This segment originally aired Jan. 10, 2016, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.Last week marked 15 years since the opening of the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. For all its notoriety, little is known about the 779 detainees who were held there during that time, or the 715 who have been released and resettled elsewhere.
“They used to strip us all naked,” former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg told VICE News correspondent Hind Hassan in Birmingham, U.K. “Right in the beginning, they would slice all our clothes off and spat at us and punched us and degraded us in ways that’s really hard to, even now, hard to describe.”The former detainees agreed that the time they spent at Guantanamo will always be a part of their lives.“After all the promises that Obama made, he never fulfilled,” former Guantanamo detainee Shafiq Rasul said. “If he didn’t fulfill them, what’s the future going to hold for the rest of them there?”