The Secret Pentagon Photos of the First Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay

By Carol Rosenberg

June 12, 2022

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — For 20 years, the US navy has tightly managed what the world can see of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

No photographs of prisoners battling guards. No starvation strikers being tackled, put into restraints and force-fed. Few faces of U.S. forces escorting captives in shackles. And in time, no pictures of detainees or their guards in any respect.

In 2011, WikiLeaks launched labeled photos of some prisoners from leaked intelligence dossiers, and attorneys offered some portraits of their purchasers taken by the Worldwide Committee of the Crimson Cross. However few different express photographs of the prisoners have turn out to be public since they started arriving at Guantánamo simply months after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults.

Till now. Utilizing the Freedom of Info Act, The New York Occasions has obtained from the Nationwide Archives much less antiseptic pictures of the primary prisoners who had been introduced from Afghanistan to the wartime jail in Cuba.

Launched this yr, these photos had been taken by navy photographers to point out senior leaders, chief amongst them Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the protection secretary, an intimate view of the offshore detention and interrogation operation in its early phases.

The apply of managing the visible narrative began the very first day detainees arrived on the base, Jan. 11, 2002. The navy forbade two information photographers, from CNN and The Miami Herald, from capturing historical past because it unfolded: They might watch the primary prisoners arrive however needed to depart their cameras behind.

As a substitute, a few week later, the Protection Division handed out an image of the primary 20 prisoners on their knees at Camp X-Ray, the makeshift jail camp the place captives had been saved within the earliest months of the operation. It was taken by a Navy photographer and initially supposed for the eyes of solely the Pentagon’s leaders.
A picture taken by the navy on Jan. 11, 2002, reveals the primary 20 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay quickly after their arrival.

Petty Officer First Class Shane T. McCoy/U.S. Navy

The Geneva Conventions oblige international locations holding prisoners of warfare to guard them from “public curiosity.” A post-9/11 interpretation by the Bush administration permitted the Pentagon to launch the picture of 20 males in shackles and on their knees as a result of their faces weren’t seen.
However the {photograph} additionally strengthened the Pentagon’s message that the boys and boys who had been delivered to Guantánamo — round 780 of them, all throughout the presidency of George W. Bush — had been “the worst of the worst,” as a result of that they had ended up there.
In time, the report would present that was not true. Solely 18 detainees had been ever charged, and solely 5 have been convicted by a navy tribunal. Ten detainees are nonetheless in pretrial proceedings, together with the boys accused of the Sept. 11 assaults. President Barack Obama promised to shut the jail, however was blocked by opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill. Successive administrations sought to whittle down the variety of males held there. All however 37 of the detainees are gone, some launched as mistakenly swept up within the U.S. navy and intelligence dragnet and others deemed foot troopers of Al Qaeda and the Taliban who could possibly be safely despatched house for his or her nations to handle.

If the photographs on this assortment had been taken by information photographers at present, none would have survived the censorship imposed by the navy at Guantánamo Bay.
They present the look in a younger Marine’s eyes as he research the face of the primary “enemy combatant” he would encounter within the warfare. They present routine safety measures, together with restraints, which navy censors would later forbid in information pictures. They present how frail and malnourished most of the males had been, and that they had been shackled at their wrists and ankles inside a navy hospital tent.

Probably the most dramatic pictures reveals how the navy improvised throughout its first flight that introduced detainees to Guantánamo Bay. In line with Jeremy Lock, the navy photographer on the aircraft, a person had tried to wriggle out of a makeshift blindfold. In order that they certain him with duct tape.

Somebody among the many safety forces planted an American flag within the restrained, mitten-covered hand of the person sitting subsequent to the duct-taped prisoner, and took a memento photograph. Mr. Lock captured that picture as nicely, for his bosses to see what had been achieved.

The duct-taped prisoner is identical man seen in a photograph of Marines puzzling over find out how to get him aboard the varsity bus that will take him throughout Guantánamo Bay to the power the place he can be held, Camp X-Ray. The photograph is a research within the juxtaposition of three males’s ft.

U.S. forces on responsibility on the time recalled that just one man arrived that day with a prosthetic leg, and jail paperwork recommend he was Mullah Fazel Mohammad Mazloom, a deputy protection minister and a commander of Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan on the time of the Sept. 11 assaults.

He was launched to the custody of Qatar 13 years later in a prisoner alternate for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl of the Military. After the Afghan authorities fell to the Taliban final yr, he turned a deputy protection minister within the militant authorities.

Mr. Lock, the navy photographer, just lately said he understood the explanation for the safety measures — wrist and leg restraints to forestall the detainees from shifting, blindfolds and earmuffs to forestall them from plotting, medical masks to protect in opposition to the potential transmission of tuberculosis.

Nonetheless, he said, the sensory deprivation methods reminded him of his earlier coaching as an airman within the prisoner-of-war survival program referred to as SERE, quick for the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape college.

C.I.A. brokers would repurpose features of that program to interrogate and torture suspected senior members of Al Qaeda. Historical past reveals these enhanced interrogations would start months later, after a whole lot of detainees had been delivered to Guantánamo Bay.

Produced by Marisa Schwartz Taylor and Rebecca Lieberman.
[Carol Rosenberg has been masking the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, together with detention operations and navy commissions, because the first prisoners had been introduced there from Afghanistan in January 2002. She labored as a metro, nationwide and international correspondent with a give attention to protection of battle within the Center East for The Miami Herald from 1990 to 2019.
Source – NY Occasions]
Courtesy: Bay St Post