In India Block, as the block of punishment cells is known, "there were no windows. There were four walls and a roof made of tin, a light bulb and an air conditioner. They put the air conditioning on and it was extremely cold. They would take away the blanket in the morning and bring it back in the evening.

As treatment for Mohammed's suicidal state of mind, US medics injected him with an unknown drug, against his will. "I refused and they brought seven or eight people and held me and injected me," he says. "I couldn't see down, I couldn't see up. I felt paralysed for one month - this injection, the effect, I couldn't think or do anything. They gave me tranquillising tablets. They just told me: 'Your brain is not working properly.' They were forcing me to take these injections and tablets and I didn't want to do that. Some people were being injected every month."

Then there's the treatment the detainees suffered at Kandahar.

The released detainees recount the roughness with which they were treated at Kandahar, from the moment of their transport there. "One thing I've learned about the Americans is they are very harsh when they transport people around," says Razaq. "They had tied up my hands so tight that for two months I couldn't use my right hand. They haul you from your neck and drop you off the plane in a very disrespectful manner. For a long time we didn't know it was Kandahar. We thought they were going to kill us there."

"They would just pick us up and throw us out [of the plane]," says Saghir. "Some people were hurt, some quite badly." Mohammed says: "They kicked us out of the plane and threw us on the ground."

From Kandahar they were taken to Cuba:

Saghir says that, as with the arrival at Kandahar, the detainees, still bound, gagged and blindfolded, were thrown off the plane on arrival in Cuba. Some had their noses broken, he says. "I got a bruise under my left eye where my face hit the ground."

According to Saghir, in this initial, relatively brutal phase of Guantanamo, there was little tolerance for the practice of Islam, with its requirement of prayer five times a day. "In the first one-and-a-half months they wouldn't let us speak to anyone, wouldn't let us call for prayers or pray in the room," he says. "We were only given 10 minutes for eating. I tried to pray and four or five commandos came and they beat me up. If someone would try to make a call for prayer they would beat him up and gag him. After one-and-a-half months, we went on hunger strike."

On the interrogation process:

There has been an enormous amount of interrogation; each prisoner has typically been questioned between 10 and 20 times, which would, assuming interviews last 90 minutes on average, have generated some 15,000 hours of transcripts, containing perhaps 200 million words, the equivalent of around 250 Bibles. Yet without exception, the detainees say they were questioned by different interrogators each time, and each time the questions were the same.

Part Two is here.