After eight years of pretrial hearings, trials may begin of five detainees involved in 9/11. They've been in Guantanamo now for 14 years. "We are stuck in a kind of legal morass caused really by the nature of [their] detention and later treatment," says Julian Borger, world affairs editor for The Guardian and author of The Butcher's Trail.
The CIA is hiding the names of those who ordered and carried out the torture, charges Marc Steiner at The Real News Network. Even after years of legal battles, the United States is likely still using black sites and torture. Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen and "almost everyone else involved in the extensive ['enhanced interrogation'] program... has remained in the shadows in terms of legality. It's still the dark side of the moon," says Steiner. "So I mean, for all we know, these black sites... could still be going on. We don't know how far up the chain this could go."
Peter Jan Honigsberg, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law and the founder and director of the Witness to Guantanamo Project, offers the most comprehensive picture to date of the lives that were deeply and often traumatically transformed by Guantanamo. From how alleged terrorists were captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan and sold to the US to the Bush administration's use of the term "enemy combatant" to bypass the Geneva Conventions, Honigsberg details how the law was broken in the name of protecting Americans-and how that lawlessness was experienced by everyone who came into contact with Guantanamo.
