Transcript for S04 - Ep. 7: The Forever Reporter

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How are we going to basically explain when we let this happen? From serial productions in the New York Times, this is serial season four, Guantanamo, one prison camp told week by week. I'm Sarah Canick. 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 911 attacks. So we went to the court, which we'd never seen in action before. Two other reporters are there with us, John Ryan, illegal affairs reporter, 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 courtroom's 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 separates 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 and seat number three, then me and number five, Dana's and 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 haulers wake up into her radio, and monitoring a fellow guard, dosing inside the courtroom, sleeping as against the rules. A little later, made a. 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'm all the most collegial course of action, she appears the terrifying guard gets right up in John startled face. She tells him to stop sleeping and if you can't stay away, come and ask you to leave. John's been covering this court for seven years and this has never happened 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, and 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 in the media operation center, the mock that's where reporters work from down here. Carol is writing up a memo about the mean guard and army specialist. It's too long.

I assume she was firing off an email to this guy Ron, the public affairs director for the Military Commission's, but she could just call Ron if she wanted to vent. So maybe she wasn't writing to Ron? Who are you writing to?

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 and replete.

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.

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 the speed 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 or nerves. An army specialist, a pisher on a power trip, is going to make her job harder than it already is. Uh-uh.

Dana asked 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.

That's John.

At 314 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 gonna 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. Eminem's mini-kit-cats, mini-twix. The uniformed young woman who wants me down for weapons, it mires 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 won Tonimo Guard Force Zero, a swift, clean wind. To the first time her, I eat 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 counter-intuitively 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, which she calls the closing of the aperture, it isn't about protecting Guantanamo 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.

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-opter. But the upside was that by having her serve mashed potatoes, it signal to

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 Wiegers, 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 Wiegers 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.

Another advantage of the early years, colleagues, other correspondence, 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, Carol'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 Carol might try to trick them. The nutty is thinking heard before he put a stop to it. Carol hired attractive young men and women to flirt with personnel and bars so they'd reveal sensitive information. All these people misunderstand. Carol is old school. She's not a lurker or an eavesdropper. She reads and she files records requests and she works the phones. If she wants information from a source, she makes it bracingly clear. She's talking to an attorney she's known a while. And she's not being an asshole. She's being explicit. I am not trying to endanger your security clearance.

UBICWITY, 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.

Carol's broken down bike.

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, quansit-hut-shaped tents erected on an abandoned air strip out by the court. Carol said the tense 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 condition 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 Anniversary 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 air strip, trying to communicate the improvisational nature of this mission and how it was becoming permanent. For Carol, those were the good years. So that's how it went for the first decade or so. But Carol says the relationship between Guantanamo and the press took a decisive sour turn about halfway through Obama's presidency.

John Kelly is Marine Corps General John Kelly. He was in charge of U.S. Southern Command, South Com, 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. Carol's coverage along with everyone else's began asking, how's Obama gonna 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 had 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.

Carol's paper, The Miami Harald, 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 Southcome, General John Kelly was unhappy.

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 Harold'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 photograph. Six approved faces, they called them. Consisting of commanders or public affairs people. I eat 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 may just before he left Southcome, his feelings tumbled out.

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'd do an extraordinary job under enormous stress.

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.

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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For the government, in the beginning at least, Bontanamo was a good news story. We got him, 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, Gontanamo was an albatross, endlessly circling the Pentagon's neck. To use terms Carol herself coined, a forever prison housing a bunch of forever prisoners.

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 it's noxious political half-life doesn't outlast your own. It seemed to care all that no one in government wanted to be reminded of Guantanamo or one of the American people reminded of Guantanamo, an attitude compounded by something else, dark and new.

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.

Daniel Bernardi was the first person to offer me a clear view into the world Carol was and still is up against. He's the one who explained how the Guantanamo leadership fashioned Carol 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.

Privately in private conversations or in like open meetings.

Am I dumb to be shocked by that? I find that shocking.

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 Southcom, 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.

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, and then Navy Commander in 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.

That's the move, like you do in the movies when you don't want somebody, you're dropping and what you're doing?

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. It would end up beating 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 her 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, Carol 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, Carol 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 one Panama, his sense was that while many senior people at Southcom and at Guantanamo understood that Carol 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 Carol. 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 or a deal 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 in last name?

His full name was Akmidzaki Jeanine, but at Guantanamo he was just Zack for security reasons he told us. Everyone at Guantanamo knew Zack. 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 had 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. Zach was clear though, he worked for the military. That's how he talked when we met him back in 2015.

Zach was trusted, he was dug in, he had his own homey office in the headquarters building, with all the JTF big wigs. 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?

To clarify, Zach never actually saw his own photo posted, but he said a linguist he knew told him about 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, Lalo.

He's 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, rub 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 Zack 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 jellacies. 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 would happen 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.

Everyone has told me this.

Well, who was saying this? How's he?

So it would be like some newspaper story would come out and they would be like, Where is she getting this stuff?

accused of leaking information. But Zack didn't caught none. 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, Zack'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. Zack 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 845 PM with my wife, Carol and two other female journalists set 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, Zack. This was the atmosphere. He felt he had to knock on himself.

Daniel Bernardi and Zach overlapped at Guantanamo. Daniel had heard about Zach in his management. He had been told it had something to do with the book he wrote. Daniel definitely understood the leadership's and tip of the toward Carol, but he didn't really get how dangerous it was to stick up for her. A Zach had done.

He had a little bit of a grow up hair 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 II was under investigation.

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 was 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 story is 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, saying was true for Zack, by the way. I don't know South comes 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 Zack, 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 Zack. She said it felt like a slap in the face.

No, don't apologize, don't apologize. 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 Zack, or the other public affairs officers presented? Again, so many secrets were already out. You could say there were 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 of freight of? I tried to ask the people in charge at the time. The admiral has 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.

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.

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 Karen custody of detainees. A few years ago, the quietly dropped the word transparent. The JTF right now is possibly the least transparent it's ever been. Carol has dragged maybe three prison-related facts out of Southcombs since 2021, which obviously hasn't stopped her from reporting. Carol's one of the best reporters in the world, which is 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 Southcome 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.

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 Crasinger, also with the prison. He pipes up.

really azzons he says we can pass your questions along and where would you pass them along so why would we just write them directly you can't if you wanted yeah definitely can Southcome is back in Miami so Carol's asking I mean I can write to Southcome directly so why would I go through you so what's your fortune here when liaison between Southcome and JTF just the past questions along so your job is to hit forward you're job is to hit forward 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 of 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 Cory Crossinger though, his hackles are up because rude, he says, we do more than forward emails.

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.

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 Carol 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, so Staff Sergeant Cory Crasinger.

Corey explains that the policy is meant to protect the privacy and security of the service members.

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.

I can't tell if Cory is misunderstanding the question or if he's being obstinate. What he seems not to recognize is that Carol is scrapping for a reason. Big reason. severely limiting photography here is a big deal. But there's no bridging worlds here. Carol believes Guantanamo belongs to us to the United States of America. And that we should all know and see what goes on here. Cory, and I admit I'm making an assumption here, but he seems to believe one tonimo belongs to them, to the military. And we reporters are whiny troublesome guests. And just to add, this is something happen 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, 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.

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 Baccus, 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 correspondence. 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.

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.

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.

Why does it make you cry seriously? Why does it make you cry?

No, I don't want to use it gratuitously. I would only use it if it helps make us understand who you are.

She took a beat.

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.

I realized she said, first of all, that is 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 then trying to stop her, who's motivating actually, because, because, fuck them, but I ain't had this ridiculous thing to say.

Carol added, well, it's still an open legal question whether it applies to the detainees, but like Dave Sheldt said, it does apply to her. She'd forgotten that. Or maybe she'd started to believe, all laws were negotiable at Guantanamo.

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 have 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. It travels with you.

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, someone say a 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 who 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. We had time to kill, so we went to one of the galley's for lunch. As we boarded a bus to return to the terminal, she looked pensive for a minute. She said to me, I've already done what I came to do, so I don't really need to be here except to stir the pot and be at pain in the ass. I can't help myself. It's terrible, right? It's terrible. I can't stop, but I'm outraged all the time. 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's biggest secrets, his treatment in CIA custody? That's next time. Serials produced by Jessica Weisberg, Dana Chivis and me, are editor is Julie Snyder, additional reporting by Chora Currier, fact checking by Ben Falen, music supervision sound design and mixing by Phoebe Wang, original score by Sophia Daley Alessandri. Editing help from our glass, our contributing editors, our Carol Rosenberg, and Rizina Ali, additional production from Emma Grillo and Daniel Gimet, our standard editors, our Susan Westling and Isha Khan, legal review from Alameen Sumar and Maya Gandhi. The art for our show comes from Pablo Delcan and Max Guter. Supervising producer for Zero Productions is in day chubu. Our executive assistant is Mac Miller. Sam Dolnik is deputy managing editor of The New York Times. Special thanks to Mark Sybel, Dave Schultz, and Janet Wrightman, and to all the journalists and writers who's reporting helped inform this series, including but definitely not limited to Charlie Savage, Michelle Shepard, Arun Rath, Margot Williams, Ben Fox, Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Jess Raven, Ben Taub, Karen Greenberg, Dana Priest, Steve Call, Terry McDermott, Tim Golden, Peter Bergen, Spencer Akerman, Sarah Merck, and everyone involved in Guantanamo voices. And John Ryan has a forthcoming book, America's trial, torture, and the 9-11 case on Guantanamo Bay.