Maybe you have an idea in your head about what it was like to work at Guantánamo, one of the most notorious prisons in the world. Think again.
Over here at serial.
We love criminal justice stories.
Guantanamo is the most astonishing one weve ever seen.
Guantanamo is a prison and a court that we made from scratch.
Right after September 11, we were at war in Afghanistan, fighting al Qaeda and the Taliban.
And pretty soon wed captured thousands of men.
Our makeshift holding cells in Afghanistan couldnt handle them all.
We needed a safe place to keep them away from the chaos so we could sort them out.
And the place we chose was Guantanamo Bay, 8000 miles away from Afghanistan in Cuba.
We already had a sleepy naval base there.
We've had it since 1903.
There's plenty of room.
And this part was crucial.
The Bush administration figured because the base was in Cuba on foreign soil, the prisoners we delivered there wouldn't have access to us courts.
That was the innovation.
We wanted leeway to hold these guys for however long we wanted.
And mostly we wanted to interrogate them.
However, we wanted to find out what they knew, especially about al Qaeda, because we didnt know a ton about al Qaeda back then.
And we were petrified they were about to blindside us again.
So that was the idea.