Nightlife and recreation upgraded at Club Gitmo

Independent:

A holiday camp it plainly will never be but the American officers running the Guantanamo Bay compound in Cuba are taking steps to make the lives of its detainees marginally more tolerable with recreational treats such as once-a-week film nights and limited access to television.

The steps, though limited, mark a change of tack for the American military after months of seeking to toughen discipline at the facility after unrest in one of its sections - Camp 4 - erupted last year with a brief riot and the suicides of three inmates.

It is in Camp 4, which is reserved for the most compliant of the prisoners, that the first changes are being brought in. Its roughly 45 detainees - out of a total of 375 still at Guantanamo - have already been allowed to tend a vegetable garden and watch television shows selected by officers. Among them is a documentary show about deep sea fishing off Alaska called The Deadliest Catch. The idea is to provide the inmates, most of whom are accused of ties with al-Qa'ida or the Taliban, with "increased mental stimulation," Navy Rear Admiral Mark Buzby said this week. Another innovation is the expansion of language classes, both Arabic and English, for detainees who must nonetheless sit in classrooms with one ankle chained to the floor.

"There are certainly benefits to giving them outlets other than sitting in their cell or sitting in their recreation cell for hours at a time with nothing else to exercise their mind or think about other than their situation," he explained.

Admiral Buzby said it has become easier to relax some restrictions because the number of inmates has shrunk. About 100 have been released in the past year. Discipline problems have also been on the wane, although another inmate died from an apparently suicide at the end of May.

But it is hardly likely that the new recreational activities will do much to blunt criticism of Guantanamo in the US and around the world....

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Of course not. The terrorist rights wackos have never been really concerned about what was rally happening at Gitmo, they have just been using it as a different kind of club to bash the US which is their main agenda.

Now if we can just get them to provide their own vegetables.