Guantánamo: An Oral History

Click here to access article by Cullen Murphy, Todd S. Purdum, David Rose and Philippe Sands from Vanity Fair.

It has been an ugly, damaging experiment. The whole point of Guantánamo was to create a regime of incarceration and interrogation—including torture—that the law could not reach: a “legal black hole"....

After 10 years we finally have a more complete picture on the human rights crimes committed at Guantánamo by the political operatives of the One Percent. I think future historians will regard this report as a major document on these crimes. I could only manage to read 7 of the 10 pages. Here is the final statement from the report:

January 11, 2012: The 10th anniversary of the arrival of the first detainees at Guantánamo. In all, 779 prisoners have been held at Guantánamo since the facility opened. More than 550 have been transferred to the custody of other countries or given freedom and resettled. Eight have died in U.S. custody. 171 remain in detention at Guantánamo. Of these, 59 have been cleared for transfer. As many as 36 will have their cases heard under a reconstituted military tribunal system; so far, military tribunals have adjudicated only a handful of such cases. The remaining detainees could be held in indefinite detention, perhaps for life, under a policy set out by the Obama administration in March 2011. These detainees, according to intelligence assessments, are too dangerous to release; at the same time, they cannot be brought to trial because of evidentiary problems. Unless Congress changes its mind about incarceration on the U.S. mainland, these remaining detainees will be held at Guantánamo, which will remain open indefinitely.