THE first independent visitor to Guantanamo Bay prison has been told by remaining inmates that she is “too late.”

For the first time since the controversial Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba opened in 2002, a United States president has allowed a United Nations independent investigator to visit.

Fionnuala Ni Aolain, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and at Queens University in Belfast, was reported today as acknowledging with just 30 prisoners remaining she had come too late.

Some 780 Muslim men were illegally detained without charge or trial following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US that killed nearly 3,000 people. Many have also faced physical and psychological torture in the prison.

The UN had tried for many years to send an independent investigator, but was turned down by the administrations of George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Professor Ni Aolain said she believes the cross-section of “high-value” and “non-high value” detainees she met with “recognised the importance of sitting in a room with me.”

“But I think there was a shared understanding that at this point, with only 30 of them left, while I can make recommendations and they will hopefully substantially change the day-to-day experience of these men, the vast majority of their lives were lived in a context where people like myself and the UN had no influence,” she said.

At the prison, the ageing men, known by their serial numbers, arrived at the meeting shackled. Every single one told the visitor — for many, the first independent person they had talked to in 20 years — “you came too late.”

But they still talked about their many health problems, the psychological and physical scars of the torture and abuse they experienced.

Professor Ni Aolain said: “There is really no population on Earth like this population that came to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the circumstances in which they came, rendered across borders.”

In her report to the UN on June 26, Ms Ni Aolain said the treatment of the detainees at Guantanamo was unjustified. 

The vast majority were brought there without cause and had no relationship to the terrorist attacks, she wrote, adding that all of the men still alive suffer from psychological and physical trauma.

What the men still at Guantanamo and those who have been released need most, she said, “is torture rehabilitation — every single one.”

The US administration responded that Professor Ni Aolain’s findings “are solely her own” and “the United States disagrees in significant respects with many factual and legal assertions.”