Why was Guantanamo chosen to house detainees?
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba was the "least worst place" to send the Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The administration wanted to move the detainees out of the war theater to a secure location for questioning as quickly as possible. Guantanamo had the dual advantage of being controlled by the United States, yet not on domestic soil. The president's advisers believed a facility within the United States could become a terrorist target. They also didn't want the federal courts to interfere with their management of the prison, or take up due-process challenges from the detainees.
The remote island of Guantanamo, called "Gitmo" by the generations of marines who served there, had a long and bizarre history: The oldest American base outside the continental U.S., Gitmo is also the only base to sit on the soil of a country that maintains no diplomatic relations with the United States.
"We thought the fact that Guantanamo was outside the territory of the United States would eliminate an important legal ambiguity," says Bradford Berenson, associate White House counsel from 2001 to 2003. "As it turns out, we were wrong."
In June 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Rasul v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detentions in federal court. To date, 100 habeas corpus petitions have been filed on behalf of 225 detainees.
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