The Secret Pentagon Photos of the First Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay
The Secret Pentagon Photos of the First Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay
June 12, 2022
GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — For 20 years, the United States military has tightly controlled what the world can see of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay.
No images of prisoners struggling with guards. No hunger strikers being tackled, put into restraints and force-fed. Few faces of U.S. forces escorting captives in shackles. And in time, no photographs of detainees or their guards at all.
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. But few other explicit images of the prisoners have become public since they began arriving at Guantánamo just months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Until now. 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.
Released this year, these pictures were taken by military photographers to show senior leaders, chief among them Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, an intimate view of the offshore detention and interrogation operation in its early stages.
These were the first prisoners brought to Guantánamo Bay, as they were being transported aboard a U.S. Air Force cargo plane, restrained and deprived of their sensory information.
The photographer said a crew member on the flight placed a U.S. flag in the hand of the blindfolded detainee between takeoff in Turkey and arrival at Guantánamo, and snapped a souvenir photograph.
This detainee was duct-taped after he tried to wriggle around and see through his blindfold, the photographer said.
The U.S. military provided the blue jackets and orange caps because the cavernous cargo plane, a C-141 that is now obsolete, was cold at high altitudes.
David Hicks, an Australian who was captured fighting for the Taliban, being led down the ramp of the cargo plane on the first day of prison operations at Guantánamo Bay.
Goggles with duct tape over the lenses and earmuffs like those used at a shooting range were seen as a more professional alternative to black hoods to make sure a prisoner could not see or perceive his surroundings.
Each detainee arrived at Guantánamo wearing a turquoise medical mask because military medical workers suspected some were carrying tuberculosis.
This tattoo was how a former guard recognized Mr. Hicks, who pleaded guilty to war crimes and was repatriated in 2007.
“With the shackles on, it was easier to transport them by carrying them,” said Michael W. Pendergrass, a Navy photographer at the time, who took this picture of a prisoner being carried to a processing site at Camp X-Ray. While this picture is being published for the first time, Mr. Pendergrass also took a widely recognized picture of a giant American flag being unfurled over the Pentagon after the Sept. 11 attacks.
No one in this image is identified, but a caption written at the time said the two soldiers were with the 115th Military Police Battalion. The unit was later assigned to Abu Ghraib, Iraq.
Soldiers recalled that most of the early prisoners were easy to carry because they were skinny, suggesting they were malnourished.
A quick reaction force, with riot shields, stood by at each arrival.
The practice of managing the visual narrative started the very first day detainees arrived at the base, Jan. 11, 2002. The military forbade two news photographers, from CNN and The Miami Herald, from capturing history as it unfolded: They could watch the first prisoners arrive but had to leave their cameras behind.
Instead, about a week later, the Defense Department handed out a picture of the first 20 prisoners on their knees at Camp X-Ray, the makeshift prison camp where captives were kept in the earliest months of the operation. It was taken by a Navy photographer and initially intended for the eyes of only the Pentagon’s leaders.
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.
But 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. Bush — were “the worst of the worst,” because they had ended up there.
In time, the record would show that was not true. Only 18 detainees were ever charged, and only five have been convicted by a military tribunal. Ten detainees are still in pretrial proceedings, including the men accused of the Sept. 11 attacks. President Barack Obama promised to close the prison, but was blocked by opposition from Republicans on Capitol Hill. Successive administrations sought to whittle down the number of men held there. All but 37 of the detainees are gone, some released as mistakenly swept up in the U.S. 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.
Marines working in pairs taking custody of the first 20 prisoners who were brought to Guantánamo Bay from Afghanistan by way of Incirlik, Turkey.
Col. Terry Carrico of the Army, who was essentially the first warden of Guantánamo Bay, was on hand for unloading while the military police troops he commanded waited at Camp X-Ray to receive the prisoners.
Two Navy photographers captured the scene from their assigned positions.
The seats were removed from this bus and a metal bar was welded to the floor so that detainees could be shackled as they were transported.
The white van on the hill brought reporters to observe, but not photograph, the arrival of the first detainees.
Troops taking custody of the first 20 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay followed a routine. Two men were assigned to a prisoner, who was shackled, essentially blindfolded and could hear only shouts. Each man was searched and led to the modified school bus. “It was all business,” the photographer Jeremy Lock recalled.
This Marine’s teammate used a gloved hand to guide the prisoner from the plane through the search and to the bus.
Marines donned battle dress for the arrival mission, right down to the helmet showing the eagle, globe and anchor insignia of the U.S. Marine Corps.
At first, troops assigned to the detention mission wore jungle fatigues. A commander later changed the approved uniform to desert camouflage.
Unlike members of the Army military police who would receive the detainees at Camp X-Ray, the Marines wore full combat gear, “battle rattle,” and carried weapons on the Guantánamo airstrip.
Although the detainees arrived shackled, this Marine had flex cuffs in his vest and a club.
This lieutenant with a riot shield on his helmet is grasping a lanyard attached to a pistol.
This Marine has a military police armband and a shotgun.
Marines puzzling how to get a detainee, still shackled at the wrists, onto the bus that would carry him to Camp X-Ray the day the detention operation opened. The photographer who took this picture retired from the Air Force in 2013 as a master sergeant after being named military photographer of the year by the Defense Department seven times, starting with the year these photos were taken, 2002.
The prisoner’s prosthetic extended to his kneecap and, in flight, was shackled to his other ankle, the photographer recalled.
The military placed tarps along the windows of the bus to prevent people from seeing inside as it passed through the base.
Based on former prison staff and documents, this is the Taliban prisoner Mullah Fazel Mohammad Mazloom, who spent 13 years at Guantánamo Bay.
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.
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. They show routine security measures, including restraints, which military censors would later forbid in news photos. 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.
One of the most dramatic photos shows how the military improvised during its first flight that brought detainees to Guantánamo Bay. According to Jeremy Lock, the military photographer on the plane, a man had tried to wriggle out of a makeshift blindfold. So they bound him with duct tape.
Someone among the security forces planted an American flag in the restrained, mitten-covered hand of the man sitting next to the duct-taped prisoner, and took a souvenir photo. Mr. Lock captured that image as well, for his bosses to see what had been done.
The duct-taped prisoner is the same man seen in a photo of Marines puzzling over how to get him aboard the school bus that would take him across Guantánamo Bay to the facility where he would be held, Camp X-Ray. The photo is a study in the juxtaposition of three men’s feet.
U.S. forces on duty at the time recalled that only one man arrived that day with a prosthetic leg, and prison documents suggest he was Mullah Fazel Mohammad Mazloom, a deputy defense minister and a commander of Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks.
He was released to the custody of Qatar 13 years later in a prisoner exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl of the Army. After the Afghan government fell to the Taliban last year, he became a deputy defense minister in the militant government.
Foreign prisoners presumed to be battlefield captives being treated inside a medical tent on a day when the prison operation held 158 detainees. By then, the medical staff had crutches and physical therapy equipment on site. Shane T. McCoy, now a civilian, also took the iconic image of the first 20 detainees, their faces and features hidden, in a holding area at Guantánamo Bay.
Note the detainee closest to the camera has an intravenous drip hanging from the bar holding the lights.
Each detainee was shackled at the wrists and ankles.
Members of the Navy, Army and Marines were present.
An Army medic examining a detainee during inprocessing. Prisoners were weighed and measured the day they arrived and given preliminary check-ups.
The prisoner number on the wristband does not correspond to anyone who was at the prison on Jan. 17.
A caption identifies the medic as First Lt. Edwin Leavitt of the Army.
You can see a soldier behind the detainee’s right side, in keeping with a practice of having guards posted near medical procedures.
The prisoners were fed rice, beans, carrots, fresh fruit and bread on this day at Camp X-Ray. The military said it provided culturally appropriate meals. Later, the military would obtain halal rations for the detainees.
When meals were distributed at Camp X-Ray, a detainee had to get on his knees and face away from the door to his cell so that a guard could reach inside.
Each prisoner was originally issued a U.S. military ISO mat, about as thick as a yoga mat, which detainees used as a mattress and as a prayer rug.
Prayer time on the 43rd day of the prisoner operations at Camp X-Ray, as the captives celebrated Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice.They appeared to have more “comfort items” by then.
Copies of the Quran had been handed out a month earlier.
Each detainee had two buckets, one to wash in and the other for peeing. Canteens were distributed for drinking water.
Note the prisoners can touch hips through the chain-linked fence, something that became impossible because of the way the individual cells were made at Camp Delta.
A rare closeup of a detainee praying inside his cell at Camp X-Ray shows Yaser Esam Hamdi, who at Guantánamo was discovered to be an American-born Saudi citizen, shortly before he was moved from the base to a Navy brig at Norfolk, Va. The photographer, Lt. Cmdr. Shawn Eklund, later returned to Guantánamo Bay as a public affairs officer for the Office of Military Commissions and is currently serving aboard the aircraft carrier the Dwight D. Eisenhower.
By the time of this photo, the third month of operations at Camp X-Ray, the International Committee of the Red Cross had provided each detainee with a traditional head covering known as a skullcap or kufi.
You can see a chain-linked fence around the prisoner’s cell in the foreground.
The prisoner was 21 years old on this day. Many of the first detainees were in their early 20s.
Mr. Lock, the military photographer, recently said he understood the reason for the security measures — wrist and leg restraints to prevent the detainees from moving, blindfolds and earmuffs to prevent them from plotting, medical masks to guard against the possible transmission of tuberculosis.
Nonetheless, he said, the sensory deprivation techniques reminded him of his earlier training as an airman in the prisoner-of-war survival program called SERE, short for the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school.
C.I.A. agents would repurpose aspects of that program to interrogate and torture suspected senior members of Al Qaeda. History shows those enhanced interrogations would begin months later, after hundreds of detainees had been brought to Guantánamo Bay.
Produced by Marisa Schwartz Taylor and Rebecca Lieberman.
Carol Rosenberg has been covering the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, including detention operations and military commissions, since the first prisoners were brought there from Afghanistan in January 2002. She worked as a metro, national and foreign correspondent with a focus on coverage of conflict in the Middle East for The Miami Herald from 1990 to 2019.