My tortured journey with former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks

I wondered if Melise bore witness to any of the horrific pictures my mind created during that split-second gap in our conversation.

"O.K. I understand," I told Melise. "I won't go there. I'm so sorry."

"I'm a good soul and I was put in a horrible place," Melise said.

"I know you are," I told him. "Well, how about this. Can you tell me what you saw in the detainees' eyes?

"Sadness," Melise said. "Like they could not believe the Americans are putting them through that. It was an emotional look. I'll never forget it."

Melise hated his job. He started drinking.

"Baccardi 151," he said. "Two bottles a night."

He said, "when you see people broken down so much you tend to drink a little to cope with what you're seeing. I couldn't deal with what they were putting me through."

Melise said "fake" detainees were planted at Camp Delta to try and gather intelligence from the "real" detainees. He said he knew they were "fake" because they were "placed in cells for two or three months and then they would pretend to be going to another camp for interrogations." But, "I would see them shopping, dancing or ordering a sandwich or hanging out at McDonald's during that time." Then the "fake" detainees would return to their cells.

He said detainees were also bribed with prostitutes as incentive to get them to work as agents for the US government. He said there was a camp at Guantanamo that just housed children, some of who were as "young as 12 and over 8" years old, called Camp Iguana.

"One of my buddies worked there," Melise said. "Sick."

There was also a camp where CIA interrogators worked out of called Secret Squirrel.