They show how frail and malnourished many of the men were, and that they were shackled at their wrists and ankles inside a military hospital tent. They show routine security measures, including restraints, which military censors would later forbid in news photos.
They show the look in a young Marine’s eyes as he studies the face of the first “enemy combatant” he would encounter in the war. If the pictures in this collection had been taken by news photographers today, none would have survived the censorship imposed by the military at Guantánamo Bay. military and intelligence dragnet and others deemed foot soldiers of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who could be safely sent home for their nations to manage.īased on former prison staff and documents, this is the Taliban prisoner Mullah Fazel Mohammad Mazloom, who spent 13 years at Guantánamo Bay. All but 37 of the detainees are gone, some released as mistakenly swept up in the U.S. Successive administrations sought to whittle down the number of men held there. President Barack Obama promised to close the prison, but was blocked by opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill. Ten detainees are still in pretrial proceedings, including the men accused of the Sept. Only 18 detainees were ever charged, and only five have been convicted by a military tribunal. In time, the record would show that was not true. Bush - were “the worst of the worst,” because they had ended up there. The Geneva Conventions oblige countries holding prisoners of war to protect them from “public curiosity.” A post-9/11 interpretation by the Bush administration permitted the Pentagon to release the image of 20 men in shackles and on their knees because their faces were not visible.īut the photograph also reinforced the Pentagon’s message that the men and boys who were brought to Guantánamo - around 780 of them, all during the presidency of George W. 11, 2002, shows the first 20 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay soon after their arrival. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, an intimate view of the offshore detention and interrogation operation in its early stages.Īn image taken by the military on Jan. Released this year, these pictures were taken by military photographers to show senior leaders, chief among them Donald H. Using the Freedom of Information Act, The New York Times has obtained from the National Archives less antiseptic photographs of the first prisoners who were brought from Afghanistan to the wartime prison in Cuba.
But few other explicit images of the prisoners have become public since they began arriving at Guantánamo just months after the Sept. In 2011, WikiLeaks released classified pictures of some prisoners from leaked intelligence dossiers, and lawyers provided some portraits of their clients taken by the International Committee of the Red Cross. And in time, no photographs of detainees or their guards at all. No hunger strikers being tackled, put into restraints and force-fed. No images of prisoners struggling with guards. GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba - For 20 years, the United States military has tightly controlled what the world can see of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay.