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Previously on Serial. Our mission today is to provide safe, humane, legal and transparent custody of the detainees here. Safe, legal, transparent care. Would you guys like to stop at this small little mini-mart real quick? On this side, it's just a small one just to get if you want a snack or something. They also have souvenirs there. This is something that they would never have made public, but the day of the riot, morale was never higher. How are we going to basically explain we let this happen?
From Serial Productions and The New York Times, this is Serial Season 4, Guantanamo. One prison camp told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. We're going to jump forward to present-day Guantanamo, now-ish, for the rest of this series. I'm going to start in summer of 2022, when Dana and I went down to Guantanamo a second time.
Media can't tour the prison compound anymore, but you can go down to report on the special court at Guantanamo called the military commissions. Five cases are still in some phase of criminal prosecution, including the case against the men accused of planning the 9-11 attacks. So we went to the court, which we'd never seen in action before.
Two other reporters are there with us: John Ryan, from a legal affairs publication called Law Dragon, and Carol Rosenberg, formerly of the Miami Herald, now of the New York Times. Carol's been covering Guantanamo for more than 20 years. She's the one to watch here. You can't bring any recording equipment into the courtroom, so I don't have tape for this part. I'll just tell it. Army soldiers are checking us through security at the entrance to the court. They tell us, "No, you cannot bring your coffee into the spectator's gallery."
This doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Lots of courtrooms don't allow beverages. But Carol pushes back. "Is that a new rule?" Carol asks. "Why? Can someone go ask why?" Once we're inside, before we even take our seats, drama begins. Not inside the actual courtroom, mind you, where the lawyers and defendants and judges will soon be, but in our section, the gallery. I'm standing with Carol at the thick glass windows that separate us from the courtroom. She's explaining to me what's what.
When an Army MP in charge of security, a guard, tells us to sit down, which does seem unreasonable. Court hasn't even started. There's no one here but us. The guard is stern and excessively bossy. We've always been able to stand at the glass before court begins, Carol says. Is that a new rule? No answer. Carol sits in her assigned seat. They've got all us reporters in the front row, but separated by one. John Ryan's in seat number three, then me in number five, Dana's in seven. Carol's seat is number one.
We are told by the guard our notebooks will be confiscated if we doodle or make drawings that depict the courtroom. I assume this is an empty threat. But Carol clocks it, points above her head. Her seat, the number one seat, is right under a camera that can see what she writes. First things first. Can you run down the coffee question, Carol asks? We did, ma'am. They told us only water bottles. The planets are in retrograde, Carol grumbles.
This is a new rotation of MPs. They don't know what they're doing yet. Carol figures maybe this uptight guard will relax when she sees we know how to behave. But the guard doesn't let up. And when we return the next day, the guard is back and then some. I get caught whispering something to Carol. "'We are not going to have conversations,' the guard snaps. Then, as a witness is testifying, she hollers, "'Wake up!' into her radio, admonishing a fellow guard dozing inside the courtroom, sleeping as against the rules."
A little later, May Day, I see John Ryan to my left, nodding off. I don't know what to do. There's a wide, empty seat between us. The seats are oversized and comfortable, just right for a nap. So there's no way to subtly nudge him. Plus, I don't know John, really. It's not my place to get between him and some shut-eye. As I mull the most collegial course of action, she appears, the terrifying guard, gets right up in John's startled face. She tells him to stop sleeping, and if you can't stay awake, I'm going to ask you to leave.
John's been covering this court for seven years, and this has never happened to him before. He keeps saying, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. All this is aggravating, of course, insulting. We're being treated like children. But frankly, it rolls off Dana and me. An amusement more than anything. After this week, we're out of here. But Carol? Carol is livid. Behold the sound of indignation as absorbed by Carol Rosenberg's keyboard.
Back at the Media Operations Center, the MOC, that's where reporters work from down here, Carol is writing up a memo about the mean guard, an Army specialist. It's too long. What do you got? I'm going to sound like such a bitch. Can we please get the Army specialist not to do disruptive outbursts while court is in session? The guard surely did not benefit from left-seat, right-seat training.
I assumed she was firing off an email to this guy Ron, the public affairs director for the military commissions. But she could just call Ron if she wanted a vent. So maybe she wasn't writing to Ron? Who are you writing to? I haven't decided yet. I'm thinking the director general, obviously Ron, probably the chief prosecutor, and I'm not sure the chief defense attorney is.
And I'm trying to decide, like, since this is supposed to be a public hearing and there seems to be a systematic harassment of the public trying to just observe, probably someone at the Pentagon. But the question is whether to also add a couple of the congressmen who are really interested in keeping these things public. What had I missed here? I mean, the guard was rude and all, but the Pentagon? Maybe some congressmen?
I asked her kind of sideways. I'm a little scared of Carol myself. Is that necessary? Because the guard's temporary. She's going to be gone in some short amount of time. Nine months. Nine months. I know this just sounds really petty, but...
Like John said, it could be a really long fucking year if she's harassing people nonstop in there every time we go to court. This is an important case, a capital case. And it's not like I can just grab a transcript, Carol points out. I've got one shot in there to hear what's going on. The two of us take this seriously. We take notes, we pay attention, we consult. And she's made it hard. I mean, some of that was like during—it was really disruptive during kind of key testimony.
Right. So like that's the fight in front of us, but what's the larger fight you're fighting? Just to zoom out for a second. I don't know if it's a fight.
I know that when I say, "Carol's been covering Guantanamo for more than 20 years," that's a sentence that can slide by quickly. So let me be clear. I don't mean Carol checks in on Guantanamo from time to time. I mean, Carol Rosenberg is the Guantanamo reporter. Carol was here the day the prison opened, and she's been here ever since, for more than two decades. While other reporters came and went, Carol stayed. She has never stepped away, never even paused. Carol knows more about Guantanamo than anyone in the world.
She alone holds its institutional memory. I'm overstating but only slightly when I say that whatever the rest of us back on the mainland know about Guantanamo, it's because of Carol. And she covers this beat more or less by herself.
John only covers the court and he doesn't always come. So that means it's all on Carol. She is writing not just the first draft of Guantanamo history, but in some instances, the only draft. And what she's been struggling against in a hundred different ways for years now is that the military has been making it harder and harder for her or anyone to report from down here.
Today's nonsense is just the latest encroachment. You can see how it might work her nerves. An army specialist, a pisher on a power trip, is going to make her job harder than it already is? Uh-uh. So I don't know if it's a fight. Well, yeah, it's a fight against being disrespected. Consistently disrespected.
Dana asks Carol, can't you just take this guard aside and say, hey, listen, this isn't how this works here. No, she can't do that, she says, because that'd be against the rules. They just, they don't understand how abnormal all this is, she says. This culture of threats and supervision of the press, that you can't talk to a guard, that you can't come and go from the courtroom as you please. Can't. You can't get up and go to the bathroom. There was a period when...
If one reporter needed to go to the bathroom, everybody had to get up and go up. If you don't have to go to the bathroom, they force you to try. It's so humiliating. That's John. The problem with John is, is like, I get so heated, and then he's so funny, I want to laugh, but I get angry. Angrier. All right, I'll let you get to it.
At 3.14 p.m., Carol sends her memo. Four minutes later, someone emails her back saying they'll look into it pronto. And a half hour after that, the mean guard is gone. We're told she's going to be retrained and reassigned.
The next time we go to court, big smiles from everyone. There's a bowl of candy on the desk where they check our badges. And not the cheap kind, the good kind. M&Ms, mini Kit Kats, mini Twix. The uniformed young woman who wants me down for weapons admires my pin. Inside the gallery, the guard reads the rules in a voice quavery with nerves and then gently announces that he might stand up during court now and then because he has a bad back. "I hope it doesn't make you uncomfortable," he says. "I apologize in advance if it makes you uncomfortable."
Carol Rosenberg, one. Guantanamo Guard Force, zero. A swift, clean win. To the first-timer, i.e. me, Carol's fights might seem a little nuts. And I'm not dismissing the notion that Guantanamo has driven Carol a little nuts. What's incredible is that this place hasn't driven her completely nuts. It wasn't always this way. Carol hasn't endured two solid decades of disrespect. She couldn't have taken it, she told me. But right now is a bad period.
Perhaps counterintuitively, late-stage Guantanamo, with its shrunken prison population and sputtering court, is even less open to public view and more aggressively anti-Carol than early-stage Guantanamo, which seemed backwards to me. The government was hiding so much more back in the day. Who the prisoners were, for instance. All the ways we abused them. What's left to hide? That's what this episode's about. The battle that's now underway at Guantanamo. Carol broke it down for me.
The deterioration of her access here, what she calls the closing of the aperture, it isn't about protecting Guantanamo's secrets. It's about something else entirely. I don't want to oversimplify. The military was never thrilled to have Carol at Guantanamo. But to give you a sense of what better times were like for her, in 2003, for example, General Jeffrey Miller, who oversaw some of the most brutal treatment of detainees at Guantanamo, General Miller invited Carol down to the camp to serve the troops Thanksgiving dinner.
In the military, the officers served the enlisted on Thanksgiving, so it was Carol and a bunch of generals wearing aprons in the galley. Afterwards, she and the officers of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, the JTF, sat down for their meal, the most lavish Thanksgiving spread she had ever seen the military put on. There was, like, towers of shrimp.
and maybe lobster tails and giant hams and obviously turkey and smoked salmon. I just remember it being so opulent, it reminded me of a buffet in the Persian Gulf. And it was sort of a reflection, I thought, of the fact that the JTF was riding high and could do anything it wanted and order anything it wanted, and there was nothing they couldn't get.
They had lobster tails and piles of shrimp and a story to tell, a story they wanted Americans to hear, which was this. We got them. We got the terrorists who attacked us on 9-11. Not all of them, but hundreds of them. And we're going to treat them humanely and still get justice for the American people. Carol says she was wise to what this was, an effort to co-opt her. But the upside was that by having her serve mashed potatoes... It signaled to the troops...
that I was somehow considered someone important, which I think contributed to people being willing to talk to me. She wasn't necessarily writing the stories the military wanted her to write. Guantanamo detainees, mostly young foot soldiers, was an early 2002 headline. Or she'd ask unwelcome questions about the Geneva Convention, say.
But even so, Carol was allowed to talk to all kinds of personnel — guards, commanders, their deputies, medical staff. Back in the day, Carol could ask factual questions and feel pretty confident she'd get an answer. Maybe not always a factually true answer, but an answer. She was allowed to watch a Pashto literacy class and write about it. She could see where the Uyghurs, a persecuted Muslim group from China, were being housed while the U.S. government tried to figure out how to get rid of them.
The Uyghurs have a little garden, she wrote. They planted orange seeds and have inch-high seedlings they are cultivating. She could ask if someone would please bring her tape recorder inside the prison. And why is she walking back and forth? Just because she's working on this blog. Bullshit! So she could get sound of the call to prayer during Ramadan. And they'd do it. Ash'ar wal la'al ma'al.
Another advantage of the early years: colleagues, other correspondents, all the big papers and magazines, TV people, foreign reporters, which meant more people asking questions, asking for access, more people pushing back against the DoD's restrictions. From the get-go, Carroll's coverage was singular, more comprehensive than anyone else's, and often more annoying to the government.
She tried, relentlessly, to figure out how much Guantanamo was costing us. A $13.4 million super-secure building for investigators, a $744,000 soccer field, a $32,000 shipping refrigerator designed to hold dead bodies but used to store bottled water. All Carol's reporting. Most expensive prison on Earth was a 2011 headline. Outlandish gossip has swirled around this base about how Carol finds stuff out.
A former public affairs officer told me that in orientation sessions for incoming troops, they were warned that Carroll might try to trick them. The nuttiest thing he heard before he put a stop to it, Carroll hired attractive young men and women to flirt with personnel in bars so they'd reveal sensitive information. All these people misunderstand. Carroll is old school. She's not a lurker or an eavesdropper. She reads and she files records requests and she works the phones. It was...
No, I'm... Okay. If she wants information from a source, she makes it bracingly clear. She's talking to an attorney she's known a while. I don't want you to just... I don't want you to disclose it. What I'm trying to find out... And she's not being an asshole. She's being explicit. I am not trying to endanger your security clearance. I'm not going to trap you and screw you up. But I'll talk to you later. Okay. Bye-bye. Ubiquity, not stealth, has always been Carol's reporting strategy at Guantanamo.
Technically, she's based in Miami. She owns a condo there. But she half-lives at Guantanamo, like a naturalized citizen of this hermetic world. There's Carol's desk, Carol's clock, Carol's whiteboard, Carol's leftovers in the fridge. Some of this stuff is, like, expired by years and years. Carol's broken-down bike. There's a problem when I try to drive it. Here, listen. It's this...
From the very beginning, Carol tried to be here as often as possible. She took the prison tour at least once a month, tried to attend every administrative hearing and court proceeding for every defendant. That's how she finds stuff out, which, on occasion, has led to retribution.
In late 2006, Carol broke a story about a building project that infuriated the Pentagon. Afterwards, Carol says she got a call from a certain general who informed her she could look forward to sleeping in a tent from here on out. And it happened. Reporters who'd been sleeping in a hotel were now bunking in big, Quonset-hut-shaped tents erected on an abandoned airstrip out by the court.
Carol said the tents weren't so bad, actually, except that you never felt clean and you were nowhere near any amenities and your glasses would fog up every time you had to leave the over-air-conditioned tent to use the bathroom outside. No matter. Carol kept coming. But over the years, the colleagues fell away. A big gang would still show up for big events, 9-11 anniversaries say, but more often, a trickle. At times, she'd be the only person staying in the hulking military tents out there on the old airstrip.
trying to communicate the improvisational nature of this mission and how it was becoming permanent. For Carroll, those were the good years. So that's how it went for the first decade or so. But Carroll says the relationship between Guantanamo and the press took a decisive sour turn about halfway through Obama's presidency. The real beginning of the end, actually, looking back, is the hunger strike and John Kelly's reaction to it. John Kelly is Marine Corps General John Kelly.
He was in charge of U.S. Southern Command, SOUTHCOM, the DOD command center responsible for Guantanamo, during the most widely publicized and effective hunger strike ever organized there. Obama, remember, had announced when he took office that he was going to close Guantanamo within the year. That was in January of 2009. Carroll's coverage, along with everyone else's, began asking, how's Obama going to pull this off? What's the plan?
No one was more interested in the answers to those questions than the detainees themselves. By the time Obama's second term rolled around, they were pissed. There'd been yet another flare-up over claims that personnel were mishandling the Quran. Navy guards had been replaced by Army MPs who were rougher and more restrictive. But the detainees' underlying complaint was that of the 166 men still there, more than half had been cleared to leave Guantanamo by the Obama administration. Yet there they still sat.
Spring of 2013, Carol confirmed the lawyers' reports that the detainees were hunger-striking. She figured it out by watching their untouched food rations get thrown into a dumpster after lunch.
Carol was all over the news. So everybody's in lockdown while they figure out how they're going to manage this hunger strike. I had one Marine major who's a defense lawyer this week tell me his client hasn't even gotten his toothbrush since lockdown. Well, you know, the head of the International Red Cross tells us that they oppose force feeding. And that some people describe it as torture. So whatever is going on down there, it's a very dark period for Guantanamo.
Carol's paper, the Miami Herald, began publishing a daily hunger strike tracker, showing how many people were refusing food, how many were being tube-fed, how many were hospitalized. Over at Southcom, General John Kelly was unhappy. He got very angry at the coverage. He believed that the media were too sympathetic to the prisoners.
that the prisoners were manipulating and their lawyers were manipulating the media. General Kelly fought back. He told the JTF to stop providing the hunger strike data. He declared that information suddenly off-limits, which shut down the Herald's tracker.
He'd institute a rule that of the couple thousand people working at the JTF, only six of them could be quoted by name or photographed. Six approved faces, they called them, consisting of commanders or public affairs people, i.e. no more talking to guards. At one point, he tried, unsuccessfully, to shrink media visits to one day, once per quarter. That's how much he wanted them out.
General Kelly went on to become President Trump's Homeland Security Secretary and then his chief of staff. He declined to speak to me, but during a speech he made just before he left South Com, his feelings tumbled out. You're the best 1% of our society. I'm convinced of that. You're all good and decent men and women.
He was addressing the troops at Guantanamo who'd gathered in the chapel on the base. He praised them lavishly, told them they were the salt of the earth. Ordinary Americans, he said, who do an extraordinary job under enormous stress.
And it always breaks my heart when I read the negative reporting of what theoretically or what supposedly goes on here. Breaks my heart because I know the reporting is wrong and I believe the media representatives that report what goes on here know it's wrong.
but they go on their merry way, highlighting... The speech lasted only 15 minutes, but he laced it with frequent references to the agenda-driven press, the critics who don't know the meaning of honor or integrity or duty. They will never stop hurling their dishonest accusations at us. They'll never tell the truth because it's not in their interest to tell the truth. Fake news was not yet in the political vernacular, but you can hear it's coming. That's after the break.
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I'm Julian Barnes. I'm an intelligence reporter at The New York Times. I try to find out what the U.S. government is keeping secret. Governments keep secrets for all kinds of reasons. They might be embarrassed by the information. They might think the public can't understand it. But we at The New York Times think that democracy works best when the public is informed.
It takes a lot of time to find people willing to talk about those secrets. Many people with information have a certain agenda or have a certain angle, and that's why it requires talking to a lot of people to make sure that we're not misled and that we give a complete story to our readers. If The New York Times was not reporting these stories, some of them might never come to light. If you want to support this kind of work, you can do that by subscribing to The New York Times.
For the government, in the beginning at least, Guantanamo was a good news story. We got them. We're bringing them to justice. Then it became the shameful place the president tried to close but couldn't. And by Trump's inauguration, apart from serving as an occasional punchline for Donald Trump himself, Guantanamo was an albatross, endlessly circling the Pentagon's neck. To use terms Carol herself coined, a forever prison housing a bunch of forever prisoners.
For me, I had to recalibrate, right? I knew it wasn't going to close, but now how am I going to cover it under Trump? And so the story became Guantanamo forever. It was poison, this story, to Democrats and Republicans alike. Everyone's failure, everyone's burden. Better to cork it and bury it. Pray that its noxious political half-life doesn't outlast your own.
It seemed to Carol that no one in government wanted to be reminded of Guantanamo or wanted the American people reminded of Guantanamo, an attitude compounded by something else dark and new. A culture during the Trump administration that allowed you to more than disrespect the media, I mean, that set in down here during COVID in a way that was, like, viral. Truly hating the media, not wanting them here,
Hating reporters. Lest you think she's exaggerating. Carol was hated. Hated. I mean, Carol was the bane of the existence of the senior officer Gitmo when I was there. Period. That is recently retired Navy commander Daniel Bernardi, who was the public affairs officer for the JTF at Guantanamo in 2020. His job, in no small part, was to talk to reporters. In fact, it was explicit that people, if they see Carol, are not to be speaking to her.
Daniel Bernardi was the first person to offer me a clear view into the world Carroll was and still is up against. He's the one who explained how the Guantanamo leadership fashioned Carroll into a threat. I've been trying to talk to Daniel on the record for almost two years before he was finally able to do it, once he officially retired from the Navy and could speak freely.
I could tell you that Carol was called bitch more than a few times in my presence. Privately? In private conversations or in like in meetings? Open. Not everybody. And these are officers? Yeah. Am I dumb to be shocked by that? I find that shocking. A little bit dumb, honestly. I mean, I don't mean to offend you. No, but I do. Okay. All right.
He told me his first whiff that something was off about the command's perception of Carol came before he even landed at Guantanamo. He was in Miami at South Com, waiting for permission to fly to the base, getting briefed on his new job. And he was handed a big binder, copies of Carol's stories and printouts of her tweets. There was no heading that said, watch out for this person. But he said that was the implication, that she was somehow unethical, a problem. Daniel, he was coming in fresh, let's say.
I didn't know who the heck she was. Now, mind you, I didn't act like I didn't know she was. I was like, oh, Carol. Oh, of course. But I had no clue. When he finally arrives at Guantanamo, strange things happen. His boss, the Navy admiral in charge of the JTF, won't set a meeting with him. And the person he's replacing, Maria, the then Navy commander and a friend of his, she seems totally spooked.
He says one day she's showing him around. They go over to meet the public affairs officer for the naval base just for an introduction. And we go into this person's office and Maria puts her two cell phones in a microwave. And yeah, I'm like, what the hell? You know. And just so we're clear, that's the move like you do in the movies when you don't want somebody eavesdropping on what you're doing?
Yeah, well, I didn't know that. Oh, okay. Right? Like, so I know I watch a lot of movies, but I was like, what the heck is going on here? And then she just tells me, you know, I think they listen to us. Oh, my God. And so we want to have a private conversation here, and I don't know. And I'm like, what the heck could we possibly say that would be something we wouldn't want them to hear? And why would they want to hear what we have to say?
Not to mention, who is the they? The intelligence services? Daniel didn't know. Maria didn't want to participate in this story, so I couldn't ask her. This was spring of 2020. Because of COVID, reporters weren't allowed on the base at all. They'd suspended all media tours of the JTF. The court was on hold. Carol couldn't get down there. We'd end up being her longest stretch away, a total of 500 days.
So she and Daniel never met in person, but they did speak on the phone. She'd ask him questions, basic information, and he mostly was told he couldn't answer her. Once or twice he says he was given false information to pass on to her, which made him mad.
He'd been instructed to prepare his commander, the admiral in charge of the JTF, for a roundtable discussion with reporters and to start planning for a resumption of media tours. But after a while, he realized, oh, I see. They don't intend to do any media whatsoever.
It was dawning on him. The whole public affairs apparatus at Guantanamo seemed frozen. Commanders and press officers whose job is to speak to the press acting like they'd be investigated or fired for speaking to the press, for speaking to Carol. Daniel Bernardi said the fear seemed to have taken root about a year earlier when the previous JTF commander, Admiral John Ring, whom I'm told was well-liked by a lot of people at Guantanamo, had been fired. Fired? It's not often an admiral gets fired.
The announcement came the very same day Carroll published a long article in The Times quoting Admiral Ring. He'd sat down with reporters during a four-day media visit and talked about how the prison might need to update its facilities to accommodate the ailments of the aging prisoners. In her story, Carroll detailed, not without tenderness, some of their conditions—people using canes and walkers and braces—
Admiral Ring didn't want to speak to me for this story, but Daniel says by the time he got to Guantanamo, his sense was that while many senior people at South Com and at Guantanamo understood that Carroll wasn't the cause of Admiral Ring's firing, many other people didn't. The timing rhymed too nicely with their distrust of the media, and so coincidence slid into causality. Ring was fired because he spoke to Carroll. Again, not true, but to some people, it felt true.
The real story was that Ring had been under investigation for other complaints, including his management style and a couple of security spills. I'll spare you the complicated backstory, but the upshot, according to Ring's then public affairs officer, was that everyone seemed to turn on the public affairs staff. Treated them like pariahs, he said. So they became miserable in their jobs. And in turn, treated Carol like kryptonite.
And then there was Zach. And please bear with me while I take you inside Zach's ordeal for a minute. Because Zach getting in trouble surprised the heck out of me. I had met Zach years before, when Dana and I first visited Guantanamo in 2015. Zach was part of our tour. He was one of the approved people media could interview. Do you only go by your first name, last name? I only go by Zach, the cultural advisor. Yes, ma'am.
His full name was Ahmed Zaki Janim, but at Guantanamo, he was just Zach, for security reasons, he told us. Everyone at Guantanamo knew Zach. Besides Carol and the detainees themselves, he was one of the very few permanent people there. He lived with his family on the base. He'd been hired in 2005, during the Bumgarner era, as a cultural advisor to the JTF.
He's originally from the Middle East. He's Muslim. And his job, he said, was to help the JTF commanders understand the mindset and behavior of the prisoners, and also to train incoming guards on the basics of Islam. Zak was clear, though. He worked for the military. That's how he talked when we met him back in 2015. Whatever I learned from the detainees, I pass it all to the leadership. Everything, every word, word by word.
Zach was trusted. He was dug in. He had his own homey office in the headquarters building with all the JTF bigwigs. And just to drive home Zach's position at Guantanamo, some of the former detainees we spoke to, they told us they loathed Zach, thought he had it out for them. So when I heard that Zach, that same Zach, company man, was forced from his job, I called him up seven years after our first meeting.
We had a rather aimless conversation for more than two hours until I said, so I heard a story about why you left Guantanamo. And then, whoa, Zach came alive. He spilled over with anger, telling me how he was investigated, but they'd never tell him exactly what for, how he was getting dropped from email chains and standing meetings, how it took him a while to figure out what was going on, that they were squeezing him out. For what? You don't like me? Fire me.
To clarify, Zach never actually saw his own photo posted, but he said a linguist he knew told him about it.
You think I'm a terrorist? My wife used to substitute teaching at the school and other teachers would whisper, oh, why is she here? Is she allowed to be here? They damaged the whole reputation of my family.
My kids used to work at the dive shop, you know, they hear people whispering. And what are the whispers? Whispers, oh, he thought he's a terrorist, you know, he's in deep shit trouble, you know, he's this, he's that, you know, he has foreign contacts, you know. People knew my business without me even knowing it. Zach tried to protest his treatment, but the JTF command told him to stop agitating, stop emailing them, don't talk to anyone about this, lay low.
Now you want me to be quiet? Well, goddammit, I stayed quiet for two years. Now I'm not being quiet. He is not being quiet. Fuck you.
This all started in 2019 when Zach wrote a book about his life and his experience at Guantanamo that he wanted to publish. He vetted the final draft through the proper DoD channels, but he believes the book, not the substance of it, but the very idea of it, rubbed the JTF the wrong way. Because after that is when the intelligence folks began investigating him. They wanted to know where his money was going, who his contacts were, why he was asking for certain reports.
The investigation dragged on, and for more than a year, Zach was relegated to a do-nothing job in the housing office. He spent his time smoking ungodly numbers of cigarettes and trying to understand, why is this happening to me? The next time I met up with Zach was about a year later at his house in Florida. He was calmer. He'd taken out his stress on the front lawn, ripped out every blade of grass and covered it in mulch. He had some perspective.
He thinks what happened to him was a combination of petty jealousies, people above him resenting his nice house, his designated parking spot, how he had a direct line to the admiral. Also, he said, a change had fallen over the JTF after Trump's election. He noticed right away a harsher tone. The JTF leadership, he said, was talking about taking things away from the detainees that they'd had for a decade. Things like television, art classes, communal living. He said his budget for the detainee library disappeared.
And he said he was hearing more Islamophobic comments at work. It wasn't lost on Zach that what happened to him had also happened to Chaplain James Yee and to the Arabic translators all those years earlier. He was suspected of being a spy, treated like a national security threat. Another reason he says they turned on him? Carol. Zach was the one who brought her up, not me. I mean, even I was associated, I don't know if you want to record this or not, I was associated with Carol.
You know, they had, just like they had Islamophobia, they had Carol-phobia. Believe me. I mean. But so what's the. Everybody was afraid and they keep passing on, oh, watch out for Carol, watch out for Carol, watch out for Carol.
Maybe those people are going to hate the fact that I'm saying this right now. Everyone has told me this. Okay. This is not new. So thank you very much. So I'm not the only one who said it. No. But I kept hearing, you know, Carol knows everything. Carol knows everything. How does she get information? To me, I said, I don't know how she does it.
It's not me. Wait, who was saying this? In meetings, you know, like in the admiral meetings, you know, the official meetings, okay? So it would be like some newspaper story would come out and they would be like, where is she getting this stuff? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I was getting accused without me knowing. Accused of leaking information. But Zach didn't cotton on. Instead, he defended her.
He says he repeatedly told the leadership that in his experience, Carol had always acted above board, never asked him for information she knew he wasn't allowed to tell. As you can probably hear, Zach's a big smoker. Carol used to smoke, too. They'd see each other sometimes at the little smoking area out in the parking lot of the JTF headquarters building. Zach thinks maybe that's what sparked the rumors. A few months before Daniel Bernardi arrived on the island, Zach went to pick up some dinner at a pair of restaurants in the bowling alley called Spins and Bombers.
Less than an hour later, Zach sent an email to Maria, she of the microwave, the spooked public affairs officer Daniel would soon replace. "Ma'am," he wrote, "just for your situational awareness, while I was at Spins and Bombers around 8:45 p.m. with my wife, Carol and two other female journalists sat at our table while we were waiting for our to-go food. Mainly, Carol talked to my wife." He goes on to explain all the benign topics they chatted about.
Our food got ready and me and my wife excused ourselves and left. Carol did not try anything. She stayed professional. She complained about herself quitting smoking. Again, above for your situational awareness. Sincerely, Zach. This was the atmosphere. He felt he had to narc on himself. Daniel Bernardi and Zach overlapped at Guantanamo.
Daniel had heard about Zach and his banishment. He'd been told it had something to do with the book he wrote. Daniel definitely understood the leadership's antipathy toward Carol, but he didn't really get how dangerous it was to stick up for her, as Zach had done. I remember one time I stood up and said, we should not be afraid of this person. And I think I might have, you know, put a little macho into that and said, you know, why are we afraid of this woman from the New York Times? She's just doing her job.
He had a little bit of a grow-a-pair tone, he said, which not welcome coming from a public affairs officer. They're not generally considered the alphas of the military. Before long, Daniel, too, was under investigation. Yeah, so the JAG comes in, says, give me your badge. They have another officer escort me out. Which was humiliating, he said. Same as Zach. Give me your badge. Get out.
At first, Daniel was investigated for a spill of classified information. It turned out there was no spill. But then, as with Zach, they kept digging for close to five months. Daniel couldn't do his job or enter the JTF area, but he could play chess and work out and otherwise try to fend off depression. On a hike, a colleague told him the stories going around, that Daniel was a spy or that he was secretly making a movie about Guantanamo. He does make documentaries, but this was made up.
And one more, one that actually did make it into an investigative report, that he had leaked information to the media on two occasions. None of the accusations against Daniel was substantiated. Same was true for Zach, by the way. I don't know Southcom's perspective on these investigations. They didn't answer my questions about them and didn't provide anyone for me to interview for this story. When his tour of duty was up, Daniel went back to California. And after 26 years in the military, he decided to quit.
It took the Navy two and a half more years to approve his retirement. To confirm, he hadn't done anything wrong. As for Zach, the military finally offered him a lump sum of money if he promised not to sue. It wasn't much. He and his wife, Amy, called me as they were deciding whether to accept it. Amy was even more upset than Zach. She said it felt like a slap in the face. They want to fill the last minute they're going to cover their asses.
They ended up accepting the money. About six weeks later, Zach sent me a video of his oldest son, Shahar, joining the army.
Zach was very proud of him. I asked Daniel Bernardi about five times, why though? What was the threat that you or Zach or the other public affairs officers presented?
Again, so many secrets were already out. You could say the word torture in open court. Camp 7 was no longer a taboo subject. Only a few dozen detainees were left at the prison, and their identities and histories, even their health afflictions, were in large part public knowledge. So what was the command afraid of? I tried to ask the people in charge at the time, the admiral, his chief of staff, also a couple of public affairs officers. They either declined or didn't respond. Daniel didn't know the answer, but he had opinions.
After Admiral Ring was fired, he said, no senior person wanted to get fired. And they thought the surefire way to get fired was negative press. But if the press isn't covering Guantanamo, then there can't be the kind of negative press that can get me fired. So I'm going to shut it down. And I'm not going to say it because I don't have the— I'm not going to say it because maybe they don't have the authority to do that. I'm just going to make it happen.
There was just this utmost interest in trying to keep media from covering Gitmo and hoping that if you stuck your head deep in that, you know, Cuban sand, the media would drop interest. In other words, if I can't officially institute a no-media policy, then I'll do the next best thing. Strangle all avenues by which information travels out of this place. So I...
I guess what I'm saying to you is I got accused of a whole bunch of things that were literally bullshit, that were never brought, nothing. And I believe it was to keep me out of my job. A couple other public affairs officers I talked to from around that time, they seconded Daniel's analysis. That some of the powerful people running Guantanamo didn't want any coverage at all.
The roadblocks that make reporting from Guantanamo difficult, those are intentional. One person told me the idea is, quote, you can't control what Carol writes, but you can control her access. What that looks like after the break.
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The situation Daniel Bernardi described, a military choking off media, that is still playing out at Guantanamo. It's not subtle. The JTF even changed its mission statement. Used to be safe, humane, legal, and transparent care and custody of detainees. A few years ago, they quietly dropped the word transparent. The JTF right now is possibly the least transparent it's ever been. Carroll has dragged maybe three prison-related facts out of Southcom since 2021 —
which obviously hasn't stopped her from reporting. Carol's one of the best reporters in the world. She's not about to let a bureaucracy, military or otherwise, dictate her coverage. But the prison operation will not give her an ounce of cooperation, will not engage with her, as if no outsider is entitled to know what goes on inside. Now, if Carol calls Southcom to ask a question about the prison, the answer she gets back, at best, is, we'll get back to you.
She can't speak to any non-public affairs personnel without prior approval. These aren't Carol-specific rules, obviously. They apply to all media, but Carol's the reporter they most affect.
Since the JTF shut down media tours, in practice, this means no one working there, none of the 900-some people, is permitted to speak to her, on duty or off. She hasn't been able to speak to a JTF commander since 2019. She can't get a photo, really any photo, not even of a sunset, without her handlers okay. She can't get inside the prison compound. No reporters are allowed anymore. And on the rest of the base, she can't seek casual comment from a soldier or sailor going about their day.
Maybe if she had approval, she could, but there's no one to grant that approval. There's no longer an on-site public affairs officer for the prison. It's true. There is no one on the 45 square miles of this naval base who can officially answer a reporter's question about the prison, one of the highest-profile operations of the Pentagon, which, needless to say, creates tension. So you're the spokesman. You can handle the questions? You're the spokesman. You can handle the questions? No, I'm not the spokesman.
We're at a media briefing at Guantanamo, a review of the ground rules for visiting reporters. Carol's been to hundreds of these briefings. I've been to three. This one is about to become painful. Again, it's the four of us, Dana, me, Carol, and John Ryan, in the conference room of the hotel where we're staying. Sitting to our right are four public affairs officers. One guy, he's with public affairs for the prison, but he's saying, "I can't answer your questions. No."
The next guy, Army Staff Sergeant Cory Krasinger, also with the prison. He pipes up. We can take questions and pass them along and get you an answer, but we can't officially answer anything.
We're liaisons, he says. We can pass your questions along. And where would you pass them along? Southcom. So why wouldn't we just write them directly? You can if you want. Yeah, definitely can. Southcom is back in Miami. So Carol's asking, I mean, I can write to Southcom directly, so why would I go through you? So what's your function here? We're the liaison between Southcom and JTF. Just to pass the questions along. Correct. Yes, ma'am. So your job is to hit forward. Say that again. Your job is to hit forward? Mm-hmm.
She's saying, your whole function here is to forward my emails to Southcom? To be fair to Carol, she's thinking a bunch of things right now. One is, what is the point of all these people down here who have nothing to do? What's the cost to taxpayers? Another is, maybe they are doing something that they're not telling us. Another is, are they going to mess with me somehow, hinder me? To be fair to young Corey Krasinger, though, his hackles are up because, rude, he says we do more than forward emails.
We do more than that, but in the public affairs function, yes. We are a liaison between you, the media, and South Com Public Affairs. But what else do you do as public affairs for the JTA? Other things that are related to public affairs. That are? That are not. He will not say what else he does, just other non-public affairs things, things having to do with visitors. He also won't say where his office is. Where do you sit? Yeah.
I'm not sure, like, why it's so important. Moving right along, they tell us about the six approved faces on base who can be named or photographed. Or actually, it's five, because one person, the former public affairs officer, has rotated out. So five. They tell us the names of two. For the other three, they have to get back to us.
In reality, though, the number is zero, because when Carroll and John Ryan, too, have asked to meet with the approved JTF faces, they decline or don't answer. You can't get access to them. Dana asks if we can take photos of other personnel around the base without showing their faces or identifying them, which was allowed in the past. No, says Staff Sergeant Corey Krasinger. Yeah, we would prefer that there were no pictures of us. Even if it's unidentifiable. Yeah. So it's a preference, but is it a rule?
Yes. So we have our own internal policies that with imagery. Corey explains that the policy is meant to protect the privacy and security of the service members. We have kind of a sensitive mission here and they could be a threat. Right. If their name was out in the public, people who know what's happened here may reach out. It's happened in the past. Right. So we want to protect our privacy, protect their privacy. When has it happened in the past?
I'm sorry? When has it happened in the past? I can speculate on exactly when. We just know that this is something that's happened. Can you give us a concrete example? No speculation. A concrete example of what? When it's happened in the past. When it's happened in the past? In the past.
That was when. No, a concrete example of when it has happened in the past. Yeah, in the past. I don't have a date for you. Oh, boy. This goes on for quite a while until our handler, Adam, steps in and tries to smooth it over. Carol's not having it. And that's more internal security? No, no, no. The public affairs officer is saying that people have their photographs taken out and they have been reached out to. We're trying to find out when that happened.
And I don't mean in the past, I mean like the specific example of a photograph that caused someone to be reached out to. I can't tell if Corey is misunderstanding the question or if he's being obstinate.
What he seems not to recognize is that Carroll is scrapping for a reason, a big reason. Severely limiting photography here is a big deal. But there's no bridging worlds here. Carroll believes Guantanamo belongs to us, to the United States of America, and that we should all know and see what goes on here. Corey, and I admit I'm making an assumption here, but he seems to believe Guantanamo belongs to them, to the military. And we reporters are whiny, troublesome guests.
And just to add, this something happened thing, Carol sees it as Guantanamo's version of an urban myth. As if the remnants of Al-Qaeda are out there scouring the newspaper, identifying low-level Guantanamo personnel so they can hunt them down back home, when no evidence that's ever happened. Not as far as I know, or as far as Carol knows either. And she's been hearing this particular doozy for years. And they believe it. It's tiring. And any ability to sort of challenge...
The attempts to undermine Carol, to get rid of her, have evolved along with Guantanamo. The first attempt was almost gentlemanly. Carol's then-editor told me that Rick Bacchus, the general in charge of detainee operations in 2002, called him in Miami and asked if he'd send someone else. His reason? Carol knew more than their public affairs people and was embarrassing them in front of the other correspondents.
In 2006, they claimed she came to the island without permission. She did have permission. In 2009, a Navy commander insisted she'd verbally harassed him and demanded her newspaper investigate. They did and found no harassment. Mostly, these attempts have been a nuisance, a stressful distraction. But one last story about Carol. Because about halfway through her time here—well, who knows what's halfway? Guantanamo will likely outlast Carol. But a while back, this place almost broke her.
You know, I was banned for life some years ago for writing something. And that changed me. She was covering the legal case of a young Canadian detainee. This was in 2010. A witness in the case was going to testify. The Guantanamo court identified him only as interrogator number one. But this interrogator had already come forward in the Toronto Star. His identity was public.
So in her story, Carol also named him. She didn't do it gratuitously. There was a news reason. The guy had previously pleaded guilty to abusing prisoners in Afghanistan, one of whom died. But the Pentagon claimed she and the Canadian reporters had violated the military court's protective order, as well as the media ground rules for covering the Guantanamo military commissions. And they banned her permanently. They told the Miami Herald, you can send someone else if you want, just not Carol. And I was like, I'm done.
And I didn't know what to do. Carol had gotten the feeling that the Herald was wearying of her close coverage by that point. They took a lot of grief for it. She worried her bosses might seize the opportunity to throw in the towel. She called an editor, and he made some calls, and soon her cell phone rang. She was at her mother's house in Connecticut. She stepped outside to take it. On the phone was a First Amendment attorney named Dave Schultz. He would represent her, he said.
He told her he had a couple of ideas for how to fight this man, including the First Amendment. The first thing I said to him is, this is where I cry. Always. Don't look at me. He said to me, I said to him, you know, Dave, they say the Constitution doesn't apply down there. He's like, we're going to get you back in there. They violated your constitutional rights. And I said, they say the Constitution doesn't apply down there.
Why does it make you cry? Seriously, why does it make you cry? The answer makes me cry. It's so awful. I hate this. He said, oh, Carol, I fucking hate this. I can't do it because you're going to use it. Let me try and compose myself. I would use it. I don't want to use it gratuitously. I would only use it if it helps make us understand who you are. No, it does, but it's so awful. What I'm really mad at myself is I can never get through it without crying.
She took a beat. He said, oh, Carol, you take it with something like now I'm confused because I'm all emotional. It's the Constitution. You take it wherever you go. It travels with you.
Carol and I talked about this call for a long time, about 20 minutes. Me pushing and pushing to understand why it made her emotional. Carol trying to pin it down. Why? Why was she crying over the Constitution? Why was it so profound? It just made me feel so good, she said. No, that's not it. Now you're making me analyze it. I've never had to analyze it before.
Finally, she got there. She had done nothing wrong by naming the interrogator in her story. And before she took Dave Schultz's call, she thought that was immaterial, that the Department of Defense could trample her anyway. Like, I wasn't guilty. Yeah. Because I knew the rules. This was not a violation of anything. But I wasn't, I didn't, I didn't think it mattered.
It's a lawless place and they can do whatever they want down there and they did it. And then, now I'm fine. And that guy basically told me I had rights, which I guess I didn't realize until that moment. I was just sort of fumbling my way through.
I realized, she said, first of all, that as an American journalist, I have a license to ask questions. Sometimes I may be unpleasant about it, but I am here to ask questions on behalf of the American people. And I take that really seriously. And them trying to stop her, it was motivating, actually. Because... Because... Fuck them. But, I mean, that's a ridiculous thing to say. No, they tried to take that away from me for saying something that was true. I'm still angry about it, right? And I...
I mean, it was like all of the stuff I've articulated about somebody has to watch them and history can't happen without journalists reporting it. And what if they had a hearing and nobody came? All of that. I mean, I think I believed that beforehand, but it crystallized in that moment. They tried to tell me I couldn't report something that was true. And I kind of believed that maybe the Constitution didn't apply down here.
Carol added, well, it's still an open legal question whether it applies to the detainees. But like Dave Schultz said, it does apply to her. She'd forgotten that. Or maybe she'd started to believe all laws were negotiable at Guantanamo. It was so, it was like the best thing he could have ever told me. She says it's why she kept going back instead of turning away at various points. Still, she wishes she weren't doing this alone. That she had a bunch of colleagues like in the old days. Then she wouldn't be the only one fighting.
She didn't plan on becoming Guantanamo's forever reporter, but here she is, more or less the last reporter standing, captive to her own expertise, her own sense of duty. So, the crying. I told Carol I wouldn't use it unless it helped explain something about her. Full disclosure, Carol's a contributing editor on this series, and she's reviewed this script as well, which does not mean she's endorsed every word of it.
This crying part was the subject of our most protracted back and forth, because I didn't have to use it. I had a lot of other takes. Carol kept asking to do it again. He said, "Oh, Carol." Both so she could try to remember the precise quote from Dave Schultz, and also so she wouldn't be crying. "Oh, Carol." "Carol!" Even when I was packing up my mic, she was still trying. "Oh, Carol, it travels with you. It goes wherever you go." Why was she so intent on not crying?
Not because she doesn't want to be seen as an emotional person. She doesn't care about that. What she cares about, some would say single-mindedly, is access to the Guantanamo story. Her fear is that if the people who run Guantanamo hear her talk like this, they might think they almost won back then and that maybe they should try again.
It is not crazy to think that they might find an excuse to try to get rid of her or put her back in a tent or decide that reporters don't need to come to Guantanamo at all. Let them watch the court on closed-circuit TV from the states. That is not crazy. That trip to Guantanamo in 2022, Dana and I left after a week. Carol was staying on, but there was someone flying out with us whom she wanted to speak to, a source. So she came along to the airport, did her thing, chatted with people, poked around for information, complained about this and that.
She was laughing as she said it, but only a little.
So what happens when a prisoner decides to tell his own story about one of the United States' biggest secrets, his treatment in CIA custody? That's next time. Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivas, and me. Our editor is Julie Snyder. Additional reporting by Cora Currier. Fact-checking by Ben Phelan. Music supervision, sound design, and mixing by Phoebe Wang. Original score by Sofia Dele Alessandri.
Editing help from Ira Glass. Our contributing editors are Carol Rosenberg and Razina Ali. Additional production from Emma Grillo and Daniel Guimet. Our standards editors are Susan Wessling and Aisha Khan. Legal review from Alameen Sumar and Maya Gandhi.
The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcon and Max Guter. Supervising producer for Ciro Productions is Ndeye Chubu. Our executive assistant is Mac Miller. Sam Dolnik is deputy managing editor of The New York Times. Special thanks to Mark Seibel, Dave Schultz, and Janet Reitman, and to all the journalists and writers whose reporting helped inform this series, including but definitely not limited to Charlie Savage, Michelle Shepard, Arun Rath, Margo Williams, Ben Fox, Lawrence Wright,
And John Ryan has a forthcoming book, America's Trial, Torture and the 9-11 Case on Guantanamo Bay.
