>>> this is one of the first newspaper stories ever written about the american prison our government decided to set up in communist prison.
"a new alcatraz rises: guantanamo ready for taliban eye ". the goal to treat people at that
prison as follows: it will be humane but we have no intense of making it comfortable. that was carol rosenberg's. it was her first story about guantanamo bay as a prison camp . her story today was about how the american medical association has written to the pentagon to protest the force feeding of the hundred prisoners at guantanamo who are now prisoners there. carol has been called the institutional memory of guantanamo . it is a statement i agree with and she joys us tonight. thank you so much for being here.
>> thank you.
>> you have been a lifeline for a lot of us in terms of understanding what's going on there, even when nobody else has been willing to pay attention. you were last there about ten days ago. you should you have none condition there is this austere since president obama took office. what did you have mean by that?
>> communal was the norm, meaning that groups of detainees, 8, 10, 12, got to eat together, pray together, watch tv together. the vast majority were considered to be communal captives kept in medium security confinement the guards were on the outside looking in, the detainees were on the inside organizing their own lives. when i went back down there about ten days ago after this raid, virtually every detainee down there is under lockdown, one man to a cell, kept inside as many as 22 hours a day, can be all day if he refuses recreation. the way he got to recreation before during the earlier part of the obama years until last month, he walked outside his cell, he went outside to a yard and the guards would be keeping an eye on him. now to leave that cell and go to a recreation yard, he has to be shackled by the hand and feet and led with a guard on each side and put into a cage, a cell. for all but a very few number of detainees down there, that is the norm. we have not seen that for the majority of them for years. and they have not experienced that for years. there were detainees who were considered medium security community detainees throughout much of the obama administration and something has gone terribly wrong. most of guantanamo now is under lockdown.
>> can you tell, i should say, can you tell if the lockdown is because of the prisoners protesting or are the prisoners protesting because of the lockdown? which came first?
>> the protest came first. the lockdown was the result of the guards deciding that they needed to go in and clear off the cameras of the cells. you know, under communal the doors were open to their cells and it was more like dorm room atmosphere. obviously it's a prison, it's not a college but they could come and go themselves with the exception of two hours a might when they were supposed to lock themselves inside. the way they watched is the guards looked through cameras and they could see each of the men in their cells at night during this two-hour period if not more. one by one they covered up their cameras. we're talking about 80, 90, 100 detain years of the 166. they put cereal boxes on their cameras. if you listen to the attorneys, this was considered a sign of distress. they believed their conditions had gotten to be so bad they wanted someone to intervene.
>> so even while they were still living communally, they still felt that conditions were changing and that's what they were protesting about by blocking the cameras.
>> they felt they had lost benefits. there had been in february a shakedown in which the guards went into the individual cells and took many things away. they took, according to the lawyers, legal documents, they took family photos, they took -- i mean, the military said they took electronic equipment that they didn't understand how these detainees had gotten. they took away according to the lawyers wrist watches, which the military said they were not allowed. but two years ago i had seen wrist watches on the detainees and asked about this and was told this was a perk the military had decided to give some individuals.
>> and then they retracted it.
>> and then the guards changed. and they knew rotation of guards came in and whatever they saw in their protocols, whatever they believed circumstances of detention and doctrine should be did not match what they saw going on in the prison and so they started taking things away.
>> so this should be seen both as -- what's going on, this real crisis with all these prisoners refusing food, we should see this as a response to a change in conditions that may be about just differences in opinion in administrative approach toes hes as to how to manage these prison facilities overtime but is it also speech about their extended detention in.
>> the underlying message is frustration. these men have been held here for 11 years. 86 were told about four years ago or 86 of them were designated -- excuse me. 86 of them were designated about four years ago for release with conditions and nothing has happened. so that frustration has boiled up and when this shakedown came, when the new guards arrived, whatever the source of tension was broke -- erupted into this hunger strike . you had a hunger strike going on behind the hidden cameras and guards who felt they couldn't see if people were starving themselves to death in secret, went in, cleared off the cameras, put them in their cells and now can watch them, have complete control over them 24 hours a day . if somebody were to cover up their camera, they'd be alone in a cell, locked inside and the guards have protocols for how to go inside, take the prisoner and clear the camera. so the doctrine allows the guards this total control . but in the process the detainees have lost a quality of life that they've become accustomed to that was seen as a management tool for taking care of people who if poll tex and international affairs had not intruded could have been gone through years ago, could have been taken to their homelands or found another country to resettle them and that some of these men were chosen to be released through reviews, reviews conducted by the cia, the ddia, the fbi, the state department , the justice department looked at the files and said 86 men shouldn't be there, let's find a way to get them out and they haven't gotten them out.
>> they knew they had been adjudicated in that way. the hope that they would leave is then quashed and it's indefinite with no hope of knowing how it's going to end.
>> yes, they don't see a way out.
>> it's amazing.
>> the international and policy consequences of this are playing out in that briefing room today. knowing the connection of the political debates to those on the ground is possible because of your connection here and i'm grateful for that. the country owes the " miami herald " a debt of gratitude for employing her to stay on the guantanamo beat when nobody else would.
>> thank you.
>> i'll be right back.
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