Guantanamo Bay detention camp

• 1. Introduction

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  The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison on the coast of southeastern Cuba. On the 11th of January 2002, military guards brought the first twenty detainees to a temporary compound there called Camp X-Ray. Over the years that followed, at least 780 people from 48 countries were held at the camp. Fifteen men remain.

  President George W. Bush established the camp in 2002 to hold terrorism suspects after the September 11 attacks. Many of its prisoners were labeled "illegal enemy combatants," a phrase his administration used to argue that neither the Constitution nor the Geneva Conventions fully applied to them.

  This documentary asks several questions. Why does the United States run a prison on land it leases from Cuba? What legal reasoning placed the prisoners where courts were told they could not reach? Where did interrogators find their methods, and what did investigators, judges and the Red Cross make of them? And why has the camp outlasted promises from several presidents to close it?

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• 2. A Lease Without End

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  In 1901, an amendment drafted by Americans was attached to the Cuban constitution. It nominally recognized Cuban sovereignty while allowing the United States to intervene in local affairs and to set up naval bases on land leased or purchased from Cuba. The backdrop was the 1898 Spanish-American War, when American forces invaded and occupied Cuba during its war of independence against Spain. A treaty in 1903 reaffirmed those terms. That same year, the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base was established under a lease with no expiration date.

  The lease agreement was signed on the 23rd of February 1903. Its second article allowed the United States to use the land and the adjacent waters for "coaling or naval stations only, and for no other purpose." A revised treaty in 1934 replaced much of the 1903 treaty but kept the lease in force. Under it, Cuba retains ultimate sovereignty while the United States exercises sole jurisdiction. Both governments recognize the territory as sovereign Cuban land. Since coming to power in 1959, Cuba's communist government has called the American presence illegal and has repeatedly asked for the land back.

  Guantanamo had served another purpose long before the prison. During the Clinton administration and the Haitian refugee crisis, the Coast Guard brought tens of thousands of Haitian refugees there.

  The base covers 45 square miles of land and water. It is run by Joint Task Force Guantanamo, part of the Defense Department's Southern Command. Inside it, the detention camp has changed shape many times. Camp Delta, a 612-unit center finished in April 2002, replaced the temporary Camp X-Ray. It included Camps 1 through 4, plus Camp Echo, where detainees not facing military commissions are held. Other compounds included Camp Iguana and a psychiatric ward.

  Camps 5 and 6 were built in 2003 and 2004, modeled on a high-security facility in Indiana. Camp 6 holds men who have not been convicted in military commissions. In September 2016, Camp 5 was closed and part of it became a medical facility for detainees.

  Camp 7 was stranger. The Associated Press reported in 2008 that it was the highest-security jail on the base. It held men who had earlier been in a global, clandestine network of CIA prisons. Its exact location has never been confirmed, and a lawyer first visited a detainee there in 2013. In early April 2021, it was shut because its buildings were deteriorating, and its remaining prisoners moved to Camp 5.

  Two more sites sat outside the official map. In January 2010, Scott Horton wrote in Harper's Magazine about "Camp No," a black site about one mile outside the main perimeter. It included an interrogation center. Horton relied on four guards who had served at Guantanamo. They said prisoners were taken there one at a time and were believed to be interrogated.

  The CIA also ran a small site from 2003 to 2006 known informally as "Penny Lane." It held prisoners the agency hoped to recruit as spies against Al-Qaeda. By Guantanamo standards it was comfortable, with private kitchens, showers, televisions and beds with mattresses. Its eight units stayed secret until 2013, when its existence was revealed to the Associated Press.

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• 3. Who Was Held

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  Afghans were the largest national group among the Guantanamo detainees, at 29 percent. Saudi Arabians followed at 17 percent, Yemenis at 15 percent, Pakistanis at 9 percent and Algerians at 3 percent. By May 2003, the camp had become a permanent facility holding over 680 prisoners, most without formal charges. Nearly 200 men were released by mid-2004, before any Combatant Status Review Tribunal had reviewed whether they were rightly held as enemy combatants.

  The Bush administration said most of the men had been captured fighting in Afghanistan. A 2006 report from the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University Law School disagreed. It reviewed Defense Department data on the 517 men still held in 2005 and found that over 80 percent had been captured by Pakistanis and Afghans, often in exchange for bounty payments. The United States distributed leaflets across the region offering $5,000 per prisoner. An earlier Seton Hall study reproduced posters, some of which advertised bounties of "millions of dollars." Adel Noori, a Chinese Uyghur and dissident, was one man sold to the Americans by Pakistani bounty hunters.

  Defense officials often called the prisoners "the worst of the worst." Yet a 2003 memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants." The Seton Hall analysis found that most detainees were low-level offenders with no tie to organizations on American terrorist lists. In June 2004, The New York Times reported that of nearly 600 detainees, no more than two dozen were closely linked to al-Qaeda.

  In 2010, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, went further. In an affidavit, he said top officials knew that most of the early detainees were innocent. Those officials, he said, included Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld. He said the men were kept for reasons of political expedience. His statement was filed in a lawsuit brought by former detainee Adel Hassan Hamad.

  The age of some prisoners was also disputed. An estimated 17 to 22 people under 18 were detained, including three under 16, and critics say this violated international law. Chaplain Kent Svendsen, who served the detention centers from 2004 to 2005, said no minors were there when he began. He was told they had been separated and sent back to their families.

  A smaller group drew far more attention. In September 2006, Bush announced that 14 "high-value detainees" were being moved to military custody at Guantanamo from CIA custody. He admitted they had been held in CIA secret prisons overseas, known as black sites. The group included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the No. 3 Al-Qaeda leader before his capture in Pakistan in 2003. It also included Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an alleged would-be 9/11 hijacker, and Abu Zubaydah, believed to be a link between Osama bin Laden and many Al-Qaeda cells. In 2011, human rights groups and journalists found that some had first been taken to other locations, including in Europe, and interrogated under torture in the extraordinary rendition program.

  On the 11th of February 2008, the military charged Mohammed, bin al-Shibh and three others with committing the September 11 attacks. On the 31st of July 2024, Mohammed, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi agreed to plead guilty to avoid the death penalty. In exchange, they would receive life sentences and transfer to the ADX Florence prison. Two days later, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin revoked the deals. In November 2024, they were reinstated, because a military judge found that Austin lacked the authority and acted too late. In July 2025, a D.C. appeals court voided them in a 2-1 ruling.

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• 4. Orders And Rulings

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  On the 14th of September 2001, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. It gave the president broad powers to prosecute a war on terror. Advisers soon split over how far those powers should reach. Secretary of State Colin Powell and State Department legal adviser William Howard Taft IV said the president must observe the Geneva Conventions. Colonel Lawrence Morris proposed public hearings modeled on the Nuremberg trials. Major General Thomas Romig, the Army's Judge Advocate General, wanted any new military tribunals modeled on existing courts-martial.

  Another view prevailed. Jay Bybee of the Office of Legal Counsel relied on a unitary executive theory developed by his deputy, John Yoo. In a series of memos, Bybee advised that the president could hold enemy combatants abroad indefinitely, without congressional oversight and free from judicial review. On the 13th of November 2001, Bush signed a military order to detain and try enemy combatants by military commissions under presidential authority alone.

  The Justice Department argued that habeas corpus, a legal remedy against unlawful detention, did not apply at Guantanamo because it lay outside American territory. Rumsfeld said the camp existed to hold extraordinarily dangerous people, to interrogate them in an optimal setting and to prosecute them for war crimes.

  The courts took years to answer. Detainees petitioned for habeas review on the 19th of February 2002. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied the petitions on the 30th of July 2002. A D.C. Circuit panel that included Judge Merrick Garland affirmed on the 11th of March 2003. Then, on the 28th of June 2004, the Supreme Court ruled against the government in Rasul v. Bush. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for a five-justice majority that detainees had a statutory right to ask federal courts for review. The same day, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote a four-justice plurality opinion. It held that an American citizen detained there had a constitutional right to petition under the Due Process Clause.

  The administration responded by creating Combatant Status Review Tribunals, an idea from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. In January 2005, two district judges reached opposite conclusions. Judge Richard J. Leon rejected the detainees' petitions on the 19th of January. Judge Joyce Hens Green found on the 31st of January that the tribunals violated their constitutional rights. The reviews finished in March 2005, and 38 detainees were found not to be enemy combatants. When the dossier of Murat Kurnaz was accidentally declassified, Green wrote that it "fails to provide significant details to support its conclusory allegations."

  On the 15th of July 2005, a D.C. Circuit panel that included then-Circuit Judge John Roberts vacated the lower rulings. Congress then passed the Detainee Treatment Act on the 30th of December 2005, explicitly stripping detainees of the right to petition for habeas review. On the 29th of June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled against the government again in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. It held that the tribunals violated Geneva standards written into the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and that detainees were entitled to the minimal protections of Common Article 3. On the 7th of July 2006, the Defense Department issued an internal memo accepting that for the future.

  Congress answered with the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which gave statutory authority to the tribunals and retroactively removed habeas rights. A D.C. Circuit panel upheld the Act on the 20th of February 2007. On the 12th of June 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for a five-justice majority that detainees had a constitutional right to petition for habeas. Justice Antonin Scalia dissented strongly, writing that the decision "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

  The fight over lawyers continued. In the summer of 2012, the government required civilian attorneys to sign a memorandum of understanding restricting their access. It gave the commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo complete discretion over visits and letters. On the 6th of September 2012, Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth rejected the policy, saying the government was confusing "the roles of the jailer and the judiciary."

  International bodies weighed in too. In May 2007, United Nations rapporteur Martin Scheinin issued a preliminary report finding that the United States had violated international law. The International Committee of the Red Cross offered a blunt principle about detainees' status: "There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the law."

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• 5. Borrowed Methods

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  On the 2nd of July 2008, The New York Times revealed where some Guantanamo interrogation lessons came from. Military trainers who arrived in December 2002 had built a class around a chart copied directly from a 1957 Air Force study. The study examined Chinese Communist methods of extracting confessions during the Korean War. Its author, Albert D. Biderman, was a sociologist working for the Air Force. He had interviewed American prisoners of war who returned from Korea after confessing to biological warfare or other atrocities.

  Biderman's chart listed "coercive management techniques," including sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint known as stress positions, and exposure. Its most extreme entries included semi-starvation and the exploitation of wounds. He described it as an "extreme model," meant to explain what happened apart from how far it was realized in practice. The military used his work to train personnel to resist interrogation. Almost all American military personnel now receive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training, known as SERE.

  In 2002, that training program was adopted as a source of techniques for the newly declared war on terror. At Guantanamo, only one change was made to Biderman's chart. Its title, originally "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance," was replaced.

  At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the 17th of June 2008, Colonel Steven Kleinman testified about the pressure on his team of SERE trainers. He said they were pushed to demonstrate the techniques on Iraqi prisoners. He objected that the techniques were meant as a "form of punishment for those who wouldn't cooperate." His team was then sent home. Senator Carl Levin, the committee chairman, said: "What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions."

  Inside the Defense Department, some objected early. Senior law enforcement agents with the Criminal Investigation Task Force later told MSNBC that they began complaining in 2002. They considered the intelligence team's tactics unproductive, unreliable and probably illegal. Army commanders running the camp did not satisfy them, so they went to David Brant, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. He alerted Navy General Counsel Alberto J. Mora.

  Mora and Navy Judge Advocate General Michael Lohr believed the treatment was unlawful. They campaigned for an investigation and for clear standards banning coercive tactics. On the 15th of January 2003, Rumsfeld suspended the approved tactics until a working group led by Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker could write new guidelines. The group based them on a Justice Department memo written by John Yoo and signed by Jay S. Bybee, later widely called the "Torture Memo." Mora argued against it, including in person with Yoo. The final report was signed and delivered to Guantanamo without his knowledge.

  The Senate Armed Services Committee's report on detainee treatment, declassified in 2009, reached a harsh verdict. It said abuse could not "simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples.'" Senior officials, it found, had asked for information on aggressive techniques, redefined the law to make them look legal, and authorized their use.

  The scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq tied the two prisons together. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who commanded Abu Ghraib, said she was told from the top to treat detainees like dogs, as was done at Guantanamo. Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of Camp X-Ray, had led the inquiry into the alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib.

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• 6. Life Inside

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  In June 2004, the International Committee of the Red Cross inspected some of the prison facilities. Its confidential report, issued that July and leaked to The New York Times in November, accused the military of "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, and use of forced positions." It called the system, whose stated purpose was producing intelligence, "an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture." The American government reportedly rejected those findings.

  The Red Cross also reported that a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, nicknamed "Biscuit," and military physicians passed confidential medical information to interrogators. That information included prisoners' weaknesses and phobias. As a result, prisoners lost confidence in their medical care. A 2013 report by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession went further. It concluded that health professionals working with the military and intelligence services had "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees." They also took part in force-feeding hunger strikers.

  An FBI agent described what he found on a couple of occasions: a detainee "chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water." Most times, the agent said, the men had been left that way for 18 to 24 hours or more.

  One case drew an official investigation. Air Force Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt looked into FBI accounts of abuse of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi described as the "20th hijacker." He concluded that al-Qahtani suffered "abusive and degrading treatment" through "the cumulative effect of creative, persistent and lengthy interrogations." Accounts describe interrogations that began at midnight and lasted 12 hours, loud music to prevent sleep, and military dogs used to intimidate him. On the 13th of January 2009, Susan J. Crawford, whom Bush had appointed to oversee the military trials, became the first Bush administration official to concede torture. She said, "We tortured Qahtani."

  Religion became another battleground. Released prisoners alleged that guards desecrated the Quran, including by tearing out pages and by flushing it down a toilet. At an Administrative Review Board hearing, one reason offered for continuing to hold Mesut Sen was this: "Emerging as a leader, the detainee has been leading the detainees around him in prayer." Former detainees also accused Geoffrey Miller of complicity in abuse at Camp X-Ray.

  Some released men told their stories publicly. Three British Muslims, known in the media as the "Tipton Three," were sent home in March 2004 and released at once without charge. They alleged ongoing torture and religious persecution. Mehdi Ghezali was freed without charge on the 9th of July 2004, after two and a half years, and said he had been tortured repeatedly.

  Hunger strikes brought the dispute into court. In the fall of 2005, striking detainees claimed that guards forced large feeding tubes into their noses and stomachs. Judge Gladys Kessler ordered the government to release medical records going back a week before such feedings. The Defense Department invited United Nations Special Rapporteurs to visit, but the United Nations refused, because the officials would not be allowed private interviews with prisoners.

  In May 2013, a widespread hunger strike began. The government later stopped releasing information about it, saying the numbers had "no operational purpose." During Ramadan, the military said strikers had dropped from 106 to 81. Defense attorney Clive Stafford Smith replied, "The military are cheating on the numbers as usual." In 2014, the Obama administration began calling the strikes "long term non-religious fasting."

  Smaller details are telling too. Attorney Alka Pradhan petitioned a military judge to order the release of art made in her client Ammar al-Baluchi's cell, because he was not allowed to give it to his counsel. It has also been reported that prisoners who cooperated with interrogators were rewarded with Happy Meals from the McDonald's on the base.

  Defenders of the camp pushed back. Jim Phillips of The Heritage Foundation said, "some of these terrorists who are not recognized as soldiers don't deserve to be treated as soldiers." In June 2005, Vice President Cheney told CNN, "They're living in the tropics. They're well fed." That same month, the House Committee on Armed Services visited and described the camp as a "resort," praising the food. Democratic members complained that Republicans had blocked testimony from the prisoners' attorneys. In October 2005, an American report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture denied "serious abuse" but detailed 10 "substantiated incidents of misconduct." That year, Amnesty International called the facility the "Gulag of our times."

  The Red Cross had raised a warning about the prisoners' minds as early as 2003, citing "deterioration in the psychological health of a large number of detainees."

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• 7. Despair And Disputed Deaths

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  During August 2003-23 detainees attempted suicide. American officials did not say why they had not reported the incident earlier. Afterward, the Pentagon began classifying alleged suicide attempts as "manipulative self-injurious behaviors." Camp physicians argued that detainees did not truly want to die but hoped for better treatment or release. Daryl Matthews, a forensic psychiatry professor at the University of Hawaii who examined prisoners, said that given cultural differences between interrogators and prisoners, intent was difficult if not impossible to determine.

  Officials reported 41 suicide attempts by 25 detainees since January 2002, though defense lawyers said the real number was higher. About one in five prisoners was prescribed antidepressants such as Prozac.

  On the 10th of June 2006, three detainees were found dead. The Defense Department said they had killed themselves in an apparent suicide pact, hanging themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes. Two were Saudis and one was a Yemeni. Prison commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris said it was not an act of desperation but "an act of asymmetric warfare committed against us." Military officials called the deaths coordinated protests.

  Others read them differently. Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights said detainees "have this incredible level of despair that they will never get justice." Amnesty International called the apparent suicides "the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention." Mufleh al-Qahtani of a Saudi human rights group said, "There are no independent monitors at the detention camp so it is easy to pin the crime on the prisoners." He added that the men might have been tortured.

  The Saudi government pressed the United States to hand over its citizens. From June 2006 through 2007, the United States released 93 of the 133 Saudis it had held. Saudi Arabia built a reintegration program offering religious education and help arranging marriages and jobs.

  The official account faced challenges. In 2009, the Center for Policy and Research published Death in Camp Delta, an analysis of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service report. It noted many inconsistencies and said the conclusion of suicide by hanging was not supported. It suggested that camp officials had either been grossly negligent or taken part in a cover-up.

  In January 2010, Scott Horton's Harper's Magazine article challenged the findings again. It suggested the three died of accidental manslaughter after being tortured. He based this on four Military Intelligence guards, including a decorated non-commissioned officer who was sergeant of the guard on the night of the 9th to the 10th of June 2006. Their account placed the deaths at "Camp No" and contradicted the official report. Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said the department disputed certain facts in the article.

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• 8. Promises To Close

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  On the 22nd of January 2009, President Barack Obama asked for the Guantanamo military commission proceedings to be suspended for 120 days and for the facility to be shut that year. A week later, a military judge rejected the request in the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. It was an unexpected obstacle for an administration still working out how to bring detainees to trial. Congress pushed harder. On the 20th of May 2009, the Senate passed an amendment by a 90-6 vote blocking the funds needed to transfer or release prisoners.

  Obama inherited a camp his predecessor had already begun shrinking. In 2005, Bush had acknowledged the facility's necessity but said he wanted it eventually closed. His administration released or transferred around 540 detainees by the end of its term. Obama then ordered closure and a search for lawful alternatives. On the 15th of December 2009, he ordered the Thomson Correctional Center in Thomson, Illinois, prepared to accept transferred prisoners.

  The Guantanamo Review Task Force reported on the 22nd of January 2010 on 240 detainees. It found 36 subject to active cases or investigations. Thirty Yemenis were designated for "conditional detention" because of the poor security environment in Yemen. A total of 126 were approved for transfer, and 48 were judged "too dangerous to transfer but not feasible for prosecution."

  On the 6th of January 2011, Obama signed the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill, which restricted transfers to the mainland or to foreign countries. In February 2011, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the camp was unlikely to close because of congressional opposition. In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files about prisoners.

  On the 4th of November 2015, Obama said he was preparing a plan to close the facility and move some suspects to American soil. A working list of possible prisons included sites in Kansas, Colorado and South Carolina. Two others, in California and Washington State, appeared to have been dropped. By the 19th of January 2017, the end of his administration, the camp remained open with 41 detainees. When he took office, 250 had been held.

  In 2018, President Donald Trump signed an order to keep the camp open indefinitely, and only one prisoner was repatriated during his administration. In June 2022, The New York Times published photographs of the first camp detainees after a Freedom of Information Act request. President Joe Biden, who took office in 2021, vowed to close the camp. His administration instead continued expanding courtrooms and other facilities.

  After the release of Saifullah Paracha in October 2022-35 prisoners remained, and 20 of them had been cleared for release pending a suitable country. By the 20th of April 2023, the number had dropped to 30. The fates of released detainees have been mixed. Some, such as Maasoum Abdah Mouhammad and Ahmed Abdul Qader, won refugee status away from home. Ibrahim al Qosi was reported to have returned to "terror-related activities." Yunis Abdurrahman Shokuri and Aziz Abdul Naji were jailed in their home countries after being sent back.

  As of January 2025, after the release of 25 detainees, the status of the men still held was this. Three await transfer. Nine have been charged or convicted of war crimes. Three are held in indefinite law of war detention, without tribunal charges and without a recommendation for release.

  That same month, Trump signed a memorandum to expand the Guantanamo Migrant Operations Center to house up to 30,000 migrants. The center is separate from the military prison and would be run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He also signed a memorandum for an unnumbered "additional detention space." In March, the government moved an undisclosed number of immigrants from Guantanamo to Louisiana, while a court reviewed the legality of their detention and relocation.

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