less frequently for a CIA agent than many of my colleagues. But even this does not spell trust. Some prisoners have coherent theories about how the lawyers are dupes for Donald Rumsfeld, despite their good intentions. After all, what good does a lawyer do? By the fifth anniversary of the Guantánamo prison, there had been more than 750 prisoners held there, 350 of whom had been dribbled back home by the Bush Administration, generally as quietly as possible. Not one had been ordered out of prison by a judge. Some prisoners think that the US has let lawyers into the prison solely to make the government look good. These prisoners view lawyers in the same light as they see the International Committee of the Red Cross – the ICRC has been visiting ever since the prison opened in January 2002, yet they are not allowed to report any of the abuses to the outside world. It makes the military look good that it allows supposedly free access to the ICRC inspectors, but what good does it achieve for the prisoners?

Often, I talk with my client about the coercion and torture he has suffered at the hands of the US military. Most of the soldiers at the base seem to accept the Guantánamo reality without blinking; a minority have qualms that this is all un-American. It is always a long day. With some clients I have to speak my questionable French and even bring my dubious Italian into play. We laugh a good deal, but I think half the time they are laughing at my accent and goodness only knows what they understand about their legal rights. How many visits will it take for me to be able to win someone’s trust in a foreign language?

At 4.30 I have to leave. I reflect as I walk out. It is not surprising that the prisoners I see today are depressed. They have good reason. The soldiers are depressed too. One military escort grumbles how life is so boring at the base, he’d rather be in Iraq. I like him. He has it tough, stranded away from his wife and children for almost a year, unable to help with the escalating problems of the kids’ adolescence. He’s done over a decade in the military, but it is still a long way till he would reach that twenty-year retirement date. He thinks it’s time he got out for good.

We are driving away from the camp when the escort applies his brakes hard. We sit without moving.

‘Is he completely off yet? I can’t see,’ the escort asks. There is an irritated horn behind us. It must be some neophyte to the island. Surely anyone else would know that a traffic jam on one of the two main roads of the base can only be caused by one thing: an iguana, unhurriedly making for the side of the road, perhaps – as in this case – pausing to turn a lazy and distinctly supercilious eye on the waiting vehicles.

En route back to the ferry landing, we stop at the NEX, the Navy Exchange. Posters advertise the imminent visit of Miss Teen USA, a reminder that the overwhelming majority of the soldiers are male. One escort remarks that the base is full of horny young men: ninety per cent of the base are male, he says, and as for the rest, half the women are lesbians.

‘That don’t leave much for the rest of ’em,’ he says. I cannot pluck up the courage to ask how many of his macho marine buddies are gay. I don’t want to offend him and I know I have yet to convince him that I am not a communist. Up to now, he has been suspending his disbelief, allowing his friendliness and good manners to govern our relationship.

I am surprised that the US military does not treat its own soldiers better. The soldiers work four days in five. They are up at 4 a.m., at the camp by 6 a.m. and they work until 6 p.m. Then they have to go on a training run before dinner and sleep. They cannot bring their families to the base and when they do get leave to visit their children every six months, many of them have to pay their own way back to the mainland. There is a new company running the chow hall, Del-Jen. Someone is making a lot of money out of this, but the quality of the chow hall food is notably worse than last time I was here. Every soldier I meet has a calendar, checking off the days.

At one of the shops there are some T-shirts hanging outside. The escort says they used to have some bad ones, but the PR people made them stop selling them when the media came on a visit. There are still plenty on offer that might offend someone of ordinary sensibilities. I cannot resist a Lilliputian shirt for my seven-year-old nephew that says ‘Future Behavior Modification Instructor’. I am not sure whether I will be liable if he beats up my brother. There is a new one I had not previously seen: ‘Taliban Towers: A Five Star Resort’. Then there is the old staple, the ‘Guantánamo Golf Course’ T-shirt, which will be a curiosity at my mother’s club in Suffolk.

We get back in the van to head down to the ferry landing. I almost don’t notice the iguana that is relaxing in the late-afternoon shade beside the tarmac as we drive by. He was well clear of danger really, but as I look back through the rear window of the van, I see him scurry away towards a hole.

I also see two police cruisers. They follow us closely. We pass the speed detector sign that shows us hovering at the maximum twenty-five miles per hour. Just when I think we might be safe, their flashing red and blue comes on, ordering our escort to the side of the road.

One military policeman comes directly to the passenger side while the second, following procedure, stands off to the side, his right hand on his gun. The escort opens the van door.

‘You came awful close to that iguana back there,’ the officer says officiously.

‘Yes, sir, it was in the shade, it was hard to see,’ our friendly escort replies.

‘I watched him run off into a drain, so he wasn’t dead, I guess, but it was awful close,’ says the policeman. ‘You know how serious that could have been.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, you be more careful in future, you hear?’

‘Yes, sir.’

And the two policemen leave, each in his separate vehicle.

‘What a shit!’ says a second escort, also with us in the van. ‘Like they’ve got nothing better to do.’

The rest of the drive is uneventful, just five minutes to the landing. The ferry has stopped for the day, so in the evening we take a faster boat back across the bay. Strangely, it’s called the U-boat. It stands for ‘utility’. Waiting for it to leave, I walk over to the plaque thirty yards away. This is where Christopher Columbus anchored on his second trip, on 30 April 1494. He found nothing of interest in Guantánamo – no water, let alone gold – and left the next morning.

The trip back across the bay takes no more than ten minutes. We skirt behind a rusty Cuban tanker listing out to sea from the communist Guantánamo City. Snapping at her heels like a sheepdog, a fifteen-foot US Navy boat patrols, machine guns at the ready.

As I walk back up the hill to the CBQ, the iguanas eye me balefully. An exquisite scarlet and white butterfly bounces in the turbulence as a pick-up truck passes by. I am smiling to myself, thinking about the guard who searched me at the camp today. He was patting me down and he patted down my arm. That might have been more reasonable if It were not for my short sleeves. I walk past a parked Island Mechanical truck, with its bumper sticker: ‘If 10% is enough for God, it’s enough for the IRS’ (the Internal Revenue Service).

Four Humvees pass by on patrol, machine guns trained in different directions. The last one has a soldier with a rifle aiming backwards. As the armoured vehicles drive away, for perhaps a quarter of a mile, his rifle aims constantly at my chest. I think how my mother told me never to point even a toy gun at a person. I have time to ponder the nervous habits of bored people, and wonder whether he is clicking the safety catch on and off, on and off. It is unsettling.

Endless tiny orange crabs scout their way across the road. They make the walk uncomfortable, as I have to concentrate to avoid adding to the orange smears of their predecessors. There is a banana rat on its back, staring at the blue evening sky, its stomach tipping out into the grass. Seven buzzards stand at attention, ugly in a circle, each waiting for a turn.

Up at the CBQ I change into shorts for a walk down to the sea. There is a dirt road that turns away through the metal fencing. Banana rat droppings are scattered like the pits of kalamata olives. Yellow flowers, counterfeit cowslips, are blooming along the roadside in the tall grass.

Chapman Beach is the first I come to, well kept military style, with concrete changing rooms so solid that they would stop a tank invasion. Only the Navy could have brought a crane round on a barge and moved massive boulders into a semicircle, creating a pool that is safe from any encroaching sharks. There is a concrete diving area, too, and the water is warmer in December than the English Channel in July. I walk along the cliff towards the airport, to Hidden Beach. Here the red sign warns of dangerous currents and prohibits swimming. To emphasise the point there is a memorial to RMC Billy Armstrong Henry: ‘He gave his life attempting to Rescue Another, 17 March 1986’. There is a Del-Jen barrel – ‘We Recycle: No Trash’ – at the top of sixty-three well-tended wooden steps down to the cove below. Several geckos scamper out of the way as I clamber down through the pine trees.

The beach is remarkable: an infinity of fossilised shells and coral thrown up in a bank by the storms. Here and there, flotsam: a ‘Comfort’ shoe sole, some plastic spoons and forks, and a blue pen top. Going further along the cliff I come to Midway Beach, where the sign allows some snorkelling – ‘Buddy System Required’. Visitors are admonished that ‘Alcoholic Beverages are permitted from Sunrise to Sunset only’. This time there are no stairs down and I am a little paranoid as I walk through the high grass to the cliff, remembering the large black snake that was waiting for me outside the CBQ motel one morning. I walk as noisily as I can, only as far as the cliff’s edge. My approach has troubled the large iguana on an outcrop below. He freezes and seems to survey the steep rocks that clamber down to the high tide. The snail crabs vanish inside their shells, hidden like limpets.

I come to the furthest reach of my walk and turn for home. Dusk is coming. Daring to come out for his dinner, another banana rat looks at me from twenty yards away. Lonely for someone to talk to, I greet him. But he is scared. He humps off like a chubby camel, ungainly, into the deeper scrub.

Rusty barbed wire from an earlier era, perhaps World War Two, pokes over the top of the grass. The evening birds use it for rest. As I walk back, I think of the conversation I had with one of the escorts, a black man from the Deep South. He understands the prisoners’ plight here better than most and even joins in with the lawyers when we talk about the prison. He tells me of his retirement dream: how the military should itself retire from Guantánamo, so that he can come back here and run a Caribbean resort. It has the name recognition and it has the facilities: a major airport, the motel and the beaches. In a canvas of reds, the sky silhouettes the cacti and thorn bushes seem aflame. It is disarmingly beautiful after a long day on the bleak military base. I always take a walk, as that hour helps to evaporate the melancholy that descends on me as I walk out of the prison.

The tannoy crackles to life again. It’s time for the bugle to blare the Retreat, the slightly defeatist end to every Guantánamo day. When I get back to my room I turn on the television. Still blurred, it is the US Paintball Championships, the Hurricanes versus XSV (pronounced Excessive). I recognise the inflatable shapes I saw earlier in the Guantánamo recreation grounds. The obstacles are the same: the ‘doll house’, the ‘car wash’ and the ‘snake’. They are being spattered with paint in Miami, as the teams battle it out. ‘Two brothers on the field,’ said the commentator excitedly, ‘with a combined eighteen years in paintball. XSV are now down two bodies, it’s three on five.’ I go to sleep thinking about this place. Al-Qaeda means ‘The Base’ in Arabic. Guantánamo means ‘The Naval Base’ here. One of the military defence lawyers has developed his own response when a soldier confronts him with ‘Honor Bound, sir!’ He returns the salute sardonically: ‘To defend the US Constitution’.

Guantánamo should consider a change of motto.