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Comment by guest_blog on April 30, 2014 at 3:03am

Guantanamo Bay: Foreign Correspondent goes inside the notorious US war-on-terror prison

Foreign Correspondent 

By Lisa Millar and Greg Wilesmith

Updated Tue 29 Apr 2014, 10:33am AEST

VIDEO: Gitmo resists efforts to close it down (ABC News)

PHOTO: Cell in Camp 5 at Guantanamo Bay.(ABC News: Greg Wilesmith)

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MAP: Cuba

"Should we close Gitmo? Absolutely. It's a blight on our history and I say this as a man who helped create it," says retired US Marines Major General Michael Lehnert.

Twelve years ago he was ordered to supervise the construction of emergency cells at the United States naval base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for the first batch of prisoners captured during the war in Afghanistan.

Close Guantanamo? You would find no contrary argument about that inside the high walls and barbed wire of Camp 5 - at least among the prisoners.

Just listen to the anguish in the voice of one of the 12-year men, Shaker Aamer, as he calls out from behind the brown door of his high-security cell: "Please, we are tired. Even if you leave us to die in peace. Tell the world the truth. Open up this place."

PHOTO: Retired US Marine Major General Michael Lehnert.

And then with rising anger: "You cannot walk, not even a half-a-metre without being chained. Is that [for] a human being? That's the treatment of an animal".

We know what the retired Major General thinks because we heard him address American college students.

"It's my opinion that many of the folks that went to Guantanamo should not have been sent there," he said.

www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-29/foreign-correspondent-goes-inside-gu...