A Decade Of Guantanamo

Few places have done more to conjure up anti-American sentiments, but has Guantanamo aided intelligence gathering?

It has been 10 years since the first detainees were brought to Guantanamo Bay, the US military base in Cuba.

"Guantanamo's single most important distinguishing feature is indefinite military imprisonment without fair process, which remains as true today as it was in 2002. It was set up as a legal blackhole. The majority of the nearly 800 early detainees were never captured anywhere near a battlefield, they were sold for a bounty from places like Pakistan." - Ramzi Kassem, a lawyer representing several current Guantanamo detainees

Despite repeated calls for its closure, it has become a permanent fixture, at least for the foreseeable future, of US national security policy.

Few places do more to conjure up anti-American sentiments than the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, chosen by George Bush, the former US president, as a place to detain and interrogate those the US accuses of terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The 10th anniversary will be marked by demonstrations in London and Washington, while some of the 171 prisoners still in detention there plan to mark the day with sit-ins, banners and a hunger strike.

The centre is controversial because most of the detainees have been held without charge indefinitely.

Out of 779 detainees, only six have been convicted. Most have been released after years in detention.

"There is a significant difference between the conduct of operations at Guantanamo and the larger debate about how the US has conducted the war on terror ... it's very common to [talk] about detention facilities and [discuss] renditions, what the CIA did and the different kinds of policies. Guantanamo is a detention facility run by the Pentagon and is not outside the rule of law." - James Carafano from the Heritage Foundation

And there have been allegations of the torture and inhumane treatment of some of the detainees.