
Guantanamo: Blacked Out Bay
Since 2002, almost 800 men have passed through the Guantanamo Bay detention facility; fewer than 150 remain, and most of those have already been cleared for transfer with no release date in sight. VICE News reporter Gianna Toboni gets an official media tour of the base, walking the outdoor cages of Camp X-Ray and the force-feeding area where hunger-striking prisoners are fed against their will, all under handlers who cut the visit short once her questions stray from the approved script. Denied further access, she travels to Sarajevo to interview Mustafa Ait Idir, who was transferred to Guantanamo despite being acquitted of any charge and describes being forced to lie naked on concrete floors, and to Phoenix to hear former guard Terry Holdbrooks, now an activist for the prison's closure, describe the abuse he witnessed firsthand. Barack Obama's 2009 order to shut the facility within a year sits unresolved in the background throughout. The film's real subject is the gap between the sanitized tour and what the detainees and guards actually describe.