The guards at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp are the "overlooked victims" of America's controversial detention facility in Cuba, according to a psychiatrist who has treated some of them.
In some cases, a tour of duty at the camp has made guards suicidal and prompted a variety of psychiatric symptoms, from depression and insomnia to flashbacks. The guards' testimony also provides a harrowing insight into the treatment of prisoners.
Professor John Smith, a retired US Air Force captain, treated a patient who was a guard at the camp. "I think the guards of Guantánamo are an overlooked group of victims," Smith told the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Washington DC on Saturday. "They do not complain a lot. You do not hear about them."
The patient ('Mr H') is a national guardsman in his early 40s who was sent to Guantánamo in the first months of its operation, when prisoners captured in Afghanistan were beginning to flood into the camp. Mr H reported that he found conditions at the camp extremely disturbing. For example, in the first month two detainees and two prison guards committed suicide.
Painful positions
The taunts of prisoners and the things his superiors required him to do to them had a severe psychological impact on Mr H. "He was called upon to bring detainees, enemy combatants, to certain places and to see that they were handcuffed in particularly painful and difficult positions, usually naked, in anticipation of their interrogation," said ...
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