How to Report From Guantanamo Bay
By Petra Bartosiewicz
The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg has reported from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay since the first detainee arrived in 2002. Last month, President Obama scuttled the office responsible for closing the center, which means Gitmo’s “media tent city” will be a permanent press encampment for the foreseeable future. Petra Bartosiewicz spoke with the veteran correspondent by phone from Gitmo’s Camp Justice, where Rosenberg has been covering pretrial hearings this month of the alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
When he took office, President Obama promised to close Guantanamo within a year. Now the office dedicated to closing the detention center has itself been closed. What’s going on?
There are 166 detainees here right now. Congress has incrementally imposed harder and harder restrictions on their resettlement. Last year, two detainees went to El Salvador and two left dead. Nobody wants to be the person who sent someone back who will be behind the next terror attack. So it’s Guantanamo forever.
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How has covering the detention center changed?
When we first came down in 2002 a couple days before prisoners came, there was a real sense that this was an important moment in history and the military wanted coverage. They wanted reporters to report on it. They were really proud of what they were doing here. It was definitely a place where reporters were being brought in 40 a week to talk to commanders. Now, if you’re not here for a trial they bring in maybe four a month.
What have you not seen that you want to see?
I want to see Camp 7. That’s where they keep the sixteen men who were kept by CIA in the dark sites. The camp’s existence came up in a briefing by mistake, and no one has ever told me who built it, how much they paid for it, or who the contractor was. They take us here year after year and they call it safe, legal, humane, and transparent detention, and they systematically keep us out of a place that holds the people who were held in dark sites. I’m not saying to them "I want to go in and interview Khalid Sheikh Mohammed." But you have to ask who is running it and why it has to be such a secret.
- See more at: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/carol-rosenberg-reporting-from-guantanamo-bay.html
