WaPo: Invasive frisks, suicide attempts: Three migrants describe Guantnamo detention [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

WaPo - (archived: https://archive.ph/rYmVH) Invasive frisks, suicide attempts: Three migrants describe Guantánamo detention

The men said they were denied calls to loved ones, subjected to humiliating searches and left in isolation for prolonged periods.

Today at 5:00 a.m.

By Silvia Foster-Frau and Ana Vanessa Herrero

He couldn’t tell when the days started and ended within the windowless, peeling yellow four walls of his prison cell in Guantánamo.

Diuvar Uzcátegui kept track of them by putting a small tear in the last, blank page of a Bible after every third meal. The book was given to him by the military guards along with a blanket and a ¾-inch foam pad to sleep on. He went to the bathroom in a bucket connected to a tap in the cell.

And though he couldn’t see his fellow detainees, he could hear them.

Some of the men screamed. Others threatened to kill themselves. One interviewed by The Washington Post said he attempted it.

During his two weeks at the Guantánamo Bay naval station, Uzcátegui, 27, said he was rarely let outside. Both times, he was shackled and placed in what he described as a cage. It was the only sight of the blue Cuban sky he got, so otherworldly it felt like a dream.

/snip