The United States opened its military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, four months to the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Over the next six years, the Bush administration kept about 780 men and boys there. Only about 30 were ever charged with war crimes.
Today, there are 15 prisoners, five of them held on charges that they conspired with the hijackers who carried out the attacks.
Here’s what you need to know about the U.S. naval base and the death penalty case 24 years after the attacks.
Guantánamo is more than a prison.
It is a 45-square-mile naval base, with a port used by U.S. ships on patrol in the Caribbean and an airstrip.
There is a K-12 school for the children of Navy families, suburban-style neighborhoods, a golf course, bars, beaches, outdoor movie theaters, a McDonald’s and even a plant nursery.
The base has 4,500 residents, including foreign workers from Jamaica and the Philippines on long-term Pentagon contracts and National Guard troops on short deployments.
Of them, 800 soldiers and civilians are assigned to the detention operation — a ratio of more than 50 government employees to each of the 15 prisoners.
The prison holding the Sept. 11 suspects is inside a closed security zone far from residential areas.
The Sept. 11 trial has never begun.
The five prisoners accused of conspiring in the Sept. 11 attacks have been in pretrial proceedings for 18 years.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the best known among them. He is accused of hatching and directing the hijacking.
Mr. Mohammed was captured in 2003 and tortured by the C.I.A., which was trying to uncover other terrorism plots. He then was interrogated during years of solitary confinement in secret overseas prisons until he was sent to Guantánamo in September 2006.
No trial date has been set. The current judge is the fifth to preside since 2012, when the five men were charged in the current death penalty case. The last time the defendants were in court was in January. Their next hearing is in December.
The case has splintered.
Prosecutors have said for years that they want one trial with all five defendants, for the benefit of the Sept. 11 families.
But one defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was ruled mentally unfit for trial and has not been part of the case since 2023 for reasons his lawyer attributes to his torture. Prosecutors want that ruling reviewed and his case reunited with the others.
The judge threw out the self-incriminating statements of another defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, ruling that they were the product of his torture. Prosecutors are appealing.
The other three men reached an agreement with case prosecutors in the summer of 2024 to plead guilty in exchange for life sentences and avoid a death-penalty trial. Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary at the time, canceled the deal within days. Legal challenges persist on the validity of the agreement, and there is also a question of whether their trial can be held as a capital prosecution.
Few people see the hearings.
Hundreds of days of hearings have been held at Guantánamo’s Camp Justice military compound since the 2012 arraignment, although the court was closed for about 500 days during the coronavirus pandemic.
Military prosecutors and the Justice Department have a program that allows up to 10 victims to watch a week of hearings at the courtroom. Relatives of fewer than 180 of the people who were killed on Sept. 11 have made the trip to the base.
Family members can also watch from closed-circuit video feeds along the Eastern Seaboard.
Under Trump, the base got a new mission.
The Trump administration has been using the base as a way station in its campaign to deport migrants. About 700 migrants have been sent there for days or weeks since January.
As of this week, 24 migrants were in detention at Guantánamo, most in a prison that formerly held Al Qaeda suspects.
That operation has a staff of 650 U.S. government workers, most of them U.S. military forces but also 120 Homeland Security civilians, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
The operation is expensive.
Since the prison opened, tens of thousands of U.S. service members, many of them National Guard troops, have been sent there on six- to 12-month tours of duty.
Keeping the prisoners off the soil of the United States, which was done at first in a failed effort to deny them access to the courts, has cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
The majority of those sent there, about 540, were repatriated by the Bush administration.
There were about 240 detainees when Barack Obama became president. His administration drew up a plan to close the detention operation and transfer a few dozen detainees to a military prison in the United States. Congress essentially killed that idea by outlawing the use of federal funds to do it.
The last time a detainee in the war against terrorism was sent there was in 2008. The last to leave were 11 men who were transferred to Oman at the end of the Biden administration.
All 15 are now consolidated in one prison building, called Camp 5.
Few prisoners had ties to 9/11.
Only a few prisoners had prior knowledge about the Sept. 11 attacks, and none have ever been convicted of 9/11-related crimes.
The other 10 prisoners include:
-
A Saudi man who is accused of plotting the U.S.S. Cole bombing in 2000, whose death penalty trial is scheduled to start next year.
-
Three men held without charges who are considered too dangerous to release.
-
Three other men who can be released if countries agree to monitor their activities or safely detain them.
-
A Yemeni man who is serving a life sentence for making Al Qaeda recruiting material about the bombing of the Cole warship in October 2000.
-
An Iraqi prisoner who is serving a sentence that runs out in 2032 for commanding forces that fought against the allied invasion of Afghanistan after Sept. 11.
It’s on Cuban soil, but it’s not Cuban.
The base is on the island of Cuba, but it operates entirely under U.S. authorities. The United States invaded the site in 1898, then leased it for the first time in 1903.
Fidel Castro told the United States to leave, but the Pentagon considers it a convenient, strategic outpost in the Caribbean. By U.S. law, the United States can leave only through negotiations with a democratically elected government in Cuba.
The Cubans have a minefield on their side. The United States has a Marine detachment that controls a fence line with surveillance equipment and patrols inside the American zone.
Plans for a low-key 24th anniversary of 9/11.
Sept. 11 is being commemorated with a ceremony at the base firehouse.
Past years had a 9.11-mile Freedom Run, a chapel service and flag ceremonies. Journalists from around the world regularly visited the base for the anniversary. That changed after 2019, when the military shut down reporters’ access to the prison.
The outdoor movie theater for the base’s residents is screening “Smurfs” at 8 p.m. on Sept. 11.
Carol Rosenberg reports on the wartime prison and court at Guantánamo Bay. She has been covering the topic since the first detainees were brought to the U.S. base in 2002.
The post What to Know About the 9/11 Case at Guantánamo Bay appeared first on New York Times.
