In Guantanamo, the cruel banality of everyday life

LETTER FROM GUANTANAMO

Saturday morning, at the Guantanamo base, it’s beach and swimming. Before the sun is overwhelming, in this too hot Caribbean Sea, it is basically one of the only possible leisure activities on August 28 in the American military enclave located on the island of Cuba. The evening is more lively: it is possible to play tennis on lighted courts, have a game of bowling with your children or have a date, in the chic restaurant on the base with a view of the bay and Parisian engravings.

During the day, it is possible to shop at the duty-free supermarket or buy souvenir mugs or caps in the base colors. In Guantanamo, where six thousand Americans live, including two thousand soldiers, life is a cruel banality: to drink a beer, you have to show your identity card, to prove that you are over 21, a bracelet passed on the wrist gives two telephone numbers, one to be accompanied if you have drunk too much, a second in the event of sexual assault.

Black hole

Everything is ultra-legalistic in this zone symbol of lawlessness: thirty-nine prisoners are still held in this base transformed into a detention center after the attacks of September 11, 2001 in order not to be forced to offer them judicial guarantees. offered by the US Constitution.

At the end of August 2021, nearly twenty years later, the military authorities had invited journalists to attend the indictment of three jihadists accused of having fomented the Indonesian attacks in Bali and Jakarta in 2002 and 2003, the Indonesian Encep Nurjaman and Malaysians Mohammed Nazir Ben Lep and Mohamed Farik Ben Amin. The correspondent of World was accepted without difficulty, but it was necessary to devote a full week to the visit, due to the lack of regular air service.

Article reserved for our subscribers Read also Attacks in Bali and Jakarta: in Guantanamo, a very supervised justice

It was very clear from the start that the press would not see anything of the prison system. At the end of the stay, however, journalists are allowed to walk in the weeds on a small hill overlooking the famous Camp X Ray. Watchtowers, double fences, cages, ruined barracks protected by corrugated iron: this is where the first Afghan captives landed in January 2002, “The worst of the worst” in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, Minister of Defense of George W. Bush, in chains and in orange attire. This camp was closed in 2002, and the detainees transferred for a long time to Camp Delta.

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