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He sits slumped in a wheelchair, back and neck in pain with every movement. For six years he lives in this dark room in the former mansion of his grandfather in al-Gharbia, Egypt. The columns at the front door are witness to a past fortune. It iss raining through the ceiling, black mold spots spread on the walls.

In addition to Sami, 56,  his mother and his younger brother with his wife and four children liev in the house. The brother lost his job as a translator in the Ministry of Defence, because Sami was trapped in Guantanamo. The family has hardly enough money to buy food.

In his rickety wheelchair Sami al-Laithy cannot maneouvre without help on the muddy path outside the house. Trapped in the room, he stares at the walls. The Americans, he says, have destroyed me, my health, my soul, my future.

If al-Laithi speaks, one hears his love of language, of Arabic poetry and  English sonnets. He is one of 38 Guantanamo which the U.S.  formally declared to be "no longer" enemy combatants. Neutrally, his files states that he "represents a low risk due to his medical situation."

The troops have broken his back, as they stormed with batons and pepper spray again into his cells again and again.  They kicked Al-Laithi, prisoner number 287, with boots until he could no longer walk. They have beaten him, because he did not want to go into the yard, for him "humiliation yard." He refused treatment at the hospital. Torturers, he insisted, could not simultaneously be doctors. They have pressed his head between his legs and pulled it back, hard. A vertebra at the neck broke. "I asked why they do these things. Why? No answer, "he says. "Only the walls have listened to me for years."

Sami al-Laithi says what he thinks. "Wearing the heart on his sleeve," he calls it. Over

20 years ago, he had to flee the authoritiarain regime of Egypt because of his constant complaints about cor-rupt officials, first to Pakistan to his sister, and from there to Afghanistan.

In Kabul, he taught Arabic and English at the university and clashed again, this time with the Taliban on their requirements for the length of beards. Then came the 11th September, the war in Afghanistan with its bombing. Laithi was seriously injured. He fled to the Pakistani border. There he was arrested and extradited to the U.S. military. Under interrogation, his opposite grabbed him by the shirt, and he, appalled by the rudeness of a younger man, was retaliated. Since then, he was considered a rebel.

In spite of this, the Americans seem to have interest early on in the man who once believed in the American Constitution. During his time at Guantánamo, he was hardly interrogated says Sami al-Laithi.

When he is sitting at home today, sore from the thin piece of leather of his wheelchair, he is hoping for a life after death, the reward of a just God. Without this belief, he would have long ago put an end to his suffering: "Animals should not sobehandelt.Ichschämemich me to be a part of humanity."

"Guantánamo is an excel-lent institution. Many prisoners live better there than in their home countries. "Dick Cheney, former Vice President of the United States, 2011

Omar Deghayes missed seeing the white cliffs on the coast of southern England. The snowflakes, the sunset. When he was released from Guantanamo in December 2007, he sat in his family home in Brighton, often in complete darkness and listenedto the silence. His right eye is blind, since a guard rubbed pepper spray into it. His nose was broken, his ribs as well. A finger was crushed in the food flap of a cell, he can no longer move it.

Deghayes, 42, a man of powerful figure, speaks softly: "Every day, every week, they brought me in for questioning, for six years. At the end there was nothing, no charges, nothing. " When you read the published part of his file from Guantanamo, you could think of him as a perfidious terrorist. He is said to have fought in Chechnya and to have been a member of a terrorist cell in Spain. But on the video that supposedly shows him in Chechnya, experts recognize a now dead, Caucasian  fighter. And for the connection to Spain a judge found no evidence in Madrid.

Nevertheless Deghayes was seen in Guantanamo as "very interesting". So interesting that Libyan agents were allowed to interrogate the detainee. The men of the dictator Gadhafi threatened Deghayes with torture, when when he would be sent to Libya from the US. His father had been murdered there in the 80s by Gaddhafi's henchmen. The family fled to Britain. Omar studied law in Birmingham and wanted to be a lawyer like his father.

In 1999, after a particularly stressful study period he travelled to Malaysia, Pakistan and on to Afghanistan - part adventure and part self-discovery trip. Deghayes had become religious during his studies. He liked living in Kabul, in the country of the Taliban: "Life was much slower, much more natueral. These beautiful landscapes, nice people. "Finally he stayed because he had fallen in love. He married and wanted to open a law practice to become a mediator, he says, between sharia and Western law. On 11 September 2001 his wife was nine months pregnant.

Deghayes fled the war to Pakistan 2ith her. In spring 2002, an army of black-clothed soldiers surrounded the house in Lahore. Deghayes disappeared in American military prisons, first in Kandahar, then in Bagram and finally Guantánamo.

He has accused the government in London, of facilitiating torture, as British agents knew of his abuse. In an out of court settlement, the government paid him and 15 others, an unknown sum. The men may not talk publicly about the sum, which is said to be in the range of millions. Omar uses his share to help the remaining inmates in Guantanamo.

"If it were me, I would not close Guantanamo tomorrow, but this after-noon. We have destroyed the confidence of the world in America's legal system. "Ex-Defense minister Colin Powell, 2007

A  secret location in West Africa. Mohammed al-Gharani uses the phrases of young U.S. soldiers, when he speaks English: "Do you hear, man" at the end of every sentence. He was 16 when he arrived in Guantanamo. He was accused in 1998 to be part of a terrorist cell London. He would have been twelve years old.

As one of few, Gharanis case was investigated by a judge in the U.S.. He came to the conclusion that the accusations was based almost exclusively on "unreliable witnesses", mostly from interrogations in Guantanamo. The judge ordered Mohammed's immediate release.

In fact, it took another six months, before he was delivered to Chad.

Although citizen of the country,  Gharani had never lived here. He was born in Saudi Arabia. At age nine, he sold stuff to pilgrims in Medina, a little soldier of the road: "If there were problems, I took care of it, you know? It was about respect. "

Precocious and enterprising,  Gharani recognized that he needed better education for a better future. As a foreign national in Saudi Arabia, he had no access to higher education. 15 years old, he managed to travel with a false passport and savings of many years of street graft to Pakistan. After 9 / 11, Gharani was arrested at a mosque in Karachi. "At my first interrogation, I still thought I might clarify the apparent misunderstanding," he says. At the second interrogation it was clear: no one was looking for the truth.

Mohammed's Guantanamo file counts 60 attacks on guards and 385 disciplinary sanctions. "Nothing they gave to us without a fight," he says. No blanket, no common prayer times, no sleep. Once he was injected with something - he woke up three days later. The first soldier who came near him after that, he headbutted: "You want to break me, but I will not be broken. I fight as long as you fight me. "

To date he has not seen his family in Saudi Arabia. Gharani should be prevented from traveling, quoted U.S. diplomats in their cables. He has not received a passport. How he has managed to get to West Africa, where he now lives with his wife and a newborn daughter, he does not say: "We are in Africa, man!" When he needed surgery on the stomach, an NGO organized the operation. The permanent after-effects are stomach pain from Guantanamo says Gharani. He is now 24. One-third of his life he spent in Guantanamo. He would like to study pharmacy.

"What happens in Guantanamo shamed the United States. It is not the reason for terrorist acts, but it gave terrorists an excuse to attack our country. "Ex-President Jimmy Carter, 2005.

His face made Abd al-Salam Saif an ideal prey for the U.S.. Black turban, glasses, thick, long beard - he was the face of the Taliban after 11 September 2001. As the last Taliban ambassador Mullah Abdul Salam had represented the brutal regeime in his country in Pakistan, TV stations carried his defence live around the world. The cleric was 33 back then,  he was said to be in the leadership circle around Mullah Omar. His appearances in the limelight of world press were ended in January 2002. Pakistani intelligence officers arrested Saif and handed him over to the Americans.

That ten years have passed since then, cannot be seen in Abd al-Salam Saif's features - he looks as distant as before, the beard is still black. He speaks softly, but confidently. "The Pakistanis threw me to the Americans as a sheep to the wolf," he says. He finds this "indescribable" because he grew up in Pakistan as a refugee child, Pakistan's intelligence service instructed him as a teen-ager for the fight against the Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan, and Pakistan was the protector of the Taliban.

Among the first ordeals of his captivity was that, amid the laughter of GIs in Pe-Shawar, he had to strip naked, that he was locked in a cage on the warship USS "Bataan" in a cage, that he was tortured in Bagram with mock executions and attacked in Kandahar by drooling military dogs.

"Guantanamo was different," says the ex-prisoner number 306. The system there was "aimed at the psyche. The inmates get physical penalties, but there are worse things. We are Muslims. If they cut my beard or throw us naked in these cages, it is absolutely humiliation. They give prisoners no water for washing. I have seen prisoners there who for 20 days could not eat anything. Many of these never recovered from this treatment. "

For many prisoners in Guanta namo Mullah Abd al-Salam was a hero. U.S. intelligence agents made the attempt to win him as an informant, the Karzai government campaigned for his release. Ever since September 11, 2005, he is back in Afghanistan. " I was in Kabul two years re-under house arrest, the secret service NDS watching me around the clock, "says Saif. But the longer the war in Afghanistan takes, the more intense Western efforts to negotiate with the Taliban . "Diplomats and dignitaries come to my house, President Karzai is talking to me as a consultant," says Saif. He does not do politics, but business, he says: "I buy and sell houses and small estates" So he can care for his two wives and eleven children.

He may also travel abroad again, since his name has been deleted from the UN list of terror suspects. He was in Oslo, London and Berlin in 2011. "The Americans", he says, "have many brutally captured human beings and killed. They must stop humiliating people. Only then they can come to negotiate for peace."

"The principle of our rule of law does not apply to non- American citizens. That is so. "Richard Perle, former advisor to the Bush-government, 2005

Abu Bakir Qassim has never experienced the rule of law firsthand. The qualified saddler comes from the Xinjiang Autonomous Region in China. He is one of 22 Uigurs who fled from dictatorship of the communist rule and were sold by bounty hunters in Pakistan to U.S. military. In Guantanamo Qassim and other Chinese

Citizens were soon seen as a special case. In China, the security apparatus suppressed the Muslim ➔

Minority of nine million Uyghur systematically and brutally. Their struggle for freedom was supported by the U.S. for years, it finances, for example, a radio station of exiled Uigurs. Nevertheless, the prisoners could not return to China, where they faced a possible death penalty. The U.S. who abducted them would have been morally obligated to take them, but above all US-Republican do not want Guantanamo prisoners on American soil out of principle.

So USDiplomats had to beg foreign governments to take them. More than 100 countries refused. The German government did as well as economic relations with China were more important than making a humanitarian gesture. Finally, two of the Uyghur landed in Switzerland, ten on the islands of Bermuda and Pa lau, and five in Albania. Five Uighurs are still in custody at Guantanamo

Abu Bakir Qassim now lives in a three-room apartment on the fifth floor of a building in Tirana. The rent is paid by the Albanian Government, the lease must be renewed every year. The apartment is a big step forward. After he landed in May 2006, in leg irons on Albanian soil, officials drove him to a refugee camp on the outskirts of the capital. "A former barracks with police guards and three mandatory meals a day and a curfew after 22 clock," says Qassim. China's embassy intervened three times opposing the settlement of the Uighurs. Once Chinese security came to the barracks and demanded access to the Uyghurs. "The guards also protected us," said Qassim.

Over the Internet, he has now met a Uighur, she moved from Qatar to be with him. His marriage in China has been canceled, he has never seen his twins. Through a temporary job at the pizzeria Hallal he has earned money for an old moped. The Uighurs cannot find regular work in Albania. Although they have a permit to stay on, they have no passport - and Guantanamo in the CV.

"The prisoners who are still sitting in Guantanamo are the worst of the worst. If we do not hold them, we would have to kill them. "Dick Cheney, former Vice President of the United States, 2009

There's nobody at Guantánamo today who does not regularly depressed", says the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. He represents 85 prisoners  and has visited the camp several times. "They are all depressed - after ten years, how could it be any different?"

Up to 779 inmates were inside the camp. Today there are still 171 left. Of these, 82 are cleared for release. But they remain incarcerated because no state is willing to take them or their home countries are deemed unsafe. The Pentagon says that at least 14 percent of ex-detainees  are engaged in terrorism. Stafford Smith disagrees: "The U.S. government has published 44 different lists. And every time they delivered other, contradictory figures. "Independent experts were able to verify less than 20 cases by name.

"Guantanamo has become a political football," says Stafford Smith. Barack Obama decided that the domestic power struggle was more important than the eradication of Bush's legacy. To get the approval of the Republicans for the military budget, the U.S. president has just signed a law that makes it almost impossible to close Guantanamo. Thus the military can now "legally" run prisons outside the country, security forces may detain terror suspects in and outside the United States - and hold them indefinitely. And no tax money can be spent for the release of Guantánamo detainees.

Anyway, the end of Guantanamo would be only a beginning. In the Bagram military base in Afghanistan alone, the USA holds 1500 intern prisoners without charges, without trial, for years.

The legacy of Bush's camps, says Stafford Smith, was not only torture. But secrecy. Even as a lawyer he could not talk to all his clients. "I would so gladly defend a really guilty man," he says, "because we must finally learn to understand, what really motivated the terrorists." 2

With research by Gerald Drissner and Julica Jungehülsing

David Hicks

"I would never plead guilty, but after more than five years in Guantánamo my lawyer said that I must sign this document, if I ever wanted to get out. This has destroyed me. At that moment, something died in me. I still believe that they would have simply let me rot, if I had not co-operated. I was at the end. My country, Australia calls me a terrorist, and my co-detainees called me a traitor, both accusations are wrong. I was lost. Today, I have to deal with panic attacks and suicidal thoughts. Guantanamo is eating me from inside. " 


Sami al-Laithi, 56

Prisoner No. 287

Citizenship:

Egyptian

Duration of captivity:

3 years, 10 months

Lives in:

Egypt

Marital status:

single "My words are not enough to describe what happened to me. They have taken us completely naked across the tarmac, dogs have attacked us, incredible, such inhumanity. As a teacher, I taught English to the Afghans and told them about the American dream. The U.S. should have been grateful to me. "

Murat Kurnaz, 29

Prisoner No. 061

Citizenship:

Turk

Duration of captivity:

4 years, 9 months

Lives in:

Germany

Marital status:

Married, one daughter, "I was for weeks in the American prison in Kandahar. In the end I would not have objected to simply die. There was no normal interrogation, they have only asked questions, while they beat you, kicked, tortured with electro shocks. During my time in Guantanamo, I was just hoping that I will not go crazy. "

Abu Bakir Qassim, 42

Prisoner No. 283

Citizenship:

Chinese

Duration of captivity:

4 years, 5 months

Lives in:

Albania

Marital status:

married, "I was involved in protests against the government in Beijing. 20 people were sentenced to death, 4,000 were sent to prison, I spent seven month there. I left my home, my wife, my twins. In Pakistan we were sold to the Americans. We have never waged war against them. They are our allies against China's government. "

Mullah Abdul Salam al-Saif

"I was the representatives of prisoners. At that time, there was a hunger strike. We requested a few books, better food and that guards treat us as humans. Nothing more. The Americans agreed to change the menu, and offered us samples of the new menu. The food was good. As we came back into the cell block, it became clear that the Americans only given us a good meal as the prisoners' representatives to break the hunger strike. The strike continued. They put me in a cell block in response, that was worst isolation. I do not trust the Americans. Yes, I hate them. "

Moazzam Begg, 44, prisoner No. 558 Nationality: British

Duration of captivity:

3 years

Lives in:

Great Britain

Marital status:

Married, 4 children, "I understand why the Americans wanted to question people like me after 9/11, a foreigner who had lived in Kabul. I understand that they had to protect themselves. But I will never understand why they have held  us for so long - in a legal state of emergency and without opportunity to defend ourselves against the accusations. "

Mohammed al-Gharani

"In Pakistan, they have tortured me for a month, hung me on the ceiling hung, asked me repeatedly about al-Qaeda. I still had never heard of this group, I was only 16. Guantanamo was even worse, for seven years. One night I was about to give up. Because they had beaten me four times in one day, sometimes with up to ten men, while they knew that I never was in Afghanis-tan, that I did not have anything to do with terrorism. They told me so in the interrogations. Now I live in West Africa, where I do not know anyone. I have no work, no pass, I must lie down often, because my stomach hurts so much. "

Omar Deghayes

"I've always resisted. They should not treat me like a criminal, which I never was. They beat me up for each word. Once they have pinched my fingers in the small flap of the cell door and held it down until the bone broke. They looked at me the whole time. How inhuman do you have to be to look a man into the face while you break his bones?. I did not scream, I did not want to give that to them "

 Source: Stern Magazine