None of the jailers would answer questions about the war. Commander Timby in his clean surgical ward and Lieutenant Colonel Pamela Hart, the guide and facilitator for our little group of reporters: they were not tasked to handle politics. Matters of that kind were deferred until the climax of our visit to the base, an interview with Major General Miller, the commandant, at the end of our three-day tour. After we had been led to an understanding of the mechanics of Guantanamo, he would help us with the meaning. In the meantime, we were not to bother soldiers with politics. “Our mission is detention operations,” said cookery specialist Sergeant Mendez, standing beside a large box of dehydrated mashed potatoes, “not policy questions.”

You have to wonder how a fifteen-year-old Canadian with multiple gunshot wounds would cope with all this, asking for toilet paper every time he needed it, waiting for his dinner to slide through a slot in the door. Perhaps he’d traded up by co-operating with his interrogators. If so, he might now be in medium security, where inmates may keep a supply of toilet paper, use a walled-in toilet under observation, be allowed outside for several hours every day, eat their meals outside; they are issued white uniforms rather than orange ones, and are allowed to talk with the American guards. In the separate Camp Iguana, juvenile prisoners lived together, ate together, attended lessons together, watched videotapes (Call of the Wild, Free Willy), and could look out over the sea through a gap in the green fence, but it seems that in spite of his age Omar Khadr was never housed in Camp Iguana. (In any case, at the end of January the last three of the juveniles held at Camp Iguana were sent home and the unit was decommissioned.)

The officers in charge of the Joint Detention and Operations Group are proud of the quality of their service. The 177th Brigade from Taylor, Michigan, has as part of its mission the preparation of high-quality food for the soldiers and the inmates – the two menus are composed of the same ingredients but cooked differently to respond to different palates, and constantly improved. (“We are adjusting the level of the condiments down a little for the detainees — a little too much curry for their taste.”)

The medical officers at the camp’s clinic and hospital are proud of the quality of their service. “When we started we got a lot of war traumas, shrapnel, gunshot. Now it’s sports injuries, upset stomachs.”

What about stress? They’re in here for months, years, they don’t know when they’ll be released, if they will ever be released.

“There is some stress, some trouble sleeping, depression, suicide attempts — nobody’s died but one man has been in intensive care for a year, a self-strangulation,” say the medical officers. “Sometimes we provide psychotherapy through a translator. Their weights vary. We track that. This is the best health care they’ve had in their lives.”

“We don’t want the detainees to stay one more day than they must,” said Major General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the Guantanamo base. Miller was our policy man, fully briefed and authorized to give us a tip-top explanation of the legal, procedural, and political aspects of the Guantanamo camp. He endured a conference once a week with a new collection of reporters. (He’d recently gone to Iraq, where he urged that prison guards be allowed to “set the conditions” for extracting information from detainees. In late April, after the shocking images from Abu Ghraib prison surfaced, Miller took over all U.S.-run prisons in Iraq.)

Miller was framed in the television lenses against the main sally port for the maximum-security camp. He was crisp and forceful and not used to argument. The man from Die Zeit was in the mood for an argument. He wanted the general to admit that some of his prisoners were worthy opponents.

“These are enemy combatants captured in an ongoing global war on terror. They are suspected terrorists, or suspected of supporting terrorism,” Major General said, clearly wanting to move on.

The lady from the Basque magazine Avui looked more agreeable. But Die Zeit wasn’t letting go. “So you don’t think they are in their way very courageous and brave people?”