'DON'T LEAVE UNTIL HE BLEEDS'

Seymour Hersh

One of the initial proposed sites for the prison for alleged Al Qaeda terrorists, I was told more than two decades ago by a senior Army general, as the United States went to war against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, was a deserted island in the South Pacific that had been used after World War II for testing nuclear weapons. But the islands there were still too hot — too radioactive — and so the prison was set up at a once obscure US Navy base on the eastern tip of Cuba known as Guantánamo Bay.

The United States, initially shocked and enraged by the murder unleashed by Al Qaeda on 9/11, looked away as hundreds of suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere were sent to a hastily assembled prisoner-of-war camp with nothing close to due process. It was later reported that the US military had paid, sometimes handsomely, for many of the alleged Al Qaeda members who ended up at the prison and were treated brutally. President Barack Obama promised during his 2008 campaign to shut down Gitmo, as the prison was known — there were 242 detainees still there — and issued an executive order to do so on his third day in office. The Congressional and public opposition was intense, and Obama retreated, as the military would say, in the face of fire. It wouldn't be his only retreat.

Soon enough the abuses at Gitmo were no secret. I was told early on by a knowledgeable American official that the promised rest and relaxation for some prisoners amounted in some cases to being tied in a straitjacket and flung into a secure outside area for an hour spent in the blistering tropical heat of midday. One group that continues to monitor the prison is the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, a nonprofit that is renowned for its continued efforts to protect the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Its most recent summary of the situation in the prison doesn't flatter either Democrats or Republicans.

In 2023, the CCR reported:

• "780 men and boys, all of them Muslim," have been imprisoned since early 2002.
• Eighty-six per cent "were sold" to the United States during the time when the US military was offering large bounties for capture, as much as $5,000 per man.
• Twenty-two or more were children when taken to the detention camp.
• Fifteen men remain at the prison and have been detained for more than fifteen years.
• Six men were not charged with any crime of offense, including three who had been cleared for release.
• Nine men still had active cases in the military system.
• Only two still imprisoned have been convicted.
• The same number of men, nine, have died at the prison as have been convicted in the last two decades.
• Not a single senior US government official has been held accountable for wrongful detention and torture at Guantánamo Bay.
• It has cost the US Government an estimated $540 million a year to keep Guantánamo open, "making it the most expensive prison in the world."

A forgotten prison in a forgotten place is the subject of Through the Gates of Hell: American Injustice at Guantánamo Bay, a new book by Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a former corporate lawyer who is now special counsel at Human Rights First in New York.

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