The cognitive dissonance begins from above. The stunning aquiline waters and jagged Cuban coastline of Guantánamo Bay come into view, and our plane makes a dramatic arc before landing on the US naval base that Amnesty International dubbed “the gulag of our times.”
Of the 123 people on board, 107 of us are here to watch the military prosecution of the five men the Pentagon says planned, funded, and executed the September 11, 2001, attacks that killed 2,977 people. We’re ranked by group. Journalists like me are at the back, near the plane’s washrooms. In front of us are law students, followed by defence teams, then the prosecution, the victims’ families, and, at the very front, the judge.
This is my twenty-eighth trip over the span of nineteen years. I started coming in 2006 to report on Omar Khadr. A Canadian citizen, Khadr was just fifteen when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, after a firefight where he was accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier. He was detained under harsh conditions for a decade, much of it without trial, and it included interrogation sessions by Canadian intelligence agents. He was repatriated in 2012 and released nearly three years later. Ottawa eventually apologized and awarded him $10.5 million—a concession of its own complicity in his torture.
Over the years, I’ve been at Guantánamo during two presidential inaugurations, a few hurricane warnings, and a couple of my birthdays, and I was among four journalists banned by the Pentagon in 2010, then allowed back after an outcry that the Barack Obama administration was muzzling the media. I’ve gone to spinning classes with marines, on patrol with the coast guard, and fought with public affairs officers until the wee hours against their censorship of photos I took of a protest by Uyghur detainees.
I’ve always struggled to make sense of the place. It’s hard to reconcile the tropical splendour and summer-camp vibe with its dark history. The gulag of our times shouldn’t have a McDonald’s. Past administrations tried to disguise its horror with euphemisms or cover-ups even as they took advantage of the offshore location. After 9/11, 780 detainees from forty-eight countries were held in Guantánamo. Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld coyly described the base as “the least worst place.”
It’s been eight years since my last visit, which was the first time Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as president and vowed to fill Guantánamo up with “bad dudes.” The prison population at that time was forty-one, and he didn’t end up sending anyone here during his first term. The Joe Biden administration reduced the number further, so that today just fifteen “War on Terror” captives remain (nine of the 780 detainees died while in custody, and others were repatriated or resettled in third countries). This dwindling population is being held in the world’s most expensive detention centre. Everything at this remote base, from water bottles to Humvees, must be shipped or flown in. According to 2019 estimates from the New York Times, the cost works out to about $36 million (US) per year per prisoner.
We land on a Saturday, which gives us a few days to settle in before the hearings begin. Some head to the beach or the navy gym, and in the evenings, the Irish pub O’Kelly’s and the Tiki Bar fill up fast. There’s a saying here: a Guantánamo posting will turn you into “a hunk, a chunk, or a drunk.”
On the morning of January 20, a day so cold in Washington that Trump’s second inauguration is held indoors, I head out for a jog in Guantánamo’s oppressive heat. About two miles later, past the base high school, the navy hospital, and a handful of housing complexes, there’s a barren stretch of road that leads to Camp X-Ray. This was the original site of the open-air kennels where the first detainees were brought on January 11, 2002, clad in orange jumpsuits, goggles wrapped with duct tape, and shackled, as dogs and soldiers barked at them. They were branded “the worst of the worst.” Now, staring at carcasses of cages and dilapidated guard towers, it’s easy to superimpose those horrific first images. And it’s easy to remember how that horror gave way to acceptance.
Later that day, I watch the inauguration on a large-screen TV at the base’s bowling alley, straining to hear over crashing pins and a thumping soundtrack. Cher’s “Believe” is playing as Trump walks on. In the days that follow, spectacle gives way to policy. Trump signs a blitz of executive orders that redefine how the US treats migrants. He dramatically expands the categories of undocumented migrants prioritized for detention and removal—not just those convicted of crimes but anyone charged or even suspected of violating immigration law. This is followed by a decision to prepare Guantánamo for thousands of these migrants. Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem revives the phrase “the worst of the worst,” which is echoed by border czar Tom Homan, and defence secretary Pete Hegseth.
Until Trump put it front and centre again, Guantánamo was largely considered a footnote—a grim but distant artifact of the post-9/11 era. But it was never that. It was always a harbinger of what could come.
There have been small changes since my last visit in 2017. The four windmills that the navy spent $12 million (US) on to power about a quarter of the base stopped turning more than a year ago, and now there’s only one radome on the hill (those large golf balls for electronic surveillance) instead of two. No one can explain why the blades ceased or where the other white dome went.
The gift shop still does good business, although it no longer stocks snow globes and “Kisses from Guantánamo” magnets. There is, however, a new line of “The Real Housewives of Guantánamo Bay” T-shirts, stickers, keychains, and tote bags, and the dive shop has long-sleeved shirts that say “Fishing in Fidel’s Backyard.”
At exactly eight every morning, “The Star-Spangled Banner” blares from speakers across the base. Troops freeze, fists clenched at their sides. One of my colleagues once quipped, “It’s like a flash mob, and you’re not invited.”
Justice at Guantánamo may be murky for detainees, but it’s crystal clear for the local wildlife: harming an iguana will set you back $10,000 (US), and the stray and feral cats are treated with compassion under the banner of Operation Git-Meow.
The day after Trump is sworn in, the war-court hearings pick back up. These legal procedures, known as military commissions, are specialized tribunals created by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. In addition to the five accused, there are two other ongoing prosecutions. One trial involves a Saudi accused of plotting the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 in Yemen that killed seventeen American sailors; another detainee is said to have masterminded the 2002 bombing in Bali which killed 202.
Regardless of the verdicts, these men may never walk free. Three other detainees remain held indefinitely under a law rushed through Congress in the days after 9/11, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF. It grants the president sweeping authority to hold anyone deemed a continuing threat, for as long as that threat is believed to exist. These men have been dubbed in the media simply as the “forever prisoners.”
The euphemisms tossed around in testimony can be dizzying. Torture becomes “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs. The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret network of black sites is wrapped in the clinical abbreviation RDI, short for rendition, detention, and interrogation. The military’s obsession with acronyms may be about efficiency, but at Guantánamo, language has always served a more strategic purpose. This is a place where interrogations were once officially referred to as “reservations,” and where force-feeding hunger-striking detainees through nasal tubes is labelled “enteral feeding”—a term that sounds more like nutritional support than physical coercion.
Journalists normally sit in the viewers’ gallery, in the front couple of rows. Three of us are in court this week: security cameras overhead provide a view to our notepads. Military minders sit at the back. Behind us sit the NGO observers. These spots used to be reserved for non-governmental organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union or Human Rights Watch, but nowadays, it’s usually a mix of law students, who have few or no memories of September 11, 2001, or what followed. On the other side of a blue curtain separating us sits Dawn Yamashiro, who’ll never forget. Her brother Brian G. Warner worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, whose offices were in the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The company lost 658 employees. Warner left behind an eight-week-old daughter and two-year-old son, both now in their twenties.
“Guantánamo really has manifested as a dumping ground for political problems under the guise of legal emergency.”
Watching from these chambers feels like another scene in Guantánamo’s long-running theatre of unreality. The gallery is separated from the courtroom by a double-pane Plexiglas barrier. The sound is delayed by forty seconds, to allow the court censor time to activate what the judge calls the “hockey light” and cut the audio feed if any classified material is inadvertently discussed. That means we mimic the lawyers in the courtroom and leap to our feet as the judge enters. We will be back in our seats forty seconds later when we hear the bailiff announce, “All rise.”
The two electronic clocks at either end of the viewing gallery are inexplicably one minute apart.
This chapter of Guantánamo—the so-called “trial of the century,” which some lawyers darkly joke may take a century to complete—shows no sign of ending soon. The delays are many, but most trace back to a single, inescapable fact: the accused were tortured in CIA custody, a reality that has entangled the case in layers of legal complexity and state secrecy.
This week’s testimony concludes a saga that’s dragged on for more than five years, centred on Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, whom the defence calls Ammar al Baluchi. He’s accused of bankrolling the 9/11 attacks, allegedly arranging the hijackers’ plane tickets, traveller’s cheques, and hotel rooms. He’s also the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a senior al-Qaeda figure, who is also on trial. After al Baluchi’s arrest in Karachi in 2003, and before he finally arrived at Guantánamo, he disappeared into the CIA’s prisons, where he was tortured, for three and a half years.
Prosecutors worked to play down the brutality al Baluchi endured in CIA custody. One technique, known as “walling,” involved wrapping a towel around his neck and slamming his head into a wall, repeatedly, for at least two hours, while rookie agents honed their method. A government witness referred to him as a “training prop.” In his first seventy-two hours in custody alone, he was beaten, hung from the ceiling, and subjected to water “dousing”—a euphemism that barely disguises its resemblance to waterboarding. For much of the rest of his captivity, he was kept naked, isolated; subjected 24/7 to darkness or light, extreme music or constant white noise; sleep deprived; and, at times, starved.
At one point during the hearing, the courtroom fills with screaming. Al Baluchi’s defence team is showing a scene from the Oscar-winning movie Zero Dark Thirty, which they’ve entered as an exhibit, since the CIA offered more details about their RDI program to the filmmakers than they ever have to the public. “In the end, everybody breaks, bro. It’s biology,” the film’s interrogator says to the weeping prisoner.
Al Baluchi was questioned 1,119 times by the CIA, and by the time he was sent to Guantánamo in the fall of 2006, the six-foot-one prisoner had dropped from 141 pounds to 116. When I later ask one of his lawyers, Alka Pradhan, about the different names used in court, she says al Baluchi won’t use his birth name any longer as he believes that man died in CIA custody.
The key issue in this week’s hearings is whether al Baluchi willingly co-operated with Federal Bureau of Investigation agents after arriving at Guantánamo. They questioned him over three days in January 2007. His lawyers argue that his statements should be thrown out, claiming they were the result of what he had previously suffered.
The FBI agents who interviewed him in Guantánamo are not accused of abusing him and are therefore referred to as the “clean teams.” But how, Pradhan and her co-counsel James Connell III argue, could al Baluchi set aside his fear of torture for interviews 1,120, 1,121, and 1,122 with the FBI, no matter the change of location, or the duration of time that had passed, or how the clean team conducted the interrogation? “We have talked about torture so often here in the courtroom that it feels normalized,” Pradhan says at one point. And she stresses in her closing remarks: “He was tortured. He lives with his torture to this day. The torture irrevocably changed his brain. And his statements in 2007 were involuntary.”
But while conceding that his time in CIA custody was “miserable” and “impactful” and “difficult,” prosecutor Jeffrey Groharing tells the court that al Baluchi was not scarred by those days in CIA custody. He was “very candid” when he calmly told the FBI agents how and why he financed the 9/11 hijackers on American Airlines flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon, killing 189. Al Baluchi told the agents the attacks were motivated by the US’s support for Israel.
“He wanted Americans to feel the same pain that Palestinians have felt. He wanted Americans to say that they didn’t like the pain, and they should stop the pain in Palestine,” said Groharing. “These are really, really remarkable statements of someone to make to law enforcement agents of the country they attacked, resulting in the worst attack ever on American soil. Three thousand dead Americans. . . . Your honour, those are not the statements of a broken man.”
The case will pause until the military judge, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew N. McCall, rules on the admissibility of the FBI statements. That decision will take months.
When Bush stood before Congress just after 9/11, he may have unintentionally foreshadowed what was to come. “Americans should not expect one battle but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen,” he declared to a standing ovation.
What followed wasn’t just a war without end but a justice system suspended in time—where the trial itself risks becoming a relic of the conflict it was meant to resolve.
While Guantánamo became synonymous with the prison complex built under Bush’s presidency, the history of the naval base goes back to the Spanish–American war. The US secured the land from Cuba as a direct outcome of its victory over Spain and subsequent political leverage over the newly independent Cuban government. The 1903 lease, set at a meagre $4,085 a year, was structured to be permanent unless both parties agreed to end it. After the Cuban Revolution, that became impossible: the US refused to leave, and Guantánamo found itself on the front lines of the Cold War during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
By the 1990s, its role had shifted. Thousands of Haitian asylum seekers, fleeing a coup, were intercepted by the US and detained in makeshift camps on the base. Most were deemed “economic migrants” and sent back. But nearly 300 were granted asylum—only to be trapped when health screenings revealed most were HIV-positive. A US executive order at the time barred them from entry, leaving them stranded in what quickly became a de facto internment camp. Then president Bill Clinton promised to close it. He didn’t. Conditions deteriorated until a judge finally stepped in, ordering their release. The lesson? Guantánamo could be used as a place outside of American law—until it’s pulled back in.
That precedent loomed large when Trump revived Guantánamo’s role. In announcing that migrants would be sent there, he declared, “We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.” But as Military.com diplomatically noted, Trump’s “claim appeared to be at odds with the Navy base’s current capacity, though that has not stopped the military from scrambling to respond to the orders of their commander in chief.”
Vincent Warren, the executive director for the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights, knows Guantánamo’s history well. In the 1990s, he was a law student and spent his spring break interviewing the Haitian asylum applicants who had made it to Miami. For the past two decades, he has advocated for the constitutional rights of “War on Terror” prisoners swept up after 9/11. “Guantánamo really has manifested as a dumping ground for political problems under the guise of legal emergency.”
Warren points to past detainee cases, from Haitian asylum seekers to terror suspects, as evidence that the justifications rarely hold. “The vast majority were not the ‘worst of the worst,’” he says, which is why nearly everyone has been released after two decades. “I see a similar situation with the Trump plans to house immigrants in this iconic base, when we don’t know the details of who is going to be there or how long they are going to be there.”
As our week covering the hearings ends, we all ride the ferry across the bay from the main base, disembark at the landing, board a series of yellow school buses, and drive up a short road to the airstrip. Although journalists must abide by strict prohibitions on photography, some of the passengers take selfies and shots of the coastline as the summer-camp vibe continues.
The lawyers, who passionately argued against each other this week, wait together in the small airport for our flight back to Joint Base Andrews, in Maryland. We are hours early for the flight—Guantánamo’s transportation system very much adheres to the military’s hurry-up-and-wait policy. Down the hall, hauntingly beautiful music spills out from one of the stairwells. A passenger has pulled out a guitar and is singing a cover of U2’s “With or Without You.” It turns out the singer, Joseph Hicks, is a pro, part of an Alabama rock group. He tells me he works with the IT team that supports the court proceedings.
We file onto the tarmac as before: journalists go first so they can sit at the back. We’re offered a brown-bag lunch—turkey or ham—and are later warned on the flight to be wary of the mayonnaise packets.
On the plane, I move between seats, talking to the sunburned law students about their first trip, talking to the lawyers who stopped counting their trips when they numbered into the hundreds. The higher we go, the smaller Guantánamo becomes, until it finally fades into the distance and out of sight.
It continues to be an embodiment of American exceptionalism where the rules don’t apply and force trumps all.
A week after we leave, on the evening of February 4, Trump makes good on his promise and sends the first C-17 plane carrying “high-threat” migrants. There aren’t any journalists on the base when it lands. Other flights follow. The first 180 migrants are detained for about two weeks and then deported to Venezuela, without trial or hearings, as alleged gang members. One of the men, who says his only crime was desperately crossing into the US illegally, later describes the conditions to the Washington Post. “They didn’t treat me like a human being,” he says. “They threw me in a cage.”
By the beginning of March, about 1,000 troops are deployed to Guantánamo, and an expansive tent city is hastily erected. And then, just as suddenly as Trump’s operation began, Guantánamo is once again emptied of most of the migrants. Some are sent to Nicaragua and El Salvador. Forty men are flown off the base back to the US and imprisoned in a Louisiana Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. Less than three dozen are still held there by mid-May.
Once again, the legal challenges against the administration begin. Once again, there is talk among legislators about the troubling logistics and astronomical costs of this place. Rhode Island senator Jack Reed, who toured the facility as part of a delegation of five senators, tells the New York Times that Trump’s migrant mission cost approximately $40 million (US) in its first month. “It is obvious that Guantánamo Bay is a likely illegal and certainly illogical location to detain immigrants,” the senators say in a statement. “Its use is seemingly designed to undermine due process and evade legal scrutiny.”
But no one is suggesting Guantánamo should close.
This place has always been a dirty secret—and it continues to be an embodiment of American exceptionalism where the rules don’t apply and force trumps all. It’s a place where the “other” is the enemy and the enemy is held without due process. First it was Haitian refugees, then terror suspects, and now migrants. Once you create a place where the rules don’t apply, apparently, you’ll never stop finding reasons to use it.
In April, the military judge throws out al Baluchi’s confessions, ruling that they were the product of the CIA’s campaign of torture. “The goal of the program was to condition him through torture and other inhumane and coercive methods to become compliant during any government questioning,” the judge writes. “The program worked.”
The program worked. This is the deeper puzzle of Guantánamo: the brutality used to secure information renders that information unreliable and unusable, and yet the detention continues, justified by the very confessions that can’t be admitted in court.
None of the veteran Guantánamo watchers is foolhardy enough to predict what may happen next. The prosecution might move forward with other evidence against al Baluchi, including a follow-the-money paper trail. Or it’s possible al Baluchi will join his uncle, Mohammed, and two co-defendants who are attempting to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences, thereby avoiding the death penalty. Those guilty pleas remain uncertain. Just two days after they were signed in July 2024, Biden’s defence secretary, Lloyd Austin, cancelled them. Now it’s up to a US Court of Appeals in the DC Circuit to rule whether he had the power to do so. Of course, there’s also the Trump wild card. While he has made Guantánamo a place to send his “worst of the worst,” he has yet to weigh in publicly on the specific war-crimes trials he inherited.
Perhaps comments made by Trump’s defence secretary can provide some insight. Hegseth has first-hand experience in Guantánamo. In 2004, he led a platoon of soldiers from the New Jersey National Guard; they were stationed in the guard towers and around the detention centre’s perimeter. Seventeen years later, he described Guantánamo as a “prison without a mission” in a 2021 Fox News interview. “It got mucked up very early when left-wing lawyers and other protections came in,” he told Fox. “It could have been a great place to expeditiously interrogate, try, and, you know, execute, because we are at war.”
In other words, for Trump and his team, Guantánamo’s not a problem; it’s an opportunity. More than any other president, Trump seems to have grasped its logic: the cruelty is the point.
Michelle Shephard is an award-winning journalist, author, filmmaker, and podcast host and producer and has covered issues of terrorism and civil rights since the 9/11 attacks.
