How are the detainees being treated? Are the conditions different from other prisons?
There is no doubt that, as the administration has claimed, the detainees have been given adequate food and clothing. But, as David Rose noted in articles published in The Observer and Vanity Fair in early 2004, they have little privacy and severe restrictions on their movements: detainees … are confined to a metal box with mesh walls … Each box is a little larger than a king-size bed: 56 square feet. Next to the hard steel wall-mounted bed, covered with a thin foam mattress, is a toilet, a hole in the floor, facing the open grille of the door. Depending on how co-operative they have been with their interrogators, the detainees will leave their box between two and five times a week for 30 minutes, during which they will be led in cuffs and leg irons to exercise, shower and change. If they have not started to confess, the only items they are allowed in their cell are a toothbrush, soap and shampoo, and a prayer cap, mat and a copy of the Koran. Until recently, members of the administ
