Guantánamo Bay: Inside The Prison America Built For The War On Terror
From Camp X-Ray To Today: The Complete History Of Guantánamo Bay
How Guantánamo Bay Became The War On Terror’s Most Controversial Prison
The first prisoners arrived in orange.
On 11 January 2002, a military transport carried twenty detainees to the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Photographs from the new Camp X-Ray showed men in bright jumpsuits, shackled, kneeling behind chain-link fencing under the eyes of armed guards. Goggles and other sensory restrictions were used during transport and processing. The cages were crude. The heat was heavy. The facility looked temporary because it was temporary.
What followed was not.
Guantánamo Bay became one of the defining institutions of the post-9/11 era. It was created to hold people captured in a conflict that did not fit comfortably inside older categories of war or crime. It became an interrogation centre, a military prison, a courtroom, a diplomatic problem and a legal battleground.
Nearly 780 men have been detained there since 2002. Many were never charged with a criminal offence. Some were accused of senior roles in al-Qaeda and major terrorist attacks. Others were Taliban fighters, battlefield detainees, men handed over by allied governments or people whose alleged links to terrorism were later disputed. Some were eventually cleared and released after years in custody.
The prison also became inseparable from a wider record of coercive interrogation and torture. That history requires care. Some abuses occurred at Guantánamo itself. Some of the most notorious acts, including CIA waterboarding of several high-value prisoners, happened at secret overseas detention sites before those men were transferred to Cuba.
Those distinctions matter because Guantánamo was never one single programme. It was a place where several parts of the War on Terror met.
And it is still open.
As of September 2026, fifteen War on Terror detainees remain at Guantánamo. The number is the smallest in the prison's history, but the institution has outlived the conflict that created it in its original form. Its oldest unresolved cases have now stretched across a quarter-century of American politics.
Before The Prison, There Was The Naval Base
To understand why Guantánamo was chosen, the story has to begin a century before 9/11.
The United States emerged from the Spanish-American War of 1898 with enormous influence over Cuba. Spain relinquished control of the island, and Cuba formally became independent in 1902. But the new republic was born under conditions heavily shaped by Washington.
In 1903, Cuba and the United States concluded agreements allowing the United States to lease land and water at Guantánamo Bay for a naval and coaling station. Cuba retained ultimate sovereignty, but the United States exercised complete jurisdiction and control within the leased area.
That arrangement was later preserved by the 1934 Treaty of Relations. The base could continue unless the United States abandoned it or both governments agreed to change the arrangement.
After Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959, the relationship became openly hostile. Cuba rejected the continuing American presence and stopped treating the lease as legitimate. The United States stayed.
The result was one of the strangest pieces of territory in modern geopolitics: a United States naval station on communist Cuban soil, physically outside the American mainland, governed by an old lease that Havana rejected but Washington continued to enforce.
That legal geography became crucial after 9/11.
American officials were trying to work out what to do with foreign prisoners captured in a new kind of conflict. Holding them inside the continental United States raised immediate questions about access to federal courts, criminal procedure and constitutional rights. Holding them in Afghanistan created security and logistical problems.
Guantánamo appeared to offer a third option.
It was under complete American control without being part of sovereign United States territory. The Bush administration believed that distinction could limit detainees' ability to use American courts.
That calculation did not survive intact.
The Supreme Court would eventually hold that Guantánamo could not be placed beyond meaningful judicial scrutiny simply because it sat outside formal American sovereignty.
The prison had been selected partly because of a legal boundary. The courts spent years eroding that boundary.
9/11 Created A Problem America Had Not Prepared For
The attacks of 11 September 2001 killed almost 3,000 people and transformed American national security policy.
Al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, had built a transnational terrorist network with sanctuary in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. When the Taliban refused American demands connected to al-Qaeda after the attacks, the United States and allied forces intervened in Afghanistan in October 2001.
The Taliban government fell rapidly. Thousands of people were captured during the fighting or detained through operations across Afghanistan and Pakistan.
That created a practical and legal problem.
Traditional wars assumed recognisable armies, uniforms, command structures, states and prisoners of war. Al-Qaeda was not a state. Its members moved through civilian populations. Taliban forces did not always resemble conventional national armed forces. The conflict mixed intelligence operations, criminal investigations, military campaigns and counterterrorism.
The Bush administration adopted the category of "enemy combatant" for people it believed could be held under the laws of war.
The administration's position was that al-Qaeda members were not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under the Third Geneva Convention because al-Qaeda was not a state party to the convention. It also concluded that although the Geneva Convention applied to the conflict with the Taliban, Taliban detainees did not qualify as prisoners of war under the administration's interpretation of the treaty's requirements.
The government argued that it could therefore hold certain captured people for the duration of hostilities without treating their detention as an ordinary criminal prosecution.
That distinction was fundamental.
A criminal suspect is normally arrested so that the state can charge and try him. A wartime detainee may instead be held to prevent his return to the battlefield. The purpose is preventive rather than punitive.
The difficulty at Guantánamo was that the War on Terror did not have a clear end date.
A system built around wartime detention could therefore become indefinite.
That possibility would shape almost every major controversy that followed.
The history of American wars in the Middle East shows how quickly the post-9/11 mission expanded beyond the initial campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Guantánamo developed inside that widening security architecture.
Camp X-Ray Opens
The first twenty detainees arrived at Guantánamo on 11 January 2002.
Many had been captured in Afghanistan or transferred through American detention facilities there. More followed quickly.
Camp X-Ray was built from chain-link enclosures at a site previously used for temporary detention. The prisoners were kept in open-sided cells under intense security. The facility was basic by design and was never intended to become the permanent face of the detention system.
But photographs of the first detainees gave Guantánamo its enduring visual identity.
The orange jumpsuits became shorthand for the War on Terror.
Camp X-Ray closed within months. Detainees moved to Camp Delta, a more permanent complex with individual cells, guard towers, medical facilities and interrogation rooms. Other facilities were later added, including Camps Five and Six, as the prison system became more structured.
At its height, the detainee population ran into the hundreds.
The number who passed through Guantánamo is commonly given as 779 or roughly 780. The difference reflects counting conventions and the way later official and advocacy records have described the total. The important point is the scale: the fifteen men held today represent only a small fraction of everyone who was once imprisoned there.
Who Was Actually Sent To Guantánamo?
The word "terrorist" is too simple for the detainee population.
Guantánamo held men with radically different cases against them.
Some were accused of planning mass-casualty terrorist attacks.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is accused of being the principal architect of 9/11. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is accused of organising the 2000 bombing of USS Cole. Hambali, whose formal name is Encep Nurjaman, is accused of senior involvement with Jemaah Islamiyah and al-Qaeda-linked terrorism in Southeast Asia.
Others were accused of serving as al-Qaeda facilitators, financiers, bodyguards, trainers or fighters.
Many were linked to the Taliban or captured in areas where Taliban and al-Qaeda forces were operating.
Some detainees were transferred by Pakistan, Afghanistan or other governments. Some were identified through intelligence reports from local sources whose reliability later became contested.
Bounty and reward systems also mattered.
During the early Afghan war, the United States and its allies offered financial rewards for information leading to the capture of suspected Taliban or al-Qaeda figures. Critics argued that this created incentives for false accusations in regions where tribal, political and personal rivalries were intense.
That did not mean every detainee handed over for money was innocent. It meant the original intelligence sometimes required much more scrutiny than the circumstances of capture allowed.
The population also included men who were never charged with any offence and later approved for transfer.
That is why status matters.
An intelligence assessment is not a conviction.
A military allegation is not a conviction.
A detainee approved for transfer has not necessarily been declared innocent; the review may instead have concluded that continued detention is no longer necessary for national security.
And a man held under law-of-war authority may spend years in custody without criminal charges because the government claims authority to prevent his return to hostilities rather than to punish him for a proved criminal offence.
Those categories repeatedly collided at Guantánamo.
The Interrogation System Changes
The early interrogations at Guantánamo were conducted in an atmosphere of fear.
American officials believed another major terrorist attack might be imminent. Intelligence agencies wanted information about al-Qaeda networks, future plots, safe houses, financing and senior leadership.
Standard military interrogation rules were soon seen by some officials as too restrictive for detainees believed to possess urgent intelligence.
Requests for more aggressive methods followed.
Military records and later investigations documented the use or authorisation of techniques that included prolonged isolation, sleep disruption or deprivation, stress positions, removal of clothing, sensory manipulation, exploitation of phobias, exposure to cold, intense questioning, humiliation and the use of military working dogs in certain circumstances.
The exact legal status of each method changed over time.
Some techniques were requested but rejected.
Some were authorised and later withdrawn.
Some were used in combinations more damaging than a simple list suggests.
Some practices reflected military interrogation policy at Guantánamo. Others belonged to a separate CIA programme operating at secret prisons outside Cuba.
The Senate Armed Services Committee later concluded that senior decisions to authorise aggressive interrogation techniques contributed directly to detainee abuse.
That finding was important because it challenged the idea that abuse at Guantánamo could be explained only as the unauthorised behaviour of individual guards or interrogators.
The system itself had shifted.
Mohammed Al-Qahtani And The Line Into Torture
The case of Mohammed al-Qahtani is one of the clearest documented examples of coercive interrogation at Guantánamo.
Qahtani was a Saudi national whom American authorities alleged had been intended to join the 9/11 hijackers. He had been refused entry to the United States at Orlando airport in August 2001 and was later captured in Afghanistan.
At Guantánamo, he was subjected to an intensive interrogation regime in late 2002 and early 2003.
Records describe prolonged questioning, extended isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, exposure to cold, sexual and cultural humiliation, threats, the use of a dog and degrading treatment. His physical condition deteriorated badly enough to require medical attention.
The crucial statement came years later from Susan J. Crawford.
Crawford was not a defence lawyer or human-rights activist. She was the convening authority responsible for deciding whether military commission charges should go forward.
After reviewing Qahtani's case, she said his treatment met the legal definition of torture.
She declined to refer the case for prosecution.
That did not mean every disputed interrogation practice at Guantánamo was legally adjudicated as torture. But it made Qahtani's treatment unusually important. A senior official inside the military commission system had concluded that the line had been crossed.
Qahtani was eventually transferred to Saudi Arabia in 2022 after a review process found arrangements could be made for his treatment and rehabilitation.
He left Guantánamo without a criminal conviction there.
The CIA Black Sites Were A Different System
Some of the most infamous acts associated in public memory with Guantánamo did not happen at Guantánamo.
This distinction is essential.
After 9/11, the CIA created a secret detention and interrogation programme outside the ordinary military prison system. Detainees were held at undisclosed locations, moved between countries and subjected to techniques the government called "enhanced interrogation".
The Senate Intelligence Committee later documented a programme that included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, confinement in small spaces, forced nudity and other brutal treatment.
Waterboarding was used on three detainees: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The waterboarding occurred in CIA custody in 2002 and 2003.
Not at Camp X-Ray.
Not at Camp Delta.
Not in the Guantánamo interrogation booths shown to visiting journalists.
Those men were later transferred to Guantánamo, which is why their torture became entangled with the prison's history.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in March 2003.
The United States accuses him of conceiving and directing the 9/11 plot. He has made broad admissions about his involvement in terrorist operations, although the legal use of statements made after coercive CIA detention has become one of the central problems in his prosecution.
He spent years in secret CIA custody and was waterboarded repeatedly.
In 2006, he was transferred to Guantánamo with other so-called high-value detainees.
His case has still not reached trial.
In August 2026, a military judge excluded statements Mohammed gave to FBI agents at Guantánamo in 2007 after finding the government had not established that the statements were voluntary. The dispute is historically important because the FBI interviews had been designed to obtain usable evidence after the CIA programme.
The ruling showed how treatment in secret custody could contaminate evidence gathered later, even after a detainee reached Guantánamo.
A trial for Mohammed and co-defendants has been scheduled for June 2028. That date is not the same thing as a guarantee the trial will begin. The case has already been delayed for years by litigation over torture, classified evidence, mental competency, legal authority and plea agreements.
Abu Zubaydah
Abu Zubaydah, whose full name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, was captured in Pakistan in 2002.
Early American assessments portrayed him as a senior al-Qaeda figure. The government's description of his role later became more qualified and heavily disputed.
He became the first detainee subjected to the CIA's post-9/11 waterboarding programme.
He was eventually moved to Guantánamo in 2006.
He has not been criminally charged in the military commissions.
The United States has continued to hold him under law-of-war authority after review boards concluded that detention remained necessary.
His case demonstrates one of Guantánamo's hardest legal problems: a man may remain imprisoned not because a court has convicted him, but because the government argues that he still presents a significant threat in an armed conflict whose endpoint remains contested.
Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri is accused of organising the October 2000 bombing of USS Cole in Yemen, which killed seventeen American sailors.
He was captured in 2002 and held in CIA custody.
He was waterboarded and subjected to other abusive treatment before being transferred to Guantánamo.
His military commission case has lasted for years without final resolution.
As of September 2026, litigation remains active over evidence, mental capacity, classified material, prior interrogations and trial procedure.
The planned proceedings illustrate the same structural difficulty that has haunted the 9/11 case: the government wants to prosecute men accused of grave crimes, but part of the evidence trail runs through a detention system in which coercion and torture occurred.
What People Inside Guantánamo Said
The historical record comes from people who saw very different parts of the institution.
Former detainees have described fear, humiliation, isolation, uncertainty, pain and the psychological pressure of not knowing whether they would ever leave.
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian detainee, later became one of Guantánamo's best-known former prisoners. He was subjected to an approved special interrogation plan, including isolation, threats and sleep disruption. He was never convicted at Guantánamo and was released to Mauritania in 2016.
His memoir became one of the most detailed first-person accounts of detention.
Former interrogators and military personnel have also described internal disputes.
Some believed aggressive interrogation was necessary to obtain information after 9/11. Others concluded that cruelty damaged intelligence gathering, produced unreliable statements or violated professional and legal standards.
Military lawyers became some of the strongest institutional critics. They challenged commission rules, the use of coerced evidence and the attempt to create a system that operated with fewer protections than civilian courts or traditional courts-martial.
Defence lawyers repeatedly argued that years of abuse made fair trials difficult or impossible.
Prosecutors faced a different problem. They were tasked with building cases against men accused of catastrophic crimes while proving that evidence offered at trial was sufficiently separated from earlier coercion.
That conflict remains alive today.
In 2023, the first United Nations special rapporteur granted technical access to the detention facility found that several material conditions had improved over the years, including accommodation, sanitation, food and opportunities for communal religious practice.
But the report also concluded that the cumulative effects of long detention, inadequate specialist care, constant surveillance, restraints, restricted family contact and the legacy of torture amounted to ongoing cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
The United States rejected important parts of that legal and factual assessment and maintained that detainees receive safe and humane care consistent with applicable law.
That disagreement captures modern Guantánamo.
The prison of 2026 is not Camp X-Ray in 2002.
But the institution still carries the consequences of what happened there and elsewhere in the system that fed prisoners into it.
Hunger Strikes, Force-Feeding And Death
Indefinite detention generated another form of resistance: hunger strikes.
Detainees refused food at several points in Guantánamo's history. The reasons varied, but protests often centred on detention without trial, conditions, searches, treatment of religious materials and the belief that release might never come.
The largest modern hunger strike came in 2013.
More than one hundred detainees were at one point classified by the military as participating.
The United States force-fed some hunger strikers through tubes inserted through the nose while the detainee was restrained in a chair.
Military officials defended enteral feeding as necessary to preserve life.
Medical associations and human-rights organisations argued that forcibly feeding a mentally competent prisoner who had made an informed refusal could violate medical ethics and amount to cruel or degrading treatment, particularly when physical restraint was used.
The dispute was not abstract.
It turned the prison doctor into part of the security system and raised an uncomfortable question: when a detainee used his own body as his last form of protest, who decided whether he had the right to refuse food?
Nine detainees have died in Guantánamo custody since the prison opened.
Several deaths were officially recorded as suicides.
Some of those findings have been challenged by lawyers, journalists and former personnel, particularly in relation to three deaths in June 2006. The official position was that the men killed themselves. Critics raised questions about inconsistencies in the record and the circumstances of the deaths.
Those disputes should not be presented as settled proof of an alternative cause.
What is settled is that death, suicide attempts, hunger strikes and severe psychological distress became part of Guantánamo's history as detention stretched from months into years.
The Supreme Court Begins To Push Back
The Bush administration originally hoped Guantánamo's offshore location would sharply restrict access to American courts.
That expectation broke down in stages.
Rasul v. Bush — 2004
In Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court held that federal courts had jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from foreign detainees held at Guantánamo.
Habeas corpus is the legal mechanism that allows a prisoner to challenge whether the government has lawful authority to detain him.
The ruling did not automatically free the detainees.
It did something more basic.
It opened the courthouse door.
Hamdi v. Rumsfeld — 2004
Hamdi concerned a United States citizen captured in Afghanistan and held as an enemy combatant.
The Supreme Court accepted that detention could be an incident of authorised military force, but held that a citizen-detainee must have a meaningful opportunity to challenge the factual basis for his detention before a neutral decision-maker.
Hamdi was not a Guantánamo case in the same way as Rasul, but it shaped the wider legal framework.
It rejected the idea that the executive branch could simply place a wartime label on a person and make meaningful review disappear.
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld — 2006
Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni national who had worked as a driver for Osama bin Laden, challenged the military commission system created by the Bush administration.
The Supreme Court ruled that the commissions, as then structured, lacked proper legal authorisation and violated applicable legal requirements, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.
Congress responded by passing the Military Commissions Act of 2006.
The government had lost in court.
It rebuilt the system through legislation.
Boumediene v. Bush — 2008
Boumediene was the deepest blow to the idea of Guantánamo as a legal space beyond the Constitution's reach.
The Supreme Court held that detainees at Guantánamo had a constitutional right to seek habeas corpus and that Congress could not simply replace meaningful judicial review with an inadequate substitute.
The significance was enormous.
Guantánamo was physically outside sovereign United States territory.
But the United States exercised complete and indefinite control over the base.
That practical control mattered.
The legal geography that had helped make Guantánamo attractive in 2001 was no longer enough to keep federal judges away.
Military Commissions Become A Second Battlefield
Guantánamo was not only a detention camp.
It became a court complex.
Military commissions were designed to prosecute law-of-war offences outside the normal federal criminal court system.
Supporters argued they were appropriate for wartime terrorism cases involving sensitive intelligence, battlefield evidence and defendants captured abroad.
Critics argued that the rules were unstable, that the system offered weaker protections and that federal courts already had a strong record of prosecuting terrorism cases.
The commissions were repeatedly rewritten.
Judges changed.
Prosecutors left.
Defence teams challenged evidence.
Congress altered the law.
Appellate courts reversed convictions or narrowed offences.
Classified material created long delays.
Torture created even larger ones.
Salim Hamdan was convicted in 2008 of providing material support for terrorism and transferred to Yemen after serving his sentence. His conviction was later overturned on appeal because the offence, as applied to his pre-2006 conduct, could not support the military commission conviction in the form used.
David Hicks, an Australian detainee, pleaded guilty in 2007 and was returned to Australia. His conviction was later set aside.
Those cases exposed a basic problem.
A special court system created quickly after an emergency can spend years deciding its own rules before it ever reaches the underlying allegations.
The 9/11 prosecution is the ultimate example.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, the case against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other defendants is still shaped by disputes over treatment that occurred before some of them arrived at Guantánamo.
Bush Built It. Obama Tried To Close It
Guantánamo changed under every president who inherited it.
George W. Bush
The Bush administration created the detention system, developed the original enemy-combatant framework and established the first military commissions.
It also transferred or released more than five hundred detainees.
That fact is sometimes overlooked.
The administration responsible for opening Guantánamo also emptied most of its original population.
But the Bush years established the practices that would define the controversy: indefinite detention, restricted judicial review, aggressive interrogation, military commissions and the transfer of high-value CIA prisoners to the base.
By the time Bush left office, Guantánamo had become politically toxic at home and abroad.
Barack Obama
Barack Obama entered office promising closure.
On 22 January 2009, he signed an executive order directing that the detention facilities be closed within one year.
It did not happen.
The failure showed how hard closing Guantánamo was compared with promising to close it.
Some detainees could be repatriated.
Others required third countries because the United States believed returning them home would be dangerous.
Some governments would not accept them.
Some detainees could not safely be returned.
Congress imposed restrictions on transferring Guantánamo detainees to the United States and created increasingly difficult rules for transfers abroad.
The administration considered civilian prosecution for major terrorism defendants, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but political opposition to bringing them onto American soil became overwhelming.
Obama restarted military commissions under revised rules.
He also created the Periodic Review Board process to reassess whether continued law-of-war detention remained necessary for detainees not facing criminal trial.
Transfers resumed and the population fell sharply.
Obama left office with forty-one men still at Guantánamo.
The prison was smaller.
It was not closed.
Trump Reverses The Closure Policy
Donald Trump entered office in 2017 openly rejecting Obama's closure policy.
In January 2018, Trump signed an executive order revoking the part of Obama's order that required the detention facility to close.
The new order affirmed that the United States could continue to use Guantánamo for law-of-war detention and left open the possibility of sending additional detainees there.
In practice, Trump did not refill the War on Terror prison during his first term.
But the policy direction was clear.
Guantánamo was no longer considered a facility awaiting closure.
It was again an available national-security instrument.
Biden Shrinks The Prison To Fifteen
Joe Biden returned to a policy of reducing the detainee population.
His administration transferred multiple detainees who had been approved for release or resettlement.
The most dramatic reduction came in January 2025, when eleven Yemeni detainees were transferred to Oman.
That brought the War on Terror population down to fifteen.
At that point, the Department of Defense said three men were eligible for transfer, three were eligible for Periodic Review Board consideration, seven were involved in military commission proceedings and two had been convicted and sentenced by military commissions.
That breakdown shows why closure has never been as simple as putting fifteen men on fifteen aeroplanes.
They do not all have the same legal status.
Trump Returns — And Guantánamo Gains A Second Mission
When Donald Trump returned to the presidency in January 2025, Guantánamo entered another phase.
Trump directed the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantánamo Bay to provide additional detention space for immigration enforcement.
The announcement produced immediate confusion because the naval base already contained the famous War on Terror prison.
They are not the same system.
The fifteen War on Terror detainees are held under military or commission authorities arising from post-9/11 detention.
Immigration detainees transferred to the base are part of a separate Department of Homeland Security-led operation.
The planned scale was enormous. Trump publicly discussed capacity for up to 30,000 migrants.
That did not materialise.
Government oversight records show that the operation was scaled back because building detention capacity to the proposed level was considered prohibitively expensive and impractical. Operation Southern Guard nevertheless continued as a military support mission for immigration detention at the naval station into 2026.
This created an unusual historical overlap.
Guantánamo's original detention camp had become a small, ageing institution with fifteen men.
The wider naval base was simultaneously being used for a separate twenty-first-century immigration operation.
The two should not be conflated.
But the second use demonstrated something important.
Guantánamo still held political value precisely because of the characteristic that made it attractive in 2002: it was isolated, controlled by the United States and physically separated from the mainland.
Guantánamo Then And Now
The contrast between 2002 and 2026 is stark.
In 2002, Camp X-Ray was improvised, exposed and crowded. Prisoners lived in chain-link enclosures. Interrogation was central to the mission. The United States was capturing new detainees in an active war.
Today, the original Camp X-Ray site is no longer the operating prison.
The remaining detainees are held in more permanent facilities.
Some have communal living arrangements.
There are medical services, religious accommodations, recreation and access to lawyers under procedures that did not exist when the first prisoners arrived.
The population is also ageing.
Men captured in their twenties and thirties are now middle-aged or elderly. Chronic health conditions have become more important. The history of physical and psychological trauma complicates treatment.
Camp Seven, once used for high-value detainees, was closed and its prisoners moved to another facility.
The centre of gravity has shifted from interrogation to custody, legal proceedings and healthcare.
Yet one feature has barely changed.
Time remains the defining condition.
Some men have been held for more than two decades without a conventional criminal trial.
What Guantánamo Is Like Today
As of September 2026, fifteen War on Terror detainees remain.
The most recent official population breakdown available after the January 2025 transfers listed:
Three detainees eligible for transfer.
Three eligible for Periodic Review Board consideration.
Seven involved in military commission proceedings.
Two convicted and sentenced by military commissions.
The legal details within those categories continue to change as commission cases move through hearings and appeals.
The 9/11 case remains the most important.
A military judge has scheduled a trial for June 2028 for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and co-defendants, but the case remains subject to further litigation.
In August 2026, the judge suppressed Mohammed's 2007 FBI statements after finding the government had failed to prove they were voluntary.
The significance reaches beyond one confession.
The ruling goes to the heart of the commission system's oldest problem: whether investigators can build legally usable cases after defendants were subjected to coercive CIA interrogation.
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri's USS Cole case is also still active.
As of late September 2026, filings continue over classified evidence, expert testimony, the admissibility of statements, mental capacity and trial procedure.
Guantánamo has therefore reached a strange stage.
The prison population is tiny.
The litigation is enormous.
Estimates of annual cost vary depending on what is counted: detention operations, military personnel, infrastructure, transport, commissions, support facilities and the wider naval base are not always separated consistently.
Recent advocacy estimates have placed the cost at roughly thirteen million dollars per War on Terror detainee per year, but comparisons should be treated cautiously because accounting methods differ and the base now supports separate immigration operations as well.
The broader point is not disputed.
Guantánamo is extraordinarily expensive for fifteen men.
Why America Cannot Simply Close It
Every president who has considered closure has run into the same problem.
"Guantánamo" sounds like one policy.
It is really fifteen individual legal problems sitting inside a larger political one.
A detainee cleared for transfer needs a country willing and able to accept him.
That country may need to agree to security monitoring, travel restrictions, rehabilitation or other arrangements.
A detainee cannot always be sent home safely.
Diplomatic negotiations can take years.
A detainee facing charges creates another problem.
Congress has repeatedly restricted the transfer of Guantánamo detainees to the United States, including for trial or imprisonment.
That sharply limits civilian-court options.
Military commission defendants cannot simply be released because proceedings are slow.
At the same time, prosecutions are complicated by classified intelligence, dead or unavailable witnesses, events that occurred more than twenty years ago and evidence connected to coercive interrogation.
Then there are detainees held under law-of-war authority without criminal charges.
The United States may argue that they remain dangerous but possess evidence that would be difficult to introduce in a criminal court.
Critics answer that detention without charge becomes harder to justify as the years pass and the conflict that produced it changes beyond recognition.
Congress matters too.
A president cannot close Guantánamo by executive preference alone if legislation blocks the transfers required to make closure possible.
Obama learned that.
Biden learned it again.
Guantánamo survives partly because the cost of keeping it open is politically easier to absorb than the political risk of deciding where every remaining man should go.
What Happens Next?
There is no confirmed plan to close the War on Terror detention facility under the current administration.
The realistic possibilities are narrower.
Some detainees approved for transfer may eventually leave if diplomatic arrangements can be found.
Periodic Review Boards may change the status of others.
Military commission cases may reach trials, guilty pleas, convictions or new negotiated agreements.
The 9/11 case may begin in 2028.
It may also be delayed again.
The remaining population will continue to age.
Medical care will become more complicated.
Deaths in custody become more likely as detention stretches across decades.
Congress could change the legal restrictions that make closure difficult, but there is no established political path for that at present.
The most likely immediate future is therefore continued operation with a very small number of prisoners and continuing litigation.
That is the final paradox of Guantánamo.
The camp was built in the panic and uncertainty after 9/11 as an answer to an urgent question: where should the United States hold men captured in a war against a terrorist network?
The emergency passed through one administration, then another.
George W. Bush opened the prison.
Barack Obama ordered it closed.
Donald Trump reversed that order.
Joe Biden reduced the population.
Trump returned and expanded the naval base's detention role in a separate immigration operation.
And the original prison remained.
Twenty-four years after the first detainees knelt behind the wire at Camp X-Ray, fifteen men are still held in the War on Terror detention system.
The institution has survived longer than some of the legal theories used to create it.
The strongest evidence of that is not a speech or a protest.
It is a court calendar.
In September 2026, American military lawyers were still filing motions in the 9/11 and USS Cole cases, arguing over evidence, mental capacity, classified material and interrogations that began more than two decades earlier.
Guantánamo was designed as a place to hold an emergency.
The emergency became history.
The prison did not.
Sources
U.S. Department of Defense — Guantanamo Bay Detainee Transfer Announced — Confirms the January 2025 transfer of eleven Yemeni detainees and the official breakdown of the fifteen War on Terror detainees who remained.
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence — Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program — Primary congressional record on the CIA detention programme, coercive interrogation and treatment of detainees later transferred to Guantánamo.
U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian — 1903 Guantánamo Lease Agreement — Primary historical text establishing the legal framework for American control of the naval station.
Next Reads
History of U.S. Wars in the Middle East Explained — Places Guantánamo inside the wider history of Afghanistan, Iraq and the military campaigns that followed 9/11.
25 Years After 9/11, Americans Now Fear the Enemy Within More Than Foreign Terrorists — Examines how the American perception of terrorism has changed since the security environment that produced Guantánamo.
Operation Northwoods Explained: The Declassified US Plan To Manufacture A Cuba Crisis — A separate Cold War history showing why Cuba and Guantánamo occupied such an unusual place in American strategic planning.
