I Spent 20 Years Covering America’s Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext. – The Intercept

U.S. Takes Hooded, Shackled Detainees to Cuba, declared the Washington Post headline on January 11, 2002. The reporters who wrote it were on the ground at Guantnamo Bay and in Kandahar, Afghanistan. I was in Washington, at my desk in the Post newsroom, where I worked as a researcher. As I read the story, one ominous revelation stuck with me: The 20 prisoners, whose identities have not been made public

I would spend the next two decades learning those prisoners names and covering the story of Americas not-so-secret terrorism detention complex. It started as a research challenge: to uncover the secrets of what some have called the American Gulag. Later, as hundreds more nameless enemy combatants were brought to the remote U.S. naval base on the south coast of Cuba, I followed the story through the brief wax and long wane of the Guantnamo news cycle. I wanted to know who was detained and why and when the war on terror would end.

I collected boxes of files and spreadsheets of data, building a trove of Guantnamo research as I moved to new jobs and new cities. Along the way, I encountered other reporters and researchers with similar habits and disparate methods, all seeking to understand what was going on down there.

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Some 780 Muslim men have been held at Guantnamo since 2002. More than 500 were released during the Bush administration, about 200 under President Barack Obama, one by President Donald Trump, and one so far by President Joe Biden. Many have been repatriated, while others have been transferred to countries that negotiated with the U.S. to accept them. Nine died in custody. Thirty-nine remain at Guantnamo today. Of those, 18 have been approved for transfer to other countries, including five approved by the Biden administration on Tuesday.

In 2004, the Post appended my list of detainees and added my name to the Page 1 byline of a story headlined Guantnamo A Holding Cell In War on Terror. Reporters Scott Higham and Joe Stephens had visited the U.S. enclave in Cuba while I stayed behind in the newsroom. They brought me back a baseball cap with the logo of the Joint Detention Operations Group, known as JDOG, from the Guantnamo gift shop.

The Joint Detention Operations Group logo.

Photo: Margot Williams/The Intercept

In September 2006, President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIAs secret detention program, saying that 14 high-value detainees in CIA black sites had been brought to Guantnamo. (I want to be absolutely clear with our people and the world: The United States does not torture, Bush pledged in the same speech. Its against our laws, and its against our values. I have not authorized it and I will not authorize it.)

So Im announcing today that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and 11 other terrorists in CIA custody have been transferred to the United States naval base at Guantnamo Bay, the president said to applause from a supportive audience in the White House. They are being held in the custody of the Department of Defense. As soon as Congress acts to authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September the 11th, 2001, can face justice.

Fifteen years later, the organizers of the 9/11 attacks still have not faced justice.

Members of the media are escorted to a courtroom to witness the arraignment of accused September 11organizer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants in Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, on May 5, 2012.

Photo: The Miami Herald via AP

On January 22, 2009, Obamas second day in office, he signed an executive order to shut down Guantnamo within a year. He wanted to try the 9/11 architects in U.S. federal courts, but a Democratic-controlled Congress blocked him. In 2011, the government initiated a new procedure for reviewing the status of the remaining detainees, and the military commission trials were reset. I was following the war on terror as it came home.

At NPR, where I had by then joined a new investigative team, I worked with criminal justice reporter Carrie Johnson to expose another secretive prison system right here in the U.S., where convicted terrorists, mostly Muslim, were segregated in facilities known as Communications Management Units. Our editors dubbed these prisons Guantnamo North.

We could not visit the facilities, but we met with prisoners who had been released, including one man at his home in Washington, D.C. (The only former Guantnamo detainee Ive met in real life, as opposed to via Zoom, is Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was imprisoned there for six years. We talked when I was seated at his table at an awards banquetduring a journalism conference in Norway in 2008.)

In April 2011, NPR and the Times collaborated to publish a trove of secret Guantnamo documents obtained by WikiLeaks. I went up to New York to read and process them for inclusion in the Guantnamo Docket database while reporting on the revelations for NPR.

Finally, on May 5, 2012, the 9/11 defendants were arraigned in the military courtroom in Guantnamo. I was watching on closed-circuit TV from a building in Fort Meade with a large group of reporters who had not made it onto the military-approved media trip to Guantnamo. As the hours passed, we glimpsed the accused when the camera panned over the defense tables. It was our first look at a gray-bearded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed known to everyone as KSM who would appear worldwide the next day in sketch artist Janet Hamlins amazing drawing.

Torture was always the subtext. As months and years of pretrial hearings dragged on, the defense lawyers continued to demand evidence about the conditions under which the captives had been held, details of their enhanced interrogations, and the reliability of admissions made while being held underwater, locked in a box, or standing naked and sleep-deprived in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Guantnamo.

After I joined The Intercept in 2014, I continued to trek to Fort Meade for the military commission hearings and to the Pentagon to watch the Periodic Review Board process launchedduring the Obama administration. Detainees who have not yet been charged despite being held for 15 to 20 years can make their case to a panel of U.S. defense and intelligence officials as to whether they still pose a threat. The open portion, which observers can watch on live video at the Pentagon, lasts at most 15 minutes, and the detainee doesnt speak. I attend these so that I can seethe prisonersand report back, and so that the Pentagon knows that yes, the press is still interested in howthey look and the aging of the detainee population. It goes without saying that there are very few in the media room for these ongoing hearings.

When the Senate Intelligence Committees report on the torture regime was released in December 2014, my Intercept colleagues and I mined the text and footnotes to map the black sites and looked for the CIA detainees who didnt get to Guantnamo.

The banality of the torture system shone through in 2016 as we developed Guantnamo stories from The Intercepts archive of NSA documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden. In 2003, an NSA staffer described an assignment there. As we reported:

On a given week, he wrote, he would pull together intelligence to support an upcoming interrogation, formulate questions and strategies for the interrogation, and observe or participate in the interrogation.

Outside work, fun awaits, he enthused. Water sports are outstanding: boating, paddling, fishing, water skiing and boarding, sailing, swimming, snorkeling, and SCUBA. If water sports were not your cup of tea, there were also movies, pottery, paintball, and outings to the Tiki Bar. Relaxing is easy, he concluded.

In this photo of a sketch by Janet Hamlin, reviewed by the U.S. military, family members of victims of the September 11 attacks observe courtroom proceedings during hearings for five alleged9/11 co-conspirators in the courthouse at Camp Justice at the Guantnamo Bay naval base in Cuba on July 16, 2009.

Illustration: Janet Hamlin/AP

In January 2017, I went to Guantnamo for the first time, as a reporter for The Intercept covering the 9/11 military commission hearings. Under the guidance of Rosenberg, the doyenne of the Gitmo press corps who was then writing for the Miami Herald, I was introduced to the amenities of the press room, the media sleeping tents, latrines, showers, and the confusing, ever-changing rules of the road. No Wi-Fi except at the supermarket complex, pay-by-the-week internet access in the press room, and dont forget your ethernet connector. Military minders accompanying us everywhere on base. Operational security OPSEC reviews of every photo taken every day. Notebooks and pens only in the visitor gallery at the back of the courtroom, where we sat separated by glass from the defendants, legal teams, and judge. No drawing or doodling allowed.

I was excited to be there, in the room as the 9/11 defendants walked in, surrounded by military guards until they took their seats, then turning to chat among themselves. Five defendants, each with a legal defense team headed by learned counsel, meaning an attorney experienced in death penalty cases.

Also in the visitor gallery, separated from the press and nongovernmental organization representatives by a curtain, were relatives of the victims, bearing witness to the proceedings.

The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers faking it.

In June 2018, I went on the Joint Task Force Guantnamo media tour. JTF GTMO is in charge of the detention center. We were able to go inside the prison, although mostly to see a Potemkin village reproduction of a cellblock, complete with a prison library. With my former Intercept colleague Miriam Pensack and a crew from Voice of America, we were given access to parts of the mysterious facility, including lots of institutional kitchens. We even briefly glimpsed one detainee from inside the guard center, a man I was later able to identify from his physical description in the files Id been compiling for the previous 16 years.

The admiral in charge met with us, and a contractor working as a cultural adviser lectured us about the hunger strikers faking it. We also went on a drive to the abandoned Camp X-Ray, where the first detainees were held in 2002 and the location of those infamous photos of men in orange jumpsuits and shackles. We took photos of the fences and weeds and drove to the lonely border with Cuba, where more photos were allowed and then OPSECd.

On September 11, 2019, reporters and victims relatives joined sailors, soldiers, their families, and military commission attorneys atthe base for the annual 9/11 eveningrun that commemorates the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fallen jet in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. At sunset, near the turnaround mark, I saw the Windward Point Lighthouse, built in 1904 by the 1898 U.S. occupiers of Guantnamo. I was the last person to finish the race on that beautiful tropical night. The next day, back in the courtroom, motion hearings about classified evidence and discovery and potential witnesses continued.

Returning in January 2020, I watched as the defense called a reluctant and antagonistic witness, James Mitchell, a psychologist known as the architect of the CIAs enhanced interrogation techniques. He testified just yards from the defendants waterboarded under his orders in the black sites. I felt my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who voluntarily took up arms against us, Mitchell said, holding back tears. Id get up today and do it again.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. The military commissions were suspended for more than a year and a half. When they restarted, the media tents were gone and public health restrictions prevailed. Wary, I watched from Fort Meade in August 2021 as the arraignment of the three alleged Bali bombers, 18 years after their capture, dissolved into disagreements over the quality of the Malaysian interpreters.

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In November 2021, there were required Covid tests, masks, and takeout meals in hotel rooms and on backyard patio tables. Camp X-Ray was now off-limits, no photos were allowed, and we had to agree that any selfies from the border gate would not be published or posted. There was a new judge in the 9/11 case the fourth and he had a lot of catching up to do. The chief prosecutor was gone, and the chief defense officer was retiring. Some of the victims families were now speaking out about possible plea agreements, instead of a capital trial after 20 years of waiting.

The Biden administration could take some relatively simple steps to increase transparency around Guantnamo. To begin with, it could declassify the 6,000-page Senate torture report. A second courtroom now being built at Guantnamo for $4 million could have facilities for press to observe the proceedings in person, which are not in the current plans. Andit could speed up the Freedom of Information Act process. My 2017 request for State Department documents relating to the detainee transfer process is still open, with a projected delivery date in 2023.

I signed up for this months session at Guantnamo so that I could be there on the 20th anniversary of the first detention, which was Tuesday. But the hearings in the 9/11 case were canceled. So I didnt take an Uber to Joint Base Andrews at 4:30 a.m. on Saturday for a Covid test and a charter flight to Cuba a few hours later. I didnt need my ethernet connector or my bug spray or my T-Mobile phone because thats the only carrier on the base.

And my press ID? I hung it on a hook with an old Capitol Hill pass, where itll stay until the trial of the 9/11 defendants begins in 2023.

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I Spent 20 Years Covering America's Secretive Detention Regime. Torture Was Always the Subtext. - The Intercept