Guantánamo Bay: The Pentagon's Alcatraz of the Caribbean

In January 2002, an editor at the Miami Herald dispatched correspondent Carol Rosenberg to report on an emerging U.S. military mission at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The Pentagon was setting up a war on terror prison at Camp X-Ray. She called it The Alcatraz of the Caribbean. She saw U.S. Marines walk the first 20 prisoners off a U.S. Air Force cargo plane from Afghanistan looking like a poor man’s Hannibal Lecter – in orange jumpsuits and shackles and surgical masks and blackout goggles. Hundreds more would follow, and hundreds got to go, nine of them dead. And her assignment is still not over.

For 15 years Carol Rosenberg has reported about the U.S. Navy base called Gitmo. The newspaper called it The Most Expensive Prison on Earth first, by White House estimates $5.6 million a year per prisoner. The newspaper calls the indefinite detainees forever prisoners, captives of a global war against an enemy with no leader to surrender.

This Herald Books edition offers a unique perspective on the people, policy, and place that strikes Rosenberg as the first no-exit-strategy, U.S. military enterprise since the Vietnam War.
Her dispatches are inside.