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Ten Years at Guantanamo

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Ten years ago today, the first group of 20 detainees landed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg was there to cover their arrival.

And she has been back many times since to report on the events at the controversial prison camp.

This past year, she received the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for her reporting from Guantanamo Bay.

Anchor Marco Werman talks to Carol Rosenberg about the tenth anniversary of the arrival of detainees at Guantanamo.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman and this is The World, a co production of the BBC World Service, PRI, and WGBH Boston. Ten years ago today, the first group of twenty detainees arrived at the newly opened US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It’s been a long decade since then.

Donald Rumsfeld (recorded): I think that, uh, we’re in the process of sorting through precisely the right way to handle them, and they will be handled in the right way; they will be handled not as prisoners of war, because they’re not, but, but as unlawful combatants. As I understand it, technically, unlawful combatants do not have any rights under the Geneva Convention.

George W. Bush (recorded): These were, uh, illegal non-combatants picked up off of a battlefield, and they’re being well treated, and they’ll go through a military tribunal at some point in time, which is a military tribunal, which is in international court. And um… or, in line with international court.

Rumsfeld (recorded): I would characterize Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the least worst place we could have selected.

Unidentified speaker (recorded): The number of Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees transferred to US forces in Afghanistan continue to grow, and the current number now stands at 346. We expect to be able to begin transfer shortly, of many of these detainees to the facilities in Guantanamo Bay.

Unidentified speaker (recorded): I think it’s important people remember that one of the reasons why security has had to be so strict and tight on those prisoners is because of the threat they pose.

Barack Obama (recorded): By the authority vested in me as President of the, uh, President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, in order to affect the appropriate disposition of individuals currently detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo, uh, and promptly to close the detention facility at Guantanamo.

Werman: President Obama speaking there soon after taking office in 2009. He obviously hasn’t achieved that goal of closing the detention facility at Guantanamo. The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg has visited the controversial detention camp many times over the past decade. She recently received the Robert F. Kennedy journalism award for her reporting from Guantanamo Bay. Rosenberg was there ten years ago, to cover the arrival of the first detainees.

Carol Rosenberg: It was three months after the September 11th attacks and we had been told on the eve of the arrival that these were the worst of the worst, so I would say that the feelings were pretty raw at the time, and that there was a lot of fear, certainly among the military that were putting together this prison camp. You know they’d spent the day before the arrival of the first twenty cutting the handles off of toothbrushes because they though that if you had a toothbrush with a handle on it and a prisoner had one he might ram it through the eye of a guard.

Werman: Mm.

Rosenberg: So there was, there was a lot of fear, they were all, I think as we now know, identically dressed in these orange jumpsuits, being taken off of the plane one by one in shackles, and they didn’t tell us who those twenty were. And who those twenty were became quite controversial because at least six or seven of them have since been released.

Werman: Mm.

Rosenberg: So if the first twenty were the worst of the worst, I think what we’ve learned is that maybe they weren’t doing such a good job of picking and choosing who was being put on those planes, and that we really didn’t know who those men were. But I have to tell you that wasn’t controversial that first day, the military was portraying it as, “We got ‘em,” and they put out their own pictures showing these guys in orange jumpsuits on their knees in the cages at Camp X-ray. Those were Navy photos.

Werman: As you say there was no controversy that first day, when those detainees arrived. What have been though, the main watershed controversies since, that have kind of defined Guantanamo?

Rosenberg: It started very early with, do they get the Geneva Conventions and are they prisoners of war or war prisoners? Because there’s a big distinction there. The Bush administration, and now, frankly, the new administration, has argued that they don’t get treated as POWs because this isn’t a typical war, and therefore they’ve given them a completely new kind of status. First they called them enemy combatants and then they called them unprivileged belligerents and, you know, we call them war prisoners because it’s kind of generic. So the first controversy was their status. Another big controversy in Guantanamo was, you know, how big is the battlefield and what is the authority to hold these people and did they get the right people? Because the planes came in from Afghanistan, but the people were plucked from around the world…

Werman: Mm.

Rosenberg: There’s a man down there who says through his attorney that he was captured by US forces in Bangkok and put on a plane and ends up at Gitmo, and then of course you know, there’ve been interrogation controversies, so treatment has been a controversy.

Werman: The status issue, and the whole idea of where is the battlefield with these detainees in Guantanamo, it’s huge, and remind us what kind of impact those issue have had on the US legal system and the US justice system.

Rosenberg: Well, for the first couple of years, they didn’t even have lawyers. You know, they weren’t charged, they didn’t have a way to meaningfully contest or argue, “You got the wrong guy.” Uh, they’ve been to the Supreme Court fundamentally three times in a series of decisions involving their rights to attorneys. They now do have attorneys. Different kinds of attorneys. But the definition of who the United States is entitled to hold as a prisoner has evolved, and is still working its way through the courts. You know, in Washington the federal judges have ordered men released and in some instances the Bush administration and Obama administration have let them go, sent them home, or send them off to other countries, and in some instances they’ve challenged those judges and moved up through the appeals court and gotten an expansive definition of who they’re entitled to hold. It’s not merely someone who is a member of Al Qaeda, it is the perception of people who have association or a relationship to terrorism. That’s still being defined through the courts on who can be held down there.

Werman: And now indefinite military detention without a trial has been enshrined in law with the Nation Defense Authorization Act on December 31st.

Rosenberg: Yes, but it’s a mix-master, I mean some of these guys will get trials, and some of them will be accused of war crimes, for which they’re seeking the death penalty. Forty-six of the men down there are held as what we call indefinite detainees, they don’t get trials, they don’t get released, their files get reviewed periodically but the understanding is that, and this was done by the Obama administration, that these forty-six men will be held without trial indefinitely, which some interpret to be Guantanamo forever. They originally had forty-eight indefinite detainees. Well, there’s forty-six because two of them died this year – one of ‘em collapsed, the military say, in the shower after working out on an elliptical machine. There’s an open inquest, they say it was a coronary, we’re waiting to know. Another man was found, the military says, hanging from a bed sheet in a recreation yard and they’re saying it’s a suicide and we’re waiting for the inquest. So, indefinite detention is being held indefinitely and the way you get to leave is, in this past year, because they died and went home to Afghanistan to be buried.

Werman: President Obama campaigned on closing, uh, Guantanamo, uh, the deadline to close it came and went two years ago. Do you think Guantanamo will ever close?

Rosenberg: It’s hard to imagine that they’re gonna be able to figure out how to get out of this. The Obama administration started off saying, “We’re going to redefine it, we’re going to give them trials, we’re going to put it into a framework that is more recognizable to greater American society.” And what they found is that there are all sorts of people who didn’t fit into that measure, and so when, by the time their year ended, what they were talking about closing it was not really closing it, but moving it. They were going to take a number of people and move them to a prison in Illinois, and it was gonna be like Guantanamo North, so, I think it depends on what the definition of closure is. There are people they intend to hold indefinitely without trial or charge indefinitely, potentially forever, so it’s hard to imagine a situation under which Guantanamo ends, even if Guantanamo closes.

Werman: Carol, uh, given the restrictions on reporting at Guantanamo, what is the one thing about Gitmo you want to know, that you may never know?

Rosenberg: I don’t know if I can tell you the one thing, I can tell you that I, ten years later I’m still trying to figure out the costs of it. Diplomatically, psychologically, and frankly the cost of it to taxpayers. The Obama administration figured out that we spend $800,000 a year per detainee down there. It’s a huge financial burden, and it’s not the question – the big questions will be answered by historians – but for the journalists, we should be able to sort of drill down and explain what it is that the American people have been paying for for ten year, especially in the last couple when the President has said it shouldn’t even exist.

Werman: The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg. Thank you very much indeed.

Rosenberg: Thank you.

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