Lehnert had 96 hours to deploy and build the first 100 cells, in time for the first plane-load of captives arriving from the battlefield in Afghanistan on 11 January. The job was done on time: a grid of chain-link cages surrounded by barbed wire and six plywood guard towers manned by snipers. There were five windowless huts for interrogations. It was namedCamp X-Ray was built in three days, but the sprawling Guantánamo Bay prison camp which grew out of it has proved very hard to dismantle.
“The speed of Guantánamo’s creation and the urgency to gain information had bad consequences,” Lehnert told senators. “I am not an attorney, but even I know that when you forego generations of legal thought and precedent, bad things happen.” “I remember overhearing conversations that it was useful to put a facility for holding captured terrorists in Guantánamo, because basically there was no clear legal context and that was seen as an advantage,” Daniel Fried, a career US diplomat who was working in the Bush White House at the time, told the Guardian. “What I kept hearing in those days was it’s a brand new world, the old rules don’t apply.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, center, and co-defendant Walid Bin Attash, left, attending a pre-trial session at Guantánamo Bay.Chairing last month’s judiciary committee hearing, the Democratic senator Dick Durbin noted: “A generation of conflict has come and gone yet the Guantánamo detention facility is still open, and every day it remains open is an affront to our system of justice and the rule of law.It is also where an increasing number of inmates may end their lives.