Gitmo day at the beach is anything but

Recently stuck at Guantanamo, I joined a group of my fellow journalists for a beach barbecue near our barracks-style quarters on the sleepy side of this U.S. naval base.

As we grilled burgers and tossed around a football, the sight of the turquoise Caribbean eased my frustration over spending a full day at the isolated, sun-scorched outpost with nothing to do before our flight back to Washington.

I also reminded myself how little I know about waiting for time to pass at Guantanamo.

In the prison camps on the other side of the bay, most of the detainees are confined alone in their cells nearly around the clock — conditions that would drive me crazy after five minutes, let alone the five years and counting that many have spent here.

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BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

During my four visits to Guantanamo Bay, I've caught fleeting glimpses into prison cells, brief glances at what day-to-day life is like for the roughly 300 men held on suspicion of links to terrorism, al-Qaida or the Taliban.

Looking through narrow windows on cell doors, I have seen bearded men frantically pacing and swinging their arms, apparently trying to exercise. They were among the majority of Guantanamo suspects held in the highest-security camps, where detainees get up to two hours a day of recreation time, spent in open-air cages.

In a communal-living camp that holds about 50 of the best-behaved prisoners, I have seen men kneel together as a recorded Muslim call to prayer plays from loudspeakers.

Inside the razor wire, I have seen detainees riding in the back of all-terrain vehicles, their hands and feet shackled, on their way to see doctors, lawyers or interrogators.

These are all just glimplses, though, and it's difficult to come to any broad conclusions about how detainees are treated. The ground rules we sign if we want to visit the base prohibit us from interviewing any detention camp personnel without permission. And forget about talking with detainees — no journalist has been permitted to do that since the prison opened in January 2002.

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WAITING

On trips like this, to cover Guantanamo's war-crime tribunals, the military ferries us back and forth across the bay for court sessions on the windward side of the base, which also houses the detainees and most of the 2,500 soldiers, sailors and Marines stationed here. When you spend a whole day on the leeward side, you find yourself killing time.

On one such day, a lazy Friday afternoon, we grabbed bath towels and traipsed to Chapman Beach — a narrow strip of rocky shoreline that's a short walk from our Combined Bachelors Quarters but a world away from the prison camps that brought us here.

For hours, we came and went to enjoy the picture-perfect beach, with the illusion of a tropical resort disrupted only by the Marine guard towers on the horizon.

The congenial soldiers from Guantanamo's public affairs office, which posted the barbecue as the only event on our itinerary that day, joined us on the beach to eat, swim and chase giant iguanas away from our food.

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THE HEARING

The group of about 30 journalists — mostly Americans and Canadians — had come to Guantanamo to witness a pretrial hearing for a Toronto-born detainee accused of killing a U.S. Special Forces commando in Afghanistan.

This was the Pentagon's third attempt to prosecute Omar Khadr, the only citizen of a Western nation still at Guantanamo. He was 15 when he was captured in 2002. The case — which has garnered far more interest in Canada than in the United States — had collapsed when the Supreme Court ruled an earlier tribunal system was unconstitutional, and then again when a military judge found he lacked jurisdiction.

The judge, who was overruled by a hastily created military appeals court, set new deadlines for the defense team to file challenges and Khadr deferred entering a plea to charges including murder, conspiracy and spying.

Khadr, who is now 20 and has spent nearly a quarter of his life at Guantanamo, wore the white prison uniform reserved for the most "compliant" detainees (the less well-behaved wear khaki-colored or bright orange). He seemed subdued but relaxed, leaning back in his chair with legs crossed under the table as guards stood watch nearby. His exchanges with the judge were polite, short replies of "yes sir," or "yeah," to procedural questions such as whether he is satisfied with his defense counsel. After about 90 minutes, it was over. It was the third day of our five-day trip.

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OFF LIMITS

Afterwards, our only way off the island was the prescheduled military flight back to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.

And so we waited and passed the time.

Some of us asked to visit the prison camps, where the vast majority of detainees, held outside the traditional U.S. justice system, have not gotten any closer to a courtroom than the trailers where military hearings determined they are "enemy combatants."

But because the trip was devoted to the tribunal hearing, the military said, such tours were impossible.

Finally, we had to settle for a browse through a gift shop full of souvenirs. One T-shirt tempted me, bringing together my experiences with the Department of Defense and on the balmy Guantanamo beach.

An iguana was set against a barbed-wire fence, with a slogan.

"Fun in the Cuban Sun. Brought to you by DOD Holiday Tours."