In vivid detail, Jason Leopold describes daily life for both the detainees and guards at the facility. He stood without a word, surveying the scene outside, where Army guards were unloading containers from a van and stacking them onto a dolly.
Inside were Styrofoam clamshells that held the morning's breakfast meals - cereal, fruit and nutrition bars that soon would be rejected and tossed into the garbage. A few hundred feet away, beyond the razor-wired fence, buses dropped off dozens of nameless Army guards reporting for a new day of duty at Gitmo. Electric wands wielded by other soldiers scanned the guards' bodies for contraband, which could be anything from a weapon to an unauthorized food product to an iPod.
The smokers among them dropped their butane lighters into a cement planter before crossing into the forbidden zone. The bearded man looked toward the American flag hanging like a portrait on the guard tower, and then he looked at me, standing there with pad and pen at the ready, hoping to discern some essential truth about this mysterious place. Raising his left arm, the man in the window gave me a "thumbs down" sign, repeating the gesture over and over again.
Then he disappeared into his cell. The military escorts could not - or would not - identify the bearded man. To them, he was just one of "unprivileged belligerents," a euphemism President Barack Obama adopted during his first term to replace "enemy combatant" used by George W. Bush to describe the men held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
But it was difficult to see anything other than a human being in the window that morning in mid-May - a man expressing his thoughts, presumably, about being locked in a cage for what likely was more than a decade in captivity. Morning prayers had just ended in Camp 5, a ritual that few outsiders have witnessed. Earlier, at 4 a. Our little entourage included a reporter and photographer from CNN and a photographer from Time magazine. We entered the detention camp and were led to Bravo block, where the prisoners were still sleeping, unaware of our presence.
