Guantánamo, the torture legacy of 9/11 that remains open

“I was only 18 when they kidnapped me, sold me to the United States and took me to one of the CIA’s black sites. They tortured me for months. Then they sent me to Guantánamo, where I spent nearly 15 years without charges or trial. What was done to me was not an aberration. It was orders.” Mansur Adayfi, a former detainee at the U.S. naval base prison in Guantánamo and an activist with the advocacy NGO CAGE International, said this in June at a panel of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna.

Adayfi was released without charge three decades after his capture. Fifteen other detainees remain behind bars. The prison — synonymous with the most sinister abuses and torture carried out in the U.S. war on terror after the September 11, 2001, attacks, which took place 25 years ago — remains open with no sign of closing despite numerous past attempts. The future of the inmates still held is equally uncertain. Meanwhile, justice for the victims of 9/11 has not arrived: in August a date was finally set — June 5, 2028 — for the trial of the prison’s most famous inmate, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known as KSM, the alleged mastermind of the attacks who has been held there since 2006, but there is still no certainty that the deadline will be met.

The Guantánamo prison and the abuses carried out there were born of haste, anger and fear. The United States had just discovered, in a state of panic, that it could be the target of unthinkable terrorist massacres; it feared further imminent strikes as devastating, or worse, than those in New York, Washington, and a field in Pennsylvania, and it was hungry for revenge. Then‑president George W. Bush ordered the creation of a detention facility to hold so‑called “enemy combatants,” without the obligation to grant them the protections of the Geneva Conventions afforded to captured soldiers or the rights they would have as prisoners on U.S. soil (a dubious legal theory the Supreme Court later rejected). The peculiar status of the naval base — on Cuban sovereign territory but under U.S. military control, foreign and isolated yet close enough to allow rapid transfers from the U.S. — led to the decision to locate the prison there.

Up to 779 Muslim men of varied nationalities were secretly captured, hooded and shackled, and brought to the prison. The vast majority of the inmates had nothing to do with 9/11, Al Qaeda, or Islamist terrorism. Many had been sold for a few dollars to the CIA, which handed out leaflets in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan promising “wealth and power like you have never imagined” to those who turned in alleged Al Qaeda or Taliban members. Few checks were carried out: there was a rush to find supposed criminals and to show the public progress in the war on terror.

“They will be treated humanely,” Bush had promised. That did not happen. According to the 2023 report by the UN special rapporteur on human rights regarding the Guantánamo prison — and as Adayfi corroborated at the OSCE session — each detainee “has lived or lives with their own indelible experiences of psychological and physical trauma after enduring severe abuses of their human rights.”

The first prisoners began arriving in 2002. Their initial housing was the hastily erected Camp X‑Ray in a corner of the base: a series of two‑by‑two‑meter cages outdoors, furnished only with two buckets — one for water, the other for bodily needs — that were used for four months until the prison facilities were completed. Interrogators, poorly trained for such tasks and under enormous pressure to uncover and dismantle possible plots — and furious over the deaths of their fellow citizens — were put in charge of the detainees.

The result was widespread use of torture: simulated drownings, beatings, extreme sleep deprivation, anal rape. By the summer of 2002 a culture of mistreatment was widespread, including the use of dogs to intimidate, forced painful positions, and sleep disruption. As far as is known, it served no useful purpose.

In 2014, Senator and former Republican presidential candidate John McCain — himself a tortured prisoner of war during Vietnam — said of those methods: “They stained our national honor, did much harm and little practical good [...] I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence. I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it. I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering.”

The allegations about what was happening in those cells accelerated promises to close the facility. Then‑presidential candidate Barack Obama announced in 2008 that shuttering it would be the first act of his administration. He never succeeded. Neither did the next Democratic president, Joe Biden. The great majority of detainees have been released after years behind bars without being charged in military commissions, the specially created tribunals to try Guantánamo inmates.

Today, 800 military and civilian staff work at what is considered the most expensive prison in the world, at a ratio of about 50 employees for each one of the roughly 15 inmates, who are aged between 46 and 54 and remain in various forms of legal limbo. Two detainees have been convicted and are serving sentences at the base. Three are listed as “enemy combatants” and nicknamed “the forever prisoners”: they will not be taken to trial and the United States does not want to release them, although their status is subject to periodic review. Three have been cleared for transfer to a third country; the Trump administration, which signed several agreements to deport irregular migrants to distant locations, did not show much interest in finding a government willing to accept the three Guantánamo detainees.

The remaining seven, formerly categorized as high‑value detainees and accused of some of the worst attacks in history, await trials for charges — over the 9/11 attacks, the 2000 bombing of the destroyer USS Cole, the bombing of a nightclub in Bali — that have been tangled in appeal after appeal and never reach a judge. The consequences of torture are one of the factors complicating their cases.

One of the five accused of participating in the 9/11 attacks, Ramzi bin al‑Shibh, has been declared too mentally damaged by torture to stand trial. Regarding the other four — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al‑Hawsawi and Ammar al‑Baluchi — prosecutors concluded that, because of the abuses they suffered, it would be impossible to successfully try them and negotiated a deal, announced in August 2024, to withdraw death‑penalty requests in exchange for guilty pleas and detailed accounts of their roles in the attacks and life at Guantánamo. Then‑secretary of defense Lloyd Austin overturned that deal: the case returned to square one.

Last month, just days before the anniversary of 9/11, a judge finally set a date for KSM’s trial: June 2028, two years away. But there are no expectations the hearing will take place even then. The judge has ruled that a key piece of evidence cannot be used in the trial: a confession Mohammed gave to a “clean” team (one that did not use torture) of FBI agents after his arrival at Guantánamo. It was determined that that confession had been influenced by the effects of the torture the suspect had suffered in CIA black sites before reaching the base.

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