CAIRO, April 29, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) – Prisoners at the US Guantanamo jail in Cuba have found solace in secretly fashioning a small garden at the arid detention center, seeing the light at the end of the tunnel despite the hard times, a British newspaper reported Saturday, April 29.
The existence of the garden - prohibited by the US jailers - was revealed by the Boston-based lawyer Sabin Willett who was informed of it by one of his clients held at the notorious prison since 2002, according to The Independent.
"I could not believe it," he told the daily.
"I knew they had no tools. If you take in court papers you have to take the staples out. The look on his face as he told me how they had unscrewed the mop handles and used buckets of water [to build the garden] was something wonderful.
The handful of prisoners have reportedly produced sufficient earth to grow watermelon, peppers, garlic, cantaloupe and even a tiny lemon plant, no more than two inches high with their bare hands and the most basic of tools.
"They have had to take the seeds from their meals and then scratch at the soil in order to get that going," Willett said. "These people have been put in such a hellish situation and yet, somehow, they have found a way to create life, literally."
The US holds in Guantanamo some 500 detainees, mostly scooped up in Afghanistan, incommunicado.
The Pentagon said last week that around 140 prisoners had been reclassified and were no longer considered "enemy combatants."
Revelations of torture, mistreatment and desecration of the Noble Qur’an by its jailers to "soften" detainees have sparked a global outrage at the US, whose image was badly sullied by the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib.
Amnesty International called the prison the "gulag of our time" and said it has become a "symbol of abuse and represents a system of detention that is betraying the best US values and undermines international standards."
"Seed of Hope"
The UK-based campaign group Reprieve has urged people around the world to send them seeds which they will in turn seek to send to the prisoners, in a symbolic call for shutting down the prison and give the inmates a taste of freedom.
"The massive might of the US military is intent on holding prisoners in an environment that is stripped of comfort, humanity, beauty and even law. Yet the prisoners held there have overcome this with a plastic spoon and a lemon seed. It is the beginning of the end of Guantanamo Bay," Reprieve's legal director, Clive Stafford Smith, said on the group's website.
The UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva pressed in a February report for the closure of the detention center, saying acts committed against detainees amount to torture.
Chief among the Guantanamo critics are former US presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who both called on the Bush administration to shut down the prison to demonstrate to the world America's commitment to human rights.
In one of the sharpest attack on the prison, Democrat Senator **** Durbin compared interrogation practices at Guantanamo with methods used by the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot in Cambodia.
Defying the mounting pressures at home and abroad, the administration decided in June to expand the prison.
The 30-million-dollar contract was awarded to Kellogg Brown and Root Services Inc., a subsidiary of the controversial oil services giant Halliburton, once led by US Vice-President **** Cheney.