Twenty years after Guantánamo Bay detention operations commenced on January 11, 2002, a new report assesses the massive costs of the United States’ unlawful transfers, secret detention, and torture following the September 11, 2001, attacks. The report, from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute and Human Rights Watch, outlines how these abuses trample on the rights of victims and suspects, burden U.S. taxpayers, and damage counterterrorism efforts worldwide, ultimately jeopardizing universal human rights protections for everyone.
“Guantánamo remains one of the most enduring symbols of the injustice, abuse, and disregard for the rule of law that the U.S. unleashed in response to the 9/11 attacks,” said Letta Tayler, an associate Crisis and Conflict director at Human Rights Watch and the report’s co-author. “The U.S. government’s reliance on deeply flawed military commissions, along with other due process failures, has not only violated the rights of the men held at Guantánamo but also deprived survivors of the September 11 attacks and families of the dead of their right to justice.”
The report notes that:
- The U.S. has held no one accountable for the CIA orchestrating a system of undisclosed “black sites” around the world, where it secretly detained at least 119 Muslim men and tortured at least 39.
- The U.S. has largely resisted accountability for abuses at its military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it detained thousands of Muslims, including several women and boys, as well as at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
- The U.S. military is still detaining 39 Muslim men at Guantánamo, 27 of them without criminal charges, with judicial proceedings so flawed that none of the five 9/11 suspects have been brought to trial. These prisoners are among at least 780 foreign Muslim men and boys whom the U.S. has held at Guantánamo since January 11, 2002.
- The U.S. has spent more than $5.48 trillion on the “War on Terror,” including $540 million a year just to detain prisoners at Guantánamo.
- While unlawful U.S. detentions have gradually ebbed, civilian deaths and injuries from U.S.-led strikes in the “War on Terror” skyrocketed under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, also without accountability.
The report’s authors, Tayler and Elisa Epstein, highlighted that “extraordinary renditions” (unlawful transfers from one country to another), secret detentions, and torture have damaged the international human rights system. By committing abuses with impunity, the U.S. has made it easier for countries such as Russia, Egypt, and China to criticize Washington and deflect international condemnation of their own human rights violations.
U.S. counterterrorism partners have replicated the Guantánamo model by detaining thousands of people in dire conditions in Iraq, northeast Syria, Nigeria, Egypt, and elsewhere for alleged terrorism offenses. Those detained, often without charge or trial, include civil society members, suspects’ relatives, and children who are victims of armed groups.
The report also cites instances in which unlawful rendition, detention, and torture have undermined U.S. security goals. The Islamic State (ISIS) and other armed groups have used U.S. abuses as a propaganda tool to lure recruits and bolster their narrative that Washington and its Western allies are waging a crusade against Muslims.
The authors call on the Biden administration to close the Guantánamo prison and enact significant legal and policy reforms to end further abuses. Reforms should include far greater transparency about crimes committed by U.S. forces and accountability at the highest levels, as well as robust efforts to address religious, racial, and ethnic bias in counterterrorism efforts.
“This report lays out a comprehensive assessment of the many unconscionable costs of U.S. torture and illegal detentions and renditions of Muslims over the past 20 years since 9/11,” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project. “This is a moral failure of epic proportions, a stain on the nation’s human rights record, a strategic blunder, and an abhorrent perpetuation of Islamophobia and racism.”
The implications of Connell v. CIA and how they are holding the CIA accountable for its actions at the Guantánamo Bay military prison are significant.
The CIA is so known for its unabashed secrecy that, when it joined Twitter in 2014, its first tweet was: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” This non-response is known as a “Glomar,” and while the intelligence community likes to poke fun at how often they invoke it, this inane phrase has allowed the CIA to skirt meaningful transparency and accountability for decades.
In 1966, despite the Johnson administration’s opposition, Congress enacted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), giving all citizens the right to ask the government for documents and obligating the government to respond, as it believed such access was a prerequisite to a functioning democracy. Soon after FOIA was passed, a Soviet nuclear submarine went missing somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and the CIA took an early opportunity to undermine this new law.
Connell v. CIA is a FOIA lawsuit seeking records about CIA “operational control” over a detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. However, the CIA has refused to disclose whether it has records about its operational control over Camp VII, a detention facility at Guantánamo Bay.
The Soviet Union and the United States raced to locate the missing sub and extract the intelligence likely inside. But first, the U.S. needed to build a ship capable of extracting the sub once it was found, and the government wanted no one to know about it. The CIA contracted this mission to billionaire Howard Hughes, who had little concern for government transparency and told the media that the ship (named the Hughes Glomar Explorer) was meant to extract manganese nodules from the ocean floor.
Six years later, in 1974, the extraction began. Unfortunately for the U.S., the extracted sub broke into pieces, and what the government most wanted was lost: the ship’s code machine and two nuclear missiles. Details of this secret, bungled extraction started to leak, inaccuracies and half-truths swirled, and people rushed to file FOIA requests, hoping to answer the many outstanding questions.
Worried about the geopolitical consequences and obsessed with controlling information about its activities, the CIA devised a novel way to keep the mission secret without telling an outright lie. The agency decided it would refuse to confirm or deny whether records about the Glomar Explorer’s mission existed, despite mounting public evidence that they did. Thus, the “Glomar response” was born. And, in the case of the Glomar Explorer, it worked: historians claim many documents remain hidden to this day.
Unfortunately, in the decades since the submarine debacle, and especially in the post-9/11 era, the CIA has repeatedly used the Glomar response to evade responsibility. They have used it to avoid disclosing whether they had information about the government’s use of drones for lethal strikes overseas, and when asked about legal justifications for the verified extrajudicial killing of three U.S. citizens. They’ve even used it to sidestep questions about whether they’ve spied on Congress.
We’re even seeing state agencies attempt to use the CIA’s non-response to circumvent local public records requests. For example, in 2017, the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a public records request seeking documents regarding the NYPD’s monitoring of protesters’ social media activity and cell phones. The NYPD initially responded with a blanket statement that it could “neither confirm nor deny” whether such records existed, claiming that even revealing the existence of records could harm national security. A New York court rejected this argument and ordered the NYPD to respond to the request in full.
The CIA’s penchant for secrecy continues to expand, with the agency using Glomar to obstruct attempts to obtain records that would publicly shine a light on its failures and abuse, even when that abuse is well documented by the CIA itself and other sources.
Take, for instance, the CIA’s torture program. After the 9/11 attacks, the agency abducted dozens of Muslim men and boys, held them incommunicado, brutally tortured them, and denied them due process in sites around the globe. Once the program was exposed, 14 of the government’s “high-value detainees” were taken to the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay and detained at a notorious facility known as “Camp VII.”
Attorney James G. Connell III, who represents Ammar al Baluchi, one of the men subjected to the CIA torture program and sent to Camp VII, filed a FOIA request with the CIA seeking information about the agency’s “operational control” over the facility. That “operational control” is hardly a secret: it was highlighted in the Senate Torture Report and in CIA and military commissions documents. But instead of processing Connell’s request, the agency issued what it called a “partial” Glomar response, producing three records, withholding a fourth in its entirety, and refusing to confirm or deny whether any other responsive records exist.
Given the extensive public record about the CIA’s connection to Camp VII, its refusal to acknowledge that it has responsive records both violates the law and defies common sense. That’s why some U.S. people are representing Connell in his appeal in federal court. To uphold its response, the CIA must demonstrate that it is logical or plausible that it has no responsive records in light of the entire record. That’s simply not possible here. These people know this because there is an overwhelming amount of public evidence about Camp VII — from the Senate Torture Report to court documents from the Guantánamo proceedings to other documents the CIA itself released — that has left no doubt of CIA involvement. And yet, the CIA continues to avoid its legal obligations under FOIA through gaslighting and Glomar.
