By Carol Rosenberg
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.
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