Telephone access of Guantanamo Bay detainees Telephone access of Guantanamo Bay detainees After the United States established the Guantanamo Bay detention camp at its naval base in Cuba, officials occasionally allowed Guantanamo captives' phone calls to their family. In 2008 the Joint Task Force Guantanamo that manages the camps developed rules regarding phone calls: all detainees who met certain conditions were allowed to make one call home per year. On September 29, 2009, the International Committee of the Red Cross announced that Guantanamo captives and their families would be allowed to communicate through a two-way video link. Since May 2008, a similar facility has been available
Guantanamo Bay detention camp the Guantánamo Bay prison as "the gulag of our times," breaking an internal AI policy on not comparing different human rights abuses. The report reflected ongoing claims of prisoner abuse at Guantánamo and other military prisons. The comparison between the Gulag and Guantanamo Bay has been criticized by a number of people, including John Podhoretz, who on the difference between Guantanamo and a Soviet gulag, said, "Maybe the people who work at Amnesty International really do think that the imprisonment of 600 certain or suspected terrorists is tantamount to the imprisonment of 25 million slaves." Former Soviet-era "gulag" prisoner, Pavel