WITNESS: Guantanamo in the beginning

Angus MacSwan has worked as a correspondent for Reuters for 24 years, reporting from Latin America, the United States, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and the Balkans.

Angus MacSwan has worked as a correspondent for Reuters for 24 years, reporting from Latin America, the United States, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and the Balkans. Now an editor in London, he was Miami bureau chief when the Guantanamo prison camp was opened. In the following story, he recalls what he saw in January 2002.

By Angus MacSwan

LONDON (Reuters) - When the first Guantanamo prisoners were led off a plane from Afghanistan and locked in open-air cages, it was clear to us conditions would be harsh. Just how notorious Guantanamo would become was not obvious.

Back then, the United States enjoyed world sympathy and support. It was still reeling from the September 11, 2001, attacks on its cities just four months earlier.

Over the next seven years until Thursday when new U.S. President Barack Obama ordered the prison camp to be closed, Guantanamo came to symbolize the dark side of President George W. Bush's "War on Terror": torture and prisoner abuse, disdain for international law, and the erosion of the United States' moral standing.

"We have no intention of making it comfortable," task force commander Marine Brigadier General Michael Lehnert told reporters at Guantanamo just before the first captured al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters arrived in January 2002.

"It will be humane," he said.

Soon after the Pentagon announced its plan to hold prisoners from the new war at the Cuban outpost, the U.S. Southern Command took a group of reporters from Miami to see the preparations.

We flew in on a military flight from Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Puerto Rico, the only way to reach the base.

I expected prefabricated huts being erected to house the prisoners. So it was a surprise to see their accommodation was to be 6ft by 8ft (1.8 by 2.4 meter) chain-link cages, open to the elements and mosquitoes, with just a mat for comfort.

Spotlights would be kept on all night, we were told. The cages were surrounded by barbed wire, watchtowers, guards and dogs. This was Camp X-Ray.

The reports filed that afternoon through the base post office were the first word to the general public about the exact conditions. Alarm bells rang in the human rights community.

That night, the military said the first 20 prisoners were due to be shipped over from Kandahar, Afghanistan, and that we must leave Guantanamo on the next flight out.

After a day of wrangling between the Pentagon and editors, a few of us were allowed to stay to witness the arrival.

On January 11, 2002 -- four months to the day after 9/11 -- a C-141 transporter landed on a runway flanked by the Caribbean Sea on one side and cactus-covered scrubland on the other.

A helicopter gunship, a squad of U.S. Marines and a busload of military policemen made up the welcoming committee.

We watched from a hillock as the prisoners were led off the plane one by one and loaded into a bus with blacked-out windows. They wore orange jump suits -- soon to become an enduring image of Guantanamo from a picture taken by a U.S. Navy photographer.

U.S. army officials called the group of prisoners "the toughest of the tough."

"We asked for the bad guys first," Lehnert had said.

All were handcuffed, some were in leg chains. They also wore blindfold goggles, and face masks to guard against tuberculosis.

A few struggled and most looked disorientated after the 8,000-mile, 27-hour flight. We couldn't tell if they had any clue where they were.

They were driven away to Camp X-Ray, where they started an indefinite stay, denied prisoner of war status under the Geneva Convention or due process under U.S. law.

A hard-faced military police colonel assured us the next morning that they had spent a comfortable first night.

ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER

The TV pictures shown across the world of the prisoners coming off the plane were ironically taken from a Cuban army watchtower, filmed by members of the foreign press corps based in Havana. The U.S. military had banned our group inside the base from filming or taking photographs.

From the start, there had seemed something incongruous about the U.S. Naval Base in the corner of a tropical Caribbean island taking a role in a war against Islamic fundamentalists from Asia and the Middle East.

Set up in the Spanish-American war of 1898, "Gitmo" became a Cold War frontline after the Cuban revolution in 1959.

A little slice of America, with a golf course and McDonalds, separated from communist Cuba by minefields and barbed wire, it had taken on a rather forlorn air in later years as the U.S. military reduced its presence there.

A week after returning to Miami from Guantanamo, I went back across the Florida Straits to Havana for a rare interview with National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon, pointman for Cuba's relations with the United States.

Alarcon had a message -- Cuba saw the Guantanamo business as an opportunity for improving its strained ties with Washington.

"The militaries of both sides may cooperate and coordinate and have established a kind of detente around Guantanamo... why not the two countries?" he said.

That never did transpire. As grim stories emerged about the treatment of prisoners, Cuba joined the chorus of international condemnation of the camp.

Reports from rights groups told of forced feeding of hunger strikers, of interrogation methods such as waterboarding which verged on torture. Few prisoners were brought to trial.

That first group may or not have been the toughest of the tough. But over the years, some of the more than 750 prisoners who passed through were found to be innocent travelers, teenagers, old men, or victims of bounty hunters as well as militants. They did not include Osama bin Laden.

(Editing by Sara Ledwith)