The rocky cliffs of Cuba split the ocean from the sky as our flight descended toward the tarmac at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. It was a clear afternoon in late June, and the first thing we were told before boarding the flight from Joint Base Andrews was not to photograph from the tarmac or plane. It was the start of a week at America’s most notorious military base, where absurd restrictions would dictate what I, and other journalists, could and could not see.
One misconception about Guantánamo was cleared up before I ever got off the plane. In my mind, everything was the prison. For so long, I associated this place with concertina wire, guard towers, and orange-clad anonymous detainees. In recent years, I’d reported on some of those same detainees, now liberated, and I learned that my prejudices and fears about the vast majority of these men had been unfounded. They welcomed me into the community of brotherhood they had forged, and I was now visiting the place where so much of their lives had been stolen. I pressed my face to the window to see the prison where people I consider friends were tortured.
From the air, I saw security posts along what seemed to be the perimeter of the base, but it obviously wasn’t the prison. “Where the fuck is it?” I thought with increasingly desperate glances out the window of the mostly empty chartered flight. I had a three-seat row to myself, television screens, pillows, blankets, and a full in-flight lunch service. Hundreds of Muslim men had arrived by air decades before to this very airstrip, beaten, shackled, hooded, and pissing all over themselves.
“Just landed,” I texted Mohamedou Ould Salahi on my T-Mobile burner smartphone. “It’s Swain.” A few hours later, Salahi, or “The Mauritanian,” shot back, “Hi. Did they put you in prison?”
I soon learned that just about anything with photojournalistic value was off limits. As Guantánamo has aged, a shift has occurred in what the military wants journalists to cover. Under the current rules, members of the media are brought here to focus on the military commission proceedings at “Camp Justice,” where a very large, very cold, and very classified courtroom has been constructed to deal with the few remaining detainees who were ever charged with decades-old crimes against the United States. Press access to anything outside the court is described as a “courtesy” and subject to arbitrary restrictions.
An American flag flies at the Office of Military Commissions building in Guantánamo Bay on June 27, 2023.
Photo: Elise Swain/The Intercept
Salahi, my unofficial tour guide, had always been hooded when taken outside the prison. He had accurately predicted the first day of my trip that my military handler would placate us with little tourist excursions to various parts of the bay, as if we had sailed in on a Disney cruise. “They want you to see McDonald’s and, like, the beach. That’s not where the detainees were held,” he said as we passed voice notes back and forth. “[It’s where] the detainees were held [that] you need to take photos of.”
Over the course of my visit, I checked in with at least five former detainees who collectively spent lifetimes imprisoned here. Most didn’t know about the novel media restrictions. “Did you go to Camp Echo?” Yemeni Sabri al-Qurashi texted me from Kazakhstan. Al-Qurashi has always maintained that he was arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. After 12 years at Guantánamo, he was relocated to a country that has continued to treat him like a “terrorist” and where he has not been granted asylum, despite assurances from the State Department that he would be treated well.
“Ask them to see Camp Delta 2, 3, 4, and Camp 5, and Camp Echo, and Camp 6, and Camp Platinum,” Salahi urged from his new home in Amsterdam.
“You can take pictures of the detainees, but not the face,” said Sufiyan Barhoumi, who was eligible for release from Guantánamo under the Obama administration after all charges against him were dropped but had to wait five more years because Donald Trump halted transfers. He has been struggling to adjust to life as a free man back home in Algeria since April 2022.
“Take pictures of what you can!”
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Elise Swain is Photo Editor of The Intercept. Prior to this role, she was an associate producer for the Intercepted podcast, while working across various mediums for The Intercept, including writing, photography, video, illustration, and audio. Before joining The Intercept, she worked as a freelance artist and has a BFA in photo and video from the School of Visual Arts. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.
