Washington – The prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay during the war on terrorism have attacked their military guards hundreds of times, turning broken toilet parts, utensils, radios and even a bloody lizard tail into makeshift weapons.
Pentagon incident reports reviewed by The Associated Press show Military Police guards are routinely head-butted, spat upon and doused by “cocktails” of feces, urine, vomit and sperm collected in meal cups by the prisoners.
Serious assaults requiring medical attention, however, are rare, the reports indicate.
Since its creation in early 2002, the U.S. detention camp on Cuba’s coast has been a controversial symbol of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism, bringing allegations of prisoner mistreatment and debates over civil rights.
About 450 foreign men captured in the war on terror are kept there. Ten detainees have been accused of war crimes, but no one has been tried.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the men are entitled to lawyers and access to courts.
The incident reports released under the Freedom of Information Act to a conservative legal group and reviewed by AP, detail more than 440 incidents between guards and prisoners from December 2002 through summer 2005 that resulted in recommendations of discipline, an average of about three per week.
One of the most unusual incidents detailed occurred when a detainee in the prison recreation yard assaulted a guard with a bloody tail torn from a lizard.
The detainee “caught the iguana by the tail at which time the tail detached,” the May 2005 report described. When the guard turned to talk to a commanding officer, “he felt something strike him in the lower right back” and then “saw the tail on the ground at his feet and blood was in the same area of his uniform.”
