The Guantanamo Guidebook

British Channel 4 engaged the Team Delta Cadre to recreate the Guantanamo Bay interrogation experience. At the production company’s request, along with Team Delta’s normal approach to interrogation, the cadre also reenacted several specific events reported to have occurred at Guantanamo. In most cases these reenacted events were counter productive to the interrogation plan developed by Team Delta – a plan that had learned 80% of the requested intelligence within the first few hours of capture.

Prisoner 73 on his experience: Total deprivation of sleep, food and water, exposure to extreme heat and cold, up to 20 minutes in stress positions, up to 2 hours listening to white noise… plus any other interrogation technique deemed acceptable by the interrogation team’ By any standards the waiver I signed for “Guantanamo Guidebook” was special, and two weeks later when I was lying naked, shaved, shackled in a ball on the floor, alone with a hood over my head, listening to white noise with a cold fan at my back, I realized just how superficial the term ‘informed consent’ can be.

Two weeks earlier I had received an e-mail looking for students who would be willing to participate in a Channel Four documentary investigating US interrogation practices for Terror detainees held in Cuba. I was to be one of seven male volunteers from various backgrounds – three Muslims: a father of two, a youth worker, and a recent graduate; plus Britain’s fittest Fireman, a triathlete, Britain’s Thai Kickboxing Champion and me, a plucky Oxford undergraduate finalist in philosophy and politics.