News | U.S. Politics: Guantanamo Bay was off Limits to Lawyers Seeking to Represent Detainee Men There.
nytimes.com 8-10 minutes In the first years of the war in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay was off limits to lawyers seeking to represent the detainees there, and the Bush administration refused to disclose the prisoners’ names. Commanders would brief reporters regularly, and guards would come forward to speak with pride about their service there but were not allowed to name the men in the orange uniforms. In time, the Bush administration bowed to pressure from the courts and released the names of many of the men and boys who were brought to the U.S. military detention center as “enemy combatants.” But by the time the Pentagon let the lawyers visit, hundreds of the detainees were already gone, many of them sent back to Afghanistan and Pakistan. The entrance to Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2010. Some of the detainees who have been cleared for release have been waiting for a decade for another country to agree to take them. Richard Perr