San Juan, Puerto Rico ? The prisoners banged on their cells to protest the heat at Guantanamo Bay. They doused guards with whatever liquid was handy – from spit to urine. Sometimes they struck their jailers, one swinging a steel chair at a military police officer.

And the American MPs at times retaliated with force – punches, pepper spray and a splash of cleaning fluid in the face, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press that detail military investigations and eyewitness accounts of alleged abuse.

Military authorities have previously disclosed some incidents of guard retaliation, which resulted in mostly minor disciplinary proceedings. What emerges from 278 pages of the newly released documents is the degree of defiance by the terrorism suspects at Guantanamo.

Some prisoners at the U.S. base in eastern Cuba have gone on the attack, as in April 2003 when a detainee got out of his cell during a search for contraband food and knocked out a guard’s tooth with a punch to the mouth and bit him before he was subdued by MPs. One soldier delivered two blows to the inmate’s head with a handheld radio, the documents show.

The soldier who struck the inmate, and was dropped in rank to private first class as a result, described it as a close call. “The detainee was fighting as if he really wanted to hurt us. : We all saved each other’s lives in my opinion,” he wrote.

In this image reviewed by the U.S. Military, a secure recreational yard is shown at Camp V on June 25 at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. This yard is where detainees of Camp V can exercise and enjoy the sun.

The documents, obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by AP, are far from a comprehensive look at Guantanamo and do not provide full details about each incident.

Names and some other identifying details have been blacked out by military censors. Handwriting at times isn’t legible and pages appear to be missing or out of sequence. In some cases, it is not possible to decipher who did what to whom. Disciplinary measures against the troops were either relatively minor or unclear in some reports.

The internal investigative reports do, however, provide a snapshot of life behind the wire at Guantanamo, depicting a tense, hostile and sometimes chaotic place.

In one of the more serious incidents described in the documents, detainees told guards that an MP threw the cleaning liquid Pine-Sol in the eyes of a prisoner in the middle of one night in January 2004. In a written statement, another soldier said he came in immediately afterward to find what smelled like cleaning liquid dripping from the cell.

“The detainee could be seen rubbing his eyes intensely and moaning in pain,” he said.

Documents show that the guard, from the 661st Military Police Company, did not admit throwing the cleaning fluid when questioned about it that night but did say the detainee had spit on him, and may have thrown urine.

A medic on the cell block flushed the detainee’s eyes with water, a witness said.

Investigators recommended disciplinary action against the soldier and a probe into why the incident wasn’t reported up the chain of command, but the outcome is unclear from the papers.

The detainees’ defiance discussed in the documents ranged from mild – prisoners getting matching haircuts in a show of solidarity or refusing orders to stop practicing martial arts in the exercise yard – to hostile acts like spitting or throwing unknown liquids at the MPs.