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The world’s most notorious terrorists – the Unabomber, the shoe bomber, soon to be joined by the underwear bomber – live side by side in America’s toughest prison. Yet they never meet. Alex Hannaford investigates life at Colorado’s supermaximum security jail

Otis Medley squints at the winter sun, still bright but low in the sky, before throwing open the double doors on the worship room of his little church. It’s a Wednesday and soon 15 of his regular parishioners will turn into the driveway for their weekly Bible study. Medley, a small, round man with a gravelly laugh, red face and even redder braces, embodies the spirit of the wooden sign that greets them: “You are welcome here,” it says.

Medley and his wife, Selinda, bought this 10-acre plot in Colorado for $20,000 and turned it into a church just over a decade ago. In the valley, just across the two-lane highway from the Medleys’ church, sits ADX Florence, the most notorious prison in America.

The United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, to give it its full title, is the only federal “supermax” prison in America. Dubbed the Alcatraz of the Rockies, it houses the crème de la crème of international terrorists, mafia dons, serial escape artists, spies and rapists.

The British “shoe bomber”, Richard Reid, is languishing in the prison’s “control unit” — the highest security section of the highest security prison in the nation; “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski is serving a life sentence there, as is 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui; Terry Nichols, an accomplice in the Oklahoma bombing that killed 168 people in 1995, also calls it home: he was joined there by co-conspirator Timothy McVeigh, until McVeigh’s execution in 2001. The latest celebrity inmate, expected to arrive soon, is the “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, sentenced last month to four concurrent life terms plus 50 years for attempting to detonate plastic explosives on a Detroit-bound flight from Amsterdam.

Medley has looked after the spiritual needs of several off-duty correctional officers (“guards” is seen as pejorative), and mentioned some of the jail’s most notorious inmates in his sermons. If they accept the Lord Jesus as their saviour, he says, even they can be forgiven.

ADX, though, isn’t really in the forgiveness business — one former warden described it as “a cleaner version of Hell”. This may explain why it is so media-shy. My request to tour the facility, which shares space with three other prisons in what’s known as the Florence Federal Correctional Complex (FCC), was turned down, with the prison citing “security” as its reason. This contrasted with my experience at Guantanamo Bay, where I spent three days touring the detention camps and saw detainees in their communal areas praying, eating and chatting. If I wanted to find out what life was like inside ADX, I’d have to head to the tiny town of Florence, Colorado.

Downtown Florence consists of a pretty main street where most of the buildings, dating from the late 1800s, seem to sell antiques and bric-a-brac. Lonnie Lasha runs Mantiques, an Aladdin’s cave of guns, scopes, magazines, grips, pepper sprays and deer-skin rugs. A picture of John Wayne is propped on the top shelf of a tall cupboard full of bullets of varying calibres. Lasha says business is picking up. It apparently always does in an election year. “Everyone’s worried that in the next four years they’re going to do away with guns,” he tells me when I visit one afternoon in early spring.

In the Two Sisters cafe, old-timers wedge themselves into 1950s-style booths and lean over the backs of their chairs to gossip with friends. Bill Calmette is 72 and was born here, moved away several decades ago, but returned in the mid-1980s to look after his elderly mother. When they were building the prison, Calmette worked for the town’s concrete company and hauled cement to a warehouse where the cells for ADX were being constructed. “They built them two at a time,” he says. “Everything in the cell was formed from cement, including the bed.”

Another man, who doesn’t want to be identified but who is very familiar with ADX, tells me each cell has a two-door automatic airlock, almost impossible to penetrate. He says ADX is highly automated, with cameras and microphones in every cell. “Timothy McVeigh had a camera on him 24/7 when he was there, and the warden asked to have that broadcast directly to his office. There was no low-level lighting available at the time, so they had to rig the lights to stop McVeigh turning them off. He was like a 10-year-old. He loved watching cartoons on the television in his cell. He was always polite, but very immature.”

Although ADX sits in its own compound surrounded by tall razor wire and guard towers, the low fence around the entire FCC complex has small posts a few feet apart, containing electric “eyes”. Seen from the front, it could be a hotel development — a low-rise, red-brick complex — and doesn’t seem particularly secure. But this is the minimum security unit. Take the dirt road that loops around the back and rises into the hills beyond and you can see the razor wire encircling ADX and USP Florence, another maximum-security prison, glistening in the sun.

My request to interview correctional officers at ADX was turned down by the prison, so instead I contacted the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), the union that a large number of the officers here belong to, and they put me in touch with three men willing to talk.

Jeff Johnson, Mike Schnobrich and Bob Snelson are all senior officer specialists and keen to explain the challenges they face looking after ADX’s prisoners, even though they’re forbidden from discussing individual inmates. Before we begin, Schnobrich shows me pictures of various “shanks” — weapons that prisoners have fashioned out of everyday objects. He says these are the types of weapons corrections officers deal with on a regular basis. Snelson says they’ve seen spears made from tightly rolled magazines and knives made from cling film, melted down, cooled until it hardens, then sharpened on the concrete of the cell. “It can get very dangerous in there if you’re not careful,” he says.

Johnson says inmates in the control unit are served breakfast in their cells around 6am. Afterwards, they are escorted by three guards to the recreation area where they exercise alone. Inmates have described this area as like a huge, empty swimming pool with walls 16ft high and steel mesh overhead. Inside is a bar for pull-ups and another for dips; nothing else. After an hour, they’re taken back to their cell where they remain for 23 hours each day. There they shower, eat, use the toilet and sleep.

Johnson has worked at ADX for nearly 15 years and says he has some idea which inmates will give him a problem. “In our business one of the most important skills we have is communication. If we don’t communicate with these guys on a level they can understand, the job can be extremely difficult.”

It’s possible to build a rapport even with these inmates, Snelson says. “Over the years I’ve done a lot of medical escorts, removing an inmate for dental treatment or whatever, and in that case we’re taking them where they want to go so we’re less likely to get attacked. Established gang members generally don’t play up because it takes the focus off them so they can communicate better with their fellow members.” It’s the younger ones, he says, that cause the most problems.

According to Johnson, Schnobrich and Snelson — big men who, it appears, of the trickiest moments is when they take inmates their food. “The danger is at the cell door,” Snelson says. “You open a slot and have to physically hand it to them. They can grab you, they can throw urine or faeces at you. And this could happen a couple of times a week; sometimes months go by. But it happens.”

Johnson acknowledges that “big, explosive incidents” seldom occur at ADX. When inmates are in solitary confinement 23 hours a day and don’t ever mix with each other, they’re easier to control. But, he says, the accumulation of smaller incidents that happen daily — many of which the staff never report — can take their toll. “Just the feeling that an inmate wants to do something dangerous; the way they look at you. Imagine that happening eight hours a day, five days a week, for years. There’s no one in their right mind who’s going to say this wouldn’t affect them.”

Caterina Spinaris knows exactly how much this affects correctional officers. A counsellor, she has been treating prison staff at Desert Waters, her Florence outreach centre, for the past decade and has had to pick up the pieces. When big events do occur, they are dramatic. “Being covered in somebody else’s blood, having someone die at your feet, seeing people being gutted in front of you, or finding someone dead in their cell… it changes people,” she says. Spinaris likens it to a war zone. “But these people are supposed to go home afterwards, act normal and go back to work the next day like nothing happened. It accumulates.”

If the corrections staff at ADX have it tough, what about the men interred there? Richard Reid was born in Bromley, south London, to an English mother and Jamaican father. A petty criminal, he was in and out of jail cells before he was radicalised by the cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri at the Finsbury Park Mosque and attended a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. On December 22, 2001, Reid attempted to detonate a bomb on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. A year later he pleaded guilty to eight counts of terrorism and a federal judge sentenced him to three consecutive life terms. From 2003, when he arrived at ADX, until 2009, Reid was held under what is known as Special Administrative Measures, or Sams.

In 2009, Reid went on a hunger strike and was force-fed by prison officials. Later that year, the Sams restrictions expired. Last November, before the prison denied my request to interview inmates in person, I wrote a letter to Reid, asking whether he would agree to an interview. To my surprise, he wrote back. Prisoners in ADX are allowed to write to journalists, but their letters are monitored. Although he said he had no interest in doing an interview, he elaborated on certain points I’d raised in my letter. He said he didn’t want to comment on his time at ADX, fearing “it will just end up being used as an excuse to keep me here longer, and while I don’t expect them to let me go to another institution any time soon, I’m not looking to give them an excuse for that.”

Interestingly, he claimed to have no idea what has been written or broadcast about him in the media. “I have only read one single article related to my case since my arrest and I didn’t see any of the early TV coverage as I wasn’t allowed access to TV when I was first arrested. I know that it has not been positive, but that’s to be expected given the nature of my case, and in reality I don’t really care what the media or others think about me as long as I know where my head’s at.

“Obviously I’d prefer that the negative images be left alone, but even if the coverage had of [sic] been positive — which was not to be expected — I wouldn’t be interested as that’s not why I undertook the actions that lead to my current situation. So people are going to say whatever they want to say and all that remains is for Allah to judge both myself and them and His judgement and decision is all that matters and everything besides that is petty and of no real import [sic] or relevance.” Reid signed the letter “Respectfully, Abu Esa Abdul-Raheem”, the name by which he now goes.

I also asked to interview some lesser-known prisoners there — men who had already been given release dates — in the hope these, at least, would be granted. When the requests were turned down, one of those men wrote to me. He asked that I withhold his name, so let’s call him John. John told me he was being held in the prison’s control unit, mainly with inmates born overseas, convicted of terrorism. John is an American, convicted of racketeering. He says he has no idea why he is kept in the control unit alongside terrorists. Aside from the brief moment each day when correctional officers remove him from his cell and put him in the recreation “pod”, John has no human contact. Before he’s taken there, he is handcuffed, a “belly chain” is secured around his waist, his legs are put in shackles, and he is searched. He is then escorted by three officers, one of whom carries a weapon at all times.

“There is very little reason to leave the cell,” John writes. “Almost everything you can think of is in [here]. It is very high tech; for instance to communicate with the officers I have an intercom box. I just hit the button and they will answer. Any notices are posted on a closed-circuit television channel on my TV… It is what it is. Real tough. But I’m a man and I deal with it. I don’t complain.”

John’s second letter to me was 16 pages long and offers a fascinating glimpse inside ADX. He said there are two FBI agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force stationed at the prison. “They are Arabic-speaking and monitor our outgoing mail and collect intelligence in the unit,” he wrote. “[Our letters] must be in English unless we can prove the recipient does not read English. It is then brought to an intelligence officer to review, then it gets approval from the FBI and then it goes out. The process takes two to four weeks.”

According to John, letters from certain inmates to attorneys or to “approved” journalists are not inspected. A stamp on the back of the envelopes of both his letters to me confirmed this: “The enclosed letter was processed through special mailing procedures,” it said. “The letter has been neither opened nor inspected.”
His phone calls, which last a maximum of 15 minutes and have to be in English unless approved beforehand (in which case a translator monitors them), are monitored live by an intelligence analyst from the counter-terrorism unit. Visits, he said, are a waste of time. “It’s only immediate family. It’s non-contact — we are in different rooms, separated by glass — and again they are monitored live. Even though you are in a secure room, you spend the entire visit in leg shackles, waist chain and handcuffs.

“Since I have been here I have literally seen people break and go crazy,” John wrote. “They just snap and self-destruct. When it gets bad the medical department comes and gets them and just ships them off to a prison hospital. You know what happened because the guy will just start screaming like he is being murdered. It will go on and on.

“You have to be very strong to survive this. The conditions we are under are just not natural. I keep my mind busy. I read a ton of books, take correspondence courses. I do everything I can to ensure I can leave a better person than when I came here. But this is hell. I can’t say it any clearer than that.”

John said he thought that life at ADX must be stressful for correctional officers as well. Many, he said, were ex-military and this could cause friction between them and inmates convicted of terrorism. “Some of these guys are very young, just come back from Iraq and Afghanistan; seen their buddies get killed. Now they are in a unit with 100 guys who they were told were the enemy.”

Another inmate in the prison’s control unit, Richard McNair, sent me an eight-page letter. McNair murdered someone during a botched robbery in 1987, and escaped from three previous jails before ending up in ADX Florence. He enclosed a page from the prison’s library list. Books available include One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; Finding Freedom: Writings from Death Row by Jarvis Jay Masters; and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn — and Fatherhood by Bill Cosby.

McNair wrote: “I hate this place with all my heart and I kick myself in the ass for doing anything to get sent here. The problem is the lack of outside stimulation. One phone call a month if you are not on restriction. Only the sky to see of the outside world. No conversation. Everything restricted. Then there’s the noise; some of the knuckleheads scream for hours on end. No one should have to live like this.”
Each night, his mail arrives along with his evening meal. “I subscribe to Field & Stream, Backpacker, Esquire, Atlantic and Men’s Journal,” he said. “The library is really good. Every two months we receive a list of books available and the list rotates so we get a decent selection.”

McNair also said he had been waiting to see a dentist since May last year. “I made the mistake of writing ‘not an emergency’ on my request for a cracked molar,” he wrote. “And the only person I have to blame is me.”

Life outside the razor wire in this part of Colorado couldn’t represent more of a contrast to the austere atmosphere inside ADX. Patti Dangel, out walking her dog in downtown Florence, says it’s like two different worlds. She decided to raise her own children here because, she says, Florence feels safe. “They can walk to the library or play in the park without it being fenced,” she says.

Just over the road from ADX, Otis Medley inhales the mountain air and walks back inside his little church. Someday soon he plans to start building a house for himself and his wife on the empty land at the back of his acreage. And when they wake up in the morning, the Medleys will look out on to the beautiful Sangre de Cristo mountains. Not the prison.

You don’t become the most successful gymnastics coach in history without making a few enemies. Then why does Béla Károlyi inspire such devotion?

Béla Károlyi knew the American Dream could be elusive, but in the early summer of 1981 it looked nigh on impossible. He and his wife, Márta, had just $360 to their name and Béla was doing manual labour and cleaning floors in order to pay the rent at some flea-pit Californian motel they couldn’t even afford. What’s more, their seven-year-old daughter, Andrea, was back in their native Romania and they hadn’t seen her for months. In the blink of an eye, everything had changed: not long before this, Béla Károlyi had been the most famous gymnastics coach on the planet.

The world had fallen in love with Károlyi’s protégé, Nadia Comaneci, at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Aged just 14, Comaneci cartwheeled into a double full-twisting-back somersault off the balance beam and into the record books, becoming the first gymnast in history to score a perfect 10 — the maximum possible at the time. The entire one-minute-and-twenty-second sequence seemed so effortlessly graceful, and by the time the Montreal games drew to a close, Comaneci had earned seven perfect tens for her routines, three gold medals, and a silver and bronze for good measure.

But as a writer at Sports Illustrated put it, suddenly Károlyi’s success became Romania’s success: ‘a glorious product of the government’s system.’ Károlyi’s athletes — Nadia included — were now celebrities, and Romania, under the inglorious charge of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceau?escu, wanted to take the credit.

Protesting, Károlyi saw his funding cut and his star pupil transferred to another gym. In the Spring of 1981, during the Romanian team’s lucrative exhibition tour of the United States, the Károlyis made the painful decision to defect: On March 30th, instead of taking a midday flight from New York City back to Bucharest, they slipped out of their hotel room into a bustling Manhattan, intent on seeking political asylum.

Several weeks later, in that seedy motel in California, when the couple had hit rock bottom and their future looked less than bleak, Károlyi recalls Márta telling him repeatedly: Don’t worry, Béla, everything is going to be alright.

“Alright?” Béla snapped. “This is a nightmare.”

There are rags-to-riches stories, and then there are those stories where someone battles against the odds to make their name, loses it all, and climbs a mountain again in order to claw back what they had. But the people who can do this — who have the temperament — are few and far between.

Today, with just a few months to go before the United States competes to take the most medals again in the Women’s Artistic Gymnastics events in London, Béla Károlyi, at 69 years old, is director of the U.S. national training programme, and his wife, Márta, the same age, is the national team coordinator. Over the past 30 years, the Károlyis’ coaching efforts have produced 28 Olympians, nine Olympic champions, fifteen world champions and sixteen European medalists. Since the year 2000 alone, the U.S. has won 60 medals thanks to the Károlyis — way ahead of Russia and China with 35 a-piece. Quite simply, they’re the most successful coaches in the history of the sport.

The question is, how, exactly, did they manage to do it all over again?

The year after they defected, and finally reunited with their daughter, the Károlyis jumped at an opportunity to start a gym near Houston, Texas. Béla’s reputation as Nadia Comaneci’s former coach, attracted a considerable pool of potential talent, and it wasn’t long before one of those girls, Diane Durham, became Junior U.S. National Champion.

Soon, the Károlyis outgrew their gym and bought 38 acres of land in the Sam Houston National Forest, where Béla, a powerfully built man with a gregarious, affable manner and bushy moustache, built a small cabin for him and Márta to live in, and converted a barn into a gymnasium. Today, the Károlyis’ land has expanded to a couple of thousand acres and there are four huge gyms on the property. It is the only official U.S. Gymnastics training camp in the country. Their little cabin is still there, too, nestled in the woods, separated from the gymnastics facility by a metal gate and small sign that says: private.

“At the time, the land was the cheapest thing I could find,” Béla Károlyi tells me, sitting on the couch in his living room, surrounded by stuffed deer heads and antlers. “And it was in the forest, which was a big attraction because all my life I’d been hunting. It was just wild land, totally unkept.”

Károlyi, who still speaks with a thick Romanian accent, says he and Márta worked “like engines” in order to prove to themselves that the decision they made to leave their homeland behind was the right one.

The ‘proof’ they were looking for came in the pint-sized figure of Mary Lou Retton. It was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and Retton, on her last event of the All Around competition, needed a 10.00 to win gold. Watching the footage of that moment today makes just as compelling viewing as it did 28 years ago. Wearing a USA-flag leotard, Retton pounds across the mat towards the vault. The American commentator can be heard saying: “Oh boy”, and then it’s all over in a split second: Retton performs a full-twisting Tsukahara – an incredible one-and-a-half back somerault and two twists, landing perfectly, earning a 10.00. “She has done the best vault of her life,” a second commentator says.

Retton jumps up and down, waving at the audience, now on their feet, and you can hear the unmistakable voice of Károlyi in the background, presumably trying to persuade her to focus rather than get carried away by the reaction of the crowd. “Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it,” he says.

“If they don’t give her a 10 here the judges may fear for their lives,” the commentator says. Then, the black scoreboard flips round, and … she’s done it. Károlyi, jet black hair and red t-shirt, hugs his colleague and once again, as the camera switches back to a beaming Retton, you can hear his voice: “Good god. Fantastic. Woo.” Like Comaneci before her, Retton becomes a media sensation overnight, and her coach, who just three years earlier had been cleaning floors in Los Angeles, is back at the top of his game.

On the day I visit Károlyi, the camp where Retton trained is eerily quiet. I’m not sure whether it is USA Gymnastics or the Karolyis that don’t want me interrupting the current crop of girls hoping for Olympic stardom, but either way inviting me on a day when there’s no training shows how they insist on single-minded determination from their athletes and just how intense that training is. For what life is like at a Károlyi training session, Retton’s book, Creating an Olympic Champion, offers a glimpse. After her first day training there – a year before the Olympics – she writes that she was “sore and confused and wondering what [she'd] got into … the intensity of the workout, having all the girls screaming and pushing for each other, made me feel like I was part of a team, and I liked that. But I wasn’t used to going full-out for three hours.”

She says from that first day, Károlyi changed everything – from the way she tumbled to what she ate, and he “wanted perfection.”

Károlyi tells me his training programme is designed to run intermittently, for a week at a time, throughout the year. Athletes train for three hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon with a rest in between. Today, the Károlyis daughter, Andrea, cooks a “very healthy, well-balanced menu which would not put weight on them, but puts a lot of energy in their body,” Károlyi says.

“We like to eliminate the carbohydrates as much as possible but the proteins yes and the vitamins yes. And fibre, vegetables, fruits – that is very very instrumental for them.”

Károlyi says the training requires intense physical effort. “We tear down the old routines, and create new ones.”

The increasing physical and acrobatic demands and involved in Artistic Gymnastics has meant the attributes of its athletes has changed quite a bit since the 1950s and ’60s. Today, women gymnasts are small, muscley, with little body fat. According to the Australian Institute of Sport, its female athletes generally reach their peak power-to-weight ratio before hitting puberty and are ready for elite international competition at the minimum age requirement – currently 16.

The Károlyis’ success continued with Kim Zmeskal, who was the senior National U.S. Champion three years in a row in the early 1990s and who, in 1991, became the first American woman to become World All-Around Champion. She was six years old when she first met Béla Károlyi — too young, she says, to remember much, but she does recall a big exhibition that the gym was putting on, and “Béla being his usual boisterous, lively self.”

Zmeskal was also aware that Béla had coached her hero, Retton, and wanted more than anything to be picked for his team. “As a young gymnast I made a lot of mistakes,” she says. “I was very good on vault but in other events I was inconsistent. But under Béla and Márta’s leadership I got better. Their ability to prepare athletes is second to none. They are fantastic at preparing gymnasts to be their best.”

Zmeskal says the Károlyis weren’t there to be the girls’ friends. “They had very specific role,” she says. “The line wasn’t grey.” She says they worked the girls incredibly hard, but that was the key to getting results.”

Károlyi is the first to admit he has always demanded the very best from his athletes — and that this is something that has dogged him his entire career. In the book he co-authored with Mary Lou Retton, Károlyi writes that even back in Romania some were saying the children he taught “would be physical wrecks”; that the Károlyis were “breaking their bones”; that they’d be “bent and crooked and hunchbacked.”

He says it was a strange criticism to level at him because they had no evidence for it. He writes that he and Márta never “over-forced” the kids and that the girls were only pushing themselves because “they can do it and because they love it.”

Károlyi points out that then, as now, his supporters outnumber his detractors. “In Romania we were idolised,” he tells me. “We were national heroes.”

One of the most surprising attacks came in 2008 from Dominique Moceanu, a member of the so-called ‘Magnificent Seven’ — the 1996 U.S. Olympic team that won the first ever gold medal for the country in the women’s team competition — who told HBO’s Real Sports television programme that Károlyi used to berate her and that Márta was physically abusive. She said the couple imposed dietry restrictions on her when she was younger and that she developed injuries as a result of undue physical stress.

Béla Károlyi won’t be drawn into a slanging match but Marta told the programme she felt sad that a gymnast as accomplished as Moceanu could only remember the harder days. “Not every single moment is an easy moment,” she said.

At those Olympics in Atlanta in 1996, the stand-out moment was when the then-19-year-old Kerri Strug, tasked with maintaining the Americans’ lead over the Russians, made her attempt at the vault. Her teammate Moceanu had fallen twice and Strug was the last to vault. As she leapt over the horse, she landed short and twisted her ankle — the third fault for the Americans. Strug limped off. “Kerri is hurt,” the commentator announced. “Kerri Strug is in trouble.” But she had one more turn. Strug ran at the vault, spinning in the air and landing — for a split second — on two feet, but then lifted her injured left foot in agony. Károlyi walked up to her, picked her up in his arms and started to walk towards the podium as her score was announced: 9.712. She’d done it, and the American team had taken gold.

Some critics point to this moment — the injured Strug being “forced” to continue — as evidence of Károlyi’s abusive methods. But the small photograph, on the wall of one of Károlyi’s gyms, of him carrying Strug to the podium says it all. Above her signature, Strug has scribbled: “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Today, Strug is philosophical about the naysayers. “There are many gymnasts who put in so much time and maybe didn’t get the results they wanted, and it’s tough,” she tells me on the phone from her home in Arizona. “When you sacrifice everything, put all your eggs in one basket and rely on the Károlyis to get you where you want to go and it doesn’t turn out how you anticipated, then it’s difficult.

“Some think you shouldn’t be so hard on the girls, but Béla never asked more of us than he asked of himself. We’d get upset we didn’t get Thanksgiving holiday off or that we only had one day for Christmas, but the Károlyis didn’t get any time off either (even today, Károlyi tells me, he starts work at 5am). Any time I was there, they were there, and they sacrificed a lot of time with their own daughter, Andrea, to be with us. If you want to be the best at something you have to put in a lot of time and effort. And the Károlyis still give it all they’ve got today.”

Some claimed it was bitterness that led to Moceanu’s accusations: she had petitioned USA Gymnastics’s selection committee for eligibility after pulling out of the 2006 qualifying event for the nationals with an injury, but it was denied. She then appealed to the grievance panel, but that appeal was rejected too.

Strug says you’re not going to be the best athlete in the world by having a “nice” coach. “Deep down I knew he was making me the best I could be. As a youngster it’s hard to keep that perspective, but if you take a step back you can see he knows what he’s doing and you can’t argue with his record. He was not meant to be my friend or my father figure — he was my coach. But I adore him.”

Steve Penny, president of USA Gymnastics, says the Károlyis have a very high tolerance for work; he says it’s a hallmark of their east european mentality. “I would not dispute the notion that Béla and Márta can be demanding in their style, but they’re only asking people for what they’re capable of .. and they’re going to push these people to their limit.”

Strug started competing when she was eight years old and went to Houston to try out for Károlyi’s four years later. She says she is fortunate her parents were supportive as she was picked for the team and wanted to move to Texas full time. “They realised it was something I really wanted and didn’t want me looking back saying they didn’t let me pursue my dream.

Together with Morceanu, Strug lived on the Károlyi ranch for a year-and-a-half before the 1992 Olympics and went from training a couple of hours a day to eight-hour workouts. “There was a goal I wanted to achieve,” she says, “but doing really well in a competition motivates you.

Károlyi believes the ‘centralised system’ currently used in China, or that was in place in Romania or the former Soviet Union, is the only system that really guarantees results. “You get the child at an early age; you follow her; her life is directed towards performance,” he says. “They are living, breathing and eating the sport … in a very special environment which is directed to the highest quality of athletic preparation.”

But he readily admits that a fully centralised system was never going to work in America. “Families would not send their child away for that length of time. Period,” he says. “And nobody would accept the liability of taking a child away at six or seven and having to be their father and mother, adviser and friend.”

Seven years ago, British Olympian Matthew Pinsent described seeing child gymnasts in pain while they were training in China, and claimed he had seen one being beaten by his coach. While Károlyi hasn’t said he agrees with China’s training methods, he doesn’t think there should be an age limit at all for international gymnastics competition. He told the ESPN sports TV station in 2008: “The age limit is unfair. It is nonsense. Whoever has the maturity and talent to compete at this level should be here.”

Trevor Low, current chair of the men’s British Artistic Gymnastics technical committee, told the BBC that negative coverage in the West of China’s gymnastics programme was unwarranted, saying it the system was “hard but fair”.

The idea that gymnasts would come to the Károlyi ranch in the Sam Houston National Forest to train for extended periods is not quite the centralised system he admires so much, but it’s close enough. Károlyi calls it the ‘semi-centralised system’, and it has the full approval of USA Gymnastics, the sport’s governing body here. The Károlyi camp has four huge gyms, accommodation for the athletes, a cafeteria, swimming pool and volleyball courts.

When they are there, gymnasts are shut off from outside distractions: the nearest town, New Waverly, several miles up a dirt road, has a supermarket, donut shop and a laundrette, and that’s about it. At New Waverly’s cafe, which on the day I visit is serving up greens and sweet potato casserole, I’m told the athletes rarely, if ever, visit. The Károlyis’ daughter, Andrea, a food nutritionist, designs all the healthy meals for the gymnasts, and serves them up at the camp. “They cannot spend their free time at the disco or in McDonald’s when they’re here,” Károlyi tells me. “There are no places, you know, to go crazy.”

Károlyi reckons American gymnastics has improved by 70% since the system was implemented. Now, the girls are looking over their shoulders, he says, wanting to emulate their colleagues. “This not stealing from each other. It’s working as a team.”=

Since Ceaucescu’s execution following the December 1989 revolution, Károlyi and Márta try to visit their native Romania once a year as Márta still has family there. Károlyi was sentenced to 11 years in prison in absentia for defecting; Márta to eight. In 1993, they flew to a town in Hungary so they could cross into Romania via a little-used border crossing rather than risk Bucharest’s airport. Károlyi says neither of them knew how fast things would change in the country and whether their arrest warrants were still valid.

“We were both sweating,” Károlyi says. “This young guard asked us to open up the trunk of the car, then suddenly another officer noticed me. ‘Bela, my God, Bela,’ he said. ‘Boys, it’s Bela’.”

Károlyi says they ended up closing the border in order to celebrate the couple’s return, breaking open a bottle of Pálinka, a potent local brandy. “Every year we go back now between Christmas and New Year,” he says.

After the 1996 Olympics, the Károlyis took a break from coaching the national team. According to USA Gymnastics’ Steve Penny, the biggest hurdle the Károlyis faced was being accepted by the system. In the three years that the Károlyis were no longer involved with the national team, the Americans went from first place to sixth. “It was the most spectacular drop in the history of the sport,” Károlyi says. In the run-up to the 2000 Olympics, he says he got a “desperate” call from the president of the federation asking him to re-join them.

“The important thing was to call the national team together; to start with the players, then their coaches,” Károlyi says. “We got the green light from the Federation and then the U.S. Olympic Committee and I was able to call the very first training session under the semi-centralised national team training programme which I had implemented.”

And while Károlyi would be directing the programme, Márta would take over as national team coordinator. “When the Karolyis stopped coaching, kids had nowhere to go and the bar was lowered,” Penny says. “After 2000 they raised the bar again and the curve went up.”

In the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, USA Women’s Artistic Gymnastics once again soared under the tutelage of the two dynamic Romanians. Nastia Liukin won gold for the individual all-round and Shawn Johnson — the cute, beaming Iowan nicknamed “Peanut” who stole the hearts of gymnastics fans around the world — took home gold in the balance beam. The U.S. won more medals in Artistic Gymnastics than any other country.

Károlyi says the team for London won’t be chosen until July 1st, a month before the event — but even that’s too soon for him and Márta. If Károlyi had his way, the team would be chosen as close to the event as possible. “They could get injured. They could lose interest and go with their family on vacation, knowing they’re going to be part of the Olympic team, and come back completely out of shape,” he says.

Károlyi doesn’t mince words. “We shouldn’t choose them before they, you know, get in a crazed summer environment with their friends, going out of their minds,” he tells me.

Both Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson are hoping to make the team. On her blog, just a few days before I visited the Karolyi camp, Johnson, who is in training despite recovering from a knee injury, wrote: “As I sit here on the flight home from Karolyi’s Camp, I’m thinking about everything that’s gone on in the past few days … I’m finally getting close to the shape I want to be in and able to do the skills I need for my routines. The girls are working so well with each other and the potential strength of what our team is capable of is incredible! We sure will be the team to beat … I still have a long way to go to be in contention for making any kind of team, but coming out of camp I feel motivated and excited to push myself into my first competition. The next camp we have is in five weeks and I plan on working my booty off so I can show up and prove to Márta that I am just as deserving for a spot on a team as anyone.”

After this Olympic Games, there has been mention of retirement and Károlyi won’t rule it out. “We’ll see how we do this summer” and “see how Márta feels afterwards” is all he’ll say.

As for his and Márta’s legacy — he says the semi-centralised training system he’s put in place is so powerful and popular, and has such support among gymnastics clubs and organisations, he can’t see it changing after they’re gone.

“There will come a time when we would like to transfer the responsibility of managing the facility to the Federation and to U.S. Olympic Committee.”

When is that likely to happen? I ask.

“Maybe after a couple of more Olympics,” he says, and lets out a deep laugh.

Former U.S. national champion Kim Zmescal, for one, can’t see the Károlyis leaving the sport any time soon. “They completely transformed USA gymnastics,” she says. “Márta’s fine-tuning; how she looks at the details. And Béla’s accent, that bushy moustache, the waving of the arms, the jumping up and down and his enthusiasm, precision and technique – I don’t know how you’re going to replace that. Béla gets people excited about the sport – and not just girls and coaches, but everyone involved. He and Márta complement each other so well. They’re such a tough act to follow.”

Waco religious group accused of child abuse, beatings and cover-ups

Click here to read story on the Texas Observer website

Sympathizers argue her British citizenship means the British consulate should have been informed of her arrest. It wasn’t.

Click here to read the story on the Texas Observer website

I worked as a consultant on this Channel 4 film. Screened 28th November, 2011. Here for more info

Kyle Wesolowski - portrait by Matt Rainwaters

US troops returning broken, turn not to the Army, but to a ramshackle café

Click here to read the story on the Telegraph website

November 2011, British GQ

America’s eyes are trained on a quiet coastal corner of the country where a murderer has claimed ten victims and remains at large, despite the efforts of investigators. Now, as Alex Hannaford reports for GQ, a growing band of self-styled ‘superheroes’ is joining in the hunt and attracting as much attention as its quarry. 

Click here to read the story on the GQ website

Detective Lieutenant Kevin Smith, Nassau County police department. Photograph: Matt Rainwaters

A 20-million-ton asteroid is currently hurtling through space at 23,000 miles per hour, on a collision course with Earth. But fear not – Nasa has 25 years to stop it

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8853407/Collision-course-the-space-rocks-that-threaten-our-lives.html

An audience with Koko, the talking gorilla. Link to story on Telegraph website

When Dallas Wiens woke from a three-month coma, he had to confront a terrifying reality: he no longer had a face. Now, the facial transplant recipient reveals all

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/8722025/The-face-transplant-that-changed-a-burn-victims-life.html

After hijacking an aeroplane and extorting $200,000 from the FBI, DB Cooper coolly made his escape via parachute. Forty years on, is America’s most elusive fugitive finally in sight?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8667855/The-40-year-mystery-of-Americas-greatest-skyjacking.html

Full text of Guantanamo feature, published January 2010

The armchairs have manacles, dinner is served via tube and there is a detention section so guarded its location is still top secret. Esquire becomes the first UK magazine to go inside the most notorious prison in the world. A special report by Alex Hannaford

I am standing waist-deep in a turquoise ocean, crushed coral underfoot, while an inquisitive iguana stares at me from a nearby rock. As wild tamarind trees blow on the windy cliff top everything seems normal. Except, perhaps, for the white radar beacons sitting on the hill behind me and the two men in full combat fatigues waiting in an air-conditioned van 30ft away.

I’ve come to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a place that has become synonymous with all that was wrong with the War On Terror and that remains the albatross around the neck of the US administration. President Obama vowed to close the detention centre in January, but today around 180 detainees, some of them British residents, languish in captivity, their “homes” encircled by cyclone fencing and razor wire. They’ve been here eight years and counting.

Esquire’s Guantánamo journey began over half a year ago. The military couldn’t tell me exactly what checks I went through, citing “operational security”. It took three months of paperwork, police checks, liaising with the British consulate and being granted credentials from the US Foreign Press Centre for me to get the go-ahead and for Esquire to become the first British magazine to enter the world’s most notorious prison facility.

On the wall behind a solitary check-in desk in the bowels of Fort Lauderdale airport, is a picture of a Caribbean island. Today, though, the flights aren’t going to the Bahamas. Waiting for my 6am flight I meet a senior naval officer who tells me Gitmo is just like a small American town.

“You even get Gitmo road rage,” she says. “There’s a 25mph speed limit and people get really annoyed at the jerk in front doing 21.

“Do you like diving?” she asks. “There’s loads of that. There’s a McDonald’s. Oh and the paella is delicious at the Cuba Club.”

I’m surprised our hand luggage isn’t checked before I board the 30-seater plane. All bags go through a scanner after we land, but when I suggest this is a security flaw I’m told “the Federal Aviation Authority makes the rules”; shocking, considering former Guantánamo military chief Col Bruce Vargo said a terrorist attack on Gitmo was something he thought about on a daily basis: “If you can fly a plane into the towers,” he said, “you can attack Guantánamo.”

My first glimpse of the Bay is a surprise. It’s small and mountainous and I can see a handful of people sunbathing as we come in to land on a thin strip of tarmac.

The following day, my photographer and I are picked up by our media handlers: Bobby Thomas, an army sergeant, and Sean Allen, a petty officer in the navy. We’re driven a few miles to a checkpoint manned by some fearsome-looking soldiers, all sporting aviator sunglasses.
The small section of Guantánamo that houses the notorious detention facilities accounts for just 15 per cent of the Bay.

Camp Delta is home to four of the seven detention camps. Our guide is Sgt Shad (like most of the guards here, he refuses to give his full name and won’t be photographed). He leads us into the library – a small mobile office building. Rosario Rodríguez, a small Hispanic woman and the librarian here, tells me one of the most popular “loans” is Sharh Sahih Muslim, a collection of books about the Prophet Mohammed. Apparently Obama’s books, Dreams Of My Father and The Audacity Of Hope are popular too. I ask if anyone has ever requested books about George W Bush. “No,” she says, without smiling.

Aesop’s Fables, Watership Down, Star Wars, and a complete set of Aristotle’s Ethics are all here. I also spot the prisoner self-help book, Chicken Soup For The Prisoner’s Soul. Flicking through Surfer magazine, I notice a woman standing on a beach has been completely scribbled out.

In Al-Arabi magazine a woman in Islamic dress has her face and hands obscured. Rodríguez says detainees request that images of women be blacked out. I ask what else they have to censor. “Anything that talks about a soldier dying,” Rodríguez says.

“We don’t want them harassing our guards.” We move through the maze of paths into Camp Four. A sign says: “Detainees in vicinity — maintain silence”. We’re shown a “classroom”; the tables are bolted to the floor. Next to each is a metal ring used to secure shackles to the detainees’ ankles. Here they can learn English, life skills, CV-writing, hygiene and financial skills.

Then, through the doorway, I get my first glimpse of some of the people at the heart of this story. The first thing I notice is how powerfully built these men are — tall, broad shouldered, they stand in the sun wearing white prison-issue tops and trousers, chatting to one another. One stands with his hands on his hips, and then laughs before disappearing into the doorway of a cell. Behind them, a row of washing dries on a length of fence wire.

It’s true that some detainees were picked up on the battlefields of Afghanistan, but a large number weren’t. Back in early 2002, the coalition offered a $5,000 reward to anyone turning in members of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Consequently, a large number of innocent people were given up. Some ended up in Guantánamo.

Back inside the classroom, items provided to the detainees are laid out on a table: sleeping mats, prayer beads, flipflops, vests and loose-fitting trousers. There’s a table football game, but the plastic players have had their faces scraped off — a request from the detainees, apparently, who said they looked “too Western”.

We’re whisked around the corner to the hospital where we meet the senior nurse. “Eight years ago we were doing bullet surgeries and amputations,” she says. “Now we treat people for diabetes, high cholesterol and sports injuries.” The long ward has beds separated by curtains and steel rings bolted to the floor.

The nurse has set up five cans of liquid nutritional supplement Ensure on a table. She picks up a yellow tube used to forcefeed detainees on hunger strike. “It’s lubricated and it goes into their nose,” she explains. Less than 10 detainees are on hunger strike, she says, and apparently all take the Ensure “compliantly”. “They don’t struggle. Just being on hunger strike is their way of protesting. Why the various flavours? They burp and can taste it.”

We’re told to keep our voices down as there are detainees recovering in a nearby ward (the nurse won’t say what is wrong with them, citing the Hippocratic Oath, though she hasn’t named them — no official list of detainees has ever been made public). The intensive care ward really is particularly horrifying: two beds inside what look like enormous dog kennels.

Guantanamo bay was leased by the US from Cuba in 1903 for use as a fuelling station. From the Seventies, it was used to house Haitian and Cuban refugees, then, in the Nineties it held those fleeing a Haitian coup but refused asylum in the US on the grounds they had HIV.

Today around 6,000 people live and work on the naval base. “As far as deployments go, this is pretty nice,” one soldier tells me. “It’s better than Iraq or Afghanistan.” But it’s perhaps not been “better than Iraq or Afghanistan” for the detainees locked up here. While things have improved over the last eight years, this is still the same place where Britons Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul complained of sleep deprivation, rat-infested cages, blistering temperatures, painful cavity searches and physical abuse.

Camp X-Ray, where the first 20 detainees were taken in January 2002, has become synonymous with detainee abuse at Guantánamo. The image of Middle Eastern men — some barely in their teens — in orange jump suits, wearing goggles and ear defenders, shackled at their hands and feet and kneeling on asphalt is the picture that accompanies almost every article about this place. Naturally, the military is keen to prove that image is no longer relevant.

Camp X-Ray was closed in April 2002 but the US has been forced to leave it intact due to pending legal cases. It sits in a bowl between towering hills, not far from the coast. It’s not big — just a series of pens with galvanised steel roofs, surrounded by razor wire and three levels of fencing. It’s quiet and warm. Stand still for longer than a second and bugs bite your neck. Looking down from a nearby hill, I can see it’s almost entirely overgrown; weeds reach waist height and the place is overrun with banana rats the size of kittens. You can still see the watchtowers and the bathroom blocks for the guards (detainees stayed in their cages 24/7 unless wanted for interrogation). I ask our media handler what he thinks when he looks at it. “Progress,” he says.

“How things have changed. We were forced to make a quick decision. It could have been a better one, but they knew they had to house these combatants somewhere.” Today, most detainees are housed in camps modelled on US prisons. Camp Five is for the “non-compliant detainees” (who wear orange jumpsuits) and we’re shown around by another officer. “They’re strictly housed according to what they’ve done since they’ve been at Guantánamo Bay — not what they did on the outside,” he says.

Cells have a window, a sink and clothing hooks that bend if weight is applied to them to prevent suicides. The last was a year ago when Yemeni prisoner Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi hanged himself. He was the fifth detainee to take his own life.

All prisoners are now checked every one or three minutes depending on the risk they pose to themselves. Some are monitored constantly. If a detainee assaults a guard (usually by throwing faeces or urine), privileges are removed. The guards wear Perspex masks.

We’re shown the “TV room” — a tiny cell with a La-Z-Boy-style chair in the middle and a television. “Only compliant detainees get to come in here,” he says. “They are placed in humane restraints and we offer 15 different DVDs a week and we have a satellite hook-up. They really like soccer. I believe they watch Al Jazeera too.” He leads us round the corner and shows us the shower. There is no privacy here — a guard stands at the glass door of the cubicle, and behind him is a control room. “We control how hot or cold the water is,” he says. “If it got real hot and steamy we wouldn’t be able to see them.” From behind a two-way mirror I see a detainee kneeling down in the outdoor recreation area, praying. He has long black hair and a full beard and I see him touch his forehead on the ground. To his right, in another cage, is a detainee in a wheelchair.

Next door at Camp Six we’re shown a “pod” of communal cells where five detainees mill around. One is inscribing his name on a Tupperware box. “That’s his lunch,” a guard tells me. Another sits down at the back of the room, reading. “Their favourite drink is Pepsi,” the guard tells me. “Monday is Pepsi day.”

The officer in charge of Camp Six is a small African American in his forties. He says he had worked at Camp X-Ray and was re-assigned to Guantánamo last year. Few guards today worked here back then, and I ask him to tell me about X-Ray. “I have orders not to talk about it,” he says. I push him but he won’t budge. I’m later told there is no regulation that prevents anybody from talking about X-Ray. Apparently, “if he chose not to, then it was a personal choice”.

Later that day I meet two Guantánamo guards. AC2 Golden and AC2 Roberts are both 23 years old but look younger. I ask how Golden, a chislled-jawed Californian with perfect teeth, felt when he was assigned here. “I was nervous, like any other human being would be,” he says.

“But my family are supportive of me being in the military. They know I’m a good person and I’m going to be professional. My biggest problem is being away from them. You get island fever here.”

Roberts, a young seaman with piercing eyes, says he knew the camp had a terrible image but he was largely ignorant of its past when he arrived. “I immediately called my mum,” he says. “I didn’t want them to think I’d do anything like that — it’s not who I was raised to be. I said, ‘I don’t know what history you know about Guantánamo, but that’s not what it is now’.” Roberts says it’s hard to remain neutral sometimes. “We still have our own troops and seamen in Afghanistan and Iraq, so sometimes it’s hard for people — someone might have a brother who’s serving there and may have adverse feelings to someone with brown skin.”

Our media handler, Sean Allen, is a reservist in the navy and worked for a medical supply company in Florida before he got deployed to Guantánamo. His room on the base is tiny but immaculate. There’s a microwave, laptop, a flat-screen TV and a small double bed. He keeps his military-issue boots on top of a tall wardrobe. These small mobile cubicles with shared bathrooms are assigned to anyone below the rank of petty officer 1st class in the navy. The top brass enjoy ocean views from houses fringed by palms.

The few shops on the base sell all you could need. There’s a supermarket with a meat and fish counter, beer and wine, household goods and vegetables. There are smaller convenience stores too and among the sun cream, toilet paper and postcards are M16 cleaning kits and an aisle stocked with Myoplex muscle-building powder.

Persuading a sceptical media that things have changed here is a tough assignment. And, generally, they do a fairly good job in damage limitation, particularly when even the President has acknowledged that this place has hurt US national security interests and become a “recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda”. Most of the people I meet are assigned for between six months and a year so there is no “institutional memory”.

The problem, of course, is that the detainees were here in 2002. And for them, the days of forced interrogations and rough treatment surely seem like yesterday.

Each afternoon, our photographer has to endure all his pictures being scrutinised. You can’t capture images of the radar beacons on the hills; faces of detainees (you can’t photograph faces of anyone, in fact, unless they’ve given permission); unmanned watchtowers; two watchtowers together; a manned watchtower if the guard’s face is showing. About 30 per cent of his images are deleted by military censors.

I’m introduced to Zak (he won’t reveal his full name), a Jordanian who came to the US when he was 19. Now 52, he works as a cultural advisor to the military — first in Iraq, now here. His job, he says, is to act as a bridge between the two cultures: “I help people understand each other. I make everybody who deals with the detainees aware of their culture and religion.” I ask how the detainees relate to him as a Muslim. “I’ve been called a traitor and everything but I’ve shown them over the years I do not take anybody’s side. I don’t take the guards’ side, I don’t take the detainees’ side.”

I ask if he works in all the camps at Guantánamo Bay. “All,” he says, “except…” “Camp Seven?” I ask.
“Yes.”

Two years ago the Associated Press revealed the existence of Camp Seven. “Somewhere amid the cactus-studded hills on this sprawling navy base,” it said, “is a jailhouse so protected that its very location is top secret.”

All that Guantánamo’s commanders — and the White House — will admit is that Camp Seven exists and that it houses key Al-Qaeda members. I turn to Maria Blanchard, another public affairs officer assigned to help with our visit. I ask if we can visit Seven. “Out of the question,” she says, adding that not even she or her commander have been there. I say that if the aim is to rectify the old image of Guantánamo, it all needs to be open to media scrutiny. How do I know that Camp Seven doesn’t look like Camp X-Ray?

The one man who can tell me this is Rear Admiral Tom Copeman, commander of the Joint Task Force. I wait for him in the public affairs office where I spot a small fridge with a sticker proclaiming “Everybody loves Donald Rumsfeld”.

I’m not quite sure whether it’s a joke.

Admiral Copeman landed the top job here last summer but he’s already in line for a transfer. “I was a little surprised when I got the job,” he admits. “I have no background in detainee operations. I’m a surface warfare officer in the navy and I didn’t know much about the place.” On his desk is a book on the Geneva Convention — the US has been criticised for picking and choosing which bits to adhere to. I ask whether he had any reservations when he found out he was moving to Gitmo. “I’ve been here for 10 months,” he says, “and that image — with the abuse and orange jumpsuits — is very, very outdated. I don’t know how to go about changing it. The detainees are treated well. But it’s the ‘poisoned well’ analogy: once it’s poisoned, no matter how many tests you show the people in the village that it’s OK to drink, they’ll be reticent.”

I ask if mistakes were made. Admiral Copeman laughs. “That’s fairly obvious.” I ask about the secrecy involving Camp Seven, but he says it’s a policy that’s come from the top. “It’s for national security reasons,” he says. “The Red Cross has access to it, but right now the classification guiding its location is secret.” Obama said last year that Gitmo would close this January. Did Copeman think he’d still be here? “We spent most of last summer and the early part of Fall very aggressively pursuing plans on what we would do after the last detainee left,” he says. “I’ve read that the administration still desires to purchase a facility in Illinois [a former prison], which is unused, and at some point, with Congress’s approval, they’ll move the operation from here to there. I can’t predict what the timeline will be and I don’t know what the resistance will be in Congress — there’s an election coming up.”

On my arrival home, I call Clive Stafford Smith, the UK-based director of the human rights group Reprieve, who has represented scores of detainees at Guantánamo. He says that in some ways things at the detention camp are worse than ever. “There is a lot of depression among the people we represent because they thought they’d be home by now.
Obama promised to close it; now it’s not going to close. It’s so politicised,” he says.

Stafford Smith says you can’t hold people without any hope, indefinitely, in isolation. “This is the sort of treatment that drives people mad,” he says, “and the physical conditions in Guantánamo are harsher than death row in most US states.” I tell him the Admiral claimed “advanced interrogation techniques” have only been approved for use on two people.

“I don’t buy that,” he says. “In fact I don’t know of any prisoner on whom they weren’t used. Whether they still are using them against some prisoners I wouldn’t know. But by and large they’re not interrogating them any more because there’s nothing left to learn. So why on Earth are they still holding them?” It’s a question the detainees would like an answer to as well. For now, it seems, they remain pawns in a political game; one they haven’t a hope of winning.

Sunday Telegraph magazine

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8566133/25-years-of-Stand-by-Me.html