Hilferufe aus dem USS - KZ Guantanamo Bay - Zensiert
h.habiger
inmates
Vikram Dodd in Guantanamo Bay
Saturday June 21, 2003
The Guardian
The US military clashed with British journalists yesterday at Camp
Delta in Guantanamo Bay after inmates shouted to a BBC Panorama team
who had been invited to tour the maximum security camp.
As the journalists walked through camp four, detainees shouted that
they wanted to tell their story and the US soldiers immediately halted
the tour, ordering everyone out.
About 680 people, including around nine Britons, are being held in
Guantanamo Bay naval base in US-occupied Cuba, as part of the Bush
administration's war against terror.
An audio recording made by the Panorama team was seized by US forces
and the BBC reporter Vivienne White was banished to a section of the
bay away from Camp Delta.
The journalists, including one from the Guardian, saw the inmates
wearing white clothes and eating at an outside table as temperatures
reached 38C (100F).
From behind a fence one man in his late 20s, with a Pakistani accent,
shouted out: "Are you journalists? Can we talk to you?"
White responded: "We're from BBC television, we are from BBC TV." Then
immediately US officials tried to order the reporters out.
The detainee said: "We've been waiting to see you."
A melee broke out as the reporters stood by only three metres away.
One US officer said: "Either you keep moving or the tour ends."
One detainee said: "We've been here a long time ... we will talk to
you later."
US officials next confined journalists to a bus, before allowing those
reporters not with the BBC to continue the tour. A US official told
the Guardian that the BBC Panorama team had been told they would have
to hand over their audio recordings if they wished to do
any more filming at the camp. The source said sections containing the
detainees' voices had been erased before the tapes were handed back
and filming, outside and away from Camp Delta, was allowed to
continue.
A Camp Delta spokesman, Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson, said the BBC
team had ignored an instruction to move, and had broken the
groundrules they had promised to obey.
Col Johnson said "the big deal" was that the groundrules were there
for a reason and "part of that reason is we try hard not to exploit
the situation of the detainees, and that way no contact is allowed in
the camp". He said the Panorama team had shouted to the detainees
first.
The US military maintains the detainees cannot speak to the press
because of the Geneva convention, but that claim is disputed by the
International Committee of the Red Cross.