For Sami al-Hajj, the scenes in the film he is watching at his home in Doha, Qatar, take him back to his darkest hours. Twice a day, for 16 months, al-Hajj was strapped down and force-fed inside Guantánamo Bay. Today, viewing a film representation of the procedure inGuantánamo Bay: The Hunger Strikes – an animated short made by two British journalists – induces a familiar sensation of torment.
"It reminds me of the painful suffering during my hunger strike. It was painful in every sense of the word. I felt at the time that I died twice every day during the force-feeding," says the 44-year-old from Sudan. A former al-Jazeera cameraman, al-Hajj was illegally detained and tortured by the US authorities for seven years inside Guantánamo Bay, before being released without charge in 2008.
More than five years later, the mystery of what goes on beyond the watchtowers and barbed-wire perimeter of the world's best known, most controversial and most expensive prison, has if anything deepened. What exactly is daily life like inside Guantánamo Bay? How does it feel, smell, sound? What do its detainees do all day? What do they think? How do they cope?
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