Guantánamo Diary: Clive Stafford Smith reports from Guantánamo Bay on his ninth visit to see his clients

14.03.2006

There is now a certain familiarity about coming back to Guantánamo Bay to visit my clients. This is my ninth trip. The sun is just up as I walk down to the Chow Hall, where the toilet that was out of order five months ago has not been fixed. The same television programmes seem to be playing, unchanged, the same stories.

It is Armed Forces Network on again this morning. A high school teacher in Somewhere, USA, has compared George Bush to Adolf Hitler and the panel members are asking each other whether they could ever send their children to such a school. There is a phone-in to answer today's question: Freedom of Speech or Unfit to Teach? It is clear which side the panel comes down on, but most callers suggest that the teacher should be given a second chance before facing the firing squad.

They take a break from breakfast chatter for the next episode of Combat Camera. The theme tune from James Bond crescendos to introduce the show. My first reaction is that it may be unwise to encourage the troops to carry their own camera, in the age of Abu Ghraib. But the lieutenant colonel presenting the segment recounts a tale of local informants who have identified a mound of recently dug soil. Amid proud exclamations - "Strike gold!" and "Hit the Jackpot!" - he tells how they have dug up 1,954 rounds of ammunition.

A Nascar advertisement follows. Two drivers talk about how they put on uniforms when they drive their Formula One cars around the track but, they say, soldiers don their uniforms every day as heroes. It is stirring stuff, although I am not sure I could watch this all day.

I walk down to the ferry as usual on First Street - past Avenue A, which cuts across to the only other road on this side of the base, Second Street. A drainpipe sticks up out of a mound of earth, perhaps some kind of century-old bunker; the rusted coils of barbed wire are of a more recent vintage, perhaps world war two. Cacti hold their arms up in surrender, 16ft into the air. Yellow Caribbean flowers, like cowslips, tangle the mesh fence beside the airport. I count 18 blackbirds pecking in the grass.

There is a dead banana rat in the middle of the road. Six buzzards eye me suspiciously. They are loath to leave their own breakfast, but I am coming too close, and they kangaroo-hop away, malevolent eyes bulging out of their angry red turkey-faces, knowing that I mean to steal their meal. I can see the blank stare of the banana rat's expired eyes. His body has been completely stolen, leaving only the rubbery inside of his fur, and the bones of his forelegs. As I walk on, an ambulance passes by, the driver eying me in the mirror as he spits on the tarmac. The buzzards finally retrieve their spoils.

I have learned a new fact: banana rats are not named for their dietary preference, but because their feces look like small versions of the fruit. It seems a little unfair ... they didn't name humans that way. The aluminium wrapped around the trunks of the trees around here is to stop them climbing onto the branches that overhang the picnic tables, dropping small bananas on the troops beneath.

Across the bay, the escort picks me up in a military bus that looks old style, perhaps pre-Castro, but has a 2004 tag on the front. Driving down towards the camp along Recreation Road, I notice that there is no graffiti on the rocky hill to the right. It used to be covered with assertions of fairly basic lust among the soldiers, and for a moment I wonder whether some poor private had to scrub it from valley to hilltop. But, looking closer, it has all been coated in green spray paint, ready for the media tour.

Its seems strange, but by now I have visited Camp Echo many more times than the young guard who lets us in. After searching the bags, he insists on reading the rules out yet again. He says there is only one occasion when we are authorised to go near the central control booth, but I cannot make out the word that follows: is that during our "introduction" tour or our "indoctrination" tour? I thought it was a Freudian slip, but when I take a look at the rule sheet, it really is "indoctrination". They're not too good at PR, these military folks.

The guard follows me into the men's toilet. He loiters. I think maybe he is getting some shade from the rising sun, but he does it again when I have to be escorted to the use the bathroom later, feeling like the schoolboy, asking permission. What mischief does he think I am going to commit in among the lavatories?

Inside, my client Ahmed Errachidi is shackled more heavily than normal. The authorities say he trained as a terrorist in Afghanistan during July 2001, and they call him "the General", But, back in England, a researcher has just located the witnesses and records that prove his story: he worked in London as a chef for 18 years and when he was meant to be tossing hand grenades he was cooking eggs at the Westbury Hotel. "The cook has become the General; the crack of an egg has become the explosion of a bomb," as Ahmed likes to put it.

His hands are shackled in a new blue box with Hiatt Thompson written on it. They dig into his wrists. This never ceases to piss me off. Hiatt is a Birmingham business, making money off the misery of a London chef. The indentations barely fade over the three hours I talk to him.

That evening, I go out to dinner with one of the military lawyers. We go to the Jerk House, friendly and Jamaican. Two soldiers come in to order, one with an ostentatious pistol, the other with his rifle over his shoulder. Why? I wonder, in the past quarter century, whether any bullet has been fired in anger on the base, let alone in the Jerk House.

I'll be glad to go home in the morning.