In recent years, an unlikely collection of portraits has given the public its only glimpse inside the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay.
In these photos, men who have been held as prisoners for more than two decades are voluntarily posing for American soldiers. Some are accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Others have never been charged with crimes and could be released.
The prisoners send the pictures to their families through a longstanding collaboration with the U.S. military and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The prisoners wear civilian, sometimes traditional, clothes. Sometimes they smile or look sternly into the camera, but mostly they look serene. Former prisoners have described this as an effort to reassure their loved ones who have not seen them for many years, and for a time thought they were dead.
It is part of a Red Cross program that allows detainees in the war against terrorism to communicate with their families through prison-reviewed letters and cards. These protections are outlined in the Geneva Conventions, the international law governing warfare. All 15 prisoners at Guantánamo have had access to the program, which began allowing photos in 2009.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is accused of hatching the 9/11 plot that killed nearly 3,000 people, appears in a recent photo in a pressed white robe, his beard dyed.
Here he is in 2009, on a prayer rug and holding prayer beads. It was among the first photos of him to reach the public since the C.I.A. released one purportedly of when he was captured in 2003, with tousled hair and his chest exposed after he was rousted from bed.
The collection of photos offers a curated view of life today in detention at the Navy outpost where the United States has held about 780 men and boys in the war against terrorism since 2002. Just 15 prisoners remain.
Most of those held there earlier were never charged with crimes, and were repatriated or resettled in other countries.
When the Red Cross initiative began in 2009, the prison held about 240 men. By a Red Cross count, about 169 of them have had at least one photo taken and sent to family.
The portraits provided proof of life of sorts, especially for prisoners who spent years at secret C.I.A. sites overseas before they were transferred to Guantánamo Bay in September 2006.
Here is Ammar al-Baluchi, Mr. Mohammed’s nephew who is accused of being an accomplice in the Sept. 11 plot, wearing a white prison uniform, signifying his cooperation with his captors, and a cap from Afghanistan. It is believed to be his first photo posing for the International Red Cross at Guantánamo.
It was taken around 2009. Someone hung a red-checked kaffiyeh as a backdrop. He sits on a prayer rug and holds prayer beads, both of which were military-approved “comfort items.” His beard has been allowed to fill out, in contrast to a haunting, once-classified photo of him nude, taken before while he was in C.I.A. detention.
In later images, his beard has turned gray and he wears a tunic, trousers and a Sindhi cap, symbolic of his family’s Baloch heritage. This time, a heavy green, tear-resistant blanket, the type used in incarceration settings, provides the backdrop.
Initially, Red Cross representatives took the photos. They brought traditional attire for the detainees to wear instead of prison uniforms, if they wanted. They hung improvised backdrops in empty cells or used recreation yards for the photos.
The Red Cross, which helps deliver the pictures, does not consider them to be its property and has never released any of them publicly. Neither has the military, which reviews the photos for secret messages or other security concerns before they are given to the prisoners’ families.
But relatives and defense lawyers have given them to news organizations, and some advocates have used them on social media sites.
The portraits also fill a visual vacuum: The U.S. military no longer allows the news media to see inside the prison.
For years, news photographers and reporters were allowed to see the detention operations. They could ask the military questions and take pictures of detainees that did not show their faces. But the Pentagon ended news media visits to the prison in 2019.
“These portraits read differently depending on who is looking,” said Debi Cornwall, a former civil rights lawyer turned photographer and photography teacher who chronicled aspects of the prison in the photo book “Welcome to Camp America.”
“For the inmates’ families, these portraits can be reassuring, allaying their worst fears,” she said. But for the public, the portraits “give a false impression that these inmates have free will at Guantánamo Bay,” she said. “They are living under the total control of the military.”
By the time of the coronavirus pandemic, when the Red Cross visits were temporarily curtailed, military photographers had already begun taking the photos.
In 2002, teams of military photographers took the first, iconic photos of Guantánamo prisoners kneeling in cages and wearing orange prison uniforms, their faces hidden by sensory deprivation measures. Later, videographers from the unit were assigned to document the forced feedings of prisoners.
Now military photographers take photos for the prisoners’ relatives, using cells as makeshift studios.
Sufyian Barhoumi, who was held at Guantánamo for 20 years but was never put on trial, said from his home in Algeria that the prisoners put on a brave face to portray themselves as making do in detention.
“For them even small things — for your mom, for your family — if they see you not in uniform it is something,” he said in an interview last year.
“The family does not know how you suffer just to take the picture,” Mr. Barhoumi said. For example, he said, there were times when the prisoners were kept in shackles hidden from sight at the ankles and wrists during the photo sessions.
The U.S. military’s Southern Command, which operates the prison, declined to make the photographers available for an interview.
In one photo taken in 2024, Abu Zubaydah looks as if he walked out of a yachting magazine, not a prison cell. A black patch he sometimes wears over a false eye, worn around his neck, suggests a cravat.
Abu Zubaydah, whose true name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn, has never been charged with a crime. The first photos of him were taken before he was allowed to wear civilian clothing at the prison, an accommodation in line with the Geneva Conventions that the U.S. military now makes for those not convicted of crimes.
He happened to be wearing red, white and blue on the day in June 2024 when he was invited to pose for that year’s Red Cross photo, his lawyer at the time said.
Abu Zubaydah was the first person to be waterboarded by the C.I.A. and the first prisoner to be held in a secret overseas detention program that was set up by the Bush administration to interrogate prisoners after the Sept. 11 attacks.
He has never been tied to the Sept. 11 plot, but he claimed to run a jihadist movement that rivaled Al Qaeda and has been assessed by a U.S. national security panel as too dangerous to release.
“In his navy blazer, we could imagine passing that man on the street,” Ms. Cornwall said. “Though as things stand, that will never happen.”
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.
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